Why Virtual Classes Can Be Better Than Real Ones - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/why-virtual-classes-can-be-better-than-real-ones <comment><USER2> "Human brains have evolved with a flitting, fleeting ability to maintain focus on any one thing."

I thought that was just me. The ability to pause, rewind or replay a lecture is just so incredibly useful. I wish this had been available when I was young.

<comment><USER3> Warning - most of this is just my opinion as a student and as a teacher in adult education. The article talks about a lot of this which makes me happy.

Lecture is my biggest problem with MOOCs. Lecture is the easiest and laziest way to teach a topic. I know because on my lazy days I tend to find myself falling back on it with my students. When I first started teaching I leaned on it heavily, and have learned it doesn't really work. Nobody retains anything of value.

Adults learn new things by doing and discussing. And adults zone out frequently. Really, the most the average adult can listen is about 15 minutes anyway, and after 10 you've probably lost interest. See [http://www.mrmediatraining.com/2012/08/23/how-many- minutes-i...](http://www.mrmediatraining.com/2012/08/23/how-many-minutes-is- the-audiences-attention-span/) for some interesting info on that.

If you watch a cooking show, you learn some techniques. But unless you get in the kitchen and try to make that cake, __and have someone give you feedback on your technique __, then you won 't learn how to do it.

But that doesn't scale online. Feedback and assessment simply don't work at that kind of level. And we know it doesn't. That's why in big lecture situations in traditional schools, there are lots of TAs, tutors, or supplemental instruction sessions to help people learn. But lectures scale really well for MOOCs so that's what they end up being - a series of video lectures. It's easy. Just record yourself talking and throw it online. And it's easy for students, too. They don't have to do things, they don't have to talk to anyone. They can just listen. And maybe zone out for a bit.

A huge benefit is that, as mentioned here, If you missed something in a lecture on video, you can rewind. But if you had a question or something to add, then the opportunity to do that in context is lost.

And that's where I think a lot of the dropoff happens too. We don't learn that way as adults. We learn by doing things and engaging with people. And if you can just take a course by watching someone talk to you, you've not really learned. You've just been told some stuff.

And this is why adults make comments like "I love online classes because I can slow the lecture down or rewind," Adules have been conditioned that lecture is how you're supposed to learn. Rewinding and slowing down is a bandage over the real problem; too much lecture and not enough application means you don't really learn - you don't retain things.

One last thing - lecture is highly effective for entry-level content if chunked. 15 minutes of lecture followed by direct application of the content or practice, followed by a review or reflection. Dr. Christine Harringon has some great insights on this. See [http://drchristineharrington.org/publications](http://drchristineharrington.org/publications) for some.

I think the future of online learning is going to involve finding a way to scale the practice and assessment parts of learning. And I see interesting movement out there on that.

<comment><USER4> A few years ago I abandonned the project of studying part-time while working, I hated it. Today, I'm well into a distance program and remain motivated. This is at a local uni, not a Mooc, with some live chat/interaction during lectures That I watch later. Key experience points:

\- For me, the most difficult part of in-person was managing my schedule and transportation. I would come in to class, all stressed out about being 10 mins late, only to listen to 15 minutes of unimportant chit chat. The energy expenditure felt hugely wasteful.

\- In-class questions from others were generally not the questions I had in mind. I find forums more tailored. When someone asks a question, another student with access to books and google can take a thoughtful crack at it any time of the day, with the teacher/assistant adding in precisions regularly. Just like with any teacher/group, this is hit or miss.

\- Pausing is key. For math classes for example, the ability to stop a lecture after a concept is introduced and spend the next 2 hours on books/internet/exercises/etc to really assimilate it before continuing is the best way I've ever learnt maths.

\- Pace is good, but focus is also important. The ability to sleep 1 hour after work before starting a lecture makes a world of difference in my sustained alertness and interest.

I understand the arguments for traditional school, but for me they are outweighted by the immediate, tangible benefits I get from distance learning. YMMV.

Edit: shorten

<comment><USER3> Look what you're saying though - you're agreeing with me.

1\. You were motivated to learn.

2\. The in-class time wasted your time with 15 minutes of chit-chat rather than purposeful doing.

3\. Pausing is key. But you are motivated to spend 2 hours working on the concept. It has been my experience that many do not. They simply move to the assessment to get it done. Then retention is lost.

I'm not at all arguing for traditional school. Traditional school seems to be "let's talk at a room of people for an hour 4-5 times a week, then give them tests to see how much they remember."

I want to see "you watch the 15 minute videos and then we engage together to create something meaningful where you apply what you learned."

Which sounds exactly like what you want.

Make no mistake - I can't drive because I don't see well. I have to take a bus to go teach my face-to-face classes. The bus ride can be 30 minutes to an hour depending on when I pick it up. To teach an hour class, I need 3 hours of my day. And this puts in me in the same boat as my students.

When students come to my classes, I don't waste their time because it's precious.

I'd love an online version of this. But with online classes, it's hard to find common times because people take classes around work and other duties.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. And I agree that progressive/hybrid approaches to teaching don't all translate/scale online well -- I'm thinking for example of programs built on being highly project-oriented in applied engineering or vocational schools, or the Khan-academy-style of doing homework in class (which I would have loved in high school)

But presently for me this is not a requirement. I suppose that, being okay with the lecture format as the core, I wanted to pursue learning but with less of the contextual hassle and inefficiencies (I have enough of my own!). On that, online courses certainly delivered -- which is what I wanted to convey.

However, I won't deny that this may be approaching the upper limit of what online education can manage to do well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When talking about the dropout rate, I imagine a lot of detractors don't think about people like me. I often register for tons of MOOCs just so I can have an archive of the material and assignments for later. I often don't have time to do things on top of my graduate studies, but I'd still like to take that course on data structures, that interesting series on complex analysis, and the course on functional programming in Scala. I hardly ever do things "on time" with MOOCs, but the amount of things I've learned from them is amazing.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, while there may be a real issue with effectiveness of online courses, the entire concept of "dropping out" is anachronistic. I always feel slightly bad to know that I'm part of "the drop-out problem", but I feel like learning a-la carte and at one's own pace is exactly in line with the unique advantages of online courses.

I think the truth that people are getting at when they discuss this is that the sort of self-education that you and I like using these courses for is not at all a replacement for traditional education. I think this "problem" will vanish once it is widely recognized that these are more useful to augment ongoing self-education. It is easier than ever to be a lifelong learner, and that is a great thing and plenty of justification for the existence of these courses.

<comment><USER3> As a teacher, nothing makes me sadder than to see people not complete. It feels like I failed to keep them engaged. I taught a free software development course online for three summers in a row. Completion was awful.

To be blunt, I won't waste my time preparing videos, material, assessments, etc anymore because it feels like nobody cares.

<comment><USER6> Don't be dejected! If your materials are good, people will continue learning from them, regardless of whether or not they finished the course. One of the major advantages of digital courseware is that you can take it on your own time at your own pace. Doing so is not an indication of not caring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was about OOP.

<comment><USER8> I thought it would be about c++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a moment I thought - "Er what is a Real class", having C++ in mind. Then it struck me after seeing that the article is from nautil.us. _Sigh_

<comment><USER10> I was actually thinking class type families ala BETA. Basically, a class can be a member of another class and overridden when the containing class is extended.

<comment><USER11> Same here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that can be true. But I think that an excellent virtual course is still inferior to an excellent physical one.

I mean, 90% of the interesting stuff I am learning during my classes comes from the discussions that start at the end of the course with the professor and a few others.

I do enjoy the ability to rewind, and choose my pace when taking an online course. Too bad the quality of the interactions I have mentioned has not yet been captured by MOOCs or OCs.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, but I'd counter and say that a median virtual course tend to be better than a median physical one. The more advanced the course, the more this tend to be true.

Lecturers in a classroom, specially professors who's main goal is to research and are forced to teach, just come and blurt out whatever they think today session is about. I once had a class where the slides had scrambled egg over because the professor had been preparing the class over breakfast, with his baby boy on his lap!!! And I am not talking about an overworked postdoc, this was a guy with tenure. I imagine he though he was being brilliant by cramming together his parenting, contractual responsibilities to students and fulfillment of bodily needs into a single time slot so he would have more time for his oh-so-precious research.

