Context is everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/10/context-is-everything.html <comment><USER3> One thing I find interesting is that humans tend to take more care of their environment as prosperity increases. It isn't subsistence farmers campaigning for nature reserves. Even compare poor versus rich housing areas - <USER2> immediately know which one has more "green".

Prosperity is strongly correlated with (and some argue caused by) trade and specialisation. Compare this with anti globalisation and "local" movements. It is certain that the latter leads to subsistence if taken to its logical conclusion. So perhaps the best thing to do for the environment is to encourage even more globalisation, only let "local" win when it does by the same measures, and have more trade and hence specialisation. As a bonus, more prosperous humans tend to have fewer children.

Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist has a lot more detail about prosperity, trade and specialisation. Here is a Ted talk to get you going [http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not a new idea, I think George Carlin said something similar.

It boils down to more philosophical questions quickly. What is the meaning of life? Does saving species have some intrinsic worth or is it only a means to an end?

<comment><USER5> Carlin, "The Planet is Fine. The People are Fucked": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovbF0D2wySI>

      (...) the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE! (..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obviously Earth will only be habitable for a finite amount of time and our solar system / galaxy (not quite sure about universe yet) for a finite amount of time as well. Therefore, I think our ultimate goal is to learn to survive outside of these systems. Or at least spread to multiple systems to prevent extinction. There are even more immediate threats such as global warming or nuclear winter scenarios.

Putting our environment first is shortsighted. We should be investing as many resources as possible, as fast as possible, to invent things such as Mr. Fusion, or missions to Mars (yay Elon Musk!) to prevent something like an Olduvai future, as mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER7> "I think our ultimate goal is to learn to survive outside of these systems"

Surviving is not the goal is only a requirement.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes?qt0324253> Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

<comment><USER8> I don't think so; we only developed one thing that gave us an absolute advantage over the other animals... a brain; and it rendered equilibrium impossible because we just keep following our instincts despite having an unfair advantage... just like any other mammal would if they could.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What does MYa mean?

I thought it meant million years ago,but he writes "400MYa ago" and "200Mya [...] _from now_ "

<comment><USER10> Megayears ago. It is a million years.. . <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/megayear>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you start your essay with a vision of the future spanning millions of years ahead, your call to action at the end is only going to evoke the emotion of "I don't care about introducing some variation in this one big random process".

Context indeed.</comment>


Non cogito, ergo sum - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/non-cogito-ergo-sum <comment><USER4> Driving is a perfect and mundane example of unconscious competence most people have. If you could perform with the simple confidence of driving to work,you would probably be very good at what you were doing.

A friend once rhetorically asked me what trying to be funny meant, and of course it means being not funny, yet when we want to achieve some other end we approach it by trying. Yoda summed it up well, but we don't really get a chance to understand what it really means. Trying to drive on a highway is farcically dangerous, but simply driving on one is among the safest ways to drive.

There is a mental change that comes from physical competence where you no longer fear failure, and I'd argue its that lack of fear that makes the difference at elite levels where skills are largely equal. It also makes the difference in the rate at which you learn. The try/humiliate style of teaching is a way to produce industrial scale mediocrity, and so few can appreciate the difference that there is often no reason to change.

<comment><USER5> Meantime I failed two road tests and my instructor said I was overthinking it, I finally gave up and figured I'll wait till driverless cars come around

<comment><USER6> I guess you'll wait 10+ years.

<comment><USER5> I've already ridden in a driverless Lyft as part of a trial, and really in cities I prefer Uber/Lyft or subway, I don't have a pressing need for a car

<comment><USER6> I would argue that getting a drivers license is different then needing a car.

<comment><USER5> I've never needed to drive. It would be mildly more convenient if I could, but not enough for me to justify spending another few dozen hours practicing to pass the test when it'll be an obsolete skill soon enough

<comment><USER6> It's still nice to have it. You gain a lot of independence be it home or on vacation. It's nice not being dependent on taxis/public transport or anyone else. This holds especially true if you are not in an urban area, and busses that don't drive 24/7 classify as those, so it's not only the typical "rural" regions.

And no, it won't be obsolete soon. And by "soon" I mean what I wrote earlier, 10+ years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is one of the goals of Judo. It combines rational thinking, "How does this throw work? Why did not my attempt work?" with the end goal of not needing the thinking in practice. No Mind. It's what allows any musician or performance artist, race car driver, to be effective; Because they need to operate creatively at speeds that are faster then rational thinking. And this in our field is of course known as "being in the flow".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_\(mental_state\)) "Once mushin is attained through the practice or study of martial arts (although it can be accomplished through other arts or practices that refine the mind and body), the objective is to then attain this same level of complete awareness in other aspects of the practitioner's life. "

[http://budobum.blogspot.com/2015/02/states-of-mind- mushin.ht...](http://budobum.blogspot.com/2015/02/states-of-mind- mushin.html?m=1)

<comment><USER8> _Consciously_ playing music seems nearly impossible to me. There's a whole world of physical technique that can be baffling.

I recently went through some deep study of my guitar picking technique. My playing nearly fell apart while I was doing it. Thinking about the angle at which the pick strikes the strings is really painful.

<comment><USER9> Such things seem like the same discipline needs to be applied except instead of practicing the music, you practice thinking about the music.

Specifically, thinking after the fact. If you play a chord, what do you remember about the angle the pick strikes the strings. Play it again, what do you notice afterwards. etc.

I have a strong hunch that its as much about developing the introspective ability/bridge to the skill as it is about bridging the write/edit flow gap (ie in writing its said to be better to write without reading, then edit in a separate session).

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's conscious practice. I do that a lot. Conscious practice to repetition to unconscious playing. Physical technique can be carefully studied in practice, _in order to_ not think about it at all during performance - <USER3> already know what you're doing, and why you're doing it. The mind can focus instead on the ideas and feelings you are trying to express.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Develop instincts actually need thinking... At least for develop good instincts without being hurt and without have to rediscover the wheel a generation after another.

In my homecountry, Italy, there was an ancient theathral novel named "Re Travicello" (King little beam, literally) that say having thinking subjects it's a big problem: they contest, protest, convince other, they develop working solutions against throne interest etc. So he invented two concept: "trust the system" and "use your instinct" to stop people thinking...

<comment><USER11> Incidentally, all this zen stuff came about during autocratic rule of China when the emperor outlawed logic...

<comment><USER12> I'm not so sure...

