How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.milewise.com/post/8792373531/how-we-used-node

<comment><USER2> they'd do much better with twisted (python) than tornado. using Deferreds is nothing like opening keys with a beer bottle -- it makes a lot of sense.

and as a former ITA Software employee, i can scoff and say they aren't actually doing anything resembling flight search. they're just scraping websites and APIs. node.js might be fine for that, but so is anything else. at that level it's more a matter of preference than capability.

<comment><USER3> There are deferreds in node as well.

<comment><USER4> They aren't part of the core API like they are in Twisted, is this correct?

<comment><USER3> No. Node is a lower-level API than Twisted.

The "fibers" utility is quite popular. There are also several different promise libraries, and a few code-translation approaches that simulate coroutines.

They all build on top of the very simple EventEmitter and continuation- passing-style ("callback") style that the node-core API uses.

As a JavaScript luddite, I prefer passing functions around and listening to events :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So does milewise scrape the airline sites for award travel? Does it also integrate with ITA or similar?

I ask because (1) the airline websites tend to be _really_ slow and (2) they tend not to find the cheapest/best flights - an ITA search can often beat them.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually do both, and then spent a few cycles de-duping etc.

1) Part of our reason for using Node+Socket.IO is to deal with the problem of having a bunch of different sources returning data over a wide spread of time.

2) You'd be surprised about the airline sites. While they don't necessarily have the widest variety of good fares, airline will often reserve their cheapest fares for their own sites (called Last Seat Availability).

<comment><USER5> Thanks ... looks like it's time to sign up for MileWise!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not related to Node, but your homepage is really well designed. Attractive, simple and clean. Nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sacha Greif did our homepage. (<http://www.sachagreif.com/>)

He's awesome, super talented and incredibly fun to work with.

<comment><USER7> Thanks Nick! You guys are great to work to as well, glad you appreciate the result :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could you describe the difficulties you encountered with Tornado and asynchronous Python code?

<comment><USER9> Don't want to turn this into a Node.js/Python flame war (we love Python as well here at MileWise), but regarding asynchronous Python code:

It's more just an annoyance of the language. Specifically, anonymous functions are must easier in JavaScript, so it was just easier to write read and write maintainable code.

In Python, you are limited to only passing in simple lambda functions (although deferreds do get around this issue somewhat). It's not a show stopper but when combined with all the other advantages of Node.js, it just made the decision to switch a lot easier.

We also ran into a lot of issues related to poor garbage collection in Python and were using up a lot of memory. This was not related to dangling references but rather Python's permanent allocation of Integer and Float objects.

Finally, we just saw better performance out of V8 than Python (although we never tried anything else besides vanilla Python 2.6).

For our specific problem, Node.js worked well. It's not always the right solution. We will write a more detailed blog post soon with specifics of how we used Node.

<comment><USER10> >> It's more just an annoyance of the language. Specifically, anonymous functions are must easier in JavaScript, so it was just easier to write read and write maintainable code.

That's pretty specious. You can easily write a function defined inside a function that you can pass by just naming it. "Anonymous" functions are just syntactic sugar. Furthermore, writing a new python named function is easier (fewer chars) to write than a javascript anonymous function, so the "sugar" gained is moot.

Finally, as you build more and bigger systems, you realize that those multi- line anonymous functions you had you actually want to be named (for documentation) and tested. So you'll end up de-anonymizing the complex (multi- line) ones anyway.

As for speed, why not compare a jit (v8) to a jit (pypy) ?

<comment><USER11> This is getting ridiculous. These guys were busy launching a product, not trying to write a balanced comparison of the pros and cons of every evented framework out there.

Node worked better for them, what's the problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a killer product and very useful for people who travel often. Way to go! Also, thanks for sharing your code. You all seem like a class act.

</comment><comment><USER13> Gah, right after I finish a site requiring me to write my own node soap interface, you guys come and release yours ;) Thanks for contributing back!

<comment><USER9> :) Would still love to see your implementation though. Ours only covers a subset of the spec so lots of room for improvement...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One comment: I typed in an email/password and right away it is asking me for my airline credentials but it isn't explaining what it is that the site wants to do with them or if it will store my info and collect information from now on. I'm curious about the site, but I thought twice about entering my info and skipped it. Just saying you might want to explain what it is you are doing to make people more comfortable.

EDIT: This information does seem to be covered in the FAQ, but you don't see the link to the FAQ anywhere when you are trying to capture user accounts on initial signup: <https://secured.milewise.com/faq>

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback - we weren't sure whether at this point people would have a clear idea from the homepage of what we were doing w/ the info and they'd just want to get on with things, or if they'd want more contextual explanation.

This is definitely an area for metrics and user testing, but probably better for us to err on the side of caution =)

<comment><USER14> I mean, I'd like to think you were going to provide me some great service.. but then that means I could register a domain name and put up a slick looking homepage and start collecting passwords :)

Just a side note, but do you use some other collection API such as Yodlee or are you maintaining your own data scrapers for all the airline sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Aw shucks you've uncovered our master plan.

We have our own account scrapers augmented with a partner API from AwardWallet for the more esoteric programs (CVS Rewards anyone?)

<comment><USER14> Interesting... I'd like to talk to you more offline. If you want to chat, shoot me an email, andrew at ishiboo dot com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great use case for Node.js.

<comment><USER4> Great use case for Twisted, Erlang, Ocaml/Lwt, Lua, Python/Gevent too.

<comment><USER3> Great point! I bet that now thanks to your razor wit, dcaylor will think twice before saying something nice about node without also saying something nice about every other programming platform.

<comment><USER4> Node gets a lot of attention despite not doing much of anything new, sometimes it can be helpful to point this out. I was not rude or insulting about it, unlike others.

<comment><USER15> I laughed at both your initial response and IsaacSchlueter's comment. Valid points from both.

It would have been a little odd for me to say "Nice use case for Python" considering the original post was about Node, and specifically said they tried writing it in Python but "writing asynchronous code in Python is like using your keys to open a beer bottle." That also made me laugh.

In fact, the original article specifically talked about why Node.js was a good choice for this use case. I agree. Not that you couldn't do it in other ways. Erlang would also be a good choice here, I'm sure. There is always more than one way to do most anything. Still, and in spite of the fact that Node might be getting too much hype, it is an excellent tool for this type of async need.

<comment><USER4> Well, I hope you learned your lesson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nicely done! Just, the "How" in the title is misleading... ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> I have to sign up to search? Is this in production yet?

</comment><comment><USER4> Can you go into more detail about how js on front and back helped? What percent of your codebase is actually shared? What type of functions are they? Many people claim that it's a big win while others call shenanigans but I haven't heard empirical data from anyone.

</comment><comment><USER18> hey nmeyer im interested in building some similar stuff could you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com so we can talk more. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Emailed!</comment></comment>


How to safely store a password (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

<comment><USER2> Related: [http://throwingfire.com/storing-passwords- securely/#notpassw...](http://throwingfire.com/storing-passwords- securely/#notpasswordhashes)</comment>


Fluent Design System - <AUTHOR> http://fluent.microsoft.com/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317171)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interface design is very, very important at this stage of evolution of computing, and I am disappointed in the overall direction taken by the industry in this regard. What we (desperately) need is work similar to the one that was done by Douglas Engelbart and still done by people like Alan Kay and Bret Victor. Instead we get things like Bootstrap, Metro, Material Design and now Fluent. (I am aware they are very different in scope, but their overall influence on real applications is quite similar: establishing certain wide- spread normative patterns.) Shallow and reactive things. They don't invent and define new ways of UI interactions and information presentation (examples from the past: clipping window, icon, hyperlink) and concentrate mostly on how things look.

You might counter that this is the domain of MIT Media Lab rather than Microsoft and Google, but at this stage new UI concepts have to be adopted by entities with significant influence to be adopted at all.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree with you.

I came to the conclusion that we need a completely new language, a new communication paradigm. We can't continue to build single-purpose apps for every single thing. We need a single interface that's general-purpose enough to let people communicate what would today take 1000 different apps (or 1 natural language).

I believe that the future of UI will be a mix of task management concepts (to- dos, task dependencies, task delegation, timelines) and binary interaction (Akinator, Tinder, Mechanical Turk). Add a graph knowledge base, a blockchain, a network of trust, smart contracts and you're set.

