A Technical Founder's Notes on Sales Team Management - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kwindla/a-technical-founder-s-notes-on-sales-team-management-60e1a93d4648?r=hn <comment><USER2> Some very good points. Most of this advice is more relevant for latter stage companies and it's an important distinction to make.

Founders often make the mistake of hiring closers (the kind of sales people this article describes) too early. They should really be looking for biz dev types who can go out and identify target markets, quality referral channels and refine the pitch to be eventually handed off to a true "sales person."

</comment><comment><USER3> So what I don't really understand is what exactly the "right" sales people are doing that the others aren't. I totally understand that there is distribution of competence for anything - but what is the real difference?

I can only come up with a few things I can figure out on my own so maybe someone can tell me if I am missing one:

1\. Understand the customer better through research/interaction and pitch a cleaner "value"

2\. Drive the CTO/CEO to refine the product to match customer need better

3\. Find the right person in the organization

4\. Have personal contacts prior to joining the organization that convert better

5\. Use "psychology" or whatever to gently coerce a sale

*6. Manage other sales people well

What am I missing?

It seems like the better a product is the less variability in competence would matter - so in that sense the difference between ok and awesome is just the speed at which they can convert.

<comment><USER4> From my interactions with sales people, here are a couple differentiators I have noticed

1\. Sheer relentlessness - A good sales person will follow-up on a lead to an extent you and I may consider excessive. They will make call after call, bouncing back from rejection with an unsettling ease.

2\. Preparation - Good sales people are very prepared. Customer says they can't afford it, sales guy has a prepared comeback to keep the deal alive. Customer suggests a free pilot, sales guy gently deflects back to closing a revenue deal. These aren't off the cuff interactions but studiously prepared counters to sales objections.

3\. Ask good questions - Really good sales people are great at asking questions that help them understand what the customer needs so they can customize their pitch to hit the sweet spot.

4\. Are honest - Ok, this one surprised me. Like most people, I had the stereotype of the slimy sales guy in mind but I have been very pleasantly surprised at the number of sales people that pull the product guys aside before a customer visit to basically say "don't bullshit". They care more about the trust the customer has in them than the quick buck. Yes, really

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article. I don't totally grok #2 about not turning over existing leads/deals to sales. That seems like a decent place to get started with minimal downside (as long as person has even the slightest discretion on shedding suboptimal situations).

I also get concerned when sales learns that it can ask product for anything and get it. My experience is it's generally better to "sell what's on the lot". This avoids the endless delays in closing pending some future enhancement.

<comment><USER6> Yes in general I thought this was a good article. But I also found some of it odd. In general sales people hate coming in with a clean slate. They want to pick up some existing customers and existing deal flow so they can learn quickly how the product is actually used (to help with positioning it accurately) and what the objections and issues are in the sales cycle. Perhaps the author was more implying "don't stick them with weird old BD/partnership stuff that isn't really 'real' to bog them down early)

<comment><USER7> I think you're absolutely right about not wanting to bog down your salespeople with old relationships. Here's why:

It seems to me that a lot of companies who are at the point where they'd hire a full-time sales staff struggle with their early clients and not-quite- clients. In hiring salespeople, companies are defining themselves as established players with an established product to sell, whereas the relationships with early customers centered much more around being the new guys on whom the buying company is taking a risk and often getting a say in feature development and a discount compared to the competition.

Re-framing those early relationships, especially "with middle managers from dinosaur companies," is a very long and frustrating process for all the parties involved.

I could absolutely see why you'd want to avoid your news sales staff getting sucked into those relationships and instead do what they're fantastic at: parachuting in, developing new relationships quickly, and pivoting those to closed deals.

(Background/assumptions: I do bizdev-ish things for a large tech company. From the tone of the article, I'm assuming that we're talking about B2B businesses with products priced such that the relationship with individual clients takes time to develop.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why should lead generation be outside the control of the sales group? Isn't marketing about a lot more than just lead generation? I always thought the best salespeople either come with there own long list of leads, or they are good at generating new leads, or both.

<comment><USER9> Even when lead-gen lives inside the sales organization, the salespeople who generate leads and the salespeople who close deals are generally not the same people. It's a different skillset to hammer the phones and repeat scripts than to gauge technical fit and negotiate.

The reason to have lead-gen live in marketing is because modern lead-gen is often based on marketing initiatives. For example, a good source of leads are people who attend webinars, read blog posts, or watch videos, all of which are organized and pushed out by marketing. You're correct that a marketing team does much more than just generate leads for salespeople to follow, but generally the entire goal of marketing is to generate targeted awareness in the market which raises the value of the company through mind-share or revenue.

There's a lot more to say about this shift, as the job of a salesperson today is very different than the same job even 5 or 10 years ago. This has a lot to do with the relative amount of knowledge out in the wild. In the good old days, you didn't really even know what a Xerox machine was until a salesperson told you about it, let alone all the ways you could use it to help your business. Nowadays, customers are doing more and more research (through marketing materials) to guide their decision making process before ever talking to a salesperson.

<comment><AUTHOR> What yannu said. Doesn't really matter whether marketing lives inside the sales org or not. It can work either way. (And your new VP of Sales will always tell you that marketing should report to her.) What matters is that you a) have enough and the right kind of marketing in place to fill the top of your sales funnel, and b) instrument and evaluate marketing performance at least as quantitatively and aggressively as you do sales performance.

<comment><USER10> What is interesting is the conflict of interest that can lead to. A sales leader who is responsible for both sales and marketing might have a vested interest in tossing marketing under the bus if they can't get traction or close.

It also makes it hard to get projects off the ground that can have a long-term payoff since Sales tends to be very focused on the short-term tangibles, even if the former are critical to healthy growth in the big picture (think SEO, branding, laying the infrastructure for automation, etc.).

Having marketing as a distinct group can help make sure there is a healthy conversation between the various priorities, and also make sure there's a voice that is empowered to say "look, we mutually agreed on these lead scoring criteria, and fact of the matter is you're not following up on all leads within 24hrs, that's not marketing's fault."

I actually had that conversation once before when the sales lead also owned marketing. This was also an individual who ignored my need to have all sales conversations logged and categorized correctly in our CRM, so there were other issues.

<comment><USER11> What happens when you do it the other way around: having salespeople work for your marketing team, essentially being their "finishers"? It seems like you'd get not-necessarily-good-or-bad effects like marketing feeling empowered to offer discounts and bundles through "their" sales force.

<comment><USER10> You might get that, or you might get undo blame on the sales team if lead quality is an issue. Of course, that's why it is critical to understand what a quality lead is, and have objective criteria for it.

Ultimately, I think the two disciplines, while related and needing to work together, are relatively separate. Their incentives should be aligned, and that is not always possible to implement in some sales organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks, this is helpful. You mention having marketing by the time you hire the VP Sales, and you link to a few posts on hiring VP of Sales- do you have any links/thoughts on hiring marketing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Jason Lemkin, again: [http://www.saastr.com/hire-the-right-type-of-vp- marketing-or...](http://www.saastr.com/hire-the-right-type-of-vp-marketing-or- youll-end-up-with-a-bunch-of-blue-pens/)

My experience is weighted towards building and selling enterprise products (so, selling to Fortune 500 companies). I actually think the VP of Marketing hire is even harder, for enterprise-oriented startups, than the VP of Sales hire. Most of the candidates you'll find with "big company" experience will want to do a lot of "big company" style marketing -- focusing on branding rather than lead gen, hiring expensive agencies, and positioning via high- profile partnerships. All of which strategems are problematic for startups, to say the least.

A VC friend of mine told me once that one of his investments had hired and fired 9 VPs of Marketing, I think over something like an eight-year span. (We were having a conversation about how hard it is to find -- and to evaluate before hiring -- marketing people who understand both enterprise selling and startups.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How much commission is typical for sales people? Is it a percentage of the amount the deal is closed for? Is it a percentage of the customer LTV?

<comment><USER2> It really depends on your biz model and there are many variations. At my company we do 1.5% of the monthly revenue of each client the sales person has "closed." Typical monthly value of a client is around $20k and we have no cap on commissions.

Reps are also the first line of defense when it comes to customer service for their clients. This works great for us because the reps who provide the best customer service typically get most of their new clients from referrals from existing clients.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. Just for your example, do they only get their commission after the client has paid?

Just general curiosity as I am technical and I have no idea how their models work. The three things that I am familiar with are:

1) I give you a small discount of my dayrate in exchange for a slice of equity (low single digit percentages)

2) You are an employee and take a paycut to participate in their vesting schedule with CAP table (the same as 1) really)

3) You are a cofounder and get a solid stake in the company but instead of providing capital as a technical person you are more likely to build an MVP for not much money in exchange for solid double digit percantages or equals pequals in the company.

Whereas their model is completely different and more comparable to real estate agents or similar.