Zen, in China, chan, is a mixture of Buddhism and Taoism, with Taoism originating in the 4th century BC during the warring states period along with most other influential Chinese philosophies (and, weirdly, much of Greek philosophy).

One rival was Mohism, sort of a mix of logic and sophism (logic has origins in rhetoric); Zhuangzi has some points about "disputation" that make me feel more kindly to modern analytic philosophy.

[https://www.iep.utm.edu/zhuangzi/](https://www.iep.utm.edu/zhuangzi/)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/)

See also Arthur Whateley (?) and especially Angus Graham.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, Mohism was outlawed because of its use of logic. Emperors don't like subjects that can think through the national policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you wish to see that "one of the all-time great shots" from Djokovic, here it is on YouTube in HD.

[1] [https://youtu.be/EjvSx0ipO0k?t=10181](https://youtu.be/EjvSx0ipO0k?t=10181)

<comment><USER14> Not to be an arse but this is the shot described[1]. I was extremely confused when clicking you link then realizing it was actually a couple of minutes later.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjvSx0ipO0k&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjvSx0ipO0k&feature=youtu.be&t=10317)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _> Federer's inability to win Grand Slams in the last two years hasn't been due to physical decline so much as a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments. In the jargon of sport, he has been "choking". This, say the experts, is caused by thinking too much._

That's the theory behind the article. Federer is 37, Dokovic is 31. Just saying.

<comment><USER16> This was 2012, six years ago, so the difference (ok ratio) was less.

Anyway Federer seems to have lifted himself well.

<comment><USER17> Actually the ratio between 25 and 31 is Larger than the ratio between 31 and 37.

You mean that both of them were considered to be in their prime.

<comment><USER18> In the nineties - in fact, the era directly pre-Federer - most players would be thinking pretty hard about retirement at 31! The current situation where all of the top three men's players (and six of the top seven) are over thirty is pretty much unheard of (with some notable exceptions of course, like Connors getting to the US Open semifinal at 39).

(The ages of the women in the top twenty currently is much more how it used to be in the men's game.)

<comment><USER17> > The current situation where all of the top three men's players (and six of > the top seven) are over thirty is pretty much unheard of

I wonder if that has anything to do with modern sport science keeping people at peak longer or even to do with steroids.

Could also be that they're just all exceptional, but I've been burned by optimism about sport personalities before.

<comment><USER18> I think (hope!) it's probably a combination of factors - firstly that the top three really are exceptional, probably the best men's tennis has ever seen; vast improvements in modern sports science - nutrition, strength training and conditioning, etc; being much more selective with their schedules (especially Federer of late); improvements in equipment; and some weird quirk that has meant the younger generation hasn't really come through and the older ones have been able to stay at the top with a periodic cycle of displacing each other as they get injured, struggle with form, and so on.

Or maybe it's just drugs, though they get tested regularly and punished very severely (but you could say the same about cycling...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tangentially related, I was reading about the negative aspects of pursuing high self-control[1], which could perhaps equate to overthinking. The text also includes links to research purporting the situations where relying on intuition is, perhaps counterintuitively, more advantageous than rationality.

Also quasi-related, a while back there was an article on HN about the human brain's Bayesian like processes[2], which again seem to form the basis of intuitive decision making.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321621803_The_Intri...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321621803_The_Intricacies_of_the_Pursuit_of_Higher_Self- Control)

[2] [https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...](https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00935.x)?

<comment><USER20> Odd, I find the concept of high self-control to _include_ the ability to exercise no-mind at will. That is, high self-control is not limited to exercising control of your "rational" (System 2), but rather involves a Zen- like perspective over System 1 & System 2. No mind is both, yet neither.

I've had what seems like my greatest awakening this past week. Practice gets you somewhere, but I can't authoritatively say "where" is. Like some other commenter mentioned, I've found myself in an intentioned mushin [0] state.

This morning I was off the wagon a bit, but now I'm back. Can't wait to see what I accomplish with this focus ;)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_\(mental_state\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It reminds me of myself. This probably falls in the same basket, I used to game (online games) on a decent level, but I noticed that when I started becoming too concerned with winning a round that I'd start failing more.

Whereas when I played more 'happy go lucky' I could coordinate my actions much better.

There's probably other factors at play here, but overthinking really does have a downside on my ability to play well.

Another interesting datapoint is a friend of mine, who overthinks when gaming except when he was slightly intoxicated. Maybe like the Ballmer peak for gaming! :D

</comment><comment><USER22> I find the arguments about "expectation" compelling, but isn't that fundamentally different from thinking/not thinking? Also, aren't we making a mistake by looking only at the upper end of the tail where high achievers achieve less due to self-doubt/risk aversion? Isn't the reverse true in many (if not most) situations, where risky behavior is mostly harmful?

I have one other qualm:

>But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.

Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the ball on the eye's optic plane. Just because processes are subconscious or effortless doesn't mean they aren't happening.

<comment><USER23> > Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate > the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which > direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the > ball on the eye's optic plane.

The brain calculating differential equations doesn't seem very plausible given the fact it has no access to data to perform those calculations. Perhaps it's more about past observations or a priori knowledge? I think it's worth noticing that catching things is an ancient predatory skill and is not exclusive to humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> To drive parallels with programming - once you develop muscle memory you can become very efficient at coding. Thinking required only at the time of learning. Yes, learning Vim/Emacs is hard. But you have to go through that process only once. And after that typing/navigation becomes such an unconscious activity.

And if you choose simple and less obtuse language stacks, e.g. Clojure(script) - that will allow you to stop thinking about "mechanics" and concentrate your focus on solving the problem (instead of fighting the ecosystem, dependency management, language idioms, style guide, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER25> Author is vague in defining thinking. To think is to be conscious not only of thoughts but emotions, movement, awareness, sight, instincts, etc...

His examples of people losing focus (ie. thinking about a movement) are right, but not because thinking is bad, but because one was focused on the wrong faucet of one's consciousness. Conscience doesn't exist only in the intellect. Animals are not unconscious.

</comment><comment><USER26> My (alpine) ski racing coach used to refer to "training your instincts", by which he meant that we needed to train in the correct neuromuscular patterns so that those would emerge without thinking (which of course is too slow at 35-40 meters/second in a Downhill race, or even 1/3 of that in a Slalom).

