Why Do Islands Induce Dwarfism? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sapiens.org/blog/animalia/island-dwarfism/ <comment><USER2> Islands can also induce gigantism [0]. My understanding is that is the microcosm allows certain species to thrive or perish and we see a more dramatic change in size as a result.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism)

<comment><USER3> See also Foster's Rule

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's funny is that, for us humans, the whole planet is kind of a big island today isn't it? (Edit: not everywhere ofc) I wonder how large humans will get in a number of generations from now.

Found an interesting article about that topic: [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150513-will-humans-keep- ge...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150513-will-humans-keep-getting- taller)

Looks like we are record holders in height already, let's see how far we can get!

</comment><comment><USER5> I think regular human size can vary a lot by level of resource consumption - the principle being the larger the mother, the larger fetus and so the larger the resulting adult.

Obviously, if a height increase/decrease trend continued for a while, one assumes genetic variations which aided this would be selected for but it seems that the change itself doesn't necessarily need genetic as such.

See height increases in Japan: [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/tokyo- journal-the-ja...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/tokyo-journal-the- japanese-it-seems-are-outgrowing-japan.html)

<comment><USER6> From my observation, I notice that a lot of younger generation Chinese adults are likely to be taller than their older fellow country people as well. I have many Chinese coworkers and even the female coworkers are at least 5 feet 5 inches or taller (for young male coworkers, they are usually at least 5 feet 8-10 inches). Nutrition certainly plays a big role in determining one's height.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't the biggest factor simply be limited resources? The same reason why the average man was 5 inches shorter in 1750 than he is today.

<comment><USER8> Actually, Foster's rule indicates that predation being the main threat leads to smaller animals, while the restriction of resources being the main threat leads to larger animals.

> The same reason why the average man was 5 inches shorter in 1750 than he is > today.

This is more likely dietary changes than resource restriction—we may not have had industrial farming, but the average person wasn't starving either. But you need access to plentiful, high levels of protein to maximize your height advantage.

<comment><USER9> Foster's rule is actually the reverse of that.

Which can be seen intuitively because non-human predators pick off the weakest and smallest of the pack.

<comment><USER10> This depends on the size of the animals in question compared with the largest practical size for an animal in that environment. Large animals will get larger, because this improves their chance of fighting back against similar- sized predators (think lion vs. antelope). Small animals will get smaller, because this allows them to evade much-larger predators (think cat vs. mouse).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know, Polynesians and Samoans seem plenty large to me.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but they've been living there for only a few hundred years, or a couple thousand at most. The article was referring to populations living in island environments for much longer durations.

<comment><USER13> They also have a very different food, cultural, and military environment than the isolated hobbits would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ideas: (1) Richest foraging environment may be out in the open on the shoreline. If any other predators are present, or even if there is simply harsh environmental exposure (sun/wind) then a smaller physical size to take advantage of shelter may be advantageous. (2) Mountainous interiors. I believe it is well documented that short people have better luck climbing and descending steep slopes due to a lower center of gravity. (3) Low dietary variation or reliance on foraged protein rather than large land mammals. (4) Safety from predators may lead to a younger age of reproduction, accelerating change.

</comment><comment><USER15> Intriguing. I wonder then; does this mean our spacefaring descendants will be smaller for the very reasons outlined in the article?

<comment><USER16> Many suspect spacefaring will require us to become quite small indeed. It will become ridiculously uncompetitive to drag around a meat body and pressurized environment.

Think of something like The Field Circus from Charles Stross's "Accelerando".

<comment><USER17> Seems like only a tiny crazy subset of humans will ever want to give up the freedoms of having a meat body and being able to move it in a pleasant atmosphere. After all, what's there to do in interstellar space? The idea of turning ourselves into space probes is a dystopian, inhuman proposition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the foxes example is interesting as there are foxes everywhere, and the further into the CA or African desert or into Arctic - the smaller the foxes are. Pure thermodynamics - like surface/volume ratio - would suggest otherwise. It most probably has to deal with [lesser] reliability of food availability, similar like in islands case.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's the bottleneck effect duh. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck) As others have noted Polynesians are huge and didn't turn into dwarves.

</comment><comment><USER20> Aspects of this island evolution were part of the plot in the marvelously detailed sci-fi book from Kim Stanley Robinson: Aurora.

TLDR: Interstellar multi-generation spaceships are essentially genetic islands.

<comment><USER21> Just finished this novel. Great hard sci-fi space opera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe the principle that height is also proportional to speed should be taken into account?

</comment><comment><USER23> Imagine the Komodo Dragon on a continent. Yikes!

</comment><comment><USER24> I live in England , this is true.

</comment><comment><USER25> Although they are representational of all islands, Tonga and Samoa disagree.

</comment><comment><USER26> Reading this I had a silly thought: "What if we are the 'giants' of old ?"

<comment><USER27> Biblical giants? They were half fallen angel, half human. Not many Christians (and maybe even Jews) believe this, but if you study the context of Genesis 6 and the rest of the Bible anytime it speaks of Noah's flood and judging of angels, they coincide (especially in the New Testament in the book of Jude) then there's the Book of Enoch, which isn't in protestant or Catholic Bibles, but the Ethiopians have it in theirs, and it speaks about how the angels took human wives to themselves. The Liger hybrid species explains scientifically the nephelim (or Giants) hybrid species to some degree, how it can be so massive is explained by the DNA. These are the views of some Christians, but again, assuming Biblical giants, there's a lot of different factors into play.

<comment><USER28> Man, it would be so amazing if we could somehow attribute ancient stories of dwarfs, trolls, giants, to humans meeting other hominid species that we coexisted with.

<comment><USER29> Or encountered the remains of, as seems to have been the case of dinosaurs becoming dragons.

<comment><USER30> From what I've heard, dinosaur bones tended to be taken for the bones of giants, at least in the Middle Ages. Dragons were much older than any awareness of dinosaurs; most medieval myths about dragons trace back to the _draco_ standard carried by late-Roman cavalry. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_%28military_standard%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_%28military_standard%29) .)

This, by the way, means that there really were dragons in sub-Roman parts of the Dark Ages world: Wales and Cornwall, for example, where draco-bearing cavalry (including King Arthur's, if there was a King Arthur) were fielded probably until the 600s or 700s.

<comment><USER31> Dragon mythology as an explanation for dinosaur bones seems pretty straight- forward. I'd even say that "dragon" was just the early word for "dinosaur", and the mythology is based on an earlier extrapolation of characteristics from fossil remains than what we use today. A somewhat less strict extrapolation, but even today a lot of what we 'know' about dinosaurs is pure guesswork.

But dinosaur bones driving myths of biblical _humanoid_ giants? That's a much bigger stretch. Most dinosaur bones are pretty non-humanoid, and people who are generally a lot more familiar with human and animal skeletons than we are today wouldn't mistake one for the other. Also, while dragon mythology is mostly reasonable based on fossil evidence (except for the flying and fire- breathing... and gold hoarding) giant mythology is completely different. The biblical texts and non-biblical books like Enoch give them names and actions that are much more historical sounding than mythological. You don't get details like that from big leg bone fossils.

So, I don't buy dinosaur bones as the source of giant mythology.

<comment><USER30> I have no idea where dragon myths or giant myths originate; giants are easy to guess, but dragons are a strangely common belief for creatures with so little basis in reality. (Plasma cosmology has a very interesting explanation for dragons, and for a lot of other strange things in human history, but the physics of that theory are pretty bad.) I'm just mentioning what it is that dinosaur bones were identified with in the Middle Ages -- centuries before anyone knew that there had ever been such things as dinosaurs.