I've been trying to start a discussion about this for years, without success. If anyone is interested in discussing this space, I encourage you to let me know.

<comment><USER5> Aren't those things voice/language processing aim to solve? That is to liberate the user from the device/interface and let ask for - as we typically do human to human - what then want and need? And voice to VR and many things change. Some, perhaps, not for the better. Welcome to The Matrix?

<comment><USER4> Natural language interfaces are horrible. I don't know what people doing voice recognition and language processing are thinking. This is extremely short- sighted, and doomed to fail.

I'm thinking about a completely new communication paradigm, one that's short of a brain interface.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps. Which I think is why brain interface is the Holy Grail. No typing/touch. No vox. Just think it.

p.s. Natural language is still in it's early stages. Think of the early (non UI) PCs. That is, over time voice as an interface will get better, and better. It will get there. Just not yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Link to a channel 9 recording of yesterday's talk about Microsoft Fluent Design System: [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/B8066](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/B8066)

It has a bit more content than the landing page IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ugh. This looks like MS trying to one-up Material Design (itself already on the rich side), and in so doing I think they've gone a step too far.

It does look good, in a sci-fi movie UI kind of way. But it would be a nightmare if many of the apps I use day to day started to look this way. All the animation, depth, texture - it's too attention grabbing, self conscious, and annoyingly, deeply, branded.

Software is not supposed to be a high-design object, taste is very individual and any object with so much aesthetic weight imposes on our consciousness. While highly designed things can bring us a lot of pleasure, we should be free to judiciously choose them for ourselves.

Many pieces of software are non-negotiable high-use tools. They should be, first and foremost, highly usable - and if there's an insistence on imposing an aesthetic experience on the user, it should be acknowledged that the user likely has no choice but to use the software, and may be temperamentally or socioeconomically unlikely to appreciate the aesthetic experience being thrust upon them. (I wonder what my 75 year old Russian mom would make of all the depth effects, Windows 10 already confuses her and hurts her eyes.) So if we're going to insist on infusing our software with some particular design aesthetic, it should at the very least be light, minimal, and easy to ignore for those who aren't interested and just need to get their work done.

</comment><comment><USER8> They don't say it at all, but perhaps the biggest change here is that they're making headings big and bold now. For quite a few years, Apple, Microsoft, and Google (even pre-material) all seemed to be competing on thinnest, smallest, ultralight-est headings.

edit: I stand corrected. Their marketing site and all their videos are (apparently) inconsistent with their guidelines: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/typograph...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/typography)

</comment><comment><USER9> Also: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/style/) for examples and code.

<comment><USER10> The calculator example for Acrylic[0] looks atrocious: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/images/ac...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/images/acrylic_app-pattern_full.png)

What is that trying to convey? Large spaces with no division? Looks broken.

0: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/acrylic](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/style/acrylic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the trend towards more animation is fine on a micro-scale – buttons and so forth — but I predict there will eventually be a big backlash against these huge, complex parallax transformations. They are just too exhausting to watch.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, but I imagine that the parallax/animation aspect will be used sparingly, or very discretely, and only within a few applications. I would be towards the shading, transparency, and having the content cut off flush to the bottom of the window being the most common use of their fluent design principles.

I will be very upset/nauseous if they overuse the parallax effect. The settings will need an off switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just an FYI, click 'Build' in the upper right for actual information.

</comment><comment><USER14> That video was essentially useless seeing as the clips never lasted for more than a split second (maybe I'm just bad at focusing this morning?). Other than that, this _looks_ pretty good. I really like the white/monochromatic stuff I've seen floating around on Twitter lately. (I'm a Mac guy that hasn't used Windows since 7.)

</comment><comment><USER15> What is it exactly?

<comment><USER16> It uses ML and AI in the cloud to identify people who don't read the linked article before commenting. It is working brilliantly.

<comment><USER17> I read the article, and I still have no idea what "Fluent Design" actually entails.

<comment><USER16> It's literally the first sentence

> An eloquent design system for a complex world

It is a set of design guidelines described with flowery language.

<comment><USER17> Right, but what makes a design fluent? Are there guidelines? Other than using "light", "depth", etc.?

<comment><USER16> flowery language

The next time your read about a tech or new startup that uses really unnecessary words, come back and visit this thread

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For now it's a few things that are available out of the box for XAML apps that target the Fall Creators Update SDK:

1\. "Acrylic". It's the blur/color-blend/noise effect that you can see on the Edge tab bar or top of Photos app in the Fall Creators Update.

2\. Mouse over lighting effects. You can see that briefly in the video when the mouse over a ListView and tiles.

3\. Lots of small animations

4\. "Depth", meaning 3D transforms and shadows used for emphasis

</comment><comment><USER19> Lens flares on everything! To the future!

</comment><comment><USER20> The video wasn't very good at explaining the system, and the website itself didn't even use the same effects that were used. For instance, there was heavy use of parallax scrolling in the video, but the website didn't have it at all. Seems like a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER8> The website has plenty of parallax scrolling, especially with the background. Maybe it just isn't on mobile? It is subtle.

<comment><USER20> Strange, it is working now. Chrome Mac.

But yes, it is subtle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're on the fast track for Windows 10 insider builds, you can see a preview of this by opening your calculator. I expect you'll be thoroughly disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER22> I like it enough to be curious. It's still a bit fluffy (scale wasn't clear). Still something there.

</comment><comment> irq-1 With Firefox on Xubuntu the site is unusable -- zooming down to 30% you can see most, but not all, of the text.

Maybe it's my system, but Microsoft doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><USER23> It's broken with my up-to-date Chrome on MacOS. I could see the site properly with Firefox Aurora.

Aside from the sketchy web page, though, the site is very vague. Yeah, I see there are elements to design but what is the "Fluent Design System" and how does it champion the use of those elements?</comment></comment>


2012: The Year Scam Apps Killed the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://impending.com/2012/02/2012-the-year-scam-apps-killed-the-app-store/

<comment><USER2> This needs attention. It's happening at the Kindle Store too. Copy/pasted ripped-off books and services that charge $5 for a review. How can it be stopped before this post is actual prophecy for every store?</comment>


Startup Economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartasset.com/infographic/startup

<comment><USER2> As a former economics major, it pains me to have my lost love's name used to describe mundane finance calculations. My liberal arts education be damned; I know nothing of this madness!

<comment><USER3> Economics is a bunch of crap. Sorry you wasted time studying it, bro.

<comment><USER2> What?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wicked app and calculator. Very nice design guys!

</comment><comment><USER5> Another: <http://www.foundersfund.com/termsheet>

</comment><comment><USER6> Broken with very large numbers, i.e. ~1,000,000,000 funding. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank god for this (coming from Excel)

<comment><USER8> As a general rule, I would be wary of this comment. When the time comes to do your math, use excel. If you're just out of napkins at the bar...GTG. Don't rely on a web app, though for more. [1]

[1] That's not an observation about this submission, its just horses for courses.

<comment><USER7> Just for quick and dirty calculations, not betting the farm on it. Thanks for the cautionary message though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As always, great job smartasset!

</comment><comment><USER10> No 'exit' without 'funding'?

<comment><AUTHOR> We should have thought of this. We will get this incorporated, until then: without funding you simply need to multiply the exit value by your starting % ownership less dilution from employees (good approximation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great</comment>


Snap Framework v. 0.6 released - <AUTHOR> http://snapframework.com/blog/2011/10/28/snap-0.6-released

<comment><USER2> I'm very interested in using Haskell for web development as the most I've done with it is writing a Scheme subset -> x86 asm compiler. Has anyone done anything non-trivial with it? How does it compare to frameworks for other succinct languages like Django or RoR? Does Snap feature an ORM or is it SQL through the IO monad or similar?

<comment><USER3> For some examples of people using Snap in the real world, check out [http://snapframework.com/faq#is-anyone-using-snap-in- product...](http://snapframework.com/faq#is-anyone-using-snap-in-production). The guys at Silk (<http://silkapp.com>) use Snap for some of their back end infrastructure. Janrain discussed their use of Snap in this presentation <http://vimeo.com/21210266>. In fact, when you log in to ladygaga.com a Snap server is involved at some point. In addition to those, I and others have used Snap to build non-trivial proprietary websites.