I also used to notice brain states that I'd call "fast meditation", completely calm and meditative, almost just observing the body doing it's work, but at speed. Happens even more in sportscar racing, i think because there's more time to get into a "flow state". Turns out there's a connection -- meditating monks generally slow down their sympathetic ('flight-or-flight") system and the parasympathetic (slow maint) system becomes primary, except when they achieve an exceptional meditative state they seek for years, when both systems kick into high gear. I suspect the same thing is happening from the opposite direction.

It is endlessly amazing . . .

</comment><comment><USER27> Miniature philosophical digression. Given even more technology we get more and more power to do things unthinkingly. The problem with it is that the general level of training has not caught up. Most people do not attempt to train themselves, even fewer have the horizon far enough to "get" the consequences of what they're doing intuitively, or even logically.

<comment><USER28> I'm sure this was also an argument used against supermarkets, automobiles, and various other things.

Put simply, you can't learn the fundamentals of everything that affects your life.

There are consequences, of course. It is important to learn to balance between when you should learn something and when it really doesn't matter. This is easier said than done and up for _constant_ debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is what the book The Inner Game of Tennis is all about.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Overthinking, over-analyzing separates my body from my mind" \- Tool

</comment><comment><USER31> >The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that much of our behaviour is based on deceptively sophisticated rules-of-thumb, or "heuristics". A robot programmed to chase and catch a ball would need to compute a series of complex differential equations to track the ball's trajectory. But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball

This is why neural nets are so powerful. They're encoding generalized heuristics, likely similar to those humans use.

<comment><USER27> Are they now? Do you have some sort of breakthrough explaining ANN encodings?

Currently the state of the art is some sort of ad hoc correlation between behavior and explanations.

The topological ANN explanation makes their thinking seem vastly different from what logical heuristics would be...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've seen this referred to as the mind/no-mind state or 'mu'

You can get there fairly simply by playing any extremely fast-paced video game, like Tetris or Tempest 2000.

When I was djing regularly, I could get to that state, too. Given how introverted I was, it would have been impossible for me to actually get up in the DJ booth in front of hundreds or thousands of people and _think_ about what I was doing. I had to lose myself in the activity. I often walked out after two hours not really remembering anything I did.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is surprising that the exact mechanism of this behavior is not known. It must be related to habits. To the microbiome where most of our decisions are made. Would like to know more about how to leave out the conscious mind. I notice that when I'm doing a task on the computer which is interestingly repetitive that requires some dexterity I forget about the passage of time. So one can achieve this state even in daily life that does not require the return of a tennis ball under stress.

<comment><USER27> It seems that our logical side evolved to predict behaviors of others since empathy is limited to same species. It is probably the other side of the same circuit... Similar to how A3C ANNs work, we have a reflective capability to change how and what we're training. "Superego" so to speak. A metric ton of automated systems for learning and action though. At least two action oriented predictors - logical/heuristic and direct emapthic/sympathetic.

As to not noticing passage of time consciously, it is because conscious though likely it's more energy intensive, so to save it when subconscious processes are sufficient it gets throttled down. Of course this is a "just so" explanation and we do not actually know how exactly this works. Perhaps the consciousness related to sensing time and rhythm gets relegated to something else.

<comment><USER33> I believe loaded words like "subconscious" make it difficult to come up with new explanations.

It's interesting that when the body is happy and relaxed the mind is not aware of it. So there seems to be a continuous struggle between the ordering mind and instinctive body. Or the mind and the animal side.

<comment><USER27> The contentment might be like temperature in an annealing system or experimentation/forgetting tunable in an artificial system.

When we're content, nothing has to be changed, right? The trouble is, our "contentment sensor" has been evolved a long time ago for a different environment and is probably hard to train being so ancient and we do not know how to do it...

Of course this is another "just so" explanation. There's not enough science on contentment and discontent related to intellectual performance.

Currently I found this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6846034/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6846034/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A novice wants to master. But a master wants to ONLY practice.

<comment><USER35> "Practice" being to use the skill or practice being to work to improve the skill ([further] mastery)?

<comment><USER34> The idea is there shouldn't be much difference in both. One same as the other.

However, really successful tilt this balance unnaturally (see above).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Isn't this article just reappropriating the system 1 vs system 2 distinction that Daniel Kahnemanb discusses in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is key:

"Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can't unthink if you haven't already thought."

Put simply, unthinking requires extensive experience and training. This isn't some magical monk super power everyone can reach for, it is only available to those who have devoted enough time and effort to the task that it almost becomes an instinct.

Driving is an example of this everyone can relate to. Imagine a newbie "unthinking". Ouch!

</comment><comment><USER38> This reminds me of the book "The Power of Now", which try to combine teachings of many religions, and basically says that you gotta "feel your presence now, without thinking" to fully connect yourself with the world. The author even mentions Descartes' famous quote.

</comment><comment><USER39> The HN audience is ripe for this kind of knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER40> To me it's unsatisfying that you have to offload the work to some part of the brain that you have no strong conscious connection with. It's like letting someone else do the work.

In my view, you really master something if you have conscious control over it. Perhaps that is what Federer was trying to do.

<comment><USER41> > you really master something if you have conscious control over it.

Quite the opposite - you master something when you can do it automatically, i.e. without conciously controlling it. The conscious mind has many limitations, one is that it's way too slow to handle real-time events - <USER3> can't consciously think about what actions to perform when you suddenly skid your car in a curve, or when you're performing the high jump on a sports field. The other main problem with the conscious mind is that it can't multi- task. So you use your conscious mind to practice, carefully, slowly at first, one part at the time, until, finally, your unconscious (or automated) trained sections of your brain can do it for you, and all the conscious mind has to do is to sit back, relax, and be the conductor. Or just watching.

<comment><USER40> Yes, that's a common view, and you worded it nicely. I think you didn't get that I'm taking about the _next level_ of mastery.

The problem with training a neural net (or part of your brain) is that it is fuzzy. You don't know _why_ it works, just that by trying hard enough, it often works. I'm saying that this is from a certain perspective unsatisfying. Also, talented people often do things automatically, without understanding why, and they have a hard time explaining things to a beginner.