When this kind of lecturer do some MOOC course, they become conscious there's going to be an audience and a record of their performance. So they devote at least as much effort to it as if they were writing a paper for some mid-tier congress. This has the double advantage of having them put an honest effort, and the delivery medium playing to their strengths. This shows in the end results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I definitely thought this was about C++ virtual inheritance.

</comment><comment><USER15> i thought this was an article about OO and I lol'd.</comment>


Ask HN: My CEO wants to learn how to code.. What do I do? - <AUTHOR>

My CEO just asked me about learning how to code. He doesn't want to actually write any, he just wants to gain a better understanding of software development.
I think this is great and I do not want to blow this chance by giving him some programming books that he will get bored of and not read.
I want to show him the pitfalls of software development so he can understand why estimating time is difficult, and how we build our technical debt by not fixing bugs when we find them and rushing features etc. I want him to know why we are forced to drop some features and why we are no longer able to keep the same velocity as when the project started.
Can you recommend any articles/blogs/books that can explain this stuff to managers without getting too technical? <comment><USER2> I'd suggest three things:

1 - subscribe to <http://codeyear.com/> (or similar)

2 - take a couple of hours every weeks to do pair-work (not only programming, but also estimating etc) so he get a better idea of the daily tradeoffs

3 - let him pick a couple of screencasts at times (see <http://www.learnivore.com/> for instance) to follow from a high level view at his own pace

If you do 2, be ready to question your own assumptions; you'll likely get "fresh" questions that will teach you just as much as him.

<comment><USER3> Point #2 - truly well-said.

>If you do 2, be ready to question your own assumptions; you'll likely get "fresh" questions that will teach you just as much as him.

Bingo, again. Spot on. Having lived on both sides of the equation (hand-coder - 20+ years ago, CXO-type since then,) I can attest to the validity of this whole heartedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like your CEO has already said to himself, if not yet to you, "how hard can it be?"

The truth is coding is not that hard, coding well, is a different game.

Does he play sport? Explain that knowing how to hit a ball with a racket does not mean you can win the Open, but learning programming as a comparison doesn't stop there.

Imagine all the games in the tournament being played at once, on one court, at the same time. That's how complex applications work, and it's that level of information that programmers routinely have to carry in their heads when they work.

Making one change often leads to a cascade of work because making a change in one part can affect the outcome of many other things.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good advice stacking up here - but the challenge is in getting your boss to appreciate the huge step from sample exercises in programming to building a real life application.

It could be the equivalent of learning to saw through a couple of wooden planks. Learning the basics of handling a cross cut saw gives little insight into the craft of joinery.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps it might be a better idea to give him related material regarding project management and get him involved in the SDLC.

Doesn't sound like the problem you are trying to solve has much to do with programming (writing code, design patterns, oop, etc.).

I'm serious.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's simplicity in this site: <http://teamtreehouse.com/>

Watch one or two with him to get the ball rolling. It'll feel a lot less like work to him.

</comment><comment><USER8> Point him to Joel Spolsky's Blog <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/>

There is a reading list on the right, all good reads about software development.

</comment><comment><USER9> The Mythical Man Month

The Soul of a New Machine (hardware; nonetheless pertinent, if dated -- was a best-seller)</comment>


Show HN: Trimmed News – Read Summarized News Created by a Machine - <AUTHOR> https://trimmednews.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I'm the creator of Trimmed News. The idea is to offer the most relevant news and summaries of those to reduce time spent reading news. I'm using state of the art summarizing algorithm to summarize the news from (currently) eight different sources. There are a lot of things I'm going to add like personal feed. I'm also going to improve UI and UX a lot before the 1.0 launch. I hope to get feedback that helps me to understand what is working and what isn't.</comment>


Ask HN: Whats the best way to give away $25 amazon gift vouchers? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I would like to give away $25 Amazon gift vouchers as a strategy to get people to use my bootstrapped startup
Whats the best way to give the vouchers away? I would like to give them to the fist 10 people who create public business plans on my site http://www.venturesocially.com but I dont want to be sued or get taken to the cleaners.
I want to limit the total spend to $500 dollars
What terms and conditions should I put in place to limit myself to getting in trouble? <comment><USER2> If you want to use it for marketing, you could get people to tweet a particular status message, where you randomly select a few entries to win the prize.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a plan for the event, basically for the first 10 public ventures would get a voucher

my concern is more to do we opening some form of loop hole or exposing my company for more than its worth

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> here is the list of rules I have come up with

<http://www.venturesocially.com/offer.php></comment>


Hello Ahead: Easing the Path to ADHD Treatment - <AUTHOR> https://www.helloahead.com/ <comment><USER2> Have tried to contact and reschedule a paid appointment for over a week and only been meet with condescension and lack of contact. Not so good for a service offering "easy ADHD" help. As a diagnosed ADHD patient for over 20 years, this is BS customer service.

<comment><USER3> Hi! I work with Ahead's customer experience team. I'm really sorry that your request hasn't been resolved quickly. I'd like to help find out how to get this fixed for you. Can you send your name and the email address you signed up with to firstname.lastname@example.com or email@example.com. I'll help get this sorted ASAP.</comment></comment>


The Hardest Logic Puzzles - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceptispuzzles.com/index.aspx?uri=info%2Farticle%2F424 <comment><USER2> What about making Conway's Game of Life in Conway's Game of Life?

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8)

<comment><USER3> Conways' Game of Life is not a strategy game. I built one using Javascript:

[http://jules.boussekeyt.org/game-of-life/](http://jules.boussekeyt.org/game- of-life/)

(instructions: click on some squares and press "Start")

<comment><USER4> It certainly has a strategy element seeing as the whole game is build upon the premise that particles act depending on a certain strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So I just got sucked into that Killer Sudoku puzzle - and ugh, now I have a burning desire to print it out on a big A2 spread to work on it.

After the first couple of "gimme" squares, the interface is completely worthless for tracking the information you actually need to remember. There's no good way to express "This square is three more than that square, and also can only be one of these possibilities", which makes it a pain to correlate that with similar information about other squares, but at the same time (at least at this, admittedly early stage) it still feels like you can always make another logical step to another piece of information.

I don't even want to look at the others until I've either finished or given up on this one.

</comment><comment><USER6> #2 is easy, by using double negatives and asking the same question to each god (asking different questions does you no good):

"Is the other non-random god capable of lying?"

The truth telling god will always answer: "yes" (da || ja)

The false telling god will always answer: "yes" (da || ja) [the truthful answer is 'no', but this god tells only lies, therefore the answer is 'yes']

The random god will answer: "yes || no" ((da || ja) || (ja || da))

This means, you will always only get the following combination of answers, no matter what A,B,C order you ask:

da, da, da; ja, ja, ja;

da, da, ja; ja, ja, da;

ja, ja, da; da, da, ja;

da, ja, da; ja, da, ja;

ja, da, ja; da, ja, da;

'Yes' will always have 2 or 3 of the same values. 'No' can only have 1 or 0 values. Now that you have the cipher, you can decode everything.

(edit: formatting)

<comment><AUTHOR> How can you then distinguish between the two non-randomly-answering gods? They will answer the same, and the answer from the randomly-answering god appears to contain no useful information.

<comment><USER6> So I started to work it out, only to discover the link about the problem in the article gives it away - counterfactuals can be used, so might as well read that instead of any thing I come up with. And thus I just wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out which specific one worked (now erased) ... but my hunch was correct! (Although hunches are hardly proofs, tsk tsk)

Also, I want to thank you again for helping me out with awk/sed/grep/command line stuff, from a year ago!

<comment><USER7> What's a counterfactual? can you give a simple explanation of how that solves the problem?

<comment><USER8> A counterfactual is a statement or question in the form 'If _X_ ... would _Y_ ". Y would happen _if_ X were true. Or, would Y be true, given that X were true? [0]

In the case of this puzzle, a counterfactual can be used to embed a question X within your question Y. By doing so (and exploiting the phrasing of the problem), you force the gods to answer in a manner that either reveals their identity as True, False, or Random.