(To an extent, dragons fall into the same category as unicorns, griffins, and phoenixes: not mythology so much as really bad zoology. All four of these species were believed to exist in the real world as contemporaries of medieval humanity, sometimes surprisingly nearby -- like griffins in the Caucasus.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


That Interstellar Asteroid Is Pretty Strange - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2017/11/23/interstellar-asteroid-mystery/ <comment><USER2> Here is the random astronomer on Reddit claiming that the community didn't rule out that it is an abandoned spaceship yet: [https://amp.reddit.com/r/space/comments/7ealls/solar_systems...](https://amp.reddit.com/r/space/comments/7ealls/solar_systems_first_interstellar_visitor_with_its/)

"Astronomer here! I will never say this lightly, but we are, swear to God, actually discussing with some seriousness right now what are the odds that this was actually a spaceship. Which I 100% assure you has never happened before in my memory with seriousness."

<comment><USER3> Why the hack do you assume it's abandoned? It can be full of lifeforms even and we are just not able to see them, talk to them, etc. Imo at this point any assumption is closing in too much. We don't have a definiton of "life" that for sure would include extraterrestrial lifeforms that are not actors with masks in star trek, right?

<comment><USER4> Well, it's tumbling end-over-end which suggests that if it's a spaceship, it's no longer in control.

The discussion around the possibility of it being a spaceship rests on the idea that long thin cigar-shaped objects are the most efficient way to travel in space because it minimizes your need for ablative protection from interstellar dust/etc. But if you're tumbling end-over-end you've thrown that advantage away, so presumably that's not a thing you would intentionally do. And if you are assuming that this spaceship has shields or whatever, then there is no reason they would be restricted to a cylindrical shape.

It could be a discarded booster stage or fuel tank, of course. Maybe they were trying to drop it into the sun and missed. Or a a mass-driver shot (maybe they finally took care of that pesky Russell's Teapot for us...)

The presumptive conclusion is of course that it's a natural phenomenon, but it sure is a weird object, and unless we can find a way to catch it (or any future objects) we will never know. Maybe a starshot probe could catch it?

<comment> semi-extrinsic The really interesting prospect raised in that Reddit thread is that while the velocity is likely wrong for an interstellar spaceship, it could be just right for the spent and discarded deceleration stage of an interstellar spaceship. In which case the spaceship would be arriving some time later...

<comment><USER5> It's already passed pedigree with the sun. It is traveling slowly enough that if it's a discarded stage the spaceship should already be here.

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming autocorrect helpfully fixed "perigee" to "pedigree" for you. It's a nice little malapropism though.

Anyway, minor point but "perigee" usually means closest approach to _Earth_ ; "-gee" is from the Greek for Earth (as is "geo-"). In the case of the sun, we have the word "perihelion", and for generic orbits around an object, you generally hear "periapsis".

And just for completeness, I'll mention that the counterpoint to periapsis is apoapsis, with apogee and aphelion being the obvious specializations.

There are more words in this pattern for various different objects; Wikipædia has all the gory details:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis)

<comment><USER5> Autocorrect figured out I meant that we need to make sure aliens have sufficient pedigree before we deign to talk to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Occam's Razor says it's unlikely that the very first object we ever see from > interstellar space just happens to be a spaceship.

Well, isn't this kind of self fulling thing?

Because we assume first that this is an interstellar asteroid, then the following statement is "proven":

> Researchers had long theorized that space should be full of comets and > asteroids ejected from other solar systems during their early days. Their > models showed that planetary formation is a messy business, with many small > objects kicked out as big proto-planets form. `Oumuamua is the first proof > that they were right

And at this point, yes, it appears very unlikely that the first interstellar object we meet would be artificial.

But if we start by saying we don't know what it is, then the above theory is just speculation, and might be false (what if planeraty formation is a clean process?). If the theory above can be false, then it could make sense that the first interstellar object we encounter would be artificial, no?

It seems to me that Occam's Razor doesn't tell us much in this instance.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, Occam's Razor can say whatever you want by fiddling the _apriori_ probabilities. Here, the probability you need is how likely that theory is to be true - just because it could be false doesn't mean it's 50-50.

If all the models show planet formation is messy, it seems reasonable to estimate its probability as much greater than 0.5 (note that even if it's 0.9999, they still could be wrong).

<comment><USER7> Totally agree. My point is just that I find it a bit weird/circular to use Oumuamua as the `first proof` for a theory that is subsequently used with Occam's Razor to demonstrate that Oumuamua is likely not something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So why exactly can we not get a better look at it as it is leaving? With all our earth- and spacebound telescopes [1] (some are sitting at Earth-Sun Lagrange points) I would imagine we could. Being too far away behind the sun seems an unlikely argument to me.

===

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes)

<comment><USER10> The only working telescope at a Lagrange point is Gaia [0] at Earth-Sun L2, but it is an astrometry instrument, designed to measure the position and brightness of various stars, rather than generic deep-space imaging. The Herschel Space Observatory [1] is also at the Earth-Sun L2 point, and has a 3.5m IR telescope, but ran out of coolant in 2013 and is now defunct. Interestingly, these are both ESA missions, not NASA.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_\(spacecraft\))

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory)

<comment><USER11> NASA was involved in Herschel to an extent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like this is the same problem/discussion a distant civilization would have with Voyager

<comment><USER13> Voyager is much smaller, though. Can someone with relevant knowledge tell us if this object would be still detected if it was the same size as Voyager 1?

<comment><USER14> Would we have detected a Voyager-size or Voyager-like object entering our solar system? I really, really doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >It's also our first direct look at an intact visitor (as opposed to dust specks) from another solar system.

Would it not be possible to calculate the origin system based on speed, trajectory, star positions?

<comment><USER16> The problem is that the star positions change over time via galactic orbit. 'Oumuamua's trajectory appears to originate from Vega, but Vega would have been at a different position in relation to our solar system back when 'Oumuamua was at the same distance from the Sun as Vega.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These actually sound like last famous words.

</comment><comment><USER18> Are there yet any credible theories for why we see so few of these? AIUI, if we're correct about how planets form, there should be far more of these than we're seeing. Is it that we're probably wrong about how planets form, or there's something strange about our part of the galaxy, something else or do we just have no clue?

<comment><USER7> Estimate is that there might be about ~10 of these object passing through every year, so it's not a lot to start with. In addition asteroids are relatively small and hard to spot since they are inert. We managed to spot this one because we were lucky it came so close to earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there _any_ possibility we could launch a really fast space probe that could overtake this object and report back, maybe within the next decade or so? Do we have the technology now to pull alongside this rock (and it's going to be slowing down)?

<comment><USER20> Probably. Strap a big overpowered upper stage behind a little lightweight payload and you can fire something pretty fast.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately it's almost impossible at this point. The object passed pedigree a while ago and is headed back out, earth is in a very poor position for an intercept. The calculations I've seen say even if you use the largest possible booster, the SLS (which doesn't exist now, won't exist for another 3 years, if ever) it couldn't even get a small probe to catch up for a very long time, if ever.

There may be options in using Jupiter for slingshot maneuvers to overcome our bad positioning, and using super advanced hall effect motors, or project slingshot type probes. But it seems pretty slim at this point.

UPDATE: The reddit thread has this comment "Not a chance. Velocity relative to the sun is presently > 39 km/sec and relative to the earth is > 64 km/sec. This is far faster than anything we have ever launched or even could plausibly launch in the near future".

Which explains why you need Jupiter to redirect your probe so you can have it go only 40Km/sec to catch up, rather than 65 Km/sec direct from earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Relevant XKCD : [https://xkcd.com/1919/](https://xkcd.com/1919/)

</comment><comment><USER22> tell me it's no the vanguard of a galactic police squad coming to arrest humans for universal misconduct

</comment><comment><USER23> Say whatever you want, I know it is Silkie spaceship.