Snap intentionally has not made ORM/persistence decisions. The developer is free to choose any Haskell library (including the one used by Yesod) to interface with a database. There is a library written to simplify the use of mongoDB with Snap (pre-0.6). The new snaplet abstraction introduced in 0.6 makes writing these kinds of libraries much easier and provides a clear path to follow, so I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more activity in this area. In fact, someone has already released an HDBC interface as a snaplet. They even have a tutorial for it here: [https://github.com/norm2782/snaplet- hdbc/wiki/HDBC-Snaplet-T...](https://github.com/norm2782/snaplet- hdbc/wiki/HDBC-Snaplet-Tutorial).

<comment><USER4> Just tried to find a Snap HTTP header on ladygaga.com. Couldn't find it. Definitely curious, do you have any more detail about what they used it for?

<comment><USER3> You won't find it. It's somewhere in the back end of Janrain's authentication service. It doesn't serve user facing requests, but it does get hit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Know How to Fix Twitter: Let the Public Do It - <AUTHOR> http://michaelwales.com/blog/let-the-public-fix-twitter/

<comment><USER2> The Twitter team already knows how to fix Twitter. All they need now is time to develop the new components and make them stable enough for production. In the words of Fred Brooks, nine women cannot have a baby in a month.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. If I could go just one day without hearing about Twitter's problems and some lame solution to them, I'll be happy. Give the team time to fix the problems and they will; the new team knows how to do it, has a plan and is working towards this plan as we speak. All this conversation about decentralizing Twitter, Twitter-proxies and Netflix-style bounties on re- implementations is just link bait, IMHO.</comment></comment>


USS Rancocas: The Cornfield Cruiser - <AUTHOR> http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/100years/stories/cornfield-cruiser.html?sf1414999=1

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of the long gone _USS Blue Jacet_ at the Naval Training Center in Orlando.

[http://www.panoramio.com/m/photo/14389433](http://www.panoramio.com/m/photo/14389433)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is something similar in the UK for type 45 destroyers[1].

Street view: [https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=50.855755,-1.090069&spn=0.00...](https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=50.855755,-1.090069&spn=0.001954,0.005096&t=h&layer=c&cbll=50.855755,-1.090069&panoid=5tVxlu7OInEzuar34Z1itA&cbp=12,9.88,,0,-6.4&z=18)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_45_destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_45_destroyer)

</comment><comment><USER4> Google map link: [https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=39.980333%2C-74.90122...](https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=39.980333%2C-74.901222&data=!1m4!1m3!1d1714!2d-74.901222!3d39.980333!4m14!2m13!1m12!3m8!1m3!1d1529!2d-74.901222!3d39.980333!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!4m2!3d39.980333!4d-74.901222)

It's apparently visible when driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, one can see it in Google Streetview.

<comment><USER5> The bridge is over a big circle. Can it rotate?

<comment><USER6> No, the structure does not rotate.

<comment><USER7> Sure it does! Anything rotates if you apply enough force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [Tangent]

The name reminds me of the Cornfield Bomber, an F-106 (not a bomber) that accidentally landed gently in a field (not a cornfield) after the pilot ejected.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber)</comment>


Moving From Wall Street to the Tech Sector Proves Tricky - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/moving-from-wall-street-to-the-tech-sector-proves-tricky/

<comment><USER2> I think it might be a New York problem in particular. I have grown quite tired of being approached by people leaving wall st who are bitter about their old job and think their new job is going to change the world. When I meet such people, I regularly suggest that they spend a year working at a startup before spending their own savings on their startup.</comment>


Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can't cure - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200812/financial-bubbles <comment><USER2> Traditional differential equations is not one of the more useful college math classes(star), but a few useful things can be extracted from it. One of the most interesting is that under certain circumstances, oscillation is _inevitable_ , by the very nature of how the system reacts to its own changes.

A classic example is the well-known "simple harmonic oscillation", where the only solution that doesn't oscillate is to start right at 0.

The market is more complicated. If simple harmonic motion is caused by negative feedback (the further you get from the origin, the stronger the force pulling you back), market instability is caused by positive feedback and the fact that there is a cap in how far bubbles can inflate. Excitement engenders excitement, so bubbles inflate. Depression engenders depression, so contractions also tend to overshoot vs. the "true" state of the economy.

Stripping this effect out of the economy would take more than just making it "smarter", you'd have to rewrite the whole foundation of it.

Mitigating recessions (and depressions) may be possible. Trying to stop them just makes them hit harder.

((star): DiffieQs are of course themselves useful; it is the class itself that is considered a bit of a waste by professors. Closed form solutions to diffieqs are the exception, not the rule, and mathematicians in general are not very interested in further pursuing the problem.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bubbles may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean we can't do anything to mitigate them. To me, it seems clear that the "Trader's option" -- big bonuses in good years, no downside in bad -- is a recipe for disaster in any market. I doubt this bubble would have been nearly as bad if the banks were still owned primarily by their management.

<comment><USER4> What I don't get is why should we expect the government to do a better job at managing banks than the banks themselves? If "trader's options" are bad, why can't the banks figure it out for themselves?

<comment><USER5> Because trader's options are good for bankers, but not good for the public. These options create incentives for bankers to take large risks to maximize short term profits, and hence year end bonuses. But if risky trades blow up, a banker merely loses his job - not exactly nontrivial, but certainly mitigated by getting to keep bonuses from past years. And if enough risky trades blow up within a firm, sending it into insolvency, it can always get government bailouts because of the systemic risk its failure would produce. Essentially, gains are privatized and losses are socialized. This is why the government needs to restructure bank pay incentives, with a key probably being making banks privately held again, as well as reducing leverage and regulating the system better (or at all).

Granted, some firms, like Morgan Stanley and UBS, are beginning to experiment with clawback provisions, that have longer 3 year horizons for bonuses. But until we reform the system, this won't be in banks', or bankers', interests, except from a PR angle, which clearly matters. And government pressure can help us get there faster.

<comment><USER4> Good for bankers, yes, but not good for banks, or are they? And banks employ bankers.

Remembering Joel's writings on performance measurements, I am simply skeptic that there can be any remedy, short of people watching out for themselves. I suspect even with longer windows for bonuses, there will be ways to game the system.

<comment><USER5> Good for bankers and bad for banks. Bankers who took more conservative, longer term views during the bubble would have been more likely to lose their jobs, because their short term profits would not have been as large as their peers' who engaged in groupthink/stupidity. So this pay structure effectively weeded out bankers who actually looked out for the long term health of their banks.

Simply making banks privately held companies, so the bankers have their own capital on the line in their trades, eliminates this moral hazard. Banks do not have some natural right to be publicly traded companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author makes the mistake of equating efficient markets with rational markets. The market is not rational (whatever that means) but rather efficient. All known information (whether it is correct or not) is reflected in the price of a security.

Rational markets lead us to the communist/central planning trap. If the market can be shown to not be "rational" the government can assume control (nationalize) of the market.

Does the weather/climate appear "rational" on a large scale? No of course not. It consists of the local weather at each measurable point on the planet. Assuming we can make systems "rational" is plain foolish.

See "The Systems Bible" by John Gall.

<comment><USER7> _The market is not rational (whatever that means) but rather efficient._

Oh boy. Careful to whom you say that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible that the expected gain is not the proper measurement for the value of the shares? For example, the expected value of the national lottery is negative (-50% in Germany), but I can understand people who play nevertheless: if you lose, you only lose 1€, but if you win, you can win a million €.

Similar for the experiment, maybe the chance on the 90cents yield was enough to warrant higher prices? It is simply gambling?

Phrased differently (using example from other comment): if you had to choose between 10$ and a 50% chance to get 0$ or 20$, which would you chose? Depending on your circumstances, either option might be more valuable to you? If you are about to starve in the next minute, you'd probably take the 10$ (50% chance of dieing is too much), but if you already have enough money, why not take a 50% shot at earning 10$? What if the choice is between getting 1 million $ and a 50% chance between 0 and 2 million $? I definitely don't think the two options have the same value, even though the expected outcome is the same.