Explaining the actual process through which the counterfactual is used to solve the problem is a bit tedious but the Wikipedia article on the puzzle has a pretty straightforward explanation of the reasoning[1].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional) [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardest_Logic_Puzzle_Ever](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardest_Logic_Puzzle_Ever).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> #2 is really only difficult because it's easy to misinterpret the rules. Random doesn't randomly answer yes or know, he randomly decides whether to answer truthfully or falsely. So for example if you ask the recursive question "are you answering this current question truthfully" he will answer yes either way. Or rather, his word for yes. Once that rule is clear, the puzzle is pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER10> I am not sure whether that info has much bearing on the puzzle itself as such. Even in the case when random randomly answers either "yes" or "no", the solution is equally straightforward and simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regarding #2,

I read Boolos' paper and found that the way the solution was explained wasn't quite to my taste (it did not have discussion on how one would go about thinking of a solution and step-by-step, logically proceed toward a solution). Add to that, the concepts of abstraction, putting away the complexity into a neat-separate function and then forgetting about the internal details, could be applied nicely to the solution in a number of places and I thought it would make the solution much easier to understand. I took an approach where I keep on reducing the problem to a simpler one by abstracting away some details and complications.

Do have a look at my attempt at explaining the solution, especially the process of arriving at the solution (for "The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever"): [http://blog.sujeet.me/2013/07/solving-the-hardest-logic- puzz...](http://blog.sujeet.me/2013/07/solving-the-hardest-logic-puzzle- ever.html)

Feedback's welcome!

</comment><comment><USER9> The Martin Gardner doesn't really seem to fit, since it is trivial to solve using brute force. Even if using a computer is considered cheating, there are shortcuts to use to keep from having to try everything. For example, having a "1" digit gets you nowhere, a "0" kills you, and a "5" and any even digit also kills you (and the 5 will persist at the end if you don't have an even digit, so it will probably kill you next round).

This led me to wonder, does persistence ever max out? It seems likely to me that it does.

<comment><USER11> I dont think it will max out. I brute forced it upto 10 million and I got the following numbers (5, 679) (6, 6788) (7, 68889) (8, 2677889) sure the numbers are exponential but no reason to suspect that a glass ceiling exists.

<comment><USER12> Interestingly, Wikipedia disagrees.

For a radix of 10, there is thought to be no number with a multiplicative persistence > 11: this is known to be true for numbers up to 10 to the power of 50.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_a_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_a_number)

I guess the problem is that when you multiply lots of digits together you become increasingly likely to end up with a 0 digit somewhere.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the link, I dug a little more and came across [1] which mentions a contribution by erdos to the effect that persistence might not be bounded. I guess I might spend some time to figure out number 12 :) [1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20050214141815/http://www.wschnei...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050214141815/http://www.wschnei.de/digit- related-numbers/persistence.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about xkcd's Blue Eyes puzzle?

[https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html](https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html)

<comment><USER14> I'm surprised "no one leaves"

the guru really doesn't seem to provide any new information. everyone knew she could see someone with blue eyes.

Nor does it seem anyone can act on the information, nor does it seem everyone's inaction be taken as new information.

If the guru said. I see someone with red eyes, then everyone would try to leave (or only the guy with red eyes would try to leave if the guru wasn't lying). That's the only circumstance I can see where someone could take action.

As much as that page insists that there is no word trickery going on, I'm inclined to think I've misunderstood the situation.

<comment><USER15> The guru does provide very indirect meta-information. Everyone's inaction cannot be taken as information on the first day, but inaction over time can.

Consider the case with 100 brown and 1 blue person (+ guru). As soon as the guru speaks, the blue person knows their eye colour and leaves.

Consider the case with 100 brown and 2 blue people. After the guru speaks, both of the blue people still don't know their own eye colour - the guru could have been thinking of the other one. So both blue people stay on the island on the first night. _The other one staying on the island is information to the each of the blue people._ Because the other blue one didn't leave on the first night, they must be also unsure - and therefore they must have blue eyes themselves. Both leave on second night.

See also: [http://img.spikedmath.com/comics/445-three-logicians-walk- in...](http://img.spikedmath.com/comics/445-three-logicians-walk-into-a- bar.png)

<comment><USER8> Exactly this; ProblemFactory has shown how the guru provides directly actionable information for the simplest case of the problem (1 blue eyed islander) and also highlighted the inductive step that leads to a proof for any number of blue eyed islanders.

Reducing to the simplest scenario and building (as ProblemFactory) has done, makes the result much more intuitive -- as it does in most proofs, really.

Also, the logicians comic is wonderful :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What makes a difficult sudoku problem difficult?

Is it possible that a brilliant, experienced solver would find the right "tricks" to solve the puzzle? Or is the sudoku such that it can be only solved by some flavor of exhaustive search on the space of potential solutions?

<comment><USER17> The more backtracking you have to do, the harder it is for a human to solve / more likely that your weak flesh brain will encounter a stack overflow.

<comment><USER14> I got the sense alot of people consider a sudoku puzzle unfair if there isn't a discrete set of logical steps you can take to solve it, sans guessing.

After all, if you're looking for a hard Sudoku to solve in that vein, just look at the minimally unique Sudokus. Those required a metric ton of back tracking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hardest? Are you kidding me? A computer can solve these quite easily.

If you want really hard logic puzzles, get puzzle books from Peter Winkler (such as Mind Benders or Connoiseur's Collection). These sometimes even contain unsolved puzzles as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just out of interest, how would you propose a computer solve number 2?

Or 4?

Or 9?

<comment><USER19> You can solve 2 with a computer by enumerating all possible questions. The gods can be in 3! = 6 configurations, and either da means yes or da means no. So there are 12 configurations in total. A question you can pose to a god will, as far as I can tell, always be of the form "are we in configuration A or configuration B or configuration C ...". So there are 2^12 questions you can pose. You can enumerate all of those and find a question strategy that works.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does the traditional "double-ask" question:

        If I were to ask you if you are the
        truth-telling god, would you say "da"?

fit in your scheme?

In particular, I think you'll find the solution to 2 does not fit in your scheme. At least, not as far as I understand it. I'd like to see your scheme for enumerating possible questions fleshed out in more detail, but I don't think I believe you.

And you haven't answered about 4. Or 9.

<comment><USER19> If I'm not mistaken, a question of the form "If I asked you Q, would you say A?" is the same as asking "Q xor (A means yes) xor (you are speaking the truth)". That is a direct question, which is part of the enumeration.

> And you haven't answered about 4. Or 9.

Umm...yes? I didn't intend to. But if you insist, 4 is not a logic puzzle, and 9 is easily solved in principle but possibly prohibitively long to calculate in practice. Compared to humans, computers are relatively less bad at finding a guaranteed winning move than at playing Go well, so you can't necessarily conclude that because humans play Go better than computers, they would also be able to solve that puzzle faster than computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> COMBIN3! - (visual logic puzzles) - Online demo: [http://combin3.com/demo/](http://combin3.com/demo/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Century Puzzle - [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/century- puzzle/id627982930?m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/century- puzzle/id627982930?mt=8)</comment>


Ask HN: I was scammed on Craigslist. - <AUTHOR>

I paid via Paypal for a Macbook Pro with the agreement that we would meet up to exchange later in the day. The seller never came; now she won't respond to emails. But, when I filed the dispute on Paypal, she said that we met, and that I took the item happily. I called Paypal, got the claim escalated, and told my side of the story.
WHAT CAN I DO FROM HERE? HOW CAN I MAKE SURE I GET MY MONEY BACK?
All tips welcome. <comment><USER2> i hope you paid through paypal with a credit card. if so, call the credit card company or go online and dispute the charge. it will be on them to go after paypal to get your money back after crediting you your money back. file a police report, file a report online with the FTC, keep disputing the paypal charge. if paypal is able to contact this person to get their side of the story, they should be able to give you that information to hand over to the police.

do you still have the emails/phone numbers from the craigslist contact? print out emails with full headers for the police. i'm not sure if craigslist changes any headers for mails sent through their email@example.com addresses. might want to contact them as well to get any information you can to hand over to the police.

just some general words of advice with paypal: always pay with a credit card. you get protection for just these types of cases. if you receive payment, never let it sit in your paypal account. immediately move it to a bank account. once it's there, paypal can never take it out without your authorization (if the situation were reversed and you sold something, the buyer disputed it, and paypal tried to reverse the charge on you). paypal is not a credit agency, and any claims that they're sending you to collections are just empty threats.

i've gone through this once before selling a laptop on ebay. the buyer paid me with a verified paypal account that had been compromised. i shipped the laptop, a month later the legitimate paypal account owner disputed the charge, paypal tried to get the money back from me and threatened me with bogus collection attempts.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would file a police report asap.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry to say this, but if you just got scammed out of $1,000 then you just got a $1,000 lesson in life.