</comment><comment><USER24> What's really shocking is the drawing from the article [1]

This Astroid was Discovered when already passed by the Earth!!

And was actually very close to it! While I am pretty certain Astronomers knew it won't hit us, the amount of time it took to discover it would be way too late for us to even hold hands and kiss our children goodbye!

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/files/2017/11/eso...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/files/2017/11/eso1737c.jpg)

<comment><USER5> The earth gets hit by similarly sized asteroids every 30,000 to 100,000 years, albeit not quite at this velocity. Average impact velocity for asteroids from our system is 17 Km/sec, so about 2/3s the speed of this visitor. Either way, it's not even close to an extinction event.

And "very close to it" is a misnomer. It came within 24 million kilometers of Earth, about 60 times farther away than the moon is.</comment></comment>


Do You Need Kubernetes? - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoworld.com/article/3527217/do-you-really-need-kubernetes.html <comment><USER2> Kubernetes seems to be a tool that people use only to have experience with it, so future jobs that use Kubernetes will deem them qualified.

<comment><USER3> i.e. it's really a developer portability tool

[https://twitter.com/dsymetweets/status/1227389677889560576](https://twitter.com/dsymetweets/status/1227389677889560576)</comment></comment>


ELIZA from 1966 - <AUTHOR> http://lispblog.xach.com/post/105434970448/eliza-from-1966 <comment><USER2> The MDL source code to Zork is also very beautiful. It brought back wonderful memories! Somebody's put it up on github so it's easy to read (just 8 days ago, holy plate of shrimp!):

[https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl](https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl)

PS: It uses lots of GOTOs, but not the harmful kind!

</comment><comment><USER2> RMS -vs- Doctor, on the evils of Natalism:

[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs- doctor.html](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that they would chose to implement BBN-LISP in Perl, given that the ability to easily run legacy Lisp programs was one of the design goals of Common Lisp.

<comment><USER4> They have multiple versions of Eliza. James Markevitch wrote the interpreter for the 1966 version[0], but they ported 1969 and 1972 versions of Eliza to CL[1].

[0] [https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen/blob/master/doctor_b...](https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen/blob/master/doctor_bbn_lisp_1966/bbnlisp.pl)

[1] [https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen/blob/master/cosellel...](https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen/blob/master/coselleliza1969and1972.lisp)</comment></comment>


AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/amd-threadripper-review-1950x-1920x/ <comment><USER2> discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979151)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope they do not suffer the same issues the already released Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 series CPUs are having.

I'm cautiously optimistic for EPYC the server grade CPU that AMD is releasing soon, although in this world of "per core" licensing costs there is a strong need for less cores and more single-thread performance in the server.</comment>


A coding error led to $30M in ethereum being stolen (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1034321/ethereum-hack-a-coding-error-led-to-30-million-in-ethereum-being-stolen/ <comment><USER2> Time for better Ethereum contract audit service? Does Open Zeppelin avoid these theft from happening?

<comment><USER3> Using Open Zeppelin does not guarantee the lack of contract issues, but since it is independently audited, it is more secure than contracts built on top using the Zeppelin library and which are not audited.

For example, Parity - covered in the article - uses Open Zeppelin and had wallet insecurities twice this year. But Zeppelin itself was not affected in those scenarios.

I sort of think of Zeppelin as a "safemath" library, similar to those in C. But even though safemath libraries exist in C, that does not mean C is safe from security issues.

<comment><USER3> I think you must also consider why an Ethereum auditing service would be viable in the first place in light of two concerns:

1\. Flaws in wallets often provide higher bounties, so the people who discover vulnerabilities are more likely to exploit it than to announce it. Basically misaligned incentives.

2\. An auditing company would be taking on a substantial amount of risk considering how underdeveloped Solidity is and the magnitude of wealth potentially stored in a contract. I would only imagine auditing be viable for people who want to build brand recognition than building a company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> (2017)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I was reading two related articles on ethereum, and one of them was in December 2017 and I got confused and though oh I won't put it in for December.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to train/onboard new programmers? - <AUTHOR> After working at my current position for nearly two years (having been a programmer now for nearly four) I am frustrated with our lack of onboarding and training.  To their credit, my supervisors have heard my complaints and want to meet with me to talk about improving (or implementing at all).
I'm looking for ideas and experiences from people on what's worked to train programmers and what you've liked.  Not necessarily on teaching Python basics, for example (although that's always helpful too) but more about the day-to-day business specific stuff.
For me, I feel like I waste hours or even days trying to figure out a problem or using some new technology or third-party software, and I feel like there are already people on my team who know how to do it and could both save me the headaches as well as making me a more productive member of the team.  While they're quick to provide feedback/criticism when I make a mistake, there's not so much before-the-fact assistance to help me do it right the first time.  I'd like to work on improving this but I'm not sure how. <comment><USER2> Having been a junior dev in a couple of startups lately and discussed about onboarding with one of them a lot, I have a few points. This is all about the technical stuff, not anything about creating accounts or signing forms.

1) Make sure you have a working and detailed setup instructions for the development environment. Nothing is more frustrating than spending the first afternoon trying to get dev tools setup and having to ask questions all the time.

Setting up the virtual machines, cloning all the right repositories required, figuring out configs etc ending with instructions on how to run full test suite. Successfully running all tests is a good signal that things are set up well.

2) Have a plan on how to cover all parts of the code base and have an architecture overview.

I personally like to start by fixing bugs. I love when a senior developer can spend some time pair-programming with me through a few simple bugs in different places on the code base. Fixing bug covers setting up dev environment, writing/running tests, finding out how the code is related to the issue (eg. how to find the right code related to the bug), using bug tracker, doing pull requests and code review and deploying.

I understand that many small startups might feel they don't have resources to designate senior devs to do "non-productive" work with a new recruit but it pays off so fast when new people get up to speed faster and can start being productive earlier.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is helpful, thank you. We're not a small startup by any means--we are a company that predates the Internet by about 100 years, literally--but we are a small team (seven devs).

Do you have a formalized pair programming process, or is it just "Hey, who can help me with this?" We're the latter, and while people often try their best, it usually devolves into "Let me do this for you".

<comment><USER2> It depends a lot on the company and the team but I think instead of just the new dev shouting out "Can anyone help me?", there would be a senior dev dedicated to you. That way that person knows it's her/his job to help you out and it's okay if that means you don't get so much done. At the same time other people on the team will be able to focus on their work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You're totally justified in your frustration, most people think about onboarding in terms of signing forms and getting added to a payroll database when really, it should take you from day 0 to 90 to the end of your tenure. In short, its about getting you up to speed.

Even when companies have an onboarding program, they often fail to relay the  _tacit_  information a new hire needs -- like the tech or third party software you describe. That's partially because tacit knowledge is hard to record and transfer, but its also a because no one thought to create a knowledge base or make it easy to transfer that knowledge.

If you're looking to improve the training, I would strongly suggest recording the way you use tools on a day to day basis. That way its not overwhelming if you have to explain or write everything down for a new hire. Using giphy/screenshots/videos is a more engaging strategy for demonstrating how to use an application. If you record processes every once in a while, pretty soon you'll have a compendium of your workflow or a living operations manual. While you could use a cloud storage platform for this, something like [https://tasytt.com/](https://tasytt.com/), let's everyone collaborate and has features like account provisioning, analytics (for compliance), and more fluid access than Google Drive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your support--it's really frustrating.

I'm looking at tasytt but having trouble figuring out what they're used for...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At all places I've worked at, it's been the "jump in the water and try to swim" technique. One thing really helpful is stressing the importance of asking questions, even if they're dumb/simple.

Code reviews are also really helpful. We use a projector and go through pull requests line-by-line, asking questions and explaining design decisions.