<comment><USER42> I still have no idea what you're trying to say.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Naval Ravikant talks in-depth on: Twitter, Bubbles, and Start Fund - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/02/22/naval-ravikant-talks-in-depth-on-twitter-bubbles-new-york-and-start-fund-interview-part-2/

<comment><USER2> "The Market has to be huge because everyone makes mistakes. You never quite get it right the first time. I believe that the Internet is very efficiently arbitraged. Anything you can think of has been thought of and tried. The only way you're going to find something is if you stick to it, at an irrational level and try a whole bunch of things. Companies that don't do giant pivots are always doing micro pivots. "You need a large enough market that you can pivot in and you still have a customer base. Another related point to that is – it's just as hard to build a large company as it is a small company, so you might as well build a big company. It's roughly the same effort."

</comment><comment><USER3> I found his comments on the Start Fund to be the most interesting. Despite all the heat generated when the fund was first announced, I didn't see anyone else describe it as an "unbundling" of advice from money, which is the way Ravikant puts it. It's an interesting way of looking at things.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I'd have used the words "in-depth", but here's what he says about bubbles: "We might be in a series of micro-bubbles, seed round prices being driven higher by VCs competing with angels for good seed deals. I don't think we're in a macro bubble. The total amount of money in the market or at risk is still very small."

</comment><comment><USER3> Argh, again, the formatting on these interviews is really hard to read. Why can't they just do a straight interview style, like:

TNW: blah blah?

Naval: blah blah.</comment>


The Asimov Pyschohistory-like Information and Communication Technology Flagship - <AUTHOR> http://www.futurict.eu/the-project/proposal

<comment><USER2> see also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)</comment>


Spent 7 months re-designing online polls. Here's what I came up with. - <AUTHOR> http://quipol.com/

<comment><USER2> That's really nice and simple. Love the design! So clean. The use of a pie- chart (or donut chart really) is very nice, but it is a bit difficult to read. I like it better than bar charts from an aesthetic perspective, but I think it is more difficult to get a perspective of scale. I would recommend finding a way to add % numbers to help people get a better grasp of the results.

Also, blue/green and particularly the shades you chose don't work well in your implementation, I don't think. The green doesn't shout Yes, you have to think about it, and blue has never been no. Also I believe blue/green color blindness is the most common, therefore many people wouldn't be able to tell which was which on your chart.

Really a great run, just a bit of refinement I think!

<comment><AUTHOR> Did percentages not show up in your pie chart? They should have. I hope that isn't broken, but I appreciate you pointing it out! We did some colorblind testing and had good (not great) feedback. Time will tell. I think color refinement is fun :)

<comment><USER3> It doesn't show percentages unless you hover over the pie chart. (Chrome)

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it! Yeah, that's supposed to happen. I guess we'll see how intuitive it is for people and then think about auto-populating the percentages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Agreed with others - Love the design and it made a great first impression. Your explanation and walk through was very well done as well. I would maybe put a few cues as to which part can be hovered and more information will be presented.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Timmee.

Cues are a good idea! It does take a bit of guesswork to figure out which piece has content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the concept, nice execution. What's your launch strategy?

HN may be more responsive to a post like "I spent 7 months solving a "small" problem." then link to a blog post with more details about what was broken, how you fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the kind words! I quietly rolled the application out yesterday. I'm bootstrapping the whole thing with my own cash, so I'm just getting it out there and hoping to get early feedback so I can make refinements.</comment></comment>


English is not normal - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages <comment><USER2> As a native English speaker whose first written language was Spanish and who has studied and spoken German, Italian, and Cantonese, it has always seemed to me that English is one of the easier common languages for conveying simple meaning in a small number of words. With a vocabulary of two or three hundred words you can reasonably speak Pidgin English to accomplish basic tasks like asking directions, ordering food, and buying daily items. With a romance language (let alone a character-based language), you realistically need about five to ten times more words to do the same thing. This is especially true for languages with formulaic conjugation and gendered nouns. My point is not that English is better or more flexible. My point is actually that English is often ambiguous and that new speakers can use that ambiguity to convey a lot of meaning compactly. However, that ambiguity also means that fluency is hard to come by because you need to understand context and custom well enough to choose the right meaning of words that could realistically have dozens of separate and contradictory meanings. Basically, the barrier to entry is low but the barrier to fluency is high and hard to overcome.

</comment><comment><USER3> > almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of > all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders that way.

Persian is Indo-European and does not assign genders that way either.

<comment><USER4> Nor does Armenian or Bengali. But English does. Gender does not affect grammar in English (cf French where conjugation depends on grammar), but it is actually a gendered language with three genders. Almost all nouns are neuter but many animate pronouns can be masculine, feminine, or neuter (people or animals can be referred to as "he", "she", or "it"/"they"). Some inanimate pronouns can also be gendered. For example, ships are often female; you might say something like "she's a beauty" when talking about a boat. There are also a handful of gendered nouns. For example, "actor" and "actress" are masculine and feminine nouns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just because a word describe something that is gendered, it doesn't mean that the word is gendered itself. And using gendered pronouns for inanimate things in English is purely result of tradition and has nothing to do with grammar; it is perfectly normal to use "it" for a ship.

> Gender does not affect grammar in English [...], but it is actually a > gendered language with three genders.

A definition of a gendered language _is_ that the gender affects grammar, not whether it has (pro)nouns to designate gendered objects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English > that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and > the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are > Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao

Only because we've arbitrarily decided that all of the English dialects are a single language. Texas Southern English and Newfoundland English are not significantly more mutually intelligible than Spanish and Portuguese. Scots and Singlish are considered English dialects but are barely intelligible to many English speakers.</comment>


Eva – A distributed entity-attribute-value database in Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Workiva/eva/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm excited that some of the ideas from Datomic are starting to make it into some open source projects. With crux last month and now Eva, there are now multiple options for modern clojure databases.

While there are many excellent ideas embedded in Datomic and these projects, for me just being able to persist the same data structures you're using at a repl and query for them with data is a huge win vs having to start translating types and concepts and query strings to and from SQL is a huge win.

<comment><USER2> I suspect by "ideas from Datomic" you are referring to ideas predating Datomic (and Clojure) that are _used and possibly refined_ in Datomic.

<comment><USER3> I think he meant to say they were not mainstream

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Workiva has decided to discontinue closed development on Eva, but sees a > great deal of potential value in opening the code base to the OSS community.

I'm confused -- does this mean that Workiva themselves are not using Eva? Or are they still using it, but not officially developing it any more? If they were really invested in it, why would they only allow employees to work on it in their 10% time?

<comment><USER5> It was open sourced because it was a cool piece of technology and it would have been a shame to keep it back, but it is no longer in use at Workiva.