I think it goes without saying, but if you were going to meet to pick up the mac, why not pay cash after you turned it on and made sure everything was all set? I'm guessing it was a great price.

<comment><USER2> i agree, i'm not sure why you would ever pay for something sight-unseen.

arrange to meet in person at some neutral place that has wifi, turn the laptop on, use it, make sure it's ok, then login to your paypal account _on some other device_ (not the one you just bought) and pay the person. they should be able to check their email and confirm payment.</comment></comment>


ADHD drugs are now so over-subscribed, we're starting to run out - <AUTHOR> http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/01/01/adderall_shortage_patients_can_t_find_adhd_drugs.html

<comment><USER2> From the linked NY Times article:

"Novartis, for instance, makes both branded and generic versions of Ritalin; Shire Pharmaceuticals does the same for Adderall XR. In both cases, the companies have ensured that supplies of branded drugs are adequate while allowing generic versions to go wanting."

Note that "branded" means the more expensive, non-generic version of the medication.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/health/policy/fda-is- findi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/health/policy/fda-is-finding- attention-drugs-in-short-supply.html)</comment>


Things a UX/UI Designer Should Know - <AUTHOR> https://learnui.design/blog/100-things-ux-ui-designer-know.html <comment><USER2> This put a big smile on my face! Thank you! It's a good compilation of what people might expect of you if you call yourself any of the above. I would add to the list most skills of a project manager, scrum master and certainly the skills of a front end developer. Throw in some sales skills and you could work as a lone UX/UI consultant.</comment>


The head of Project Vigilant is a former couch surfer living off $800/month - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20013136-281.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

<comment><USER2> What are we supposed to take away from this article? The journalist didn't get this dude Chet to state one single actual _substantiated_ thing about anything at all.

Man, I'm sick of watching professional journalists write articles about computers full of quotes like "We've found people attacking from Kuala Lumpur. Here's the attack pattern."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is bizarre. The guy in charge is spouting gibberish.

</comment><comment><USER4> His name is "Chet Uber"?!?! He's the ultimate Chet?!?! "Chester Superior"

My uncle Chet is going to raise hell when he finds out there's a Chet claiming to be a better Chet than he.

</comment><comment><USER5> Where does it say he was a couch surfer?. The title the submitter chose seems a bit of an ad hominem.

<comment><USER6> It's implied, but not explicitly stated, in paragraph 20:

> Uber moved back to Omaha because "I knew I could go from couch to couch to > couch"

<comment><USER7> "couchsurfing" is a worldwide community of people that is quite different from just going from couch to couch.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Couch surfing" is a slang term for being homeless (by choice or necessity) and moving from couch to couch. This term predates couchsurfing.com.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dude, Where's My Frontal Cortex? (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/72/quandary/dude-wheres-my-frontal-cortex-rp <comment><USER2> Whenever I see articles about brain development, I'm reminded of "virtual nobrainers":

[https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116)

This is individuals who have 5% of the brain matter that normal individuals have, but seemingly normal IQs...

<comment><USER3> What blows my mind is the fact that not everyone has an inner voice.

<comment><USER2> Interesting! Reference?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >that developmental phase of antsy, itchy exploration and creativity that has been evolutionarily enriching. We might not have had that long line of pimply adolescent geniuses who worked away to invent fire, cave-painting, and the wheel.

Reading will power instinct and doing lots of meditation I can relate that I became so apathetic (got sick and spend a month of my summer in hospital and I couldn't even bother, they told my parents to visit psychiatrist and diagnose me with depression but they pulled it of by saying I always been this way) and lost my creativity due to this.

Also I just couldn't stop reading this in Robert sapolsky's voice :-)</comment>


Datasaurus: Never trust summary statistics; visualize your data (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefunctionalart.com/2016/08/download-datasaurus-never-trust-summary.html <comment><USER2> The datasaurus is an interesting concept, but I think the biggest issue with most of our society is basic mathmatical fluency. This idea of "visualizing your data" or "sanity checking" can be expanded to a lot of situations outside of statistics.

In software engineering and electrical engineering this comes up all the time. Does it make sense for this log file to be 5 GB? Is it really 10 amps going into this shunt resistor? Being able to "sanity check" things mentally is an important skill.

</comment><comment><USER3> The dinosaur drawing is a little gimmicky or "so what do you do with this?". Far better and more applicable to real life is the lesson in Anscombe's quartet: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet)

It's all the more important to have a trained skepticism of stats when every day you hear things like, "we just had the greatest quarter of economic growth in history!"

<comment><USER4> There's a dinosaur version of Anscome's Quartet:

[https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats](https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats)

<comment><USER3> oh, very nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Eyeballing 2d plot is important statistical tool.

If it looks like a blob, correlation coefficient is usually meaningless. You can instantly see if the relationship is linear, quadratic, piecewise linear or quadratic, mixture, clustered or even dinosaur.

<comment><USER6> Except scatter plots do not handle occlusion. If you have a lot of data to plot, the blob shape might be outliers.

<comment><USER7> This might be a problem, but if you're careful to make use of transparency, axis scaling and random jitter (for integer or categorical values), the occlusion issue can be overcome.

<comment><USER6> * in some cases

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Never trust summary statistics" is a misnomer. Data is lost in the creation of summary statistics, that's basically a tautology. His example could look like a fuzzy line, or a dino, or a cross, or anything else. These facts don't refute the usefulness of summary statistics, however. At issue here is the competency and good faith of the ANALYST.

If the summary statistics are chosen and presented in a way that is useful, in context, and not misleading, then there is nothing wrong with omitting the full data visualization. If some of these pieces are missing though, then yeah, check the data.

</comment><comment><USER9> Whenever I see single number statistics thrown around in news articles, press releases, ads, etc., I'm generally pretty skeptical. I want to see the distribution. Is it Gaussian? Bimodal? Flat? Apparently random?

The shape of the data tells you a lot that isn't captured in a single number like a mean or median.

Also, what's the sample size? What was the methodology used to acquire the data?

Lots of statistics fall apart when you look at how the data was collected.

</comment><comment><USER10> Matt Parker (famous from his YouTube channel stand-up maths and frequent guest on numberphile) did a video on it and visited the inventor

[https://youtu.be/iwzzv1biHv8](https://youtu.be/iwzzv1biHv8)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it ok to use traditional server-side rendering these days? - <AUTHOR> So I was going to start on a small ASP.Net core project today. It wasn't anything complicated, and I was just going to use server-side rendering with Razor. But then I forgot. It's almost 2017, I'll probably get kicked out of the web developer community for not using Angular, or React, or something else. Jokes aside, is it discouraged to use server-side rendering? <comment><USER2> Is it OK? Who cares? As long as you solve the problem for your customer, it doesn't matter that much.

That said, I find server-side rendering to be more difficult when faced with the problem of creating the type of UI that people want these days. Generally I like the server to just be an API that a Javascript client talks to, because unless you want no dynamic/asynchronous features you're going to have to write that anyway. Now you're maintaining two apps, which is twice as much work. Sometimes it's necessary to do that, sometimes it's not... I always aim for only writing one UI, because it's like twice as fast as writing two. But no doubt people will reply to me saying they browse with Javascript disabled to get an extra 15 minutes of battery life out of their laptop, so there's that.

<comment><USER3> I browse with JS disabled by default because of shoddy ad networks and incredibly annoying dynamic effects on websites. (I go to like 5 websites on my phone because of how unusable the internet is without blocking that nonsense.)

Now, I may not be the target audience for your app, and that's fine, but it's unfair to dismiss people browsing without JS for strawman reasons.

<comment><USER4> Why not use an ad blocker?

<comment><USER3> I can use several things.