Spontaneously I would take the 1 million, otoh I have read somewhere that in TV game shows, participants routinely gamble away such sums (the kind of game show where you can either quit and take the money you already won, or put it all at stake for the next question, with a chance to double it).

I wonder, in the experiment of the article, if prices rose even above the maximum possible value of the shares?

<comment><USER8> Well they are not the same because your first million has a lot more utility than the second for most people, unless say you need 2million to start he company you always dreamed of starting or to do a surgery in a foreign country on your child that is superexpensive and if not the child will die.

<comment><USER4> Yes that is what I mean - it seems "expected value" is not equal to real value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "These lab results should give pause not only to people who believe in efficient markets..."

The author is mistaking why markets trend toward efficiency. The 10% who don't overvalue the equities will have enough money (if not at first, but later as their realism makes them much more profit) to keep the price in line.

Just because 90% of people overvalue something doesn't mean the markets can't be efficient.

<comment><USER10> "Bubbles start to pop when the momentum traders run out of money and can no longer push prices up."

She states credible evidence that the market is efficient, then claims that the evidence undermines those who believe in efficient markets... Weak.

<comment><USER11> _Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can't cure_

"Human Condition" is sometimes a code word for something people don't want you to fix. There are those who have the means to profit from the large scale business cycle certainly want you to think that it has to be this way. They want the forced selling so that they can profit "on the buy." There are those out there who want to blow up bubbles and ride valuations up, then get out before the fall.

Death is inevitable. The inevitability of taxes is propaganda.

<comment><USER12> > "Human Condition" is sometimes a code word for something people don't want > you to fix. _snip_ Death is inevitable. The inevitability of taxes is > propaganda.

Dang, that's kind of profound. Are you quoting somebody?

<comment><USER11> Nope. I wrote that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. Given the common complaint here and at other news sites about economics lacking scientific vigor, I assumed that it was because it was impossible to experimentally isolate human economic behavior. Not only does this article point out one way to do just that, but that it even has a "stereotypical" base experiment used for decades that future scenarios can be derived from. I need to bookmark this article as rebuttal or "ward against trolls" in the future...

<comment><USER13> Our university even has its own lab for 'experimental economics', where they do nothing else but run such games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like to point out that Chile has less regulation than US _and_ fewer bubbles.

<comment><USER15> So, what is a bubble? I would define a bubble as when we get irrationally exuberant just to come crashing down when reality strikes. Such a bubble could be measured by looking at the up and down of the GDP growth rate. Does that sound fair?

The WorldBank actually keeps track of a lot of economic data. So, what does data say? Well, the United States (in the period of 1961-2007) has had fewer bubbles and those bubbles have been smaller.

When counting bubbles, I used this methodology: a bubble is a decline in the growth rate of at least 3.5%. When a decline is continuous without a growth of at least 1% in between, it is considered part of the same bubble (so that I wasn't counting several years that Chile had large declines in a row as multiple bubbles). Under that assumption, the US has seen 6 bubbles. Chile, on the other hand, has seen 8. Move that assumption to 4% and the US has seen 5 and Chile has still seen 8. Moving the assumption up doesn't help Chile. Moving that assumption to 2% and the US has seen 7 and Chile has seen 10. Moving the assumption down doesn't help Chile.

The facts show that Chile has more bubbles and the bubbles are larger in size. The US bubbles average at around 5% while the Chilean bubbles average around 10%.

So, Chile has more bubbles and their bubbles are much greater than the US'.

You can see it in a cool chart: <http://mda-cxxtx.posterous.com/>

A basic look at the chart and you can see that Chile fluctuates a lot more than the US.

<comment><USER16> GDP isn't a useful way to analyze bubbles. Bubbles are asset price inflation significantly above the trend line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great article.

I wonder how the experiments would have turned out if people were allowed to short-sell. My guess is that the bubbles and crashes would be a lot less common. When people can only go long, there's a desire to buy in order to be "participating", and there's also the effect of the Winner's Curse.

One interesting result I read about in Aaron Brown's _The Poker Face of Wall Street_ involved a mock security that would mature either to $0 or $20, with a 50% chance of each. The participants would be given index cards; half of the cards had the security's correct value, and half were blank. The price would start around $10 (since those who have information don't want to show it by bidding $19/$1) but rapidly converge to the fair value.

When the experiment was done with everyone receiving blank cards (but no one knowing that all cards were blank) trading would start, as usual, right around $10. In many cases, it would converge to $0 or $20 as the market "figured out" the fair value.

<comment><USER13> Does anybody care to set up the experiment with short-selling enabled? Would be interesting to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I haven't read the article, but Isaac Newton once fell prey to the South Sea bubble, showing that even geniuses get hit.

<comment><USER19> I haven't read your comment, but there's no way our shirt cured AIDS.</comment></comment>


StackOverflow unwinding? - <AUTHOR> http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stackoverflow-unwinding <comment><USER2> None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or answer 5 times monthly) are steadily growing.

<comment><USER3> What about measuring number of upvotes on questions closed as not constructive /not about programming? I get the feeling that the technical questions are getting saturated, and that the community moved towards more soft issues (management, people skills etc). But soft issues get rejected. Perhaps start softie-programmer.com? At least do something other than closing them.

<comment><USER4> Well, there is:

<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/> \-- for conceptual, no-source-code whiteboard programming questions

<http://workplace.stackexchange.com/> \-- for questions about general professional workplace issues that aren't specific to programming

And of course the rest of the sites at

<http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic>

I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective at every topic. It's primarily effective at technical-ish topics where there can be somewhat definitive answers backed by a bit of research. That's still a pretty big chunk of the world, e.g.:

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad- su...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/)

<comment><USER5> My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read _1_ site with the content I want on it.

The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.

<comment><USER6> Here you go <http://stackexchange.com/questions>

Click the "Filtered Questions" link at the top to customize it.

<comment><USER5> Hrrm, that's a start. Any way to get this in the SO theme? I like that lot more than the SE layout.

<comment><USER6> No, I don't think I've ever seen any official support for customizing themes. There is the Hot Dog theme for SO (<http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/34939/1288>) that you might be able to use as a starting point for a custom user theme.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, should have been more clear. What I really meant was having things like the score, number of answers, etc, in nice big numbers next to the question.

<comment><USER6> Oh, not on the official site. I don't think that page is updated in real time, so the vote counts would be off by quite a bit for the hottest questions on each site. You might find an app on <http://stackapps.com/> that uses the API though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases.

I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently.

The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions with quality answers get closed because they are slightly subjective, which completely obliterates the community feeling.

<comment><USER8> With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies.

They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to.

The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems.

These aren't always the same problems that the creators of the system or moderators intended to be solved.

So moderators kill the potential utility of a tool.

One of those potentials (now referring back to SO) is the unification of people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain.

Without community, why should a user invest in it?

So I assert (overly simplistically) that moderators kill communities.

<comment><USER2> And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation.

The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's rules and values are not intended to create a warm and cuddly discussion area for long-winding, far-reaching conversations, social networking, and "community" whatever that means. They are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers which are peer-reviewed, editable, and high-quality that you can search with Google.

<comment><USER5> Is the quality of the site being kept up, though?

Questions certainly feel "worse" than they did 2 years ago when I first started following SO.

Way more "homework" or "newbie south-east Asian programmer asking for THE CODEZ" type questions than there ever was back in the day.

I'm not really sure how you fix that, although slightly raising the barrier to entry (perhaps require they at least pick a username?) might help reduce the "drive bys" who ask a poor question, and never accept an answer.

<comment><USER4> All true, and far more real a risk. That's why we now (as of about 6 months ago) require registration to ask questions, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Closing questions - no, _deleting_ questions - really really grinds my gears.

Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking around for 4 years, and, well, gone.

Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether you've deleted a question, you can still see them.

While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well, jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have incomplete information, because _you don't know how to ask a good question yet_. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing.

I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as a community member and hacker, to fix these things?

<comment><USER10> Due to this problem I think the site would be much more useful if the deleted posts just had a red warning at the top like wikipedia. "this question was flagged for being funny" "a little off topic" let the user decide if he wants to look or not. Buyer beware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly _lost count_ of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense.