<comment><USER14> Generally the principle behind designing sales compensation works along these lines

(i) First figure out a notional target amount of revenue you would expect a salesperson doing reasonably well to generate over a time period. [1] (ii) Then offer sales role(s) with a base salary and a higher[2] OTE (on target earnings) figure reflecting their expected earnings (including salary) if they hit this notional target. This is what the compensation will be advertised as, and how it'll be benchmarked against rival company salaries (iii) In the simplest case, the salesperson gets paid the base salary plus (OTE - SALARY)/TARGET per unit of revenue they book during the course of a reporting period[3]... As they probably over or undershoot their target by quite a bit, chances are they earn more or less than the magical OTE Common variations on the simple case include increasing the commission percentage for sales over the target (or various other thresholds) to weight incentives in favour of the lowest performer, setting a base threshold so the salesperson doesn't earn any commission at all until they've reached this minimum tolerable level of performance, and offering fixed cash bonuses for various other achievements. Salespeople looking after a mixture of new and existing accounts might find their OTE composed of separate targets for new and retained business with different percentages, or they might have a single target with new sales required to cancel out the losses.

Either way, the compensation is usually calculated based on when the revenue gets booked and paid at the end of the quarter, month or week. So salespeople might get paid before client pays, but they might get paid three months after if they're on a quarterly commission scheme.

[1]Of course definitions of reasonable vary, and any kind of targeting might be more alchemy than science, especially in a startup. [2]Maybe a mere 15% above the base salary (if the sales role is mostly admin and the salesperson isn't expected to boost the figure through excellent work) or it might be more than triple the base salary (typically promoting above-market achievable earnings as an upside for accepting below-market base salary, much like the high-equity offers for developers) [3] the reporting periods is probably a quarter or a month, but possibly weeks for very transactional sales or years for the 4-deals-a-year enterprise roles).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks, lots of great insights in here. Jives with my instincts, but important to hear it from someone else as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> How to manage salespeople: round them up, pile them into a dump truck, and release them from the edge of a high cliff.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting to see the justification for screwing engineers on the pay.

EDIT:

To clarify--the idea of commission is effectively an equity stake in either the revenue or profit (depending on the setup, right)?

So, the sales folks see an immediate return on their work. The engineers, while salaried, have no such visceral link to the performance of the product...just some trivial paper and the thin sliver of hope they won't be fucked over during an exit.

<comment><USER18> Here's a good article on why Fog Creek does not pay sales commissions:

[http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales- commissions/](http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/)

We don't pay sales commissions at my company, and it works well for us. It does help the sales department to work more as a team.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd definitely be interested in knowing more about your company, davideous. I have no doubt that not paying commissions _can_ work for some companies. And getting comfortable with paying commissions to salespeople took me, personally, a really long time. (Too long, from the perspective of being a good CEO and doing what needed to be done to move my company forward.)

The arguments in the Fog Creek post sound right, and really resonate with those of us who are engineering/product people. But they don't match the reality of my own experience. At least for the high-cost, high-touch, long sales cycle stuff that I have the most experience with, the best salespeople all want their compensation to be heavily weighted towards commissions. So if you want to hire the best sales reps -- and, just as with engineers, you really, really want to hire the best -- you have to recognize and understand that preference.

But I'd be happy to be wrong about this! In addition to Fog Creek, I remember reading another blog post about a startup that doesn't pay commissions. Maybe a Foundry Group company: Moz? I can't find that post now, though.

<comment><USER18> We sell enterprise email server software. It's high-touch and sometimes a long sales cycle. Lots of demos of the software via screen-share.

Right now we have two people in sales. They are collaborating multiple times a day on Skype and help each other out on basically every sale.

Much of your concern seems to be about the ability to hire the best people, given the preference for commissions. I've been fortunate here: I've been able to hire my sales reps through personal connections, based off of reliably knowing their prior performance -- and I know I have really good people.

Perhaps it would have been harder to start the sales organization without commissions without these connections. But it's working for us right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Zettabyte File System (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cpp.edu/~gkuri/classes/ece426/ZFS.pdf <comment><USER2> ZFS is such a great operating system and it still stands the test of time. One of the best engineered systems and a great inspiration for sure :-)

<comment><USER2> File system for sure... it's late</comment></comment>


How to Reduce Your Vue.js Bundle Size with Webpack - <AUTHOR> https://www.jenniferbland.com/how-to-reduce-your-vue-js-bundle-size-with-webpack/ <comment><AUTHOR> Can we ever get rid of webpack? First it was grunt, then gulp, now webpack. Will we ever be able to just write vanilla js again?</comment>


ReasonML: React done right - <AUTHOR> https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/reasonml-react-as-first-intended/ <comment><USER2> How big of a thing is ReasonML really? I feel like the transpilation steps are a bit of a turnoff and it feels risky to kind of going the route of inventing yet another language - or dialect - for the problem at hand, though I like ML as a language.

<comment><USER3> I'm sceptical about it too.

Sometimes I look across the landscape of web tech and it feels like it's all by and for people who make the same kinds of apps over and over and over and are trying to optimize that process up the wazoo.

Though it's also possible I just haven't run into the kinds of problems that need these techs.

Something I'm a huge believer in is that there's tremendous value in us all using the same tools, even if they're not the ideal tools for any of our individual needs. We are at least all speaking the same "language". For that reason I'm hesitant to go adopting TypeScript and whatnot.</comment></comment>


4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-ddos-takes-down-mpaa-and-anti-piracy-websites-100918/

<comment><USER2> RIAA and MPAA really need to come to their senses. They just can't buy more black hat firepower than disenchanted script kiddies will unleash against them for free. This is almost identical to the repercussions (having their websites defaced) of their attempts to pollute P2P networks with virus-infected seeds. They're really not good at this wannabe cyber-warfare game, and should be held responsible for misconduct, like any other netizen.

<comment><USER3> The only way they can get out is to hire 4chan.

<comment><USER4> Dear RIAA/MPAA,

Although Anonymous is not your personal army, and when Jesus asked them their name, they replied "My name is Legion, for we are many", and by many, they mean over 9000; and they're also a front for the Marcab Confederacy....

They take large sums of unmarked, non-sequential large denomination bills, and don't skimp on the briefcase. Deliver it to moot's beachfront property in Mexico.

<comment><USER5> What? That totally sounds like the argument for a Quentin Tarantino movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I might be missing something here but surely a web presence is not vital to either of these organizations, and while it might be satisfying to DDOS them it doesn't accomplish much.

Also www.aiplex.com appears to be back up.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of the whole "refusing to be interrogated for entering my own country" incident.

You're not _sticking it to the man_ , you're _sticking it to the low-level employee who is punching the clock for the man but doesn't actually have any say in steering procedure._

And I guess that's fine if you want the publicity. But that's all you're going to get out of it.

<comment><USER8> That was more interesting because nobody was really sure as to whether or not you had to answer those questions. Turns out you don't.

This is silly, though, because there is little point in bringing down a website that nobody visits. If a tree falls in the forest...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the young guys out there, you should know that DOS is illegal. If an individual is caught doing this, they could end-up in jail or in the least get a criminal record. So, if you want a decent job and to be a productive member of society, don't DOS websites.

 _Your IP address is not anonymous._

<comment><USER10> Also for the young kids: illegal is not always synonymous with immoral, and sometimes to be a productive member of society you have to step across that line.

<comment><USER11> DDoS or human flesh search would be morally acceptable IF there were no other recourse in society for justice. In china the government is authoritarian and the people have human flesh searches as their effective form of justice. But to condone illegal activity for change in places like the united states is to suggest that there is critical flaw in the democratic process. Is there? Because if there is then we should acknowledge that and fix that too instead of relying on mob rule all the time. The only person I can see who morally justifies this (for him/herself) would be some teenager who has never been allowed to vote (thus not having any other recourse for change). But I think its irresponsible to encourage these who must be kids to take the illegal route to get what they want if there is a _viable_ legal route. Write your senator or something, don't cheer the mob on. Make sure you're not operating on impulse.

<comment><USER12> The MPAA has powerful lobbyists. I can see people being disenfranchised pretty easily, at which point, what's your recourse? Vote in the next guy who'll be just as easily swayed? I don't agree with DDOS'ing people, but I can understand how some people might think it's one of the few options which might bring about change.

<comment><USER13> Sometime it is better to employ a taoist strategy of doing nothing and let them create their own demise. If they are targeting P2P users, than it let them know not to pirate that content and consume somebody's else. If that somebody else is smart, than he could enter into a mutually beneficial relationship rather than wasting money to try to fight piracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oddly, while giving a tutorial on how to be a part of the DDoS, the article misses out the minor detail that it is in fact illegal.

<comment><USER15> Participating in a distributed denial of service attack is not necessarily illegal. There has to be some intent on the part of the visitor to cause damage. You could get involved in one just by innocently visiting a malicious web page which makes your browser download large files from the victim. Or suppose I set up an under-sized server with a very popular web application, the server might collapse under the load, but my visitors would not automatically become criminals when my server went down.

<comment><USER14> My comment was in the context of the article. I'd say firing up LOIC is plenty enough intent for it to be illegal.