Source: I work there, although I have literally nothing to do with this project.

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Are you guys switching to another EAV store like Datomic or something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Question for Eva and Datomic users: How often does your org miss having a separate relational database around for data folks and product folks capable of (read only) SQL? Do you find yourself making a separate store/s to support them?

<comment><USER7> One thing that's nice with Datomic (don't know about Eva, but probably the same) is that syncing data to other stores is straightforward, thanks in particular to the the easy change detection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh sweet memories

I have created almost identical implementation of this as an embeddable library in a year 2000 along with proprietary SQL language. The reason was that my client had inventory of products with some crazy amount of attributes and each product can have its own set and the client kept changing, creating, deleting those. It was in memory but with persistence and atomic transactions. No history though. It was blindingly fast on complex queries. And the schema of the database was kept as a set of entities with some predefined names, values and range of id's .

For a while I was contemplating releasing it as a standalone product but as I had enough tasks on my plate decided not to do it. Kinda feel sorry now ;(

So all in all very close by idea.

</comment><comment><USER9> Last time I saw the EAV pattern used was in Magento. It was an absolute nightmare to query against.

<comment><USER10> I don't think Magento used it right.

I used EAV in an application and it was fine (I used Datascript on the client- side, with server-side data being stored in a JSON document database, RethinkDB). I did run into some annoying issues with the lack of nil value handling. I'd say writing queries was difficult, but not significantly more difficult than in any other language, if you care about performance and want to know what the query actually does.

Overall, I felt there was a good mapping between my domain model and EAV.

I eventually dropped this solution in favor of Clojure data structures: if you have an in-memory (in-browser) database anyway, why keep the data in Datascript, if you can simply keep it as ClojureScript data structures?

<comment><USER11> As I mentioned here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308175) , I think Magento did use it right, but EAV is impractical on a relational database not designed for EAV. This fact, however, doesn't show itself until you've reached a certain (arguably low by today's standards) scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If someone wants to really make money, please clone the Versant Object Database.

<comment><USER13> Can someone explains how anybody is willing to even give a chance to a software product that is sold like this? [1]

* Generic/"bootstrappy" looking site, mostly marketing speak.

* Not even one code example of what it looks like to solve a problem with this DB.

* Gigantic "Get a Trial" button that links to a lengthy form that I'm sure has 99% abandonment rate.

There are a lot of other software products that are marketed like this, so I'm genuinely curious how this works.

1: [https://www.actian.com/data-management/nosql-object- database...](https://www.actian.com/data-management/nosql-object-database/)

<comment><USER12> > "the website uses bootstrap, the product must be crap"

congrats on speaking about a product you haven't even tried.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The name of this is a bit confusing since there is another language by the same name that also is related to databases: [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-7091-7557-6_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-7091-7557-6_61)

</comment><comment><USER15> E-A-V is basically a JSON/BSON document store, perhaps with typing. Anything that distinguishes it from those datastores?

<comment><USER16> It's the other covering indexes (i.e. AVE, AEV, VAE) that make it interesting because they allow the query engine to perform efficient ad-hoc graph traversals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> EAV is the best schema. How you can do NoSQL in SQL.

</comment><comment><USER18> Glad to see another contender in the EAVT field! Yay!

</comment><comment><USER15> AP or CP?

<comment><USER16> Definitely CP. With Eva and Datomic, transactions are serialised through a single transactor node at a time.

The transaction log design is a fundamental design tradeoff that Eva/Datomic/Crux share, which means system throughput is limited by the throughput of a single process. The argument in favour of such a design is that most businesses & business applications don't actually experience transactional data volumes over 10K tx/sec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> EAV is generally an anti-pattern. How does Eva break away from its long, dark history?

<comment><USER20> I reject the premise of your statement. It's only a failure when implemented on top of relational databases which are (obviously) not optimized for it.

What are the failures of EAV except when applying it to a database optimized for something different?</comment></comment>


LibreSSL, and the new libtls API - glass- http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls-fsec-2015/mgp00001.html <comment><AUTHOR> I remember so many people in the open source world angry or annoyed with the OpenBSD team for forking LibreSSL. The fact is it's more than a year later, several more high-risk vulnerabilities discovered, and OpenSSL has yet to make any noticable changes. Meanwhile those same vulnerabilities were fixed in LibreSSL due to code cleanup and removal.[1]

No matter how you feel about the forking or the openbsd team, there is something to be learned here. There are times when forking, deleting old code, and major clean-ups can be very useful strategies. Sunk cost bias can be an enemy of progress.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreSSL#Security_and_vulnerab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreSSL#Security_and_vulnerabilities)

<comment><USER2> I'm curious what circles you run in in the open source world. In my little corner of it, most everyone had nothing but excitement and support for LibreSSL.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was employed at a large open-source organization at the time of the fork. A conversation I participated in was specifically along the lines of (broad paraphrasing here) "They should be contributing their changes back to OpenSSL versus forking".

While attending a security conference in Vancouver earlier this year, someone commented that they thought the OpenBSD team was childish for forking LibreSSL, and several people chimed in with agreement.

Of course this is all hear-say for you, and your experiences may vary. I've met more than a handful of people who did not like the fork. There are lots of people in the world, and they all have different opinions.

<comment><USER3> One of the big things they did was cut out enormous amounts of legacy code. Code that someone somewhere might be using. Since they were basically just making LibreSSL for themselves they didn't have to care about that and could be much more free with the changes.

The OpenSSL developers would have a much tougher time dropping MSDOS and VMS and OS/360 support because there are still a couple of people who need it.

<comment><USER4> How about big-endian x86, in case anyone makes a processor that operates that way? At least OpenSSL is ready!

<comment><USER5> I think that has more to do with code hygiene.

Problems are easier to spot when there are less underlying assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to miss:

Less code [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00004.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00004.html)

What's wrong with the OpenSSL API [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00007.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00007.html)

TLS small set of functions [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00009.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00009.html)

read() and write() semantics [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00011.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00011.html)

No need for handling errno EAGAIN/EINTR yay! [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00016.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls- fsec-2015/mgp00016.html)

There's more stuff like event/poll, but I don't want to link more. The presentation is very interesting.

<comment><USER7> > _No need for handling errno EAGAIN /EINTR yay!_

Yay for EINTR, but you're still handling EAGAIN; it's just called TLS_POLLIN/TLS_POLLOUT now. (Not that this is a bad thing: this is exactly what I'd expect from such an API, as it needs to integrate with the local event loop.)