Acknowledge the fact that it's going to take long time and just keep new programmers bouncing around with projects so they eventually touch all areas of the code base.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, while question-asking is encouraged, question-answering is not. I can't count how many times I've asked something--to the group as a whole or to an individual--and it's just been ignored.

Do you find the "sink or swim" the best technique, or just the way it's done?

<comment><USER4> Does everyone have someone they know they can go to for questions? I've had times where asking a question to a group, it could be ignored (everyone assumes someone else will take care of it). But if you can have a one-on-one with someone, I haven't had those instances ignored.

That's just how it's been done. I do think, though, the best way to learn a system is to work on internal, non-critical projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a small team, but just today I was in the middle of a Slack chat with someone and told him I was lost, but never got a response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being a noob, after asking several "dumb" questions, I was given a link to Eric Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"[1]. You need to learn to ask questions the proper way.

Ask your supervisors to organize pair-programming sessions. That way you'll learn a lot.

[1] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> What about documentation? Having a good and up to date documentation on \- how to setup the development environment \- what is the coding standard that the team follow \- How to build the project \- (maybe) how to install components like db, key value store etc.

Of course having a script to setup the environment will help so the new person can start doing something, they might get error but at least they start getting error that they can work on their first few days.

<comment><AUTHOR> We all agree that documentation is important, but none of us want to write it.

<comment><USER3> What if you were incentivized to do so? As an engineer

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you suggest? That's the sort of thing I'm looking for to prepare for this meeting this afternoon. Have you found something that works?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Is the R & D for startup development tax deductible? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious as to whether new startups can deduct the development hours as R & D. If so, how do new companies formally track, quantify and price them? <comment><USER2> I have seen some software development R&D deductions at my previous companies here in the US. I am not an accountant and the definition of what is deductible is pretty narrow. The best advice is to discuss with a tax professional since the last headache you need in your startup is an IRS hassle.

</comment><comment><USER3> You had better clearly state your country as tax rules tend to vary as you go around the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> that is quite a large blanket of things to be deductible. i doubt it.

/not an expert</comment>


Why Removing Choice Is Critical To Learning Anything Difficult - <AUTHOR> http://dreaminespanol.com/spanish-lifehacks/removing-choice-life-critical-learning-spanish/

<comment><USER2> You still have the choice to not listen to anything, and it's hard to remove yourself from choice to the point where "this productive thing I want to be doing" is the path of least resistance compared to a bunch of other more immediately "rewarding" activities.

That said, artificially limiting ones choices can certainly help.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like how you phrased that: artificially limited choices. It's accurate, since we always have choices, even ones that are contextually unrelated.</comment></comment>


Show HN: AppTerminal – Create Android App for Websites – Need Your Suggestions - <AUTHOR> https://appterminal.org/ <comment><USER2> Great. I want to merge two websites. Can you add this feature?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks..can you explain a bit more in detail..?

<comment><USER2> I want to do an app with FB and Maps together, do you think is possible ?

<comment><AUTHOR> you mean to integrate facebook pages and google maps.. for your website/business..? if am not wrong..?

<comment><USER2> yes, but i don't know how to do it. Can you help me?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's a good US address parsing library? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to parse address strings (user input) into address objects for use across multiple services. What's a good library to do this?<p>I'm currently using Google Geocoding API, but since I don't use these addresses within a Google Map, I'm pretty sure I'm violating the TOS and would like to yank and replace it before I get shut down. <comment><USER2> My coworkers recently setup an internal API using a Flask app for US address parsing. They used libpostal after comparing it with usaddress and address (both are Python libraries).

libpostal had the best results and good abbreviation parsing ("St" for street, "blvd" for Boulevard, etc). We use this to check if two address strings are equal, so you can imagine how much abbreviations are important to us. The US postal department website has a list of postal abbreviations but writing our own address parser with this is not a simple task.

libpostal is a few gigs of download and will take about 2gb ram to setup. But worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I've tested it before and it looks very promising, but I'm not sure the overhead is necessary for my use case. I'll need to run some tests against all options and figure out where the equilibrium lies between cost (size, memory, price, etc.) and functionality/ux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you looked into libpostal?

[https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal](https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have looked into libpostal. I'm not sure the overhead is completely necessary for my use case. Since posting I've toyed with usaddress and it seems nice. It's a python library so I've had to pull it into my project (node.js) with a child process but it seems to work very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would appear you are correct that you are breaking google's ToS

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/p...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/policies)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I found this after adding the reply below since I felt the need to verify :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keep in mind that address parsing is only one piece of the puzzle. A good library can parse out address components with some degree of accuracy but unless the address can be verified, the result is worthless in many cases. In order to get accurate results, the library must use up to date, real world data.

The best options are commercial: ArcGIS, HERE, Google Maps, SmartyStreets, etc. There are free options such as OpenStreetMap, Census TIGER, and Open Addresses but in my experience the results are unreliable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Our company is dealing with this problem. We have implemented an API to provide enterprises address parsing & geocoding capabilities.

If you want something cheap, business-friendly and ready to go asap, I would advise you to use Here Maps. They have batch-geocoding plans that are quite affordable.

If you want an API that runs behind the firewall or some customization on parsing & geocoding, then we can help you with that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why do you think you're breaking Google's ToS?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm automatically parsing the user input and using the geocoding api data output to link their address with their account, and then I'm charging for services that are placed by using this address. I'm currently under the impression that automatic parsing without using the data in a Google Map is against the TOS, but haven't been able to verify this 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a python library that uses probabilistic string parsing on addresses. You can even add labeled data to improve accuracy: [https://github.com/datamade/usaddress](https://github.com/datamade/usaddress)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've had luck using [https://smartystreets.com/](https://smartystreets.com/) if you don't mind using a paid service. They're far cheaper than Google.

<comment><USER10> I also use SmartyStreets - generally very happy with it, and you can do up to 250 lookups per month for free. One thing to watch out for is that SS is meant primarily for mail delivery. There are many addresses in the US that represent real places on a map, but cannot receive USPS mail, and thus will be rejected by SmartyStreets. Our customer base includes a large number of industrial addresses, so that may skew our results, but we find that up to 20% of our legitimate addresses get rejected by the service. You can control how strict the validation will be, up to a point, but beyond that we have to rely on Google as a backup for cleanup and standardization.</comment></comment>


How The Fast Times Of The Paparazzi Came to a Halt - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/claudiarosenbaum/downfall-of-the-paparazzi <comment><USER2> I honestly see the paparazzi photo scene as comparable to child porn (obviously, lesser, but on the same scale). Here we have a mass market of seemingly ordinary people consuming violations of other people in a way that makes it clear they don't see the victims as other than a source of titillation, an industry that serves this content up to them out of pure asocial greed, and these photographers actually going out there and committing the violations, because it's fun and the money is good if you don't have a working conscience and can depersonalize your prey. Each blames the others.

Guilty, all of them.

<comment><USER3> Paparazzi aren't 100% parasitic. A lot of celebrities get benefit from them.

Princess Di was thought to be a master of the press for instance.

There is a certain amount of celebrities creating their own feeding frenzy.

My issue is more when people not in the game get hit by media storms.

<comment><USER4> The official inquest concluded that paparazzi killed Princess Di.

"press" != "paparazzi"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Wales#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Wales#Death)

<comment><USER5> > The official inquest concluded that paparazzi killed Princess Di.

Drunk driving probably didn't help either if you read the link you posted..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll only read this if someone copies it and pastes it to another site with the title "12 Crazy Reasons Why the Fast Times Of The Paparazzi Came to a Halt."

Nice that Buzzfeed is doing journalism. Shitty that it's funded off of their content theft...

</comment><comment><USER7> And nothing of value was lost.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, chalk seeing a BuzzFeed article on HN as one of the last things I thought I'd ever see...