<comment><USER16> I don't know about the rest of you but I've thought about firing up LOIC just so I could say I fired up a Low-Orbit Ion Cannon. Who cares about DDoS-ing. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think they need a new target. This would make more sense five or so years ago as these organizations have bended to the market. I can now for free use YouTube or vevo listen to any song I want either on my pc or thru their iPhone apps. Similarly use hulu , Justin TV or YouTube to watch for free mpaa content.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, if you live in the United States. If I wanted to see, say, the Lost finale before it was spoiled to oblivion I had two options:

a) BitTorrent it. b) Scream in agony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> we had efnet, they have 4chan

kids will be kids

</comment><comment><USER19> _We target the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites. [...] We have the manpower, we have the botnets, it's time we do to them what they keep doing to us._

What else, they stabbed us in the back? I know I'm breaking Godwin laws here but that's some pretty sickening Kristallnacht rhetoric there.

</comment><comment><USER20> Also Sean Hannity's forum, but for some reason nobody noticed that. (it's back up now)

</comment><comment><USER21> Leave 4chan alone. Young freaks (and, oh, oldfags) have the same right to crowd together as everyone else. ^_^

<comment><USER22> "Orakio -> #programming: I mean I hate scientology and I don't need to be in some group called anonymous to express that hate." – zf04

Same can apply with anti-piracy. Anonymous = noobs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do affiliated sex ad sites really generate income? - <AUTHOR>

a throw-away account.
Do sex advertisement sites where they are affiliated with other major sex based sites really generate worth-while income?
Like Hooker.com or sex.com, etc These sites have no content, just ads and links to other sites.
Does anyone have any experience? I own a few suggestive domain names and was considering the best way to make a few hundred a month so I can afford to work on my REAL dreams... <comment><USER2> Although this admittedly isn't my specialty, I would imagine that they only generate worthwhile income if they have a fairly significant amount of traffic. Ergo, it's not as simple as "put ads on this domain name and wait for profit," but instead would require getting traffic to your site (which most people in that industry tend to do by spamming).

It's definitely possible to turn a profit, but it's not as simple or clean-cut as you might believe. That said, sex.com just sold for $13 million, so if you happen to land on something good, you're probably in the money!

</comment><comment><USER3> One of my former coworkers operated a few ad-based porn sites, and he made some decent money a few years back, but it quickly dried up. He said he made as much as a few grand per month per site, which was enough for 3 guys to party and not have to work, but by 2009 the revenue had almost completely dried up.

<comment><AUTHOR> From an expense standpoint, I can host this in my apartment as I already have statics, a home-based business circuit through Comcast that is 50/10. They don't charge for bandwidth and I have never been told about any cap on monthly bandwidth either. In 4 years I have never paid more than my monthly fee.

So it would seem like I would have no over-head.just my time to create the sites, set up affiliate accounts, etc.

<comment><USER4> If you are hosting the actual videos and pictures, your site will crumble pretty quickly. It will probably be better to just link to them instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> right, that is what my thought was. Just linking, not hosting any real content

<comment><USER4> Even better, I've seen some sites iframe videos from other sites. It will make it harder to figure out that you are hotlinking it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find the second and third customer? - <AUTHOR> A mentor recommended to find at least three customers before writing code. How to find the second and third customer without building anything? <comment><USER2> PowerPoint presentations. Get people to agree to buy before it's built. If the first customer is paying enough, you probably just need one.

</comment><comment><USER3> What problem are you trying to solve? Who might also have that problem? Where would you go to find people that also have that problem?

<comment><USER4> What are the current things that people with that problem are doing in order to solve (or hide) that problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is your product?

</comment><comment><USER6> How did you find the first?</comment>


The assault on the pie chart - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/should-you-ever-use-a-pie-chart/ <comment><USER2> It seems to me many of these tests are asking pie charts to do something they're really not meant for. Sure, you can create a synthetic problem and dataset where you need to order four different categories, all comprising around quarter of the whole, and there a bar chart would excel.

But that's not actually that common a use case: a lot of the time, I'd only be interested that they are all roughly a quarter of the whole, and not care beyond that (providing a ranking of small differences can actually be pretty misleading, depending on the problem you're trying to answer).

I can just as easily say, I want to know roughly what proportion of the whole a category comprises. And with widely varying category sizes, the pie chart excels, while with a bar chart I'd have to sum the bar sizes in my head, and divide that total by the category in question. That's at least as taxing as having to differentiate between small differences in pie slice sizes.

The answer isn't "always use pie charts" or "never use pie charts": it's to use what's best for a particular situation and context.

<comment><USER3> There's no rule that a bar chart cannot mention the proportion of the category above each bar, and there's also no rule that a bar chart has to be for absolute and not relative numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After having worked with a lot of data visualization I came to the conclusion that the purpose visualizing most data is to show proportion, trend or significance not details.

I.e. it only has value if it clearly visualizes the point trying to be made. Otherwise you might as well show it on a list or it might come up as an alert.

The challenge is not to be able to read and understand graphs but to know what to do with them. This is why most dashboards are purely made to make the product look sexy not to actually provide any valuable insights.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Charts are narrative.

They are the visualization equivalent of TLDR. It captures the presenter's gist of the data but doesn't tell the whole story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a (brain) dead simple rule about pie charts: if you're using them to demonstrate a difference or change, so that you end up showing two, or more, pies, and if the aggregate amount represented by each pie isn't equal, then you're up to no good. Even if you try to compensate by making one of the pies have a larger radius than the other this is bad, as area comparisons will always be under perceived. If the case distinctions have the same summed aggregate, and you're just showing how the apportioning of the groups have changed then you're ok. But then graphically why not just have two bar charts which are visually more easy to interpret?

</comment><comment><USER7> I build BI products for a living and used to get into a lot of pedantic arguments about whether a pie chart or worse, the dreaded 3d bar or line plot, should _ever_ be used. Eventually I had to give it up though as it's not a productive use of time to try and pry beloved bad visualizations away from business users, plus I sensed I was starting to become a stephen fewesque curmudgen. They haven't reasoned their way into liking them so you can't reason them out of it most of the time.

Instead I'm focusing on building tools that show data in better ways first, but let you get to other options if you really want to giving viewers you share views with a way to quickly switch back to something easier to grok. Even initially graphically purist tools like Tableau have had to go this route and you can now find nightmarish packed bubble plots and the like in there. In modern visualization there are so many worse visualizations that have crept in that arguing about the pie chart seems almost quaint to me at this point. For example check out this _flying 3d globe with bar chart where the bars point directly up (at the camera)_ [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/power- map.aspx](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/power-map.aspx) \- A while back someone from Microsoft demonstrated this to me and after I gave him a hard time about it being an improper way plot geographic data he retorted "The world _is_ round you know!"

edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER8> I have no problem with pie charts. The area chart on the other hand are pure evil. For example here, how is the percentage of ios over time? Has market share grown or shrunk from Q3'11 to Q1'14? It's extremly hard to answer this kind of question except for the lucky ones getting the top or bottom slot. [http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/537b72f169bedd1e043...](http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/537b72f169bedd1e04384fab-1200-924/smartphoneosmarketshare.png)

<comment><USER9> The big, big problem with such charts is that the vertical thickness _perpendicular to the x axis_ of the line is the actual proportion, but your brain will look at the thickness perpendicular to the gradient.

To put it visually: [http://i.imgur.com/vZ7uTu1.png](http://i.imgur.com/vZ7uTu1.png)

The pink bars are the percentage market share as your brain reads it. The green bars are the percentage market share the graph is supposed to show. (The burning sensation in your eyes is because I made a poor choice of colours.)

If you were to naively look at the thickness of the black area (shown with the pink bars), it'd look like it was constant. But look at the vertical height (green bars): whatever this proportion is, the black has started small, grown massively, then contracted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've seen pie charts used particularly effectively in two areas of personal finance:

1) In budgeting apps, to show the distribution of monthly expenses across categories.

2) In investment tutorials and reports, to show a distribution across asset classes.

In the case of budgeting, it's true that a pie doesn't capture all variables, like total expense from month to month. But if you're trying to optimize a metric, such as savings (which can be included as an expense category to visualize savings rate), it makes it intuitive to see which budget categories are throwing you off. Suddenly it's not about reducing expenses, but rather shifting them between categories of a whole. At 50%, there is a tipping point where the pie slice becomes concave. If you're trying to push yourself to a 50% savings rate, it's an interesting visual benchmark.

For portfolios, here are a few examples. These are 3d pie charts, perhaps the most-mocked visualization type of all. But they communicate the information effectively enough. Repeated pie charts emphasize to the reader the importance of asset allocation.

[https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Lazy_portfolios](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Lazy_portfolios)

What makes pie charts effective is that they are simple and approachable. There are better graphs for showing a portfolio's size and allocation over time-- but not for initially communicating the idea of asset allocation and giving a few examples. Bogleheads is one of the best resources on passive index investing, and I think it's not an oversight how often pie charts show up on the wiki.