(The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at the comments here and see that those kind of shenanigans are mostly unnecessary)

When you're killing off high-quality content because it "doesn't fit the format", perhaps the format needs to change.

<comment><USER12> Example? Haven't noticed this..

<comment><USER11> It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> StackOverflow is awesome and nothing touches it for quality as far as I'm concerned. But the one thing that annoys me most is the seemingly arbitrary way that posts get deleted by Moderators after they have been closed (but still visible) for a significant period of time. Often they are extremely popular posts with 100k+ views that just disappear in a puff of smoke.

FYI: An SO user has recently setup an unofficial archive of deleted SO questions, ranked in order of votes ... [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial- st...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-stack- overflow-deleted-question-archive-now-available)

</comment><comment><USER14> _I guess any sufficiently large 'community' (there's not a community on Stack Exchanges, of course; they are fairly anti-community) ends up attracting those wanting to curate the resource and purify it, until those competent to answer and help have had their fill and no longer feel welcome?_

This was my experience as a contributor (one of the top 10) to Literature SE. The mods were very harsh and basically killed the site (or at least drove off most of us contributors).

Both question and answer quality declined dramatically in tandem with the rise of "rules".

Months later I was still in the top 10 contributors. Answers had declined to single sentences.

Now I logged in and noticed it has been closed down (and much of the content migrated to SciFi SE) due to lack of participation. I am not surprised.

At least some of my answers will survive.

(here's one early question where it was poorly asked, we wrote some good answers and worked with the questioner to focus the question - [http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are- the-...](http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-the-anti- church-messages-in-the-his-dark-materials-trilogy/16107) This attitude disappeared within very short time)

<comment><USER15> It's possible that the site floundered and closed because it just wasn't a good fit for the StackExchange model. Literature doesn't strike me as a field where there are obvious right answers.

<comment><USER16> There are plenty of right answers and more than plenty of wrong answers. Literature and other "soft" fields are not so different from math and science.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFQR2FUEm4>

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Right, so we study math for the twin reasons of wanting to learn mathematical language and wanting to understand our place in the universe, which turns out to be precisely why we also study literature: to learn about language and to understand our place in the universe. Which by the way, Hank, gets to the thing that make me angriest in the entire world, which is when people say that there is only one right answer in math, but that every answer is equally correct in literature.

First off, there is often more than one correct answer in math, and secondly NOT EVERY ANSWER IS EQUALLY CORRECT IN LITERATURE!

For instance, Hank, if you think that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a pro-slavery novel, you're wrong! You're as wrong as you are if you think that the square root of four is strawberries!

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

<comment><USER15> Like you, I strongly reject the idea that literature means anything and everything the reader wants it to. Nobody really believes that, even if they say they do. Just try interpreting the English professor's exam directions however you like and see what happens.

However, you must admit that there is _some_ subjectivity involved in literature. Maybe no more than in programmers.stackexchange. But that has the benefit of spillover from StackOverflow, where the right answer proves itself by _executing correctly_.

<comment><USER16> That's an interesting point and I agree with what you say for a simple question and answer. But there may be just as much subjectivity in the "right" answer for a complicated problem.

What if it compiles but gives erroneous results? What if it compiles and gives correct results, except for a certain day of the year? (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4128208>). What if it compiles and runs and always gives the correct results no matter what, but isn't as efficiently written as it could be?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The OP seems to be saying 1) SO and network is "anti-community", 2) making lots of targeted sites was misguided; they should be broader, and 3) purists are running off real experts.

Having listened to many hours of planning and philosophizing on the SO podcast as the site developed, I think the OP misunderstands their approach.

1) They are "anti-community" only in the sense that they don't want content unrelated to the site's topic. They do have moderation, votes for moderators, etc. Everything about the site is geared around getting the best answers and making those searchable, not socializing.

2) This is a tradeoff: too narrow and you won't get enough momentum to keep going; too broad and it's uninteresting. Specificity keeps real experts interested; if you know and love Unix, you'll be much more likely to hang out and answer questions on a Unix site than on a General Computer Stuff site. The whole model depends on keeping experts involved, and if a site is TOO specific to generate enough interest, they kill it. One downside is the inevitable overlap between topics. But I think it's an OK tradeoff.

3) I don't see anything like what he describes. I've been using SO since it was in beta, and I'm still getting good answers to my questions quickly. If there is a rise in militant purists, it's in response to the inevitable influx of newbies and crappy questions, which will happen to any site that gets popular. SO has had this in mind from day 1 and they actively promote community moderation, which is the only scalable approach.

I don't mean to sound like an SO apologist, but this post sounds a little too "those guys don't know what they're doing". That's the most common refrain on the internet.

The proper response, snarky as it sounds, is "you try doing it better." And it's serious. If you can make a site and cultivate a community better than StackOverflow, I'll be there.

<comment><USER17> "love it or leave it" is only a proper response in a regime that seeks to protect the status quo.

<comment><USER15> OK, perhaps I was a bit harsh. But there is already a very active place to discuss how SO should do things; it's called meta.stackoverflow.com. This discussion has been going on for years.

It's great to try to influence it, but as time goes on, the chances decrease that a newcomer has a point that hasn't been considered. That's just life. You don't see HN changing its format every week; newcomers adjust.

And if someone does have a good point, and it's not being considered, as we say, "fork it." The public Q&A data is available, or you could start from scratch.

<comment><USER17> HN frowns on the single sentence comment that does nothing but concur, so there ought to be an upvote which a parent can give that says, I agree, nice retort, I modify my concern and cheers, mate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer- to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away._

I feel a bit like StackOverflow has extrapolated from a huge pent-up demand for decent answers to programming questions, that the world is desperate for Q&A sites on _every_ subject. That does not seem to have been the case.

<comment><USER17> I treasure and trust StackOverflow for my programming questions precisely because of the elitist, purifying attitude. I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. I'm a self-taught programmer with only a few years under my belt, so this resource is valuable.

As for the other Q&As...especially the non-engineering ones, this culture is counter productive. In a field like history, the experts are not debating dates and places which are defensible positions, but methodology and theory. Those are discussions and require a little more breathing room than a q&a forum could provide.

<comment><USER19> >I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top.

That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers will get you a good answer.

I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource for beginners, but as someone more intermediate, I've had no questions answered satisfactorily in the time I've tried using it. And all those questions I ended up getting answered by asking in the appropriate IRC channel. My concern is that more and more open source projects are saying "if you have questions, ask on stackoverflow", but not actually watching for those questions and answering them. When a project has no mailing list, no IRC channel, and says "use stackoverflow" I'm pretty much out of luck for getting help.

<comment><USER20> I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of "bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh codez", "me too".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A couple of points (from a top 0.47% user, but that's not why I'm on SO):

* imagine googling for a programming questions and be stuck in 2008 - I don't want to go back

* imagine researching a wittgenstein paper - do you need philosophy.stackexchange.com - probably not; the numbers show, that SO's still the metrics vanguard - I think the demand for the niche sites is certainly there, but large communities have formed around traditional forum sites - and people are happy with that - so there is no pressing need to switch to the new format

* concerning questions - it has been a phenomenon since the beginning, that the simplest answers (C-C C-V the docs) got the most upvotes - interesting hard questions don't earn you much reputation, if that's what you're after - I still get a lot of upvotes for year-old answers, which everybody could have written, while the answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions: try to bring your point across in a few words, collect useful references and show working code - it's like a daily workout equivalent in the tech field

* open questions: I'm trying to make it a habit to answer one hard, unanswered, maybe older question each week - because it's true, the "reputation clock cycle" leaves a lot behind...

* moderation: most moderators have been long around - and I can somehow guess, in which tags a person is active, because I likely saw their comments, answers, flags already a couple of times - can't really blame them for closing a lot of questions - it's hard; if you can, sift through <http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged> and you might know what I mean

* tldr: SO rocks if you're a programmer, for other SE sites YMMV; unsatisfied with closed questions? reopen them or discuss it on meta - it's not possible that moderators don't make mistakes and it's not true, that you can't at least try to discuss specific issues; unsatisfied with unanswered hard questions: find one and write up something great

<comment><USER22> You put it quite eloquently:

>"...The answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions..."