Adblockers generally do two things: block specific domains and change the rendering of certain elements.

Browsing with JS disabled handles things like stopping certain kinds of code -- even loaded from the primary domain -- from running.

Layered defense usually works better than a single method, and advertisers, privacy violators, etc have shown a willingness to enter a full on arms race. So I responded in similar measure.

The honest truth is I just don't want to do business with most people trying to run code on my computer, so if that's a sticking point for them on using their product, I just don't use it.

<comment><USER4> Good point

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course it's okay. Server-side rendering is still the most robust, accessible, SEO-friendly way of building websites and web applications and that's unlikely to change.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are still many use cases where server side rendering makes sense.

For example, I work on a large, enterprise webapp, it has the frontend UI, which users interact with heavily: this, we have built out using clientside Javascript which interacts with the Rails backend via an API.

However, we also have an admin area -- many of those pages are used very rarely and are quite complicated. I initiated a change to build these panels using traditional server-side rendered ERB views. In the context of our codebase, it takes less code and it's easier to iterate on these without bothering with the Javascript framework.

In other cases, like my personal blog, I use Jekyll to generate a bunch of static HTML and, essentially cache all this on Github pages.

Javascript frameworks are amazing and can provide a much richer, much better experience. But, I don't necessarily think they're appropriate for all problems. One other big reason why, it just the inherent "experimental-ness" and, the churn / quick obsolescence you may find in this area. Some problems don't need to be re-solved every year or two. :)

<comment><USER7> > Javascript frameworks are amazing and can provide a much richer, much better > experience.

I think this is the point worth inspecting if you're considering server side rendering. If you're making a page that just displays content, I don't see any reason to throw Javascript in front of it. Just render your HTML and send it. If you want to make changes to the content dynamically, if it's going to take super long to load and you want to show users a loading screen, if they can interact with the content, etc, that may be a case to throw Javascript into the equation.

<comment><USER8> This is incredibly true and something you don't realize until you're browsing the web on a slow connection.

I was travelling with 2G and using most client side apps was near impossible. One app sent down a 1.9MB `components.js` file, and because it was a JS app, all scripts had to be loaded until anything rendered.

Obviously server-side apps are in no way immune from this, but by default, unless you really do need a rich client experience, it's often not worth the bundle size and CPU load. Just send down HTML.

You know which website works fabulously over 2G? Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a strong preference for a fast and low latency server-focused application compared to pretty much anything. It just feels more solid, and I am confident that I'm less likely to run into bugs than I would on a thick client. Let browsers focus on what they excel at, parsing and rendering documents, and let the server handle business logic. Which it has to anyway: the question is whether the client also has to.

That said, this is not the direction the industry is moving in. Sadly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Server-side rendering is absolutely fine. The only caveat I would add is that if you want to change some functionality to a client-side JavaScript app later then having dynamically generated HTML will make this harder. For example, if you want to make it work offline in the future then you will probably have to rewrite the presentation layer.

Razor views in ASP.NET Core are really nice (disclaimer, I wrote a book on this so I'm obviously biased). However, if you are making a Single Page App then you will need to stick to HTTP APIs (returning JSON, not HTML). The controllers in Core can easily do both now that MVC 6 and Web API 2 are merged and the same thing.

The only exception to this is for an initial rendering of your app server- side, so that the browser gets populated HTML on the first load and there is something to see immediately. For example, using ReactJS.NET you can load the same model into your Razor view that you return from your API and pre-render it using view helpers.

If you're interested then I wrote more about this today: [https://unop.uk/react-and-asp-net-core/](https://unop.uk/react-and-asp-net- core/)

P.S. Has this whole thread been hidden or flagged?

</comment><comment><USER11> Client-side rendering and the usage of JS MV* frameworks has made great inroads and is replacing the combination of 'server-side MVC framework plus rich AJAX on the client', because in the latter scheme you have two separate parts in foreign languages held together by thin glue, and can only do limited code and transfer of expertise.

That being said, server-side rendering will continue to be a great fit for cases where you ingest data and produce a deterministic, non-interactive (or not-too-interactive) result.

Remember, the issue is that in AJAX you'd receive some async result from the server and would have to splice it into the DOM, so you're throwing these contextless snippets of data on the wire and relying on your client-side JS to do the right thing; all the while you have an entire different server-side application spitting out complete well-formed HTML documents.

In a modern, virtual-domming JS MV* framework, these two functions become the same, and you don't have to architect two different solutions.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am giving a talk on this in January internally:

Make SSR Great Again - "Swinging the pendulum back to server-side rendering"

[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s17/sh/08a3fdd5-7ff7-40ea-b2d...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s17/sh/08a3fdd5-7ff7-40ea-b2d4-95ccb54d423c/edd690277968ba60)

<comment><USER9> Interesting. You have this as one of your points:

"\- https2 server push is anti-pattern. Doesn't consult browser cache."

This is an odd claim, as server push is built to respect the browser cache and can even be used to populate it. In usual cases the server can know whether to push the dependencies of a requested resource based on the ETag header, working under the true-enough assumption that if a resource is in cache, its dependencies are also likely to be.

I can think of a thornier case where two resources have a shared dependency, and the server pro-actively pushes the shared dependency in response to a request for the second resource, oblivious to the fact that it's already in cache from a request for the first resource. I don't believe this case is enough to call server push an anti-pattern, though: the browser can cancel the push midstream if it already has it in cache. Although the server probably has already sent all of the dependency at that point.

Used appropriately, server push interacts nicely with caching and can even improve cacheability: I think servers can push 304 responses, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, it's OK technically, morally, and legally. The most important thing is that your project does what it sets out to do.

<comment><USER14> And ethically don't forget about ethically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I strongly advocate actually using SSR. Way quicker to build.

</comment><comment><USER16> I use server side rendering sprinkled with some JS. Works great and my users are thanking me for the simple UI.

</comment><comment><USER17> If your project is going to face the general public and needs the best chances of being indexed correctly by Google, you should start with some type of server side rendering.

Currently, I'd opt for using either an existing CMS like Wordpress or Shopify, depending on the needs, with a layer of React.js on top of it. Or a full stack React.js + Node.js custom build.

You'll find plenty of resources saying Google can index JS SPAs but regardless of what you think about that, the no JS user should not be left out in the cold.

If you're building an internal application where you can dictate the browser support I've actually found that I'm fastest completing projects building a JSON API with an Angular.js front end. React.js would work just as well of course, just depends on what you are more comfortable with.

Lastly, PageSpeed. Some clients don't care about this, but some do. If you're deciding on a stack, try running your build through Google PageSpeed Insight once in a while during the early stages to make sure you're not getting any road blocking red flags.

I personally don't care much for PageSpeed's reports, I have found them to be buggy or bizarre at times. But having your client rip your masterpiece apart just because they hired a marketer that's blaming all their shortcomings on a less than perfect PageSpeed score isn't fun.

I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions. I would be happy to clarify or elaborate.

</comment><comment><USER18> Amazon still does. Every freaking filter checkbox you click reloads the whole page (although not sure about the header) and then loads stuff with Javascript afterwards as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> One thing I haven't understood about JavaScript frameworks is how people go about setting meta tags for Facebook and Twitter sharing. These meta tags aren't readable by the Facebook scraper when set in JavaScript, so at least for my work, even if I do use some JavaScript framework, I also have to do some server side rendering so brands can share what they pay to share.

Maybe some people just don't care about this, and pure JavaScript works for them.

<comment><USER20> You likely have a simple HTML page that bootstraps the SPA; just put your meta tags there! UPDATE: Ah, set in JavaScript. Yes, tricky. Reading is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Depends on your requirements. If you are chasing fads or just looking to learn, then you pick the "hottest" of the JS frameworks and go with that with the understanding that a new itch will be upon you in about 9 months and you will likely feel the need to scratch it. If you want your product to last through the latest fad, then continue to do server side rendering and augment it with the JS/Client-side framework of your choice.

</comment><comment><USER22> You don't need client-side stuff until you do. If all you're doing is simple html form submissions, it doesn't make sense to integrate something like React.

But then you need validations, and server-side checks for availability, then dynamic forms based on previous input choices, and data synching to preview the profile on the right, and then - might as well use React or similar instead of jQuery with DOM manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER23> Most companies work/develop enterprise software so its totally normal not to use the hippest architecture or js framework. You need to solve a business problem.