If anything, I would say visualizing a portfolio as a line chart can be more deceptive. This is a common technique used to sell mutual funds that have recently outperformed to naive investors. Line charts can implicitly promise a future trend which may not materialize.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pie charts aren't perfect but are useful when applied correctly.

Two great things about pie charts:

1\. From the shape you can tell you are looking portions of a whole. For example, a pie chart of market shares shows all businesses in the category.

2\. You can easily guess the proportion of the segments relative to each other. For example, in this chart [http://www.liv.ac.uk/~cll/lskills/WN/pie%20chart1.gif](http://www.liv.ac.uk/~cll/lskills/WN/pie%20chart1.gif) you can tell that football and rugby make up half the total and cricket, tennis, athletics, and other make up the other half.

<comment><USER12> That encourages you to make a spurious connection between football and rugby. Football and Other also make up a half, but that wasn't what you immediately spotted.

<comment><USER13> Well, they're both winter sports while the others (apart from "Other") are summer sports.

But I take the point -- you only notice that connection because of the way they happen to be arranged on the graph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One warning about pie charts in many visualization applications today is you are often looking at how the terms in the chart relate to each other. Not over the set of all terms.

If I want to draw a pie chart of the top-5 terms for some field and the chart represents just those terms, then the chart represents how they compare against each other - not necessarily how those top-5 terms compare against the entire set.

I know, sounds obvious but I've seen data misinterpreted because of this. The pie chart must represent the entire set and if you're plotting a subset of the data in the chart and ignoring the rest then your visualization may not say what you think it says.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can only assume this was covered 60 years ago:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

Misleading charts have long been an important and valuable career skill.

</comment><comment><USER16> > _In Cleveland's paradigm, the perceptual task associated with a bar chart is > judging position on a scale, and the task associated with a pie chart is > judging angle. They found that the length judgments for the bar chart were > "1.96 times as accurate as angle judgments" for a pie chart._

In pie charts, I find it much easier to estimate a percentage than estimate the angle, perhaps just based on value range alone; 100 vs. 360.

I also find estimating percentage to be harder with a bar chart since there is no reference to the entire pool of data; the encompassing circle in a pie chart.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Pie charts are good if you want to say e.g. "Hey! A large parr of our problems are caused by X!" That's actually what Florence Nightingale used them for when she popularized them, she showed the British military leaders that "Hey! Most of our troop deaths are caused by infections in soldiers with minor injuries! We can fix that!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with pie charts is that it's too easy to use them in a wrong way. I would say the only scenario when a pie chart might be a right form of data visualization is when you need to display _shares_ of two, maximum three, components of a total. It means 2-3 data points only. Trying to use pie charts for anything else will quickly degrade readability. More data points, day- over-day comparisons, variations with the circle size, grids of pie charts -- all makes things worse.

</comment><comment><USER18> When I give demos of our product, I often show the pie chart and tell people, half jokingly never to use it, this always produces a good laugh.

</comment><comment><USER19> Pie charts have merit, especially when used in a dynamic dashboard that changes based on either selection, filtering, or the passage of time. They may be over used, but they are not without merit entirely.

<comment><USER4> Rarely yes but only if those changes are noticeable which they most often aren't.

Most dashboards are purely made because they look good. The actual purpose of a Dashboard is to give a skilled person an overview of the entire system and see if anything is out of the ordinary and if not whats wrong.

The way most dashboards are used today they are more working like glorified lists and gives nothing of value to the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love pie charts. Good luck making sense of scatter and bubble charts unless you're already intimate with the data.

<comment><USER21> And that's something of the challenge with visualizations. Obviously some visualizations are just bad. But others are merely complex because they include a lot of information. This latter sort of visualization won't be appropriate everywhere--like accompanying a typical newspaper story--but it might be just the thing to really dive down into data.

A great example of this is actually the Napoleon army graphic that's famous for being in Tufte's first book. It's a great visualization of what happened as Napoleon's army went off to Russia and returned. But what it's showing isn't really immediately obvious (and probably wouldn't be even it if were redesigned in modern graphical style).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> fuck pie charts</comment>


Macie: Automatically Discover, Classify, and Secure Content at Scale - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launch-amazon-macie-securing-your-s3-buckets/ <comment><USER2> Dear aws,

Could you guys take it easy for a moment with spawning new weird services like horny hamsters, reflect on the ~372 you already have, and fix some aspects of them?

      How about letting me add basic auth to S3 or CloudFront?
      How about non-expiring signed s3 urls?
      How about restricted access to api-gateway?
      Hey, how about fixing Athena to stop throwing random errors, and actually support the fully featured presto syntax?

I could extend this list with 64 items more without even opening my dedicated aws complains notebook.

<comment><USER3> You can implement basic auth using Lambda@Edge.

You could also implement your own non-expiring signed URLs with Lambda@Edge too.

<comment><USER4> _rolls eyes_

Is there some reason programmers feel this need to bring up workarounds when I'm looking for an actual solution? If I could count how many answers on StackOverflow are just "well if you use JQuery..." or "Well if you use Boost...".

Address the point the person you're responding to is making, and answer only the questions they are asking. Making assumptions just wastes people's time. I understand you're just trying to help, but it comes across as really condescending.

"You _should_ be doing this you pleb!"

is how I always read these types of responses in my head, and it's really frustrating because often-times I'm already aware of whatever workaround you've mentioned, have already tried it, and know it's not suitable. It's doubly frustrating when you're specifically looking for the solution that's not the workaround.

<comment><USER5> There's no need to be like that.

> Is there some reason programmers feel this need to bring up workarounds when > I'm looking for an actual solution?

It _is_ a solution! It's not the same solution you want, but it's an _actual solution to the problem you described_.

> Address the point the person you're responding to is making, and answer only > the questions they are asking.

They are addressing the point, and " answer only the questions they are asking." is a dreadful idea to me. So often people are asking how to solve a problem in a specific way, but there's no good reason to be limiting themselves in that way. Given that they currently can't easily solve their problem in that specific way, it suggests that if there is a nice solution they are likely looking in the wrong place.

> Making assumptions just wastes people's time.

I feel like _not_ sharing a solution because you think that the person you're trying to help has some unexpected extra

> is how I always read these types of responses in my head, and it's really > frustrating because often-times I'm already aware of whatever workaround > you've mentioned, have already tried it, and know it's not suitable. It's > doubly frustrating when you're specifically looking for the solution that's > not the workaround.

Then you should make it more explicit what you've already tried. We're not inside your head, and many people _haven 't_ tried these things before. This is a good guide: [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

I didn't realise lambda@edge was a thing, or that I could use it to solve these problems. If I'd asked the question, these would have helped me. Why should someone refrain from writing a concise and polite response helping me purely because they think I may have tried that before and it will annoy me?

> "You should be doing this you pleb!" is how I always read these types of > responses in my head,

Then you may benefit from trying to work on this. Their reply has none of this snark or rudeness at all, and is simply listing some ways of solving the problem. You are the one that added this mentally, and then it annoys you. You are adding something yourself which then annoys you.

Go back and read what they said. They very simply explained that AWS let you do those things using lambda@edge. There was absolutely no reason to reply so rudely.

<comment><USER6> So, I totally agree with you on the tone of the GP, and that workarounds are worthwhile to share, but I feel like they have a point.

I feel the problem is more pronounced in the Javascript/webdev community (caveat: I'm recently dabbling in web front end development after a good number of years in Java-land) - the willingness to throw a poorly understood workaround or npm-incantation out there ("it usually works if I.."), rather than trying to actually get at the root of the problem is frustrating. I don't just want to make it work, I want to understand why it didn't before. It seems, from still shallow observation, that the community (such as a singular community exists) has an ethos of doing whatever to make it work and moving on.

Sometimes the root of the issue is a fundamental limitation that you need to work around, and workarounds are definitely useful in those cases, but they are definitely frustrating when they aren't accompanied by reasonably precise diagnosis of the problem they are working around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _once your data has been classified by Macie, it assigns each data item a > business value_

... and a thousand startup founders started the process, looked at the results, put their heads down on their desks, and wept quietly.

<comment><USER8> I don't get it. Are they crying because they have a ton of unsecured PII or because all their data is worthless?

<comment><USER9> Yes.

<comment><USER10> Would you like Coffee or Tea? Yes.

<comment><USER11> Whiskey or Vodka?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there an actual use for this? seems like its another useless service from the aws team instead on focusing on improving their interfaces, api's and pricing options.

<comment><USER13> Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and related things, mostly. Like alerting you that you just wrote a bunch of private customer data to a world-readable bucket. Or that some random employee is downloading all of your privileged and confidential reports, which could mean their credentials have been compromised. Very very nice if you have data stored in S3 that you really want to keep secure.