More than anything else, that's what keeps me coming back to stackoverflow. Most of the questions I've spent the most time on get little attention, but I learned quite a lot from answering them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I disagree with the author on a few points. The branching out of Stack Exchange has been _excellent_ —I'm mostly active on English (14k), SO (9k), and Programmers (6k), but I often browse the other sites to pick up useful and interesting information _that I would never have come across_ if it weren't for that diversification. Where else can I stumble across juicy morsels about mathematics, or TeX, or any of several languages I don't speak—all in one place?

I find the idea that Stack Exchange is anti-community laughable. The chat system is excellent and has relieved a lot of the tension between contributing to the site and just having fun meeting people who share your interests. I know a lot more about my fellow language enthusiasts, C++ programmers, and Haskellers than before. And more people read my blog and watch my YouTube videos now. I call that a win.

So: the last time I asked a good question on SO? Last month. The last time I gave a good answer? This week. The system still works from my point of view. And I'm one of the guys who actively edits questions so they _don't_ get closed for stupid reasons—moderation isn't restricted to just moderators.

</comment><comment><USER24> My opinion on SO is apparently in the minority around here. I find the content on SO to generally be of high quality, and in most cases, I agree with what moderation I see. Most questions I see that get closed seem like requests for extended discussions. I actually believe that SO works better on questions that have verifiable answers. As for my questions, I've asked 42, and gotten good answers to most of them.

<comment><USER25> I think you mistyped here: 42 is the answer, not the question.

<comment><USER26> :)) yep, clearly a mistake

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't generally have a problem on StackOverflow. The last few questions I have asked have been quite high level and not been asked before and they tend to get some good answers / guesses.

I find that a well structured question gets some good answers, I find a lot of people leaving their question open to interpretation and people cannot be bothered to ask the same old questions because the poster has neglected to be specific in their question.

I find a lot of people use it being lazy as well, most questions are simply part of the language / subject they are asking about but they cannot be bothered to read up on it. They would rather ask insanely simple questions to get other people to provide an answer for it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I like StackOverflow, and contribute heavily to one of the "other" Stack Exchange sites that is busy, but not enough to get out of perpetual beta.

The problem that they have is that SO grew very quickly and developed a Usenet-style culture. That's good in that there is alot of good information out there, but bad in the sense that you get all of the assholish behavior that came with Usenet.

The other problem that they have is the network of other sites, some of which are very good. The problem there is that they're scaling a model meant for 1,000,000 SO users down to 5,000 users, and it just isn't the same. On a smaller SE site, you cannot wrangle the 5 votes to close some nonsense question written in pidgin english. On SO, a question will be closed in seconds by the vigilantes who roam the site.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was disappointed by the answers to my last few questions so I'm back to asking on IRC. The answers come more quickly and the format makes clarification and follow up easier and faster.

It's also easier for me to look at someone's gist/paste on IRC and give a quick answer.

<comment><USER30> IRC is great, but SE-based sites are meant to also help the nth person to ask the question you're seeking, too...

<comment><USER29> I know, and I do feel I am robbing the community in general, but I also don't think I would get my questions answered well at SO.

It would be great if someone came up with a way to bring IRC answers into a SO-like site for clean-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Google, Wikipedia and StackOverflow/StackExchange are my favorite "creations" on the Internet.

But StackExchange has been a big disapointment for me. No big traction on the StackExchange sites, and moderators constantly closing questions without providing better alternatives. It's really a turn-off. (StackOverflow is still great though).

</comment><comment><USER32> I think there is a general problem with Q&A/Forums in general.

I will generally only ever go to a website to ask a factual question if I cannot easily find the answer myself either from documentation or experimentation. If I ask a question on Q&A it's because the answer is not forthcoming , this may be because my entire approach to the problem is wrong or maybe I'm doing something that only a handful of people would ever want to do. In that case I am relying on the right people actually seeing my post which would have low odds, so I am better served using dedicated forums/newsgroups for the library in question.

So this really leaves opinion based questions as the best things to ask, which don't seem to be encouraged on SO and the format of correct/wrong doesn't work there so well anyway.

Another issue is that I'm usually asking questions related to work things that I am doing, and while I can easily justify using time that I am paid by someone else to ask questions it is less easy to justify spending work time answering other people's questions in order to gain rep.

Also giving a good answer to many questions involves showing sample code , or digging back into something I did a while ago so it's not really something I can do in 2 minutes. So this means I either have to answer questions somewhat covertly or wait until I get home by which time I may well have other things to do.

</comment><comment><USER33> It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: <https://api.stackexchange.com/docs>.

<comment><USER34> But the first question is obvious: how do you measure quality? Votes are primarily for popularity, not quality.

<comment><USER15> One way would be "mean time to an accepted answer."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I disagree. I recently picked up pyparsing, and in trying to understand (I'm not a comp sci major), I made an account on stackexchange. The author of pyparsing answered my question. I'm sold.

<comment><USER36> Wait until said author or the author of another tool / API enters in an argument with one of the elected moderator and gets banned: you're going to be "unsold". This is _precisely_ what this discussion is about: it's about obviously knowledgeable SO users that are getting more and more pissed off by the behavior of these "close-trigger-happy" moderators. And this is relatively new: it wasn't anywhere near as bad two years ago on SO. The one thing that prompted me to leave is twice I spend time answering a question only to see the whole thread getting deleted: this is a waste of _my_ time (I don't care about the b*llshit reason invoked by those overzealous mod to close the question: I care about my time spent helping people being lost). I'm not bringing anything anymore to a "community" that is so prone on wasting their user's time.

<comment><USER35> I agonize with a similar problem, but I think anyone with a blog will agree there is a real curatorial challenge there. I know Edward Tufte; he routinely deletes his own contributions to his own forum, and will not hesitate to delete material contributed to experts in their fields, often post- publication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I routinely find the question I'm asking has already been answered when googling, and have rarely had a question go unanswered.

The hard part in my experience when going to try and answer some questions is it seems like there are more and more questions by inexperienced coders expecting people to write basic code for them, or not formulating the question in a way that will be useful to others in the future - instead they're pasting in their code and asking, "why isn't this working". Instead of, "I would expect this framework to behave as follows but it's not" it's "Here's 50 lines of code, why isn't it working?" The only way to answer such questions is to get their code up and running somewhere, perhaps on a jsfiddle, figure out what's wrong (often something as trivial as a syntax error), and then tell them. Doesn't feel very gratifying to do one off debugging on behalf of the person asking especially if the answer is unlikely to be useful to others in the future.

</comment><comment><USER38> I really follow the ESR's asking questions the smart way guide pretty seriously(<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>) and most of my easy to difficult questions get answered easily without ever asking a question.

What I really care for is getting answers to tough questions. The problem with SO is it doesn't aim to be a QA site on the longer run. It aims to be a database of programming answers site that slowly evolves to solving most commonly faced programming problems. I don't know if their aim is to be advertising based revenue site on the longer run.

I ask a question because I want to get help. It has so happened when I absolutely can't get anything out of the problem at hand. I go on SO and ask a question, often I've been down voted down to oblivion, then I delete the question. Because all I see in response is sarcasm, cynicism and attempts by commenters to prove how big a fool I am.

To me stack overflow looks like site that wishes to attract people who already know answers to their questions, but want it put in a community wiki kind of way.

But I do agree that a simple Google search on SO sites, gives you solutions to most commonly known programming problems. And not just that most commonly known problems on areas that stack exchange sites deal with. These address most problems people face daily. Tough problems is a different cup of tea. But most common problems often get answered and their database seems to be growing with regards to those problems. And this might also be a great business model for SO.

SO was the cool new shiny tool, few years back. We all like to play with Shiny tools. Until something new, and more shiny come along.

These days most of colleagues ping me with interesting answers on quora. I would be happy with Quora opening their questions for reading without opening an account.

</comment><comment><USER39> It is interesting that some of these same criticisms have been applied to Wikipedia and the reasons remain the same too

</comment><comment><USER40> So many questions are already authoritatively answered that there's a much higher bar for new users to contribute. And without new users coming in and participating, there's a feeling of stagnation. I'm not yet convinced they're at an impasse but I personally don't know how I would solve that problem.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure it's a problem. If every PHP question you want to answer is already answered, hooray! Google solves your problems instantly. The PHP section is stagnant, but it's still helping people. The supply of answers scales down to the demand.