<comment><USER9> Buzzfeed does a fair amount of pretty good journalism, many of their articles have appeared here before..

JustFab: The Billion Dollar Startup with a Secret Past [1]

Larry Ellison's Cat Island [2]

Or literally dozens (hundreds?) of others. [3]

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278697)

[2] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10089747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10089747)

[3] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com)

<comment><USER10> It's true. There's definitely a noticeable segment of bitter Reddit users who complain "they stole that content from Reddit", blissfully unaware of the irony that most of the things "stolen" from Reddit often didn't originate on Reddit either, but they like to squawk about BuzzFeed (as it's only theft when it happens -to- Reddit).

<comment><USER11> Maybe, but my negative view of BuzzFeed has nothing to do with Reddit since I barely go there. It's more the fact that BuzzFeed is the tabloid of the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good riddance.

<comment><USER13> Not that I disagree, but of all the problems in our society, those suffered by our _poor_ celebrities are somehow the least of my concerns.

<comment><USER14> How dare they successfully make music for a living, and expect their family to live normal lives! The arrogance.

<comment><USER15> More like, _they make lots of money so we have a right to make their lives a living hell and drive them to substance abuse & suicide!_

<comment><USER16> They make lots of money by deliberately signing themselves up for privacy violations. The relation between celebrities and paparazzi is symbiotic, not parasitic, despite what the former sometimes say (or some even think). It's how popularity manifests and grows, and popularity is what celebrities make money on.

<comment><USER17> So are you saying that anyone who makes music for a living cares more about money than privacy? That there isn't anyone who would prefer to be able to entertain onstage and live a private life offstage, even if it reduces their income?

Half the responses in this subthread seem to be from people who honestly believe that every actor and musician and athlete cares about money above all else and deserves any consequences of that drive, and it's just really bizarre.

<comment><USER16> I don't mean they care about money above everything else, not in a condescending way. I only mean that lack of privacy is a part of being a celebrity, and it is a fact about the nature of things, whether anyone likes it or not. Privacy issues come with the territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any article about paparazzi is not properly balanced without a mention of the way many, many stars actually cooperate with them for media exposure.

<comment><USER19> luckily, this article mentioned that,

> Little more than a decade ago, stars like Paris Hilton would "inadvertently" > leak their plans to the paparazzi — part of the wink-wink symbiotic > relationship that fueled their tabloid fame. But what once took an army of > clamoring paparazzi can now be tweeted, Instagrammed, Snapchatted, and > Vined.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Documentation Hub for Your Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.docsapp.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link to demo [https://demo.docsapp.io/](https://demo.docsapp.io/)

Ask me anything.</comment>


Equilibrium Grade Inflation with Implications for Female Interest in STEM Majors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w26556 <comment><AUTHOR> Overall there has been grade inflation at U.S. colleges, as documented at [http://www.gradeinflation.com/](http://www.gradeinflation.com/) . I can believe that less grade inflation in STEM discourages more women than men, but I fear that the "solution" will be to make STEM grades as inflated as non-STEM grades rather than to reduce the inflation in non-STEM courses.

</comment><comment><USER2> This makes me a bit cynical. Are we to believe women are too delicate to receive a 85% or less?

I can't seem to read the paper, so I don't know.

I find the gender debates on HN mostly pointless... so trying to avoid that here.

<comment><AUTHOR> The paper is at [https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/aa...](https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/aahtmasterdoc042718a.pdf) . The paper "Choice of Majors: Are Women Really Different from Men?" did find that "Women are, however, more likely to switch out of male-dominated STEM majors in response to poor performance compared to men." The paper is at [http://ftp.iza.org/dp10947.pdf](http://ftp.iza.org/dp10947.pdf) .</comment></comment>


The New York Times–Facebook Deal Is Here - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/new-york-timesfacebook-deal-is-here.html <comment><USER2> This is a big deal to everyone. Independent, high-quality, high-integrity journalism is essential to society. Of three who provided it on a national scale, the NY Times might be the last standing.[1] Now they are affiliated with someone who recruited other tech leaders by saying:[2]

[We can be] "one of the most powerful political forces" because "We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA." To what degree is the Times part of that distrubtion channel? You and I may agree with their SOPA stance, but in general I want to make up my own mind and I need independent journalism to do that.

Regarding the Times: Reading their internal report from last year[3] it was a frustrating to see how far behind they were in both development and perspective. If you haven't read it, some of it is shocking, at least to me.

I hope the owners of the Times see themselves as stewards of an institution essential to society (not only the publication itself, and also independent, quality journalism), and will sell it to another responsible steward if they can't make it work.

[1] Following and reading the 'serious' media closely for a long time, my perspective is that maybe 10 years ago there were three top-end sources: The Times, the Wall St Journal, and the Washington Post. The WSJ is now published by the same people as Fox News, which (along with their willingness to publish absurd lies on their editorial page) tells me about their journalistic ethics. The Post now publishes increasingly strident and poorly considered stories, seemingly aiming for BuzzFeed. People love to criticize the Times; partly that's a result of being #1 in any field. They are imperfect as is every human institution, but if you look at all they do, we would be much worse off without them. For example, why was the Times the only publication (AFAIK) kicked out of China? Bloomberg openly made the concession to not criticize the government; how do the others avoid trouble?

[2] [http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg- immigr...](http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration- groups-status-stumbling-89652.html)

[3] [https://www.scribd.com/embeds/224608514/content?start_page=1...](https://www.scribd.com/embeds/224608514/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key- TiQrYKIlOq2iHdtIubdB&show_recommendations=false)</comment>


Brazil finds possible COVID-19 anti-viral - <AUTHOR> http://www.mctic.gov.br/mctic/opencms/salaImprensa/noticias/arquivos/2020/04/MCTIC_anuncia_testes_clinicos_em_pacientes_com_remedio_contra_o_coronavirus.html <comment><AUTHOR> Some quick bits for non-brazilians:

Out of more than 2000 tested drugs, six presented good reactions in-vitro, and when "mixed" together showed a 94% decrease in viral load.

Human tests approved this tuesday (14th) and to being next week on 7 army hospitals in Rio de Janeiro (5), São Paulo (1) and Brasília (1).

<comment><USER2> You are going to get a lot of derisive comments because this is only an in vitro study, but I think the most important part of this article is the aggressive approach Brazil is taking to try these treatments.

We are so conservative in the US - we only allow doctors to try different drugs on the severe cases, when we should also be focusing on pre- hospitalization trials.

Brazil's hand is forced because I doubt they have enough ventilators and have a lot of people living in remote regions.

I am also aware that the US is more litigious, but I believe doctors should be empowered to try regimens before hospitalization, particularly things more benign than Chloroquine, like Ivermectin, which has shown some promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Everything kills viruses in vitro.</comment>


Show HN: KickStarter for open source projects and LinkedIn for OSS contributors - <AUTHOR> https://openteams.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> After 20 years of working in open source, Travis Oliphant, the co-creator of Numpy, Scipy & Numba and the founder of PyData, NumFOCUS, & Anaconda, decided the economics of open source needed to change.

Organizations are disconnected from the communities and lack support and maintenance from the open source projects they depend on. Open source teams are burned out, underpaid, underrepresented. These problems have made open source software difficult to maintain.

This is the reason Travis started OpenTeams, a marketplace to connect open source communities with organizations. On one side of the marketplace, we connect companies with teams to help fund project development and maintenance. On the other side, we create a way for open source contributors to showcase their work, help them get recognized for their work and hired to work on projects they care about. Put simply, it's like a KickStarter for open source projects and a LinkedIn for open source contributors.

Please give us feedback to help make open source software sustainable.

Thank you!

<comment><USER3> This is a two sided marketplace - which side are you focusing on first? Developers or sponsors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question!