DISCLAIMER: work for AWS, have met and talked with the Macie team on several occasions. Opinions on here are my own

<comment><USER12> Still this seems like a poorly managed enterprise, probably a lazy cto or lack of a ciso, personally m kinda spektic that these services actually offer value in a well managed enterprise, specially if you work under the assumption that everything that it's on the internet or well "the cloud" it's by nature inherently insecure. Let's see how long those "valley people" keep milking the "AI", "Deep learning", "Machine Learning" hype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not cheap: [https://aws.amazon.com/macie/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/macie/pricing/)

After first GB, $5 per GB processed by the content classification engine

<comment><USER10> That's $5 once for each GB, not $5 per GB per month. Seems reasonable to me compared to the cost of implementing a DLP solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > When Jeff and I heard about this service, we both were curious on the > meaning of the name Macie. Of course, Jeff being a great researcher looked > up the name Macie and found that the name Macie has two meanings.

I somehow initially parsed the author's mention of Jeff as Jeff Bezos but soon realized she was referring to Jeff Bar, chief evangelist of AWS.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think their svm classifier would work over encrypted data, so if a service stores data encrypted at rest is this useful at all?

<comment><USER17> Most people using S3 are encrypting their data with KMS. Haven't looked, but if it's like every other S3 consumer, you can write a trust policy for Macie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _> The first meaning of Macie that was found, said that that name meant "weapon"._

Is macie a french word for weapon? I'm familiar with the English word "mace" that is a weapon but not macie.

</comment><comment><USER19> I ask myself how many people are storing _potential_ sensitive information without application level encryption so that AWS decides to build such tool... slightly distressing.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't get it. In what scenarios would this be useful?

</comment><comment><USER21> how do people train and build a service like this ?</comment>


Flutter: 2018 year in review - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mobilehackersio/status/1077874242853761024 <comment><USER2> Posting the link[0] is nicer than posting a link to a tweet unless it's the tweet itself we're interested in.

[0] [https://medium.com/@mobilehackersio/flutter-developer-top- ne...](https://medium.com/@mobilehackersio/flutter-developer-top-news- of-2018-57e0415c9ea3)</comment>


Android vs. iOS: Comparing the Development Process of the GQueues Mobile Apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gqueues.com/2013/07/android-vs-ios-comparing-development.html

<comment><USER2> Not mentioned are the command line dev tools for working with the device. adb[1] is really handy on Android. You can easily upload packaged builds, stop and start apps, transfer files, invoke anything via Intents (am), get a list of installed apps, and use the shell to invoke other things (eg `pm clear` to reset an app to first user experience).

Doing the same with iOS development is painful. Apps for the simulator end up in arbitrarily named directories so you can at least inspect their sandbox and can be invoked via extremely long command lines. But forget about apps on the device itself. libimobiledevice has reverse engineered some of it, but for example there is no way to start or stop an app from the command line.

I was doing some FTUE[2] work on both Android and iOS with a third party app, and needed to stop it, clear the data and start it again. For Android I just had to press up arrow and return. For iOS I had to do multiple gestures on the device, then use an app named iFunBox (really) to manually clear out the sandbox, and then launch the app again via touch.

[1] [http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html](http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html)

[2] First Time User Experience

<comment><USER3> Why not just use the XCode organiser (via AppleScript if you want automation) to delete applications or download/upload app sandboxes? There's no need to touch the phone or use "iFunBox" for this.

<comment><USER2> I only care about one file in the sandbox and the organizer doesn't let me upload/download just that one file. I also can't find upload/download in the Xcode Applescript dictionary.

The Xcode also only shows a subset of applications. My particular use case is that other developers have written apps using a library that I have authored. I then update the behaviour of the library for their needs based on interactions between the app and configuration for the library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Re: CoreData

Every iOS developer has to go through that learning curve. It is part of the initiation process, unless you want to stick with straight SQLite. CoreData becomes a merit badge of honor. Every developer has their war stories about NSPersistentStoreCoordinator, PSCs on multiple threads, threading, performance, sorting, etc.

Quick note on performance in CoreData. If you need to cache objects that you use frequently, make your own in-memory cache. CoreData is not optimized for caching objects.

But really, CoreData, is something most people who move from iOS dearly miss. Not everyone wants fine grained SQL-level control over persisting data. There is no equivalent in Android. Nada. OrmLite and some other libraries have tried. Where most of the Android OR persistence libraries break down is either m:n relationships or performance or both.

However, times may be a'changing - maybe CoreData and some of its pain can be abstracted itself - if I were to advise a new iOS developer - assuming their requirements for persistence weren't too complicated - I'd tell them to go with Parse for managing backend persistence or [http://helios.io](http://helios.io) from Matt Thompson (of AFNetworking).

<comment><USER5> I was able to pick up SQLite much faster than CoreData. It just made more sense to me.

I was building the iOS and Android versions side by side, so a solution that was similar in both platforms was important.

<comment><USER6> Core Data, as someone said earlier, has a much steeper learning curve than straight SQLite, but it pays off in the long run, saving you from writing enormous amounts of repeating, mindless code. I dread having to maintain my older non-Core Data-using apps, and am in the process of migrating them where I can.

I'm in the process of writing the same repetitive database code for an Android app at the moment and would love a (high quality, I've tried a few bad 3rd party libraries) Core Data equivalent to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't understand why people always complain about the performanceo of the android emulator. With an Intel X86 image and activated hardware acceleration (GPU & CPU KVM or HAXM), the emulator is much faster than an actual phone. Installation Guide by Intel: [http://software.intel.com/en- us/articles/speeding-up-the-and...](http://software.intel.com/en- us/articles/speeding-up-the-android-emulator-on-intel-architecture).

<comment><USER2> I had several problems with the emulator not doing audio recording and playback the same as real devices. Often they don't have the google apis or voice recognition either.

I must admit I haven't found it a big deal to use real devices. I also use Wifi ADB so I don't actually need to mess with cables.

Compared to those long intel instructions, switching simulators on iOS is trivial. I also found them mostly bug compatible with the devices - ie the same bug would appear on both. The Android emulators have historically diverged (I remember the 2.3 days when javascriptinterface on the webview would crash in the emulator but not the real device).

<comment><USER8> AOSP is different from OEM builds. It's not an emulator problem, most of the time. The folks at Genymotion seem to be working on fixing that with preapproved builds and more powerful controls.

<comment><USER2> The acronyms don't really matter. What I need to know is that a bug encountered in the emulator would also occur on the devices and vice versa. If that doesn't happen then the emulator becomes yet another platform with a differing set of unique bugs.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Unfortunately, that's a guarantee that Android's licensing model can't provide. Every manufacturer can do whatever they please, so fragmentation can't be regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing you realize after writing a few mobile apps is that most of them are really just glorified CRUD apps. Grab something from a web service, stuff it in a table view, let the user fiddle with it, post changes to web service etc. And overall I've found writing those kinds of apps easier in Android. The framework is, for the most part, at a higher level of abstraction.

However, if you want to do something a little more interesting, particularly with any kind of interactive multimedia, then Android makes things harder or downright impossible.

</comment><comment><USER10> > "Complex" Layouts"

> Neither Android or iOS support this "Flow Layout" natively

I don't know about Android, but iOS has just that : UICollectionViewFlowLayout. It would be trivial to implement a tag list as he did.

<comment><USER11> Was just about to post this. Also, IB is great and constraints are easy to manage once you realize that it's a calculated ruleset that enforces unambiguous constraints. The iOS framework is beautiful, and the author favored Android mostly due to his inexperience with both platforms.

<comment><USER12> Is that therefore a failing in the apple documentation, or perhaps not meeting the conventions with other frameworks and languages out there?

<comment><USER13> There is no failing in documentation. The framework is the same (UIKit), and in fact the API is a lot like that for UITableViewController—the cornerstone of many iOS apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I seriously think this one is kinda biased. I've been a long time Android developer and working with ios devs in parallel. Recently it's true that Android development is becoming a better experience but still not even close to ios. Have you ever really experienced shitty jar mismatchs or wrongly generated R files or trying to fix that shitty class paths ? Those are really making Android development xp shitty and painful.

<comment><USER9> I've had none of those problems. I made the decision early on not to use Eclipse though. Maybe that helped?

<comment><USER15> These problems are largely due to the eclipse android build system being a bit of a hack.

This is changing though - android studio (and soon ADT in eclipse, IIRC) are using a totally new build system based on Gradle, which is awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Almost all my mobile development experience(of which there isnt much to start with) has been acquired via PhoneGap, meaning i only did native if absolutely necessary.

The biggest issue and something that has gotten me into a state of white-hot rage has been Apples certificate/provisioning profile nonsense. I don't think I've ever gotten a profile to work from the get go, even just for development(a requirement thats positively ludicrous). That's why I generally develop/test on Android first.

Seriously, I've managed to require a whole week just because of some certificate snafu.

<comment><USER17> I agree that the certificate and profile thing is confusing when you are getting going, but I think a lot of that was exacerbated by not using the native toolset. Xcode handles a lot of it for you (with more and better support coming in Xcode 5), and point you in the right direction for things you have to do alone. Plus, there is loads of help on the 'net about doing this stuff in Xcode because everyone has to, whereas PhoneGap's user base is lower, so less out there. I wouldn't say it's overly complex, but it is by no means simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is why I like Xamarin Studio. You can reuse like 50% of your code base for both Android and iOS [1] (if you strictly keep the view separated from business/logic).