The "What's wrong with the OpenSSL API" is excellent: a coworker ran into this just recently. A client was failing to connect, and had SSL23_XXX in the stack trace, and he wondered why it was using an outdated version of SSL; since we've long since disabled support for SSLv3 server-side, he figured — reasonably — that the client was failing to connect for that reason.

For those wondering, from the Python docs, which have the best explanation I know of:

> _ssl.PROTOCOL_SSLv23_

> _Selects the highest protocol version that both the client and server > support. Despite the name, this option can select "TLS" protocols as well as > "SSL"._

<comment><USER8> > Yay for EINTR, but you're still handling EAGAIN; it's just called > TLS_POLLIN/TLS_POLLOUT now.

I think their point is that you just have to check the return value to know how to proceed, you don't have to check the return value _and_ errno.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just curious and,yes, it's a bit off-topic AND forgetting the relevant dates, etc. that are at play here: isn't developing an SSL/TLS library the sort of thing that Rust should excel at? I see all those lines of C code (and clearly other non-C code) and am thinking of all the opportunities for bugs to come up related to pointer and memory management. Would such a library be a good use of Rust from the performance and safety perspective? Seems like it's how the language is being sold.

Note: I'm not a C developer nor do I typically work at this level of the stack, thus my seeking opinions.

<comment><USER10> Mozilla hosted a Rust Meetup last December on crypto you might be interested in.

Tony Arcieri's talk in particular covers a lot of the areas Rust help prevent some of the recent snafus but also covers the areas Rust might be more dangerous to implement crypto in [https://speakerdeck.com/tarcieri/thoughts- on-rust-cryptograp...](https://speakerdeck.com/tarcieri/thoughts-on-rust- cryptography)

Videos: [https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup- december-2014/](https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-december-2014/)

<comment><USER9> Very cool. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks to the developers for LibreSSL and libtls. I'm using both in an application I'm working on.

I've been meaning to post on the mailing list, but I have some requests I guess I'll try here:

\- For libtls, accept custom read and write callbacks. libuv has no way to poll for writable: [https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/517](https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/517)

\- I wish they would provide (and maintain) the modern cyphersuite from here: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS) ("secure", "legacy" and "high" are all lacking in various ways)

These are fairly minor issues and overall LibreSSL and (especially) libtls have been a huge step forward. Thanks again.

<comment><USER11> Doug emailed me personally to follow up with this. Couldn't be happier!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Arch Linux has not switched to libreSSL I suspect this might have been a tounge slip of alpine linux, which has.

<comment><USER13> Alpine Linux still uses OpenSSL since LibreSSL releases is only supported for 1 year while Alpine releases is supported for 2 years. Void Linux has switched to LibreSSL though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those on OS X, `brew install libressl`. Note the actual binary is still called `openssl`, but you can tell because it's half the size.

<comment><USER15> Is `openssl` a symlink to `libressl`, which acts differently based on argv0?

I'd love to get away from some of openssl's arcane flags... :-)

<comment><USER14> It's not a symlink, but that's a good idea. Eg, openssl has 'nodes' (no DES) which means 'dont encrypt the file you're about to make' and if you omitted it and did encrypt it wouldn't use DES anymore anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a saner version of the slides, a PDF, or something with less jpg?

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm interested in this but it's in lack of documentation, worse than openssl at the moment.

for example any demo code for me to try out the libtls?

<comment><USER18> What documentation do you need? Have you read the manual: [http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man3/...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man3/tls_accept_fds.3?query=tls_init&sec=3)

You can read example code use by browsing the source codes of the applications listed in the presentation such as netcat and httpd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice slides, but I would have liked to see how they are making sure there are no memory corruption issues.

<comment><USER20> I guess you need to look at the general OpenBSD coding guidelines (if they're documented anywhere).

Also, they ripped out a bunch of what they called "exploit mitigation countermeasures" in OpenSSL's memory allocation code.

<comment><USER19> Well it is still C anyway.

For example, I find worthless the Annex K of C11 as solution for memory corruption, because the functions still require to keep track of a separate pointer and size, while making sure they match. And the Annex is anyway optional.

However OpenBSD coding guidelines do look quite good:

[http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man9/...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man9/style.9?query=style&arch=i386)

I like that they request developers to make use of static analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any chance of getting this into Debian?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to have anhedonia at early 20s? - <AUTHOR> This is a throwaway account. I have felt like this for about 1-2 years. I recently found by chance the term of anhedonia, and by reading about the symptoms I do think that I have it.
Is it possible? What should I do?
For instance, I have never had much social life and I have never hanged out with someone of the opposite sex. The difference is that some time ago I was keen on these activities (and frustrated for not having access to them), but now I am just not interested anymore. Actually, I have lost interest for almost everything, except computer science/technology, which happens to be my career, and perhaps watching basketball matches. I don't even play computer games. I go to the gym once a week, but it's just a routine and I don't enjoy it.
Also, it's not being workaholic because I no longer have the ability to concentrate that I had before. I don't have any social media profile, so the issue is not related to Facebook/Instagram. <comment><USER2> I'm not familiar with anhedonia as a formal diagnosis.

But I am familiar with depression, of which "inability to feel joy" is commonly regarded as a primary symptom.

Depression is common for people in their early 20s or even earlier, so it's possible to have that at your age.

The fact that you used to seek the activities you mentioned but no longer do, could be a response to the frustration of not having access to them, so your mind has switched off the desire, in order to numb you to that pain.

The mind has all kinds of ways of adapting to your circumstances in order to make life bearable through unpleasant experiences.

In the short term, you may need to seek professional treatment for depression. If your condition continues to decline, you might be in danger, so you should investigate whether therapy and/or medication or other treatment may be necessary.

Beyond that, you could benefit from some work to develop good strategies for getting good outcomes in social situations - e.g., overcoming self- consciousness, learning good conversational skills, getting better at showing sincere interest in people and being kind/generous.

I've been through the kinds of experiences you've described, and I understand how bleak it can feel.

But please trust that there are all kinds of things you can do to get to a better place, to develop a healthy and well-functioning social live, and to build a life you truly enjoy.

Feel free to email me if you're in further need of suggestions (address in profile).

Please know that you are loved and valued.