I'm working at a EMS company. Most of your web tools are developed with ASP.NET WebForms. New projects are developed with MVC or Web API but it is always more overhead than WebForms. You have to configure/develop more to get the same result at the end.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Is it discouraged to use server-side rendering?

No, it's not! But it's discouraged to use it as the only rendering layer.

Server side rendering has its unbeatable advantages - speed. That's why you can view content on [https://huu.la](https://huu.la) within second, similar methods are used by Google, Twitter, etc. A lot of people might say, we have faster networks now. Believe me, even at Bay Area, it takes time to, first, download your powerful client-side library, second, _bootstrap_ your powerful client-side app, and third, call XHRs to fetch your data. Not to mention there are so many mobiles, with even less capable networks.

So from my experience developing Huula, I would recommend using a combined approach. For places where speed is critical, for example your landing page, help page, use server side rendering; for places where a lot of user interactions will happen, use client-side rendering since it gives your more support for _componentization_ if that's a word and user interactions.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know this is a joke post, but there's some happy middle ground that's possible too, without going full SPA.

If you render your pages and snippets on the server, a small amount of JS on the client can hotswap content. In the extreme of this idea, you get turbolinks from Rails where no real pageloads happen, but pages are rendered on the server.

But in the small, it can let you do a sprinkling of async calls where they make the most sense, and still keep all rendering of responses on the server.

Thoughtbot wrote about it recently:

[https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with- pho...](https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with-phoenix)

</comment><comment><USER14> I use entirely server-side rendering, with a slight bit of jQuery sprinkled in for the very small amount of dynamic interaction that isn't easily done via the traditional HTTP request model, like menus or popups.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why wouldn't it be? The only people that genuinely care what technology or programming language is used are other developers. And even then, only in certain situations.

So unless you're making a community/social network for developers and the picky type are somehow your primary audience, it doesn't matter what you pick to code your site in or how its rendered.

The average Joe doesn't care whether it's something purely server side (like old school Perl) or React.

</comment><comment><USER27> Of course the answer is "depends."

If you are building a web application that is behind login or you just don't care about SEO then ... No, you don't need server-side rendering.

If you are building a website with JavaScript functionality for making it easier for the user, then you probably want a JS-free version, so yeah, better do some server-side rendering and use JS as a progressive enhancement.

</comment><comment><USER28> Use "universal" React to only write the frontend code once. The server renders the React app to HTML, and the client attaches the click handlers and other behavior.

Here's a good example: [https://github.com/erikras/react-redux-universal-hot- example](https://github.com/erikras/react-redux-universal-hot-example)

</comment><comment><USER29> A lot of websites work with very minimal JavaScript functionality. Yes, modern hype dictates things like SPA, but it isn't a standard, so unless you want to look like bleeding edge, server-side rendering is fine and might be preferable, especially if you are single developer and don't want to maintain two separate stacks.

</comment><comment><USER30> What's your intended audience for the app?

Are you building an app for a doctor's office with low-tech ability users and low tech-level expectations, but extremely high reliability and speed expectations?

Or are you building a dating app for millennials who are going to expect the app to be shiny & cool?

As usual, the intended users' needs will inform your decision.

</comment><comment><USER31> There is some movement to support universal JavaScript apps, i.e. render first hit with the server and serve the same JS code for the client to just fetch data for any page navigation after - both Angular and React support this.

That said, use whatever solves your needs/requirements/etc. in a timely fashion. Literally nothing else matters.

</comment><comment><USER32> Twitter did full client-side rendering and moved _back_ to partial server-side rendering to reduce perceived latency. Pushing business logic to the client has a cost attached.

Personally, I would default to server side rendering unless there's a very good reason to be rendering on the client instead (and there often is).

</comment><comment><USER33> Server side rendering still beats js frameworks if your site depends on search engines for your traffic. I try to stick as much to server side rendering with only the required js files with minimal dependencies. It has worked wonders for my site.

</comment><comment><USER34> More than ok, I'd say it's positively encouraged! I've seen more than my far share of over-engineered web applications that would have been much simpler and no worse off for being straightforward server side rendered apps.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ummm... The page you are looking at is server-side rendered.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yes, it's still ok. SPA (single page apps) should only be edge cases where you really want your website to feel like an app (see gmail as a good example).

</comment><comment><USER37> What is "traditional server side rending"?

</comment><comment><USER38> If it works well for what you are building.</comment>


Tesla Electric Cars: Revved Up, but Far to Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/25elon.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> This article has its fair dose of FUD, as NYTimes pertaining to tech usually are. The title sets the tone, and quoting Jalopnik as if they are credible journalism raises some serious eyebrows.

You can typically read the bias in these articles by simply looking at the spin of the first sentence of each paragraph, because it's the pauses between the paragraphs that set the poise and direction of the monologue.

<comment><USER3> Would you like to take issue with any specific points, or just attack the source?

<comment><USER4> For me, it's the NYT's habit of referencing noise that they helped to create (the "soap opera") as if they were a completely impartial 3rd party; it's like they're blind to their own influence. Reminds me of a Tom Tomorrow cartoon (which I'm too lazy to find).

<comment><USER2> That more or less nails one major class of attacks. We should try not to feed the trolls (the NYTimes, in this example), so I won't address any points specifically.

There are some common patterns though, and these are worth thinking about because they come straight out of drama and literature. Poise the character as a charismatic, ambitious person. Then start whittling him down. The common themes here are his moments of naivete, the femme fatale, the awful reality of the situation, what others now think of him.

Note that none of these plot elements actually have much (if anything) to do with the economic viability of Tesla, and as such, the title is inappropriate. It does however, make for great rhetoric. Great narratives are rarely, if ever, the bare truth of such specific situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great profile of Elon Musk. The article is about him more than his car company. I would do anything to meet this guy one day.

       "He's one of these just unboundedly ambitious people;
       that's probably the single most important thing about him,
       and he's an eternal optimist, to a fault sometimes,"

<comment><USER6> It's also inspiring, and scary, to see that he's been broke before the Tesla IPO because he completely believes in the success of the companies he's involved with. That is unconditional faith in ability.</comment></comment>


Piturna: a CommonJS/JSGI-Compliant Web Framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/01/22/introducing-pintura/

<comment><USER2> Wow, I've never seen so many words on one page before.</comment>


With a new law in place, all sides are claiming victory in the tipping wars - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/03/22/under-the-spending-bill-restaurant-owners-could-be-barred-from-taking-servers-tips/ <comment><AUTHOR> As whacky as tipping is in general, I found the ban on tip pooling particularly whacky. Allowing sharing tips with back-of-the-house employees seems like progress while we try to figure out a more general solution to compensating service employees better.</comment>


Fred Wilson on Why the Collapse of Venture Capital is Good - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/428869/fred-wilson-on-why-the-collapse-of-venture/ <comment><USER2> I feel tricked by link-bait on this one. Fred Wilson makes no mention of the "collapse" of VC. He doesn't even come close to the concept.

Tl;dr of the article:

-many VCs are having trouble fundraising because of mediocre returns

-Fred thinks it's good that there is a lot of early stage funding (angels). It should create more entrepreneurs

-Some VC funding is too concentrated in megafunds. If that $ was spread across funds, then there would be more diversity of ideas and companies

-Will Kickstarter/crowdfunding replace VC? Too early to tell

<comment><USER3> Even more succinct tl;dr:

\- It's a _diversity_ problem. Too much money in the hands of white guys in suits.

"I don't think there's too much money sitting around. I think there's too much money in too few hands. So when six white guys in suits control two and a half billion dollars, that's not a good thing. Instead of being allocated just to one firm, it would be better if that two and a half billion dollars was allocated to 25 firms at $100 million each. It would lead to more diversity or people trying more things: data sciences, urban sciences, transportation, energy, materials science, and many others. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to see a firm number quoted on the target returns:

> _What is a mediocre return?_

> _Anything less than three times your money over a 10-year period._

Fwiw, that's equivalent to around 12% annualized.

<comment><USER5> You have to consider the risk/illiquidity that's taken on to achieve that return.