We focused on building out the contributor side of the marketplace first. However, we are now focusing on building out both sides of the marketplace in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the subtitles for this is "a KickStarter for open source projects". I looked at their landing page and utterly failed to understand if this description is accurate for the funding part of this product.

However, if it is, I think it's a terrible model for OSS development, or for funding development in general. I develop Cursive ([https://cursive- ide.com](https://cursive-ide.com)), an IDE for Clojure code. When I was starting out and deciding how to fund it, lots of people told me I should do a Kickstarter like Light Table, another popular Clojure IDE. I decided not to and instead did the old-school thing of actually charging for the value I create. 4 years later, Cursive is going great and Light Table has been dead for years, despite obtaining $315k (IIRC) in Kickstarter funding.

So what went wrong with Light Table? The problem is that that funding is not ongoing, it's a one-off thing. $315k sounds like a lot of money, but if you have a couple of people living in San Francisco, you burn through it very quickly. When that money runs out, what do you do? It's really hard to go back and ask for more, and even if you do you're only kicking the can down the road - a year later or whatever you have the same problem again.

Obviously Cursive is not directly comparable to OSS development since it's closed-source and commercial. But the principle remains the same - <USER2> needs ongoing funding, not lump sums. As distasteful as it is to many developers, the model that best matches the actual requirements of funding software development is subscription pricing. When I was discussing possible licensing models on my mailing list, one of my users made this point more eloquently than I could:

 _Software is never delivered as a complete static product, it evolves over time to meet the needs of its users. Perpetual licensing leaves developers in the awkward position of deciding to support that product forever for free, or releasing new paid-for versions regularly and stepping onto the feature treadmill where you have to keep delivering 'value' to attract users away from your old versions. Perpetual licensing is bad for developers and bad for users._

As I said above, I couldn't work out whether OpenTeams is actually more similar to Kickstarter or something like Patreon. I really hope they're aiming for ongoing funding and not one-off lump sums.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your detailed comment. We really do appreciate your feedback - it will help us to get better!

Our KickStarter style funding events are called Initiatives. Please visit our early Initiatives page and you will find two projects we are already helping to get funding. We say it is a KickStarter for open source projects because it is a marketplace where companies that use open source software can connect with companies/individuals that will commit on a commercial basis to advance project roadmaps and maintenance. This is similar to KickStarter in the sense that the public (one side of the market place) is funding the project (other side of the marketplace) in return for a promise to use a product/service in the future when it is available.

Unlike Closjure, the projects that start an Initiative will be open source. Additionally, the feature/maintenance that the project releases as a result of the Initiative will also be open source.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many other large companies donate to open source software for a number of reasons. Typically, it is to fund a new feature or to help maintain the project. We are creating a platform for these companies to better fund the projects they rely on (and already fund).

These projects aren't restricted to one Initiative. They can start as many Initiatives as they desire. Of course, the success of the Initiative is dependent on the supply of funding.

With regards to ongoing funding, projects can create an Initiative for maintaining the project which, while it is a lump sum, can be distributed to the maintainers over time (under contract). In this sense, it is similar to the world of startup funding: when you've run out of money, you ask for more and continue to grow.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the detailed reply.

One suggestion I have is to use plainer language when describing what this actually _is_ , especially on your landing page. Here in the comments, when describing the project you've repeatedly described it as a marketplace, which makes sense to me. However that word or description doesn't appear at all on your landing page, and after reading the whole page I'm really none the wiser about how it works.

The way you describe all this, it _sounds_ very complicated, but I'm wondering if it really is that complicated in practice. I'd suggest trying to have a "How does the funding work?" section on your landing page, and try to get that section under (say) 100 words. If you can't describe it that briefly, I'd gently suggest that you should try to make the way it works simpler.

 _In this sense, it is similar to the world of startup funding: when you 've run out of money, you ask for more and continue to grow._

I think that's fair enough, especially once it's understood that it's mostly companies who are putting up the money, not individuals. Personally, I'd stay clear of the Kickstarter analogy because Kickstarter doesn't have this ability to go back for more money, and that's a killer for software funding.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciate the suggestions. They are very insightful and I'll make sure I discuss them all with the team - thank you so much.

In practice, a project needs funding. They create an Initiative on our platform with a product roadmap and outline of what they are going to do (maintenance or a new feature). Companies/individuals that use the project go to the website and provide funding. A contract is formed by the OpenPartner (similar to a general contractor) whereby the project only gets the money once certain requirements are fulfilled. The OpenPartner hires contributors to work on the project and those contributors get to work and are paid as they provide deliverables. Everyone then gets to use the updated software.

We will be working on our messaging so thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I searched for OpenTeams' OSS license, but all I'm seeing is

* © 2019 OpenTeams. All rights reserved.

* [https://openteams.com/terms-of-service](https://openteams.com/terms-of-service)

Why isn't a project who wants to change the economics of open source, open- source itself? Can you reconsider your licensing choices?

<comment><USER6> An organization collecting funds for open source should itself be open source and not earn margin for anything other than upkeep and paying engineers' salaries.

I kind of feel like Patreon and Kickstarter are in the same vein: rent seeking marketplaces that would be better if they were replaced with entirely open source alternatives that belonged to their respective communities. Patreon should be funded via patreon.

If Wikipedia were started today, I worry that it would have ads or be for- profit.

<comment><USER7> As someone working on a crowdfunding platform that I would like to be able to release the source code as an open consumer union implementation, I have concerns about enabling unmoderated crowdfunding.

The power of a collective wallet is not something to be taken lightly. Whether it's environmental destruction or divisive politics, I have yet to decide that setting something like this free is for the best interest.

I would like to see an open source license like the GPL that has enforceable, well-defined provisions for environmental protection and human rights.

It seems like to go all the way, a smart contract would need to be used to ensure the transparency that a standard webserver-based infrastructure cannot provide. But credit cards are the standard for online payments so this would put a project in a further category from the start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing your concerns. We will not be an unmoderated platform and I will look into the GPL license, thank you.

We are at the very beginning of our journey and so there are many features to come.

<comment><USER7> Sorry if there was any confusion. I was wondering just in a general sense. I did not mean to imply anything about the moderation of OpenTeams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could be cool to use Mattermost instead of Slack, given the concept is supporting open source.

Along those lines, I appreciated login with GitLab!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! I'll be bringing this up with the team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this compared to OpenCollective [1][2]?

[1] [https://opencollective.com](https://opencollective.com)

[2] [https://github.com/opencollective](https://github.com/opencollective)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! Thank you.

OpenTeams' vision is to become THE platform for open source innovation.

OpenCollective uses a donation-based model. On the other hand, OpenTeams is creating a marketplace that connects open source software consuming companies to open source consulting and development companies who are proposing fundable roadmaps for new features and maintenance of critical open source software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As I recall, there was an attempt at "Kickstarter for open source" before. Only, it might even have been before Kickstarter (in which case I guess it was a "Fundable for open source").

I never heard of it again. I like the idea, but it might not be the easiest to get off the ground. Why not just use Kickstarter? (Except that they're doing union busting, I know).

<comment><USER11> There's Bountysource. Dunno if that's what you had in mind, but it seems like a similar principle. People put "bounties" on features in open source projects. Someone closes a PR for that feature, they get the bounty. Someone wants to encourage work on a feature, they contribute to the feature's bounty.

In my view this is a natural next step for open source as it closes the loop on users who don't contribute code but do use the software. Now they can contribute financially, in theory fueling more code contributors (in practice, most bounties I've seen are not worth the work, but I've only had my eye on one obscure little open source game, so this may not be representative).

I think Kickstarter is not great for this model simply because it has a fixed end date for fundraising and there is less of a direct tie to specific features in a particular codebase.