All the very best to you.</comment>


Ask HN: What is Parse? - <AUTHOR>

This is a very noobish question, sorry about that. I've spent the last several minutes trying to understand what Parse.com is but I still don't get it. What does Parse Cloud do? Does it take care of all my database needs? (Replacement for MySQL?) <comment><USER2> Parse is a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS). A BaaS is a great solution to connect your app to a backend server without having to build the backend yourself.

Why would you want your app to connect to a backend? Without a backend, you can only store data from a user in a database on their local device; which means that data is only available on that device.

If you need to do a login system, any kind of social interaction (sharing data between users), a leaderboard, syncing data across devices, etc. - you will need a backend. Parse helps you with that by providing you APIs to do all of those things.

I'm actually building an open source BaaS. Email me if you have any more questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a cloud database. If you know a lot about front end and don't want to do any work for your back end, it's perfect.

Just enter your data types as objects in the GUI and you're good to go. There's JavaScript too if you absolutely need it.

I've used it and it definitely made my life a lot easier as a mobile developer with little back end experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> Parse is effectively a very easy to use NoSQL database in the cloud. It has many more features than that, but that's the core of it.</comment>


Ask YC: Why hasn't Microsoft acquired Xobni already? - <AUTHOR>

Xobni is such a good fit for Microsoft that its puzzling that they haven't been acquired already.
Any theories why this hasn't happened yet?<p>p.s. please remember the intent of this thread is analysis and not gossip. <comment><USER2> Microsoft doesn't want to acquire Xobni because Xobni already works for Microsoft. If Xobni is independent, microsoft benefits, and Xobni takes all the risk and deals with all the cost. Besides, Xobni is developing in an area (desktop office applications) that microsoft has tidily wrapped up.

Microsoft is interested in acquiring companies in markets they don't have wrapped up-- like the internet. Xobni makes outlook better? Great. Except that it's not about Outlook. It's about Gmail.

<comment><USER3> The solution to that would be make a version for Gmail.

That would piss MS off, they might buy them just to kill the Gmail version.

<comment><USER4> If it is really successful on Gmail, Google would make their own version, and Microsoft would know that.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe Google would. They make there money with ads, an add-on to there platform isn't going to make them any additional ad sales so there is no reason for them to do it.

<comment><USER5> My guess is that Google actually would, and probably is; in an attempt to have a more social aspect Google is probably _working on_ features that make it gmail part of a grander scheme including YouTube/Orkut/Blogger/etc..

<comment><USER5> I seriously need to proof read my comments...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is silly. There are hundreds of third-party add-ins for Microsoft Office. There are 677 listed in the Office Marketplace [1], including 20 "inbox management" applications.

Microsoft encourages third-party developers to write add-ins for Office. That doesn't mean they have any interest in acquiring (or copying) all of those add-ins.

[1] [http://office.microsoft.com/en- us/marketplace/FX100621221033...](http://office.microsoft.com/en- us/marketplace/FX100621221033.aspx)

<comment><USER7> This is the power of PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft doesn't want to admit that they had the inbox backwards all along. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> The primary reason Microsoft acquires companies is either to enter a new market, or greatly strengthen its position in a market. For instance, Microsoft acquired bungee to grow it's xbox platform, and more recently FAST, which is to enter the enterprise search space. Microsoft is already firmly embedded in the corporate e-mail business (outlook), as well as the online e-mail (live mail/hotmail), so buying xobni doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER10> God forbid they try and improve one of their products...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone else mentioned once it has a lot of users and is a mature product then they might be interested.

I don't agree with the people saying that they wouldn' because they own the market place. This is not true and xobni would be a nice fit with enterprize customers and MS could try and buy them to attract new customers or a value add for existing customers.

I think if they never buy them its because MS having angling Office as a platform for years and a company like this demostrates that it is possible to make money from that platform.

I spent a long old time developing on top of office making business apps and its not a bad platform if you take it for what it is.

</comment><comment><USER13> Being a better feature has nothing to do with being a lucrative acquisition. If Xobni can show a clear benefit in $$'s to M$'s bottom line, then the corpdev guys might get excited. Right now there's no serious competitive threat to Outlook as installed software, so buying Xobni (or anyone else) just for additional features isn't interesting. Without a competitive threat MS could take 2 years to copy most of Xobni and roll it out in a future version.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So I thought about this for a while and here's what I came up with:

Scenario a) Microsoft wants to acquire Xobni, but Xobni does not want to be acquired at its present valuation (whatever Microsoft was offering). However Microsoft also has strong leverage over Xobni as it controls what components work with Outlook. So this scenario of an aggressive Microsoft being rebuffed by a confident startup does not sound plausible.

Scenario b) Microsoft is timing its acquisition. If Xobni is independent, it could possibly integrate its service with other webmail providers. These providers (like Google or AOL) would be very reluctant to let a Microsoft owned Xobni have access to their users. In this case, by delaying the acquisition Microsoft could be hoping to gain leverage over the other email companies once their users are hooked on Xobni. Something along these lines seems much more plausible to me.

A third scenario comes to mind: Microsoft realizes that its history of acquisitions has not been too great, and it thinks Xobni is too important to risk screwing up this way. This seems unlikely just based on everything I've read and heard about the company and its culture.

<comment><USER14> Well (A) is more likely because Xobni is part of the microsoft accelerator program already which I'm sure turns off google and AOL.

They're well-funded, so the asking price must be high.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are well-funded, but they cannot achieve much without Microsoft (because Microsoft controls access to Outlook). So Microsoft has huge leverage in this situation. This makes me believe that Microsoft is in charge of the timetable (whatever it maybe). And yes being part of the Microsoft accelerator would I guess raise suspicions in the valley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Xobni is holding out for the possibility of lucrative corporate site-wide licenses (negating the need to be acquired by Microsoft).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK I thought of a better reason for Microsoft to keep Xobni independent. This way a business has to pay for both Outlook and Xobni!

If Xobni was rolled into Outlook, then Microsoft could only charge for Outlook (possibly force an upgrade to a new version). If Xobni was an independent (though Microsoft controlled) entity, every enterprise Xobni user would willingly pay for Xobni and have to still pay for Outlook. Further depending on the utility of Xobni to users, they could charge more than Outlook itself! So maybe Microsoft sees the potential to double its enterprise email revenue and is being patient.

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess there are 2 sides to it.