It's my understanding that VC works in a manner similar to PE, where investors are given their returns when the entire fund they invest in is run down. Each fund has a vintage, so if you invest in the 2006 fund you might get paid back 7 years from then in 2013, that's kind of a long time.

For a liquid asset class to compare to, equities have done something like 6-6.5% real historically.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that makes sense. I wasn't meaning to imply skepticism, just that I don't recall having actually seen a go/no-go number explicitly spelled out elsewhere, that 12% p.a. is the rough threshold delineating whether VC is worth it as an asset class, taking into account the risk/liquidity/etc.

I suppose going forward it mainly depends on what you think will happen to the stock market. Will the next 20 years see the resumption of the WW2-through-1990s performance level, or will they look more like the past 20 years, with middling to flat returns? If the latter, VC might become attractive at even lower returns compared to anemic returns in "regular" equity, but if the former, then it may become less attractive compared to a more liquid and diversified stock portfolio.</comment></comment></comment>


Charlie Stross on Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Ebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html

<comment><USER2> _I get this a lot from dedicated ebook readers: "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!"

I think this is a peculiar kind of brain damage or mental scarring..._

As someone who shares this "brain damage", these lines puts me in the mood of a designer who, seeing objective statistical evidence that his redesign was outperformed by the older, uglier website, dismisses the metrics and rants about art for a few hours.

<comment><USER3> Except, the most significant layout and typography issues involved in book design and usability _have_ been studied. A basic example would be in the use of fully justified text versus ragged right: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286700> .. that topic not scream "design" to you, but it's all part of producing a high quality book. So are choosing the right typeface(s), the right text size(s), page layout, and more.

Authors and book designers who have high production values aren't all arty- farty designers who just want things to look cool. To many, just getting it _right_ objectively (versus the subjectiveness of design as "art") is important, and there are ways and means of doing that. For example, the average Edward Tufte book shows a high level of attention to detail in matters of underlying design and usability, rather than pure aesthetics.

Readers _should_ care about book formatting and design at a basic usability and readability level. You might not want pompously "designed" books, sure, but having easily read type in a usable layout is paramount (in the sense that a Web surfer wouldn't like to read beige text on a yellow background). Sadly, it seems not to be as big an issue as it could be as the jaw-droppingly bad typography on the Kindle demonstrates: [http://redubllc.com/2009/01/a-typographic-critique-of-the- ki...](http://redubllc.com/2009/01/a-typographic-critique-of-the-kindle/) \- [http://qwan.org/2009/05/17/kindle-typography-goes- craptacula...](http://qwan.org/2009/05/17/kindle-typography-goes-craptacular/) \- [http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/05/kindle-page-layout-and- ty...](http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/05/kindle-page-layout-and-typography/) (and oh so many more)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is an interesting meta-discussion going on here, over whether content curators add value. Most of the hackers that I've met tend to believe that they would prefer to latch onto a raw content stream, then filter and format it to their liking. No surprise -- that is the way of hackers, after all.

However, I do think that it's a conceptual mistake to assume that the public at large would like to filter their own content. Even music sales, which are pretty far down the road towards an openly accessible market, are still driven by the major and minor labels. For books, I see an even stronger incentive to keep paying others to filter our content. Reading is a big investment, time- wise -- when people curl up with a book, e- or paper, they want to know that it's going to be worth their time. And, yes, they probably want it to be nicely typeset and proofread as well.

<comment><USER5> I think there are many books out there that aren't exactly masterpieces, put out there by big publishers. Conversely, works that are big commercial successes were for a long time shunned by publishers (JK Rowling).

Perhaps user reviews & ratings, and previewing books would be a good enough filter? I mean people can already publish anything they want for free online, and non-techies seem perfectly capable in filtering out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't agree that the reason people think an e-book is worth less is overvaluating the cost of paper and ink. People feel that an e-book is worth less than a paper book because the physical experience of handling a book is worth more than the experience of reading a book on a computer or e-reader screen. The e-book has other advantages, but we're not used to those and thus it feels to many people like they're getting less.

Also, I believe that the author under-estimates other values inherent in a physical book, such as the ability to lend it to someone else, at least as long as DRM is the norm.

<comment><USER7> I dislike the experience of reading a physical book. I tried to read a textbook while I ate lunch today but I couldn't because it kept flipping shut on me. Books require one hand (or a heavy object) to constantly hold them open in order for them to be readable unless you're in the middle section of the book. The alternative is to crease the spine, which will hurt the book's resale value.

So I gave up trying to read the book at lunch and read something on my iPhone instead.

Also, I dislike lugging around the bulk of books or multiple books. I really can't wait until someone releases an eInk reader that can handle academic books and PDFs. I might get impatient and buy an iPad.

But I suppose there are some people that fetishize the smell of wood pulp and who love signaling how smart they are to the world with shelves of impressive- looking unread books, and who therefore overlook a reading experience that is superior in every other way.

<comment><USER8> _But I suppose there are some people that fetishize the smell of wood pulp and who love signaling how smart they are to the world with shelves of impressive- looking unread books, and who therefore overlook a reading experience that is superior in every other way._

I'm a voracious reader, and have an iPad, a Kindle, and shelves of (mostly read) books.

Out-of-print -- with e-books, that means it's _really_ out of print. With a traditional book, it means you need to talk to a used book store.

Used -- you can't save money by buying your e-books used. Nor can you sell them if you decide they have no further value to you.

Unanticipated Reading -- e-books are great for unanticipated delays where you brought an e-book device, but didn't bring a book.

Outdoor use -- you can take a paperback up a mountain, onto a lake, or into the jungle knowing that if it gets wet your losses are capped at $25, and if you fall down, it won't be damaged. With the e-book, a fall or weather could result in expensive damage.

Travel -- the paperback book doesn't need to be charged, doesn't need a power plug converter, works during takeoff and landing, and doesn't immediately mark you as a person who is worth robbing.

Portability -- you can carry a lot more e-books than books.

Search -- e-books are great for reference texts, where you intend to do a lot of searching for content, rather than linear reading. paper indexes are good, but not as powerful.

Markup -- e-books have a 'highlight' capability, and some note capabilities that seem like they'd work nicely in an academic context, but I generally prefer my system of post-it notes, scribbles in the margin, and underlines, which doesn't cleanly translate to e-books.

Disaster Recovery -- e-books are replaced from backups, or not at all. books are replaced by homeowners insurance payout.

Public Image -- my iPad and Kindle both mark me as an early adopter tech guy. a book likely says nothing about me, unless the person looking has an opinion about the title in question.

Permanence -- I'm relatively confident that my paper library will endure for as long as there's somebody who values the content of the books. I'm not confident my e-book library will be usable in 10 years. (between DRM, format incompatibility, and accidental data loss.)

Images -- books currently beat e-books pretty solidly when it comes to imagery. I can't really imagine getting a Photography book as an e-book at this point in time.

Visual ease -- e-books let you adjust the font, but paper books are often (though not always) easier to read.

\----

Or maybe e-books are superior in every single way, and I only buy books to fetishize the smell of wood pulp, whilst filling shelves to signal to my wife, kids, pets and good friends that I'm intelligent.

 _sigh_

<comment><USER7> Many of your points in favor of paper books exist because of flaws in the Copyright regime, not the eBook format itself. Fortunately there exists ways to (partially) circumvent the copyright regime. And hopefully market norms will evolve to be more open and permissive over time.

Books are the next vinyl records. Sure, there are some advantages to them. Enthusiasts will cling to them for a long time, mostly because of feelings of nostalgia and the desire to mark themselves as members of a particular subculture. But the advantages of digital formats are so large that books are going to be relegated to niche markets. Considering my own personal reading habits, I can't wait for that to happen.

Indeed most of your arguments in favor of books can also be made to support CDs or vinyl records over digital music.

Lastly, you forgot to mention the environmental impact of books and eBooks. Books have to be manufactured and carted around. eBook devices also have this drawback, but eBooks themselves do not.

<comment><USER8> _But I suppose there are some people that fetishize the smell of wood pulp and who love signaling how smart they are to the world with shelves of impressive- looking unread books, and who therefore overlook a reading experience that is superior in every other way._

Your original statement was not set in a possible future, or in an theoretically different copyright regime.