Meanwhile, some people start switching to Node or something else, and a new wave of Q&A starts on that. Rinse and repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've heard the same rants in any of the usenet groups I used to partecipate. :)

</comment><comment><USER42> IMHO StackOverflow jumped the shark when it started adding karma or whatever the fuck they call it.

<comment><USER41> That's gamification... :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can anyone post specific examples of "stackoverflow unwinding"? I didn't see any in the article.

</comment><comment><USER44> They move from Q&A model to a Wikipedia model.

<comment><USER18> I don't think this was a particular change in approach, to be honest. From the start they were clear (listening to the early podcasts, at least) that they wanted the site to stand as a reference, and to have each question be the best possible question asking one clear thing, with the best possible answer underneath.

Everything else on top of that was gamification to convince people to achieve that. Whether that sort of community becomes degenerate at a certain point is certainly interesting to study, but my intuitive reaction whenever I see a StackOverflow result at the top of some google results is to be joyful, so I feel they've mostly achieved their aims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed of activity & build out slowed to a crawl.

Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most popular.

How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP or Python, before you wipe out the radical majority of possible and important questions? Obviously languages like that evolve, but not very quickly once they hit a certain point in their life cycle.

As you saturate the big segments, you're going to naturally bleed off user excitement and interest. Stack will continue on, getting tons of traffic because their answers will remain extraordinarily valuable, but the ratio for the amount of new content in relation to existing content will continue to accelerate toward Stack being mostly an answers archive. That guarantees the stagnation of their community (perhaps leaving small pockets of excitement around new, lesser adopted tools).

Haven't communities like Wikipedia followed curves like this? Once you max out all the English topics (for example), then it's an update approach with a smaller number of new topics coming in. Net result ultimately being a lot less overall new content being added in relation to the existing base (demanding a peak in overall community activity). Wikipedia isn't nearly as exciting as it once was, several years ago, when the rate of build-out and topic addition was staggering. The wild west eventually becomes a boring suburb.

<comment><USER15> "That guarantees the stagnation of their community"

Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions.

Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.

<comment><USER45> Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic):

Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc.

Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that environment.

Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?

<comment><USER15> I don't see anything in this that bodes badly for Stackoverflow, financially or as a community.

If all the PHP questions are answered, every PHP programmer is now able to Google and find what they want to SO. That means they 1) learn that SO is the place for answers and 2) see ads.

2 years from now, when they're working in another language with less established Q&A, they'll know where to go.

"Excitement overall" really doesn't mean anything here. I don't care how much or little activity there currently is in the Objective C section because I don't use Objective C. I'm able to find the info I want and get questions answered if they're not already there. That's all that matters.

What's going to stop that from happening?

<comment><USER45> I don't see anything in it that bodes badly for Stack in terms of traffic or financially either. I never said otherwise. They're dominant and given their answer base and the value of the content, they're likely to remain so.

I believe overall stagnation in the community is guaranteed however, which is what the topic rather focuses on.

<comment><USER15> Maybe we just aren't talking about the same thing. What does "stagnation in the community" mean to you?

If it means "overall, people lose interest and stop visiting to ask and answer questions," I don't see that. I'm not visiting to fill in all the gaps in SO's content, and feeling disappointed when there aren't many gaps to fill. I'm running into questions, Googling, and hoping to find my question already answered.

If I find it and it's not answered, I'll do research and try to answer it myself. If it doesn't exist, I'll ask. If I find the answer before anyone else does, I may answer it myself.

I'm not going to stop doing that, and I don't see why anyone else will, either. What the overall trends are in the site really has no bearing on my individual participation, so it never feels "stagnant" to me.

Maybe you're imagining users who show up and surf for questions to answer, and those people are getting bored? That's just not the way I use the site, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EPA Says Mercury Limits on Coal Plants Too Costly, Not 'Necessary' - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/12/28/679129613/trump-epa-says-mercury-limits-on-coal-plants-too-costly-not-necessary <comment><USER2> > The EPA proposal is open to public comment for 60 days after it is posted in > the Federal Register.

Proposal: [https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-12/documents...](https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-12/documents/frnmatsfindingandrtr_12_2018wdisc.pdf)

How To Comment: [https://www.epa.gov/mats/how-comment-proposed-revised- supple...](https://www.epa.gov/mats/how-comment-proposed-revised-supplemental- finding-and-rtr)

<comment><USER3> No wonder Trump is not budging on the shutdown, when holding out has now expanded it to include the EPA.

"Due to a lapse in appropriations, EPA websites will not be regularly updated. In the event of an environmental emergency imminently threatening the safety of human life or where necessary to protect certain property, the EPA website will be updated with appropriate information. Please note that all information on the EPA website may not be up to date, and transactions and inquiries submitted to the EPA website may not be processed or responded to until appropriations are enacted."

[http://fortune.com/2018/12/28/government-shutdown-epa- smiths...](http://fortune.com/2018/12/28/government-shutdown-epa-smithsonian- fcc/)

<comment><USER4> I wonder if they consider the Cali fires an "environmental emergency imminently threatening the safety of human life"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I say coal plants toll on environment is too costly, not "necessary".

</comment><comment><USER5> How does clean coal fit into this narrative?</comment>


Hackers have a new way to secretly mine crypto on your computer - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/14663/hackers-new-way-secretly-mine-cryptocurrency <comment><USER2> "Hollowing"?? What the hell does that even mean?

This article is totally devoid of content.</comment>


Show HN: New markup language for fans of Haml and Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/inem/hamdown? <comment><USER2> Before Markdown, there was another plain text markup system called Textile, which seems to be all but forgotten -- and I'm not sure "Hamdown" has a lot of advantages over Textile, beyond being more familiar to fans of Haml. (Which could be very important for many use cases, of course.)

The opening example in Hamdown's readme would look like this in Textile:

        h1. Main Title

        h2(f2 helvetica strike). Fancy title *with some bold*

        Some content

I used to prefer Textile to Markdown (and I ran a web site using Textpattern, the CMS designed by Textile's creator, which still has one of the nicer template languages and plugin systems of any system I've used). I eventually gave up and joined the Markdown crowd, and I'm generally happy with it, but in some ways Textile is still superior. It has some aspects of Haml's "HTML but simpler" approach, but Textile still reads more like, well, text in a way that (at least to me) Haml mostly doesn't.

[https://txstyle.org](https://txstyle.org)

<comment><USER3> We use Textile on our Redmine install. It's not terrible, but it always seems like I am writing more markup than should really be necessary

<comment><USER2> It's possible that Textile is a little bit too "middle ground": it's not trying to be a fully semantic markup language like AsciiDoc, but it's not as minimal as Markdown's "cover the common cases as easily as possible and fall back to HTML for everything else" approach, which I suspect is kind of what led Markdown to win. (Also what lets it get away with its "who needs specs" approach that drives some people nuts, of course.)

That suggests Hamdown might _also_ be too middle ground, although it'd be more familiar to folks who are already Haml fans. Personally I always found Haml a little off-putting, but I have absolutely no good reason why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a worthy effort. Markdown isn't quite there in terms of slightly more complex web sites, and Haml is definitely more complex for the simple things than I would like. I currently have a scheme where I have combined a bit of the perl Template::Toolkit and markdown so that I can write

       %DIV sidebar%
       ##Interesting fact##
       This fact it tangentially related
       to the __content__ and will appear
       in a sidebar.
       %ENDDIV%

Which throws the
 ..
 around the content. Basically by slurping it through the toolkit first, then markdown second.

It is still clunky and I always have to load all the perl dependencies after I do a significant upgrade to me dev machine but so far it works.

I'll try to keep an eye on it.

</comment><comment><USER5> You missed one hell of an opportunity here when you didn't choose to call it...

MarkHAML

<comment><USER6> This is so clearly the best post. Where are the upvotes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm afraid I'll have to be one of the curmudgeonly naysayers, too.

The nice thing about Markdown is that the source file is just as readable as the output. Haml and hamdown fail at this. If I'm gonna have a computer parse "%h2.f2.helvetica.strike" for me, it might as well handle an entire HTML document.