Yes the Android emulator can be very slow but testing on a real device is very quick without the hassle of certificates.

[1] Windows and Blackberry as well

<comment><USER19> True if you pay a not insignificant amount of money to get both xamarin.ios and xamarin.android.

<comment><USER20> I haven't tried either yet, but there's jRuby for Android via Roboto[1] and MobiRuby[2] for iOS. Both are free.

[1] [http://ruboto.org/](http://ruboto.org/)

[2] [http://mobiruby.org/](http://mobiruby.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No matter which side you work on if you put the effort into learning how to do it right and use the tools the way they were designed to it becomes so much easier. XCode 5 is a massive improvement. Jetbrain's involvement in Android dev made it so much more palatable.

</comment><comment><USER22> The article kind of matches with my experience. And I as well enjoy working in vim more than Eclipse / Xcode. As I have significant experience with Eclipse and with VisualAge before that, Xcode took some getting used to. The coding part is ok, but for anything else (which I found out only after doing a real project in it) it is horrible. I cannot count the times I have to kill Xcode and restart it because things which were properly done just didn't work. The Stackoverflow answer to those things usually is; restart Xcode. That kind of behaviour, to me, makes it a horrible and unpredictable IDE to work with.

On a previous stable version I had to suffer a month without code completion (well broken code completion) and there were many complaints online about it, but no fix (at least none that worked for me). This did teach me to memorise more and type faster.

Also half-baked things like Storyboards & IB which you cannot really use for actual apps because you need code to add images, custom fonts etc to controls and the often buggy code generation for Coredata makes me think that this has no priority for Apple. It feels outsourced (as in, thrown over the fence with a vague spec) and more neglected with every new version, making me think it's some kind of arrogance; let developers do everything the hard way, they cannot do without us anyway. Every story and tutorial I read seems to back this up; working around the quirks in the toolchain instead of the tools helping you. I keep wanting to believe i'm doing it wrong, but I haven't met anyone yet with a better experience.

<comment><USER9> Xcode 5 is quite a bit better, although I'm with you on not liking storyboards.

<comment><USER22> Good to hear; I have the developer preview, but I didn't dare to try it yet for anything serious. I'll try it for the next project. Maybe it's final by then.

<comment><USER23> Just one datapoint here, but I've found the v5 betas to be faster and more stable than most of the v4 releases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > and my Objective-C coding was limited to the two games. So I basically > started with an equal blank slate on both platforms.

It's not like game dev is one of the most complex kind of development and requires game design as well as low-level graphics programming skills.

<comment><USER25> >"It's not like game dev is one of the most complex kind of development and requires game design as well as low-level graphics programming skills."

Depending on the game that you are making the developing is not necessarily complex nor require low-level graphics programming skills, especially now that you can find high quality open sourced game engines out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The gripe i have with android is that the IDE is essential. and it does not work very well.

You can't find documentation or do with easy most things without the IDE. and the IDE often assumes things that get you by surprise, such as saving the project files when you change something in a preference dialog, and not providing a Undo for that, and not telling you all the files modified by such action.

<comment><USER27> Try android studio. It is based on InteliJ - I find it much more pleasurable than Eclipse. It also under very rapid development and has vim style plugin.

Although still IDE I think you will find it better than Eclipse.

<comment><USER26> I tried. my experience:

       1. download version 1.0
       2. create hellow world
       3. close it.
       4. open, get notification for 1.1. install it.
       5. IDE complain that my hellow world program is bogus.
       6. i can't open or import it.

so, yeah, bad first impression.

disclaimer, i have some rather complexes projects with android, none using Eclipse or IDE. vim and the android cli stuff. So, not a clueles beginer clicking away on the IDE, but maybe the oposite, maybe i tried to mess up with the details more than the IDE was confortable with

<comment><USER28> There is no Version 1.0 of Android Studio. The newest version is 0.2.2.

What did you install?

<comment><USER26> Replace 1.0 and 1.1 with whatever actual versions it was first announced and the subsequent update two or three days later.

<comment><USER27> I would say it has moved great deal from there. And even if it is not good enough yet keep an eye on it - the pace of improvement is incredible from what I see.

(only hobbyist android development here)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> More than 20,000 lines of code. In my opinion that's a lot of code for this kind of apps. What a pain to maintain such a codebase.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it's likely that a particular community, language, tooling combination is likely to resonate with a particular person. Although reading a few well reasoned articles might give you a hunch of which one to choose, it's likely, barring external forces like occupation or marketplace requirements that you'll know until you plunge in and try it for yourself. I appreciate the article, seems well written and reasoned, but I wouldn't want to read too many more like it before I just dove in and found out for myself where I felt most happy, efficient and expressive.

</comment><comment><USER22> For the float:left and such wouldn't [http://www.pixate.com/](http://www.pixate.com/) be a solution? I haven't tried it yet, but will do for my next app.

</comment><comment><USER31> > I finally ended the pain by taking all layouts out of IB and simple wrote > them long-hand with pages of boiler-plate code.

Mother of god. Simply using layout constraints instead of auto layout would have saved > 1000 lines of code I would estimate.</comment>


Murder Suspect Has Witness: A MetroCard (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/nyregion/19metrocard.html <comment><USER2> >During the interrogation, he said, it occurred to him that he had used his MetroCard on the bus and the subway, and he asked the police to check it. A detective took the card briefly, and then gave it back to him, and there was no further discussion about the card, he said.

The justice system doesn't seek justice, it seeks someone to blame so the statistics look good. How is it not a crime to waste taxpayer money on the wrong person when a detective's willful negligence leads to someone being illegally imprisoned? Taxpayers get to pay even more to rehabilitate the illegally imprisoned since they lose their jobs, and the real killer is meanwhile on the loose. If there was justice, the detective and prosecutors would be facing charges for wasting taxpayer money and wrongfully imprisoning someone, and be fired.

<comment><USER3> Per danso's comment...he wasn't jailed for this. Charges were dropped.

<comment><USER4> No, he was in jail prior to the charges being dropped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that the charges were officially dropped a month later [0]. I submitted the original article because it's almost 10 years to the day, and it contained info about other cases involving the MeteoCard.

0\. [https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/after- metrocar...](https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/after-metrocard- alibi-murder-charges-are-dropped/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The Bronx is a civil rights disaster.

This wouldn't be noteworthy if New York City didn't masquarade itself as the center of the free world. But this only matters from Wall St to West 118th st.

Would be 79th st, if Columbia University wasn't up there.

<comment><USER6> The New York City marathon goes thought the Bronx.

Most of the runners hate it, there are not many trees, not many people come out to cheer runners on.

There is not a single bookshop in the Bronx.

<comment><USER7> The New York City marathon goes through the [worst, least interesting part of] the Bronx, for like a mile and a half.

The other side has way more trees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From TFA: "It seems somewhat implausible," he said, that the government's witness saw the event and was "right about one and mistaken about the other."

I've often wondered if this is part of the reason cases seem to be dropped if the primary suspect is exonerated. I can picture a lawyer saying "Well they took all the evidence and tried to pin it on that guy and it turned out wrong, how can they turn around and say it was my client now?" Or maybe my perception is just wrong, I don't tend to follow such things.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've heard a bit about various Police departments and prosecutors burying evidence that could clear someone's name, so I'm surprised they only ignored it and didn't just discard the metro card.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you heard wrong, and most police officers and public justice employees are actually generally good people, who just want justice to be served and for the innocent to be free.

<comment><USER11> And once they get a conviction, the person they caught is, _by definition_ , not an innocent. See how easy that was?

Police can only keep their personal sense of self-worth, justice and fairness by… arrogantly sticking to their guns and forcing a conviction onto whoever they initially fingered as being guilty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, I'm looking at this image, and a handful of details strike me about the geography...

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/11/19/nyregion/18metroc...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/11/19/nyregion/18metrocard.map.190.jpg)

The case was founded on claims by a witness:

      The witness, who has not been identified, said
      Corey Jones was arguing with the man and accused
      him of being a "snitch." A short time later, the
      witness said, Corey handed Jason a gun, and Jason
      fired shots, killing the man. A call to 911 was
      made at 12:21 a.m., records show.

Based on the map, any of these data points have a yawning gulf of time between them. maybe an hour each.

None of those data points is really an hour from the other, as the crow flies. These a bike ride-able distances, within the time stamps given.

Not knowing any of the names involved, or having a substantial axe to grind, I can just look at those point on the map and say that it would be trivial to hand someone a metrocard and have them swipe it somewhere else, to construct an alibi, and then get it back to me after I'm done with a premeditated crime.

The MTA didn't show a video frame capture of any specific person in a particular place.

The check-cashing branch had the video still. But look at the time stamps. There was nearly a solid hour to displace, and have someone else fabricate the metrocard swipe. You know, maybe the kind of favor a girlfriend might carry out?

Really, there's only one crucial detail that forges the integrity of the evidence: The accused did not warily supply his own evidence. Someone else fished it out and asked questions.