<comment><AUTHOR> We agree that a KickStarter style of funding is the best way to succesfully fund a project as it has many benefits. For example, funding companies mitigate risk by sharing the burden of cost.

Check out our early Initiatives page and you'll find two early projects we are currently working with to get funding.

Thanks for your awesome comment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apart from KickStarter and LinkedIn, what other projects/companies do you think would be considered as competitors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our competition is companies that help open source contributors to be hired or paid in one way or another. Additionally, any companies that help open source projects get funding would be considered competition.

Competition includes: * Bounty-based companies like Gitcoin, BountySource, and IssueHunt * Donation-based companies like Github Sponsors, Liberapay, and Patreon * Subscription-based companies like Tidelift

However, there is no direct competitor creating a marketplace that connects open source stakeholders with organizations to facilitate funding for new development and maintenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Right sidebar and popover message obscures the page and is hard to click away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this feedback. I'll be sending this info back to the dev team. We really appreciate it!

<comment><USER13> Cool. It is worth testing on mobile since many readers are using our phones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The voice-over voice in the video on the landing page is terrible. Sorry :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't apologize! We really do appreciate the feedback, so thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating idea and I look forward to seeing where it goes!

</comment><comment><USER16> Some comments from some friends:

The website needs to be open source too.

You being able to revise the terms of service with no notice is a deal breaker.

The privacy policy might not be GDPR compliant due to changes being effective immediately instead of being consented to.

Why are you using Slack instead of something more open (like self-hosted Mattermost)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this fantastic feedback. We will discuss all of these points as a team.

Really appreciate it!

<comment><USER16> Another comment:

You need to be super transparent about what sort of cut you are taking from funders and how you are funding the OpenTeams project itself and what expenses that funding is paying for (salaries, development, servers etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> We will be taking a 10% cut on the funding which will go to further development of the platform.

The OpenPartner's are responsible for creating the product roadmap in liaison with the development team. This includes a clear budget for where the money is going, just as you described.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Removes Ad blocking Extensions from Extension Gallery Front Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.geektechnica.com/2010/02/google-removes-ad-blocking-extensions-from-extension-gallery-front-page/

<comment><USER2> From what I can tell, a cron job randomizes the front-page [1] every 1 to 2 minutes (try refreshing the page a few times over the span on a couple minutes). Ad-blocking plugins appear every so often.

On the real, ranked Popular page [2] you can see that ad-block is always #1. While it is possible that Google is rotating the front page to minimize the number of downloads of ad-blockers, I think it is far more likely that they simply want to give more exposure to other popular plugins than the top X, which will likely become static.

This is a non-story.

[1] <https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-US>

[2] <https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular?hl=en-US>

</comment><comment><USER3> The front page of the Chrome extensions gallery was designed to give as many good extensions as possible some of the eyeball share from users landing on the front page. The Chrome gallery team is _very_ interested in a healthy ecosystem, rather than promoting and re-promoting a number of older, most- popular extensions. Showing the top-N extensions all of the time is antithetical to their goals.

If you look at the Chrome front page from time-to-time, you'll see that a lot of extensions on there have only a few thousand users, but are really cool extensions. They are doing a pretty good job of surfacing less-popular or newer extensions.

Disclaimer: we are a partner extension and showed up in the gallery on the front page for a few days after the initial launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> They just changed it from today. It wasn't always like this, so the argument that all of a sudden they are trying to promote less popular extensions, is not very reasonable. There is a "featured" section and "Today's Top Pick" section where they can promote as many extensions as they like.

I am not saying it is necessarily a bad thing, they _are_ an online ad company, it is in their best interest to make sure less people use ad blockers. But lets not justify this action under the pretense of them trying to "promote" other extensions.

Honestly, if I was in charge, I probably would have done the same.

<comment><USER3> I'm afraid you are reading too much into this. A static list of most popular extensions reinforces the popularity of those top extensions over and over. There is no grand conspiracy to kill off or discourage adblocking extensions, only to promote as much variety in the ecosystem as possible. If they wanted to kill it off, they would have just gone and removed them from the gallery and posted a TOS update as they did with YouTube downloaders:

[http://blog.arpitnext.com/2009/12/google-rejected-youtube- do...](http://blog.arpitnext.com/2009/12/google-rejected-youtube-downloader- extension.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I never said they want to kill it off or implied anything like that. I stated the obvious that they are trying to make it less accessible to get ad blockers because it is in their interest.

You claim that they are trying to promote less popular extensions, which you have no way to know because they just started removing the most used popular list from the front page _today_.

Unless you work for Google, or had any conversation from anyone from Google regarding this in the last 24 hours, how can you claim such a thing?

<comment><USER4> I work for Google, on Google Chrome extensions.

The change to the gallery was actually made awhile ago, and discussed here:

[http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium- exten...](http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium- extensions/browse_thread/thread/e8064192990c8f9e)

mmastrac is correct. We always wanted the front page to work this way, we just didn't get to it in time for ship day.

The idea is to spread the wealth a bit on the front page. Otherwise the lead the frontrunners have becomes difficult to challenge.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for clearing this up. I just noticed the change from today too.

BTW, I am a big fan of GreaseMonkey and I really appreciate your work on it and thanks for porting it to Chrome. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _What's stopping Google from blocking these extensions in the future when user base reaches a critical mass?_

The fact that Chrome is open source, and (I assume) has the ability to install extensions from other sites should the user wish to do so. I really see this as what separates Google from Apple.

<comment><USER6> Chromium is open source, not Chrome. This may seem like semantics, but when users search the dominant search engine for "chrome web browser" they are going to get directed to Google's version of the browser. No amount of open source linkfests are going to budge that link from the top of the search results. As a consequence Chrome will always be exactly what Google wants (or allows) it to be and nothing more. If Google decides at some future point that ad blockers are eating into its bottom line then the ad blockers will disappear, end of story. I am sure it will be couched in some pseudo-technical justification (c.f. why adblock won't work on Chrome) but the end result will be the same. What separates Google from Apple is that at least the latter will have the balls to tell you to your face instead of pretending they don't know what you are talking about.

<comment><USER7> Eh? AAPL isn't telling-you-to-your-face the reasons for rejecting iPhone apps (heh, such as Google Voice). Every large company attempts to coat its shallow self-serving behavior with bullshit-flavored rainbows and unicorns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting if it's true, but it could also be a glitch. I could see taking it off the front page, but manually changing the download count would be a bit much.

<comment><USER9> It's either a glitch or they began filling the "Popular" column with random results. I reloaded the page a few times and got different results there, one included some ad blocking extension.

Screenshot: <http://imgur.com/HT1R9.png>

<comment><USER10> According to a comment (the comment, actually) they're just rotating the popular results some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm counting down the seconds until we get a comment about how this is "evil"</comment>


Periodic Table of the (HTML5) Elements - <AUTHOR> http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html

<comment><USER2> Every time I see a "periodic table of X elements" a question pops to my mind: what is the benefit of arranging elements totally unrelated to the natural ones using the same structure?

In the original table, elements are arranged in rows, columns and colors using their specific properties, which actually are not at all present in these html elements.

In this table I see only the meaning for the colors, but why not to use the two dimensions of the table to convey something different (losing, of course, the familiar shape)?

<comment><USER3> In most cases I'd agree with you - but I assume that in this case it's purely done for the sake of a rather excellent pun, which I rather enjoyed :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've just printed a copy for my wall, and it's beautiful! If you had a poster, I'd buy it :)

One request: please switch from W3Schools to the official W3C spec for the "more-info" link.

<comment><USER5> Or the mozilla dev center, W3Schools has some issues (<http://w3fools.com/>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty cool!

Not to be pedantic (I hate that word), but in the spirit of improvement, you may want to spell check your popups.