From Xobni's perspective: 1\. What is the long term roadmap for Xobni? 2\. Will merging with MSFT slow down innovation?

and the most important question

3\. What is the _right_ acquisition price for Xobni?

           Xobni roughly raised 4.25 million Series A. At that time they probably had a decent prototype to demo at Khosla ventures -- which means that (pure speculation) 20-35% of the company is owned by the VC's. Ideally the VC's would like to make roughly 3-10X of their investment, which means 15 to 45 million.

           From Adam and Matt's perspective, they have a winner on their hands, and they would want to maximize their ROI on selling Xobni and make sure they never have to work again:-). The longer they wait, the more users they get. And, clearly their pace of innovation is going to be faster than msft.

From MSFT's perspective: 1\. Does Xobni have enough users? 2\. How frequently do people use Xobni? 3\. Can Xobni scale with large mailboxes? 4\. Should MSFT buy it or build something similar?

[From using Xobni for a few months, I can say that it's a kick ass product]

my 2 cents.

<comment><USER17> [off topic] Could you please not use the 'code' tag in the above quote? thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My guess is because Xobni doesn't have widespread adoption(1 mil + users), which I'm sure is on it's way..

</comment><comment><USER18> They bought Lookout with the ostensible purpose of improving Outlook.

I'd guess MS is waiting to see what sort of traction Xobni gets, and if it's solid they'll consider acquiring and/or implementing some of that functionality into Outlook.

</comment><comment><USER19> Because Microsoft prefers to copy/release a crappier version of things in house.

I'm just saying!

</comment><comment><USER20> This comment is INDEPENDENT of my personal feelings about Xobni the product and the Xobni the team:

Outside of a small core community, Xobni news just isn't that relevant. Please save the Xobni posts for actual Xobni news.</comment>


Tips for recruiting great developers - <AUTHOR> http://improvingsoftware.com/2009/09/29/19-tips-for-recruiting-great-developers/ <comment><USER2> 20\. Have something cool to work on. Top talent doesn't want to rewrite your java accounting system (again).

<comment><USER3> I feel you on that and actually had it on the list on my draft version of the post. However, in the final version I decided to limit my tips to things the manager likely had some control over.

What applications the team is going to work on is definitely a factor for how attractive a job is, but it really isn't something you can easily change just to get new people in.

<comment><USER4> If you're starting a new company, though, you might actually want to consider solving a problem that good hackers would find interesting, in order to better recruit them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another tip is to read your job ad and ask what a cynical person may read between the lines. _Particularly_ if there is some standard boilerplate that the HR process tends to add.

During my last job search I was amazed how many companies had ads that told me that I didn't want to apply there.

<comment><USER6> For example?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some great tips (especially 14.) many of which we already use when hiring.

I would add 'Introduce the interviewee to the team and try to emulate their future working environment'.

Talk to the interviewee like you talk to the existing members of your team, ask them questions that presume they're of the same calibre and attitude. If someone doesn't seem comfortable with your workspace, communication methods, and discussing high level technical concepts during an interview that's typically a sign of a poor fit to your company's culture.

</comment><comment><USER8> So far, the only recurrent pattern I've found is this: the best way to recruit great engineering talent, is to include great engineering talent on your founding team.

There _are_ start-ups that begin with marketing/business development folks creating an idea and hiring others to implement it, but usually these places aren't technology companies staffed with top talent -- but are rather shops operating in a niche market, staffed with people who had nowhere else to go (which isn't always a bad thing: it makes these people much more determined to succeed).

"Top talent" joining such a company would be in for a disappointment: they'd find themselves both underutilized (not being able to use their talent and skill) and yet overworked (with tedious tasks).

(I've underwent this experience myself which had left me rather jaded: I was no longer at all interested in working for/starting start-ups and advised others not to as well. Fortunately realizing this "kinds of start-ups" dichotomy changed my attitude for the better).

</comment><comment><USER9>
      13. "Ignore your instincts...consciously decide to go harder
      on the people [you] like and easier on the ones you don't"

that doesn't sound like _ignoring_ your instincts!

<comment><USER10> Haha.. quickly followed up buy #14. "Go with your gut".. I could see what he was trying to say, but there is a problem with 13 and 14.

<comment><USER3> Ignore instincts _during the interview_. Trust instincts when you are down to the _final decision_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have to pick only one, I think #15 should be it.

<comment><USER12> I think #4 is also _very_ important.

Here in Brazil, globo.com hired a stellar team, apparently from a couple years at FISL (kind of OSCON for Latin America)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found my current job through LinkedIn, and it was definitely a plus to be able to see the structure of the organization, and what the people that I would be working with have done in the past.

</comment><comment><USER14> Actually pretty good tips.

</comment><comment><USER15> amen to #10.

</comment><comment><USER16> 1 tip for writing anything on the Internet:

1\. Turn off that annoying snapshots hover-over-link-and-see-a-screenshot crap.

<comment><USER17> 127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com

127.0.0.1 snap.com

127.0.0.1 www.snap.com

127.0.0.1 kontera.com

127.0.0.1 kona.kontera.com

127.0.0.1 www.kontera.com

<comment><USER10> 127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com snap.com www.snap.com kontera.com kona.kontera.com www.kontera.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also, props for #8: "Don't expect to pay median salaries for top talent." I've repeatedly had this conversation with CEOs / hiring managers during the interview process: you want to pay median / 65th percentile salaries for 90+ percentile employees?

Two years ago I actually told the CEO that he was basically trying to hire a really smart person who sucked at math, and I wasn't interested. He was a little shocked, but I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the company's stated desire to hire great talent while not paying top of the market salaries...</comment>


What are a sane set of key bindings between i3wm, tmux, and vim? - <AUTHOR> I'm test-driving using i3wm, tmux, and vim on a regular basis, and am in the process of learning how to use the three of them together. The default key bindings for each of them individually is decently sane, but together they don't really make much sense. I'd like to put together bindings which are designed for the three together. If you have any links which detail keybindings for these programs, I'm interested, or if you have any input on how you've made the keybindings across them mesh, I'd be glad! <comment><USER2> I never found that i3 and tmux were so useful together... i3 gives me 90% of what tmux offers when you configure it right. The only thing that i3 lacks is to detach a session. I don' use that feature often so I'm not missing much.

Also, check this out: [https://github.com/jwilm/i3-vim- focus](https://github.com/jwilm/i3-vim-focus)

<comment><USER3> This exactly. I honestly don't