The only thing that really lends credence to the extra facts is that the individual might not have opted to seal the alibi air tight of his own volition. The detail might have sat there unused, but for external, and (most- likely) objective advocacy. The trustworthy face of the former detective offering assistance.

But really, those metrocard swipes have all the integrity of a wi-fi IP address. Theoretically, a motivated individual could make a metrocard that contradicts real events.

It's really not more substantial than a thermal paper receipt.

Perhaps interesting on it's own. But only if incidental and used to support stronger facts.

<comment><USER13> > Perhaps interesting on it's own. But only if incidental and used to support > stronger facts.

That's not really how any of this works. It's not the defense that has to "support stronger facts", that's the prosecution's job. The existence of the metrocard evidence pushes the prosecution's burden correspondingly higher.

Now, here's a few ways this could've played out:

Scenario A is that a random guy with a couple of drug priors is actually trying to keep his life together, leaves work, goes from work to a place to cash out his pay check, goes hanging out with his girlfriend. He somehow ends up wrongfully accused, possibly because of his priors.

Scenario B is that the guy was walking around town, randomly ran into the victim (while presumably having been snitched on by said victim), and, after a verbal confrontation, murders the presumptive snitch.

Scenario C is that the brothers had just heard the guy snitched on them, they're fuming, and, as a spur of the moment thing, go on the prowl for the snitch, and kill him.

Given the existence of the Metrocard evidence, B and C are off the table. Instead, you have scenario D:

Random guy with a couple of drug priors but no prior history of violent crime plans and executes a homicide, devises a sophisticated alibi that has him at reasonable locations at reasonable times while biking to the crime scene and back. This perp was sophisticated enough that there is no evidence pointing at him other than eyewitness testimony, yet he was still sloppy enough to confront the victim in public.

Scenarios B and C were fairly run of the mill situations, and eyewitness testimony might've been enough to clinch it, but D is the "this shit only happens on TV" type of crazy, and requires a correspondingly high amount of supporting evidence. This leaves us with A being the overwhelmingly likely alternative.

<comment><USER12> So why do people get shot at all? Why do people get shot over arguments, out on the street, in public? Where do the guns come from?

How is it, that the guns land right in the hands of the people willing to use them? How are those guns floating around, carefully concealed, from purchase to grudge match? How does the grudge match start? Who snitches about what at all?

Clearly someone got shot, and no one knows who did it. No one knows anything? No one knows what happened. Based on that line of reasoning, maybe it's safe to conclude that no one got shot at all.

Except someone did get shot. And whoever did it managed to sail right through all of the gaps you've outlined, and disappear. How did that happen? Who would be motivated to operate against someone disrespecting them in a convenience store argument?

Why taunt anybody in a convenience store? Much less about authenticity or being a tattle tale.

Would you shoot someone for getting snarky with you? A random person at a deli?

If you were the kind of person who roamed the streets with a gun, you'd have your eyes in front of you about getting picked up with it. Even getting caught with a gun inside NYC city limits is a serious thing.

So to carry one around, to know where it is represents a degree of premeditation. Were the victim and the assailant just strangers? The assailant was so chaotic that this is a senseless crime against a stranger during some seconds-long encounter, and yet all so careful, that no one can figure out who dunnit, no one knows how the gun showed up, or why the sudden outburst?

Platonic ideals are great, but hang around some of these delis some time. See what it's like to mingle.

<comment><USER14> Except why does any of this make sense? Just because it can't be pinned on anyone, it has to be them? Why should it be a slam dunk conviction simply by process of elimination?

We don't know the witness or even the victim, by way of this article. Who were they?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Malicious iOS Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.andreas-kurtz.de/2014/09/malicious-apps-ios8.html

<comment><USER2> > Third-party apps can no longer secretly take pictures and transfer them off > the device without user's consent or knowledge.

Wow. No fix for iOS7?

> Third-party apps still can permanently monitor the iOS pasteboard for > changes and read out any sensitive data that is probably copy-pasted.

Even if the app is not "running" (not visible after double-pressing the home button)?</comment>


Brainstorm HN: Startup Idea Pool (Part II) - <AUTHOR>

Pitch Startup Ideas here (no matter how insignificant or how radical/outlandish the idea is)
Why do this? Well think of it like a brute-force brainstorming method. Very low SNR but hopefully a few of these will inspire someone to come up with a realistic/sane/good idea. Share only the ideas you won't mind if someone picks up and implements.
First Brainstorm Session: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602478 <comment><USER2> This is dead/low/no tech, but I really want someone to design a way to carry drycleaning - either a reuseable strap (which I have created and used, but which can be forgotten at home or in the car etc.) or, and better to my mind, something that costs essentially nothing and can attach to every hanger without interfering with its use in the drycleaning process, or perhaps an entirely new hanger.

<comment><USER3> You could propose this at Quirky (<http://www.quirky.com/>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Customer help crowdsourced by customers.

The basic idea is this: \- You have a site where you sell something online (ecommerce) \- Someone wants to buy what you sell (product/service) \- Before buying it, you offer something (discount, points, prize, etc) in exchange for doing customer service for what you are selling. This should be measurable somehow (number of calls attended / duration of calls / attended customer feedback) \- If this person agrees, you ask for his phonenumber and availability for taking customer help calls (days/time) \- When someone else comes to your site looking for help about what you sell, he can enter his phonenumber on a simple form and click on 'receive call' \- Then (if available) the person who bought your stuff gets a phone call. When he answers, a recording asks him if he'd like to take a customer help call. If he agrees, the person seeking help gets called and the calls are connected. \- After the call, the person who got help, gets redirected to a short customer satisfaction survey (1 to 3 questions) to rate the help he got

Calls would be logged and recorded. There would be call and satisfaction statistics, etc.

You could charge for each call or on a per minute/hour base, so that you could profit from the assistance or at least pay for the discounts you are giving to the people who are helping you out.

What I like best about this, is that customers would be getting assistance from other customers. This is especially useful when you buy a product from an online retailer. Usually if you call customer service, the person who takes your call will know nothing about the product you bought, because doesn't own it, and he's never used it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Online business cards. A site where you can create your business card, choose from many different designs, upload your company logo, customize the design, add links to your [choose your favorite online service] account, etc. Something like this: <http://rogieking.com/> but for everybody.

Then you could have private and public information. You could share your private card via invitation or a special code, you could also share your card via sms, facebook and a phone app (iphone, bb, palm pre, etc).

You'd also be able to choose a print design and order some prints (possible partnership with Moo?).

I have a few more features in mind, like click-to-call and other stuff, but I guess you get the idea.

<comment><USER4> <http://card.ly>

<comment><USER3> Looks like a good start! Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll start this off.

Customized/Personalized print magazines. Customize what topics you want, more text or more photos, what categories (Internet, Photography, New Gadgets, Politics, Economics and even subcategories). Then monthly or when ever you get a magazine that's custom tailored just for you. Price also adjustable (more you pay, less ads, or vice versa)

Business side: the content will be automatically arranged and placed, then printed, and shipped.

<comment><USER5> Offbeat Guides <http://www.offbeatguides.com/> delivers customized travel guides for $25.

I like print magazines, but I wonder about the economics of dead trees. However a good online personalized aggregation service would be worth the price of a magazine subscription to me.</comment></comment>


Intermittent isolation from each other's improves collective performance - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jessecshore/status/1029124892439072768 <comment><USER2> Paper at [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/09/1802407115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/09/1802407115)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1029124892439072768.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1029124892439072768.html)</comment>


Geeks always win. Today: how to sneak in a static CMS - <AUTHOR> https://ungleich.ch/en-us/blog/2019/09/24/sneaking-in-a-static-cms/ <comment><USER2> Nice Blog Post! Good choice of choosing rsync over git. Just, make sure to backup the end host.</comment>


Bulletproof Coffee: Debunking the Hot Buttered Hype - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/bulletproof-coffee-debunking-the-hot-buttered-hype-1681321467 <comment><USER2> There's a reasonable approach you can take to getting something out of bulletproof coffee that answers just about every straw-man'ed-up objection in the article.

For over a year, I made a mason jar every morning consisting of either cold brew coffee concentrate with hot water, or press-pot brewed coffee, mixed with a slab of grass-fed butter (1/8th of a package of unsalted Kerrygold), and a few tablespoons of coconut oil. Sometimes a small dollop of heavy cream if I had some on hand. I'd add some 100% stevia powder and 1/8th of a bar of Green and Black brand (no soy lecithin) 85% dark chocolate, and hit it with a hand blender until it foamed up to the top of the jar (you have to fill the jar only half full or it will spray over the top). You don't need to use a regular blender (in, having tried it, I'd highly recommend against it, because the steam tends to blow the top open and you have scalding greasy coffee everywhere). The hand blender (aka "stick blender") is perfect and to clean it, just put the end in soapy water and turn it on, then do it once more in plain hot water, and it's clean until the next day. One caution is that on winter mornings you should pre-heat the mason jar a bit with hot (not boiling) water, or it might crack from thermal stress when you pour in boiling water.