Today, in the world we live in, books and e-books each continue to have their own strengths and weaknesses, with substantial portions of the market being better served with paper books, and a growing portion being better served by e-books, as reader technology improves.

Your comment was wrong. It was very, very wrong. And it still is.

And now I'm going to go curl up with a paper book, and fall asleep. I'm not using one of my readers, because that's a recipe for a broken reader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even though editorial, typesetting, and publicity costs may be comparable between ebooks and physical books, the ebook medium overcomes the problem of inventory costs, which, I understand from author friends are substantial. Many books go out of print every year because, although there are still willing buyers, the cost of producing lower volumes and keeping warehouses stocked outweighs the benefits in the traditional book publishing model.

I'm also surprised the author of this piece implies (?) the cost of setting up and maintaining a physical press is basically zero. Swish offices on 6th Ave would possibly also be less necessary in an ebook-dominated world where there is a more direct line between authors and their readers (customers).

<comment><USER4> There are a lot of data points on the web for these costs, here's one example: [http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book- cost...](http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html)

So, for a mass-market hardback book, printing costs represent about 10% of the list price, less than just about any other component. Certainly, eliminating the printing costs alone would not knock a dramatic amount off of the consumer price of the book, assuming, that is, that book pricing is based on a "cost- plus" model, which it clearly is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That piece completely turns my intuition about how the writing world works on its head. I always thought that writers wrote books, editors trimmed them and publishers sold them.

I never thought that publishing an e-book required as much work as a 'regular' book, other than the removal of the printer, but it does make sense.

In a way it's a pity, but maybe this could be cured by writers hiring free- lance editors and marketing on a performance basis?

<comment><USER10> _writers hiring free-lance editors and marketing on a performance basis?_

This idea is a common trap for newbie writers. A very _very_ common trap. To the point that there are an absolute plethora of scam artists lying in wait to "accept" your manuscript in exchange for a fee, "edit" it in exchange for another fee, send it to Lulu.com for you in exchange for a fee, get it listed by Amazon for a fee, and "market" it for a fee.

The non-solution of self-publishing was discussed at length during the "amazonfail" incident a few months back. Here's a novelist on the subject:

<http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/563086.html>

<comment><USER5> Interesting. I wonder if it doesn't make sense then for an authhor and editor, when they work on an ebook together, share the revenue, instead of an upfront split? That way, both are incentivized to put the best work out there.

<comment><USER11> When a manuscript for a novel—especially a novel by an unknown writer—hits an editor's desk, neither the author nor the editor really knows for sure whether the story is going to be a hit, a bomb, or something in between. The current publishing world is organized so that the publisher, which has much deeper pockets than the author, commits money up front (not just the author's advance but the salary of the editor and other personnel); if the book turns out to be a hit, the publisher takes on a better-than-50% share of the profit. This risk structure, as far as I can tell, is independent of the medium in which books are published.

Also, when a publisher associates a certain imprint with a book, it advertises something about the book's contents. (What image does "an O'Reilly book" or "a Baen book" evoke in your mind?) That kind of endorsement is extremely valuable to an author who hasn't already become a celebrity, and an author-editor team working independently couldn't duplicate that effect unless the _editor_ was a celebrity. And by the time an author or editor becomes a celebrity, he or she has already built up a mutually profitable relationship with a publisher. (You don't see Stephen King or J.K. Rowling offering their next books through lulu.com, do you?) Again, this effect has little to do with the medium in which books are published.

<comment><USER5> JK Rowling is a great example where big publishers can miss the boat. She was rejected by no less than 12 publishers for Harry Potter. Bloomsbury, Rowling's independent publisher owes much of their success to the Harry Potter series.

<comment><USER12> The interesting question is how much of JK Rowling's success does she owe to Bloomsbury? If she'd given up after her first 10 rejections and tried to self- publish would any of us ever have heard of her? I think a lot of people underestimate the amount sales and marketing work publishers do.

<comment><USER5> I suspect it was highly symbiotic, in addition to winning all those writing contests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _My prediction is this: ebooks will kill the mass market paperback distribution channel._

Hmm. I usually prefer to read paperback novels than their ebook counterparts, the main reason being that there's a barrier to reading something I don't know about and then looking it up on wikipedia and hey, there goes 30 minutes of link following, after which there's a 50% chance I don't return to the book. I wonder how many readers are like me?

</comment><comment><USER14> Publishing is an industry full of turmoil at the moment it seems like, what opportunities are being presented as a result of this?

</comment><comment><USER15> Two mostly factual items:

\- E-ink readers seem to be coming down in price - Borders will be selling the 6 inch Kobo for 150 USD ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328438> ). There are also various recent, cheaper, models with 5-inch e-ink screens, but same 800x600 pixels, which I think will do fine for fiction.

\- Elsewhere in these comments, jacoblyles said "I really can't wait until someone releases an eInk reader that can handle academic books and PDFs". In my opinion, the 10-inch e-ink readers do an acceptable job. I have a KindleDX, and PDFs of books, papers and theses can be read sequentially fine. Skipping around and jotting annotations are not so convenient ...

Handy overview of devices: <http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix>

<comment><USER16> I have the Kindle DX also, and it's too low contrast and the type on most academic papers (that I read) is far too small.

I'm 25, so it's not as if it's my eyesight that's the problem.

On the other hand, reading them on my iPad with a tool like iAnnotate, I can not only make the text bigger, but mark the PDFs up with highlights, boxes, and notes (which are PDF format standards -- not special to the app itself). And transfer them over wifi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> eBook readers have a clock and a dictionary. Paper is dead to me.

<comment><USER18> You don't own a watch? =)

<comment><USER17> Not any more. Clock at the top of all my displays. If I'm not staring at a display doing work, I'm reading on my iPad or iPhone; clocks abound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He forgot my favorite book formats of all, HTML and plain text.

<comment><USER5> Epub, arguably the universal ebook format, is really just a fancy zip-based Package of html resources. IBM has a nice guide for hackers about creating an epub file: [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-epubtut/in...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-epubtut/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Authors like Stross or Scalzi need to see this bit about "Learned Helplessness" here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness>

Their attitude of publishers being all-powerful is one that needs to die.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure how to interpret this. I get the sense that you believe that Stross and Scalzi are rationalizing what you believe is learned helplessness on their part? If so, that isn't what I believe they are saying. I think that Stross is mostly expressing that publishers contribute significantly more to the bookmaking process than most people think, and that these contributions are actually useful.

<comment><USER20> What they have said and are saying is that the publishers are so powerful that they, the content creators, don't even get a say in setting prices or demanding better returns, because that's the way it's always been done.

Any requests to them to stand up for their readers (like the recent pubisher price control mechanisms on ebooks or DRM schemes or region controls) results in a "Haha, you're kidding right? We have zero control over what the publishers do with our output".

I'm saying, the publishers have nowhere to go if you dont write the books. The relationship is a total inverse of what it should be. Even music artists, normally thought to be clueless/careless on real world matters, are already taking big stances on DRM and their ability to distribute/sell etc and sticking up for their fans. The writers' backwardness (and plain old ludditism) in this regard is mighty strange.

<comment><USER22> Music and writing are two very different industries though.

For musicians record sales have never been the revenue stream, a musician gets paid an advance and then they make more money touring selling merchandise and eventually from licensing royalties after the advance and marketing gets paid back.

For writers book sales are pretty much the only revenue stream, they get an advance and a cut of every book sold, then what? Writers can occasionally swing speaking engagements but by and large there's no merch, no tour, movies don't pay people so they can read passages in the background.

If writers aren't in a hurry to drive ebook prices down to $0.50, it's not because they think publishing houses are powerful, it's because they like to eat.

EDIT: Another problem thing to remember is that a song, at 3 minutes or so, can be rapidly iterated hundreds of times, and done so at paying gigs. Listeners can stand in for the editorial process to a degree.

A 400 page novel has a minimum iteration speed of probably a week, and normally several weeks, which the author is not getting paid during, and how many people are willing to read the sometimes subtly different 400 pages a dozen times.

<comment><USER20> Granted that they are different industries, but still you'd think the putative intelligentsia of our times, our writers and story tellers, especially in sci- fi, would be ahead of the curve and not so far behind it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>