Think of Markdown as a WYSIWYG format. The plaintext is the document, but there just happen to exist tools for automatically displaying it as HTML too. If something looks wrong as plaintext Markdown, you're doing Markdown wrong.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ok, so usually I'm not a fan of the sarcastic "Hey, you just reinvented X! We've been doing that since the 90s!"

But in this case:

Fancy title with some bold

Tachyons really seems to have reinvented the  tag. Like, exactly. Come on guys.

Edit: Apparently I'm out of the loop, and this style (atomic css) is now good. I'll take this as an opportunity to learn to refrain from making snide comments about fields I am not deeply involved in

<comment><USER9> That's not what Tachyons is. The people who made it and those who advocate Functional CSS (Tachyons, Tailwind, Atomic CSS etc.) have a clear idea what HTML < 5 used to be, what inline css is, why BEM and SMACSS exist, what js-in- css is, and in general know what they're doing.

I'm saying that to help apply a principle of charity when evaluating this idea that on first blush looks like insanity. But there is something in there.

Readings to get started: [https://johnpolacek.github.io/the-case-for-atomic- css/](https://johnpolacek.github.io/the-case-for-atomic-css/)

<comment><USER10> Why not go one step further (like Style Elements in Elm), and reduce CSS & HTML to layout and style?

[https://mdgriffith.gitbooks.io/style- elements/content/](https://mdgriffith.gitbooks.io/style-elements/content/)

Accessibility is often mentioned when it comes to the separation of concerns between HTML layout and CSS layout, but why would somebody try to adress blind people differently when it comes to semantics and hierachy? Wouldn't you want the same experience as seeing people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hamdown author here. To make it clear the I don't see this as a replacement for HTML/ERB/whatever templating solution for your web app.

The niche is rather narrow - it is for people who use static site generators like Jekyll/Middleman, and write content mostly in Markdown.

I often simply want to do a quick look-and-feel experiment by styling some of the elements with Tachyons. This is where Markdown becomes a bottleneck.

Another idea is to make front-matter a first class citizen of Hamdown so that you could add a bit of structured data on top of your blog post and use on the page.

P.S. You kinda can achieve this with kramdown, but I find its syntax super- weird.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this looks really great! Love the idea of the front matter enabling things like default classes.

Writing HTML or markup using something like Haml or Pug is just so much more enjoyable than using raw HTML/XML. The structure is forcibly clearer and you simply type less. I know some who like Emmet, but this is so much better than that. It's too bad that sometimes it isn't an option! =(

<comment><USER12> Actually just a method of enabling default classes for certain control sequences would be great, or some simple configuration for ie accessibility defaults(auto IDs, roles, etc). Give me that in a Markdown implementation and that's 99% of what I want.

Awaiting the 30 responses to implementations that already have this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know this isn't the fault of the author but I don't like the way periods seem to be overloaded in the Haml example:

        %h2.f2.helvetica.strike

The first period denotes a tag on the left and a class attribute on the right, but the other periods just denote sibling classes. They don't parse into the same syntax, and my instinct is to read it as (h2 (f2 (helvetica (strike))) but that's not what's happening.

And adding significant whitespace to Markdown and everything else to me just serves to obfuscate and abstract away the one thing I most want in a markup language that emits HTML, which is to easily visualize the tree and the markup.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure if the advantages are significant enough over using haml markdown filters (last example) to warrant creating an implementation.

Great idea though.

</comment><comment><USER15> The first example already seems so wrong as it sets the documents style in the content.

</comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of a fun personal project [0] I implemented a few years ago. Very similar syntax.

[0]: [https://github.com/weaversam8/ctml](https://github.com/weaversam8/ctml)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why not just put HTML in your markdown? Lots of parsers support it, you rarely need it so who cares if it's ugly, it avoids having to learn another thing, and it lets you do anything.

<comment><USER18> Because Markdown works really well for content creators, but it could use a few extra features. I am not a fan of the examples they used, but believe Markdown could use some revamping.

`##### test` for example is not as efficient and easy to read as `#5 test`.

<comment><USER19> I disagree. The indentation of the extra #s makes it much easier to scan the document structure with your eyes. #5 would only make sense if you're only using your markdown as a source for translating to some other format and you want to save some typing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think making the spec easy to write and easy to parse would be huge. Have you tried creating any parsers yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, no yet. But I've got few recommendations from hamlit gem author Takashi Kokobun.

Takashi recommends to take a look at these gems: \- [https://github.com/judofyr/temple](https://github.com/judofyr/temple) \- [https://github.com/eagletmt/haml_parser](https://github.com/eagletmt/haml_parser)

<comment><USER18> If you create it in Ruby, you're going to have a bad time. The reason I love Hugo is that it is fast and compiles. I'd love to see an optimized implementation of a markdown language and template engine in C, but Hugo is next best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So is this the "lean startup" equivalent of a Show HN?

"I have this great idea. buy it here!" oh really we haven't implemented anything, but now that we see a bunch of people tried to buy it...

I'm fine with the idea of running ideas past the community here, but this really feels like a bait and switch. It's not a new markup language. It's a new IDEA for a markup language.

<comment><USER22> It doesn't look like it's trying to be a startup at all, just showing an idea to HN- but I guess you're saying it should be more of an "ask for early feedback on HN" instead of "Show HN"\- which implies show something that is working. I'm OK with "Show HN" being the default idiom for anyone posting their own link. Guess it could have had a "(proposal)" or something in the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I know I'm very likely to be in a minority here, but I hate both Haml and Markdown.

I much prefer HTML and erb.

<comment><USER24> I also preferred the clarity of unambiguous plain code.

Then I found slim. It eliminates most of the markup, reducing it to its humanly readable essence, producing clean well-formed html.

Writing, and more importantly, reading only the meaningful part of the markup has helped my productivity skyrocket.

My eyes don't have to struggle to figure out the document structure.

[http://slim-lang.com/](http://slim-lang.com/)

<comment><USER25> Seems pretty similar to pug/jade, other than not needing parentheses for tag attributes? (which admittedly, has annoyed me in pug) If I had to go to Ruby- land, I would use slim...

<comment><USER24> Looking at both and their timelines, I'd think pug may be based on slim which is a great thing.

Slim has been around for years, steadily improving and addressing corner cases.

I absolutely love it. Reduces typing by 50%, reading by 1000+%(as I re-read the code multiple times and it eliminates the multiple takes and looking for closing tags) and matches how my human brain thinks about markup.

<comment><USER25> Slim v0.1: Sep 15, 2010

Pug (actually _Jade_ at the time) v0.1: Jul 5, 2010

I'm thinking these are "convergent evolution", especially since they arose in different language communities.

I totally agree that this is the best way to generate HTML. I use pug even for really tiny pages and templates. It amazes me that people like JSX, which seems like a total regression from building elements with function calls like React originally had. When I code Cycle.js in coffeescript it looks and feels a lot like pug; which is great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does this compare to RestructuredText?

<comment><AUTHOR> RestructuredText seem to me like an alternative to Markdown.

Hamdown idea is to enable automated content-generation by allowing ruby code embedding (like you can do with HAML)

<comment><USER27> rST is actually more like an easier to write and easier-to-read-as-plaintext HTML alternative, since it specifies a DOM-like document model, cross-document referencing and a well-formed mechanism for markup extensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Of course, there is an XKCD cartoon for every occasion: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment><comment><USER29> [REDACTED]

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome! :)</comment></comment>


Who's Afraid of the Boss? Culture in the Global Workplace - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/thoughtfulanimal/2011/02/at_home_a_young_man.php

<comment><USER2> Indian here. I have an asshole boss. Having been hired for a job, he doesn't allow me any independent decisions, no budgets, nothing. All he is constantly worried about is if Iam trying to talk to any of my American counterparts without his knowledge. The guy is creepy and I now barely get anything done. To top it all, the guy pits people against each other. The standard opener "those americans..."

It's not as much being scared as avoiding conflict, I'd rather get home without stress than take on something the fellow is nutty about.

Anyways this is in a top of the line international MNC that Iam talking about. It's chock full of assholes and cliques. The sad thing is he manages to get himself promoted like clockwork every year.</comment>


Is the Government Down? - <AUTHOR> http://isthegovernmentdown.com/ Stay up to date on if the Government is down! <comment><USER2> It's been down since 1999.</comment>