When I first started this, it _did_ make me a little queasy, but after a few days that went away. I also _did_ feel hungry shortly after drinking it as the author described, but I'm pretty sure that was more habit than anything else -- my body wasn't actually short of calories. After doing it for a week or two my system got accustomed to not having solid food first thing in the morning and I was not hungry like he described. I don't think the author did it long enough to let his body & brain actually adjust to a radical change in morning routine.

I'd have this for breakfast every morning and go for a long walk in my neighborhood (maybe 4-5 miles) then start work (I worked from home during that time).

The net effect was that I had quite a bit of energy, my mood improved, and I lost weight. I'm not going to claim that it was just the bulletproof. With this breakfast, I didn't crave lunch until about 2 p.m. most days. I think I actually ate fewer calories in a typical day. Also, I did have my cholesterol checked, and my HDL and all that improved after doing this for a year. Not that they were bad, but my HDL was low, and this seemed to fix that.

I never once bought expensive MCT or anything _labeled_ with the Bulletproof company name. The grass-fed butter (Kerrygold) is more expensive than regular butter and good coconut oil is not cheap, but as a _meal_ it's not that expensive per serving.

I realize it's just anecdotal but it was a good breakfast routine for me, once I figured out how to blend it well enough to stay blended. Your mileage may vary.</comment>


Don't bet on the most likely winner - <AUTHOR> https://avoidboringpeople.substack.com/p/relatively-speaking-the-billionaire <comment><USER2> It's contrarian article:

1\. In many tech area: networks effects and zero marginal costs creates winner(s) take all. In that sense it make sense to follow the winners as previously investors underestimated how big winner could be (e.g. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple).

2\. Everywhere else: betting on underdogs that are mispriced is much better strategy in long-run. See Warren Buffet got huge returns by looking at fundamentals, but his strategy would not work well in tech.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Because if not, why isn't bing on par with google by now?

<comment><USER4> Bing does seem to be on a slow upward trend: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide- market-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share- of-search-engines/)

It's still only 6% of global search vs 86% for google.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how much of that is from dark patterns in Edge.

<comment><USER6> Do DDG searches count in Bing's percentage?

<comment><USER7> I thought that DDG used Yahoo! Search under the hood exclusively (because... why use more than one?). It turns out that it is a complex mix of resources from multiple partners[0]:

> In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its > partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search > engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It > also partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make > use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share > user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.

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

<comment><USER8> One way to quickly find out what underlying provider a metasearch engine uses is to search for "my user agent". You will then normally see the user agent of the crawler in the result snippet.

Doing this on DuckDuckGo: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=my+user+agent&t=hk&ia=answer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=my+user+agent&t=hk&ia=answer) , reviles [http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm](http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) in the snippet for whatsmyuseragent.org .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I disagree somewhat with #1.

Long Amazon, short JCPenney is an example of an obvious trade the past 5 years. Or even the past 2 years. Same with long Apple in 2012 when iPhones were ubiquitous. And you would have obliterated the index with those trades.

Sometimes you don't need an edge. sometimes the most obvious idea is the most profitable.

And my theory why is because if it's obvious, it's because everyone else is in love with the idea as well and putting money into it. And in the financial world, people don't just put money into it once. They add on to it month after month after month.

So you don't necessarily need to be early to profit well. Let the big trend appear, then invest big into it once it becomes clear as day. Because huge trends last longer than you think.

<comment><USER10> Specifically, there is a style of investing called "trend following" or "momentum" where you literally just buy things that are going up, and sell things that are going down.

This works wonders and has been a constant source of factor alpha.

<comment><USER11> They have been a reasonable source of alpha some of the time. But not a constant source all the time: trend following can badly go wrong.

And, of course, because so many people do trend following these days, trend following itself will work less well in future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking at everything as relative to each other is a slippery slope to zero sum mindset. Are things relative? Yes, absolutely (no pun intended haha), great to be aware of that. But focusing too much on your relative rank eats away from the edge that got you to wherever you are and pushes you towards groupthink. Once you start the measuring contest, you've already lost.

I think one of the Intel founders said something along the lines of "every new business sows the seeds for its own upheaval". Yeah that's true, but only once you start caring about the scoreboard.

<comment><USER13> Had to look for it :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- sum_thinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking)

<comment><USER14> Zero-sum game [1] is the root term. An example is playing poker or similar (without any outside sponsorship or the like) - no matter how well we all play, there's no way for our combined wealth to be greater (or lower) at the end than it was at the beginning. Zero-sum thinking or mind set or whatever is the assumption that a situation is a zero-sum game, which may or may not be true.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- sum_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well yeah, you want to bet on undervalued horses, not just fast ones.

Likewise with stocks, it's hard to argue that Tesla isn't doing well, but you'd be bonkers to buy their stock right now.

<comment><USER16> > but you'd be bonkers to buy their stock right now.

You're probably correct; but didn't people say that when they went above $200 as well?

<comment><USER17> Yeah I've been hearing that basically since the IPO.

Has yet to payoff.

<comment><USER18> Too much FOMO and not enough 'I'd be bonkers to' \- for as long as that's the case it pays to follow the FOMO!

(Not investment advice I'm willing to follow myself! But a comment elsewhere in this submission, and a recent Levine column, have discussed that.. yeah, basically following the trend works... I suppose it shouldn't be _that_ surprising, add more signals and act more quickly and you've reinvented a successful industry/form of professional trading.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know, this

> It's how the stock performs relative to expectations that determines whether > you make above average returns or not.

is like, investment 101 knowledge. Anyone who ever came near managing a portfolio understands that.

</comment><comment><USER20> "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet" —Hugh Keough

<comment><USER21> I think that misses the point of this article. More appropriate might be:

"The race is often to the swift, and the battle to the strong, but the way to bet is on those with miscalibrated odds."

If the odds are well calibrated, the expected return is zero; we might as well not bet. The same goes for speculating on well-priced assets.

If we have reason to believe that the odds/prices are miscalibrated, we can expect a positive return by going long/short (depending on which direction they're off).

<comment><USER22> Well, the original quote is more about making plans. Georgia is at war with Russia: who will win? You can -- and people very much do -- try to set up a situation with a massive payoff for you in the unlikely event that Georgia wins. But the maxim is there to remind you that Georgia isn't going to win.

Interacting with a bookie is a whole different context than interacting with reality.

<comment><USER23> > Interacting with a bookie is a whole different context than interacting with > reality.

I think the point of the article was that interacting with the stock market (and potentially other areas of many businesses) _is_ more like interacting with a bookie than interacting with reality.

<comment><USER22> Yes; I'm just saying I don't think the article's point detracts from the maxim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This may be true in public markets, but I'm not sure it extends to venture capital where not everyone can get access to the same opportunity. A good VC firm will not only see the best opportunities but may also pay far less in a competitive bidding environment. That's where edge comes from.

</comment><comment><USER25> A nice post! The initial part of the article with the efficient markets hypothesis (satellite data and app download data are table stakes for investing) rings a bit hollow for me in a world where bankrupt Hertz is seeing its share price go up though...

<comment><USER26> If you sincerely think that Hertz is overvalued, why don't you short it? It seems like an easy money-making opportunity, if so.

<comment><USER27> Aside from the other issues (staying solvent long enough to profit), there is another issue - government intervention. You never know if the government will sweep in and save a company [unfairly?] or change terms -- either with a guarantee, bailout, or unlimited loans.

Case: Bear Sterns, AIG, GS

<comment><USER11> One of the first things many European countries did to combat (?) the pandemic was to ban short selling.

See eg [https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus- hedgef...](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-hedgefunds- shortse/hedge-funds-target-france-as-short-selling-bans-lifted-idUSKBN2321K7)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Engage your Facebook page fans with page apps - <AUTHOR> http://socialmediatoday.com/bemmu/313426/engage-your-facebook-page-fans-page-apps

<comment><AUTHOR> My first ever guest post and marketing attempt. Contains some hidden self- promotion, can you find it?</comment>


Restraint by Ursula K. Le Guin - <AUTHOR> http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2012/10/08/restraint/

<comment><USER2> Great essay but I think the point will be lost and the typical HN community member won't get it.</comment>


Video on How to Increase Traffic with PageRank Sculpting - <AUTHOR> http://www.boldformula.com/increase-traffic-pr-sculpting

<comment><USER2> Check it out!</comment>


Ask HN: Passenger_WSGI or FastCGI? - <AUTHOR>

I'm hosting my site on Dreamhost, and I'm having difficulties using both Passenger and FastCGI. I write in Python using Flask which means I use VirtualEnv, I've followed through all of the Dreamhost tutorials and Wiki pages, nothing seems to work. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> do they not have support?

If not, I'd suggest getting a new host.

<comment><AUTHOR> They support it, they have tutorials and wiki articles on them. I follow them step by step, then the next day it breaks, or when I download a module, it breaks. Very frustrating, especially when it works flawlessly locally.</comment></comment>