(example: "<bdi> Text that is seperated from directional formatting of its surroundings."

... should be separated)

At first, I looked at this chart, and thought "cute, but what good is it." Then I started clicking on it, and eventually found myself printing it and hanging it in my office! Good work.

<comment><USER7> How did you print it? I only ask because the print preview for it shows that it loses a lot of it's style (background color, borders, etc.).

<comment><USER6> Gimp Screen capture and print.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one thing I learned from this - there is a new ruby tag in HTML5 (not related to the lang): _Ruby (also spelt rubi) characters are small, annotative glosses that can be placed above or to the right of a Chinese character when writing logographic languages such as Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation. Ruby annotations, are usually used as a pronunciation guide for relatively obscure characters._

</comment><comment><USER9> This is quite useful when you don't remember the name of a tag.

With html5 there's lots of new tagnames to remember.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see a filter button on this page as well. When I click on a "Show supported tags" button, it will let me know which tags are currently implemented in my browser, and hide those which are not

</comment><comment><USER10> Thank you, I've been looking for something like this for a quite while

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice. One suggestion- make the title or something clickable to restore the clean table after using this to examine some site's code.</comment>


Forgive your users; even when they are drunk - <AUTHOR> http://usabilityfriction.com/2008/10/09/forgive-your-users-even-when-they-are-drunk/

<comment><USER2> This isn't forgiving users. This is adding a gimmicky feature that frustrates late night hackers.

How about trusting your users? Short of a BAC test there's no surefire way to know they're drunk, and in addition so what if they are? Impossible to detect the context of when someone really shouldn't be sending an email.

Virgin Mobile did a similar thing with their mobile service a few years ago in Australia. Just like this it generated a lot of media interest and discussion, and just like this it is a useless addition by a 'funny' engineer (Jon Perlow? Likely, given his single use case he quotes as inspiring this.). If anyone else had done it it would have been derided -- Google can't keep public goodwill like this for much longer.

Thank goodness it's in Gmail Labs and not actually released.</comment>


Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?ex=1334203200&en=79be2f770fc76c6d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I think this model implies a certain marketing strategy. While achieving a critical mass might be impossible (read unlikely and hard to control) if you try for the world as a whole, it may be possible for a smaller one. Once you have a small group that is largely converted you can add other groups in such a way that you don't put out the fire by separating members of the first group.

It may be that a large part of the success of Facebook comes from the way they were able to use student bodies as small, self-contained networks, and then build from there.

It reminds me of building a fire with charcoals. If you keep them together you can keep them burning. If you can get a nice group going you can add to it bit by bit and build as big as you want. If you disperse them they die.

Our world has a million little self-contained networks. If you try to win some over perhaps some will succeed to the point that the network works for you. Then maybe you can add others.

</comment><comment><USER3> I blogged this last night about how it pertains to what we're doing: <http://www.zaid360.com/?p=143>

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool feature of NYT online I just discovered: If you double click a word, it'll define it for you in a pop up window.

</comment><comment><USER5> And closer to home: Is Google?

<comment><USER6> How so?

If you want close to home, think news.yc or other social news sites when it comes to cumulative advantage.

<comment><USER5> Your point is that news.yc and other social news sites are actually _more useful_ when more people use them, right? I agree with that. But IMHO, that's missing the point of the article.

Music doesn't _objectively_ get better just because more people listen to it; and yet, the authors' research appears to show that people's opinions of music is hugely influenced by what other people like. Recall their main result: They had one group of users who they didn't show any information about how often a song was downloaded, and then eight independent groups who were shown the download count of each song inside that group. "The song 'Lockdown,' by 52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in [the group not shown download counts]; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in [the group not shown counts] had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success." Their conclusion is that the reason why predicting the success of media products is shaky is that what's a success is hugely influenced by an unpredictable feedback process.

Thus, my question: Can we assume that Google's success is due in a large part not to anything that Google did, but to the (random) feedback process of people liking Google because they see other people liking Google?

Of course, one could argue that this is simply the truism that one needs luck as well as talent to succeed. But I come away from reading the article with the feeling that I've learned something that goes deeper than that, and I'm trying to figure out how to apply it to the tech world.

<comment><USER7> I think what Daniel is saying is that on social news sites, popular posts tend be popular because they're popular.

I don't think we can attribute Google's success to cumulative effects:

I suspect that you can see cumulative advantage effects only when objective quality is difficult or impossible to measure. Taste in music is extremely subjective - it's very difficult to measure the quality of music independent of its popularity.

On the other hand, the objective quality of search results can be measured by independent testing and feedback - it's not perfect - but you can get a much better measurement of quality for search than you can for music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One word: MySpace.</comment>


Why Dijkstra suggested Premature-Loop-Exit Prohibition  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plover.com/2009/07/31/#Hoare-logic

<comment><USER2> I know that the article is foremost about Dijkstra, and uses Hoare-style verification of programs as an example only, but there's a C function with "break;" being verified using Hoare logic right there:

<http://frama-c.cea.fr/jessie_tutorial_index.html>

Presumably exceptions were not a standard feature in programming languages when Dijkstra made his comment about premature-loop-exits. The "break;" C construct is only a restricted form of exception and exceptions are much better understood now than then. Verifying a program that uses them is no more difficult than verifying a program that doesn't.

Pascal Cuoq

<comment><USER3> Pascal: I used to sign my comments on this site and after a polite argument I changed my ways to fit in better. It's just not the house style on news.yc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A nicely argued article, but I haven't come across anti-Dijkstra sentiment before, so I didn't realize it needed a response. Are there many folks out there who consider Dijkstra "out of touch with reality", or was this just one wack-job on a mailing list?

<comment><USER5> Here's an easy way to determine "reality". Find a large C program. Rewrite it so that none of the loops use break. How excited will the program's maintainers' be to receive your patch?

<comment><USER6> Clever, yet informative and to the point. I can't upvote you enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It falls so far outside of day to day programming, that it feels somewhat alien.

I however miss the argument a bit, as i can imagine a mechanical transform that can turn the premature exit version into one without. (using if statements to remove all operations until the end of the loop)

<comment><USER8> I agree that it's pretty easy to transform the code. You could also take the code block in the loop, make it a separate function, and return instead of break. It's no harder to understand a block with break statements than it is to understand a function with multiple returns, although maybe Dijkstra wasn't a big fan of multiple returns, either.

<comment><USER2> Good thinking on both counts. Multiple returns are another limited form of exceptions, and you don't need to go back in time to ask the Dijkstra from that period if he disliked them. They too escaped theoretical treatment as it was formulated at that time :)

I have put some example rules to introduce exceptions in Hoare logic at <http://snipt.org/lWg> (I needed monospaced fonts, sorry for the inconvenience)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Duplicate of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736494>

Still, this submission is getting the attention it deserves, the other did not :-(</comment>


Whiz Kids - This show inspired me to be what I am today. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yQ3LCeGLvU

<comment><USER2> I loved this show until it went off the rails of 'real world possibility' with the "possessed by ancient Egyptian demon" episode. The pilot shows off the schizophrenic nature of the show, with Wojek from Barney Miller and A. Martinez uncovering a Chinatown-like land deal, while the kids cause fire alarms and sprinkler activations at evil NASCorp.

I showed that scene to my boyfriend about a month ago, and he couldn't believe such a show ever aired...

<comment><USER3> Check out the sign at 1:44: 'Sunnydale Convalescent Hospital'.

As everyone knows, Sunnydale was Buffy's home town (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunnydale>) a decade and half later...

So, demons? Yep, all very logical - in a time-displaced sort of way ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discovered this a while back and was pretty excited. This was my favorite show in the 80s. I think I actually hated my parents for a while cos my room didn't look like Richies.

Pretty sure most episodes are there, quality is bad but the magic is still there.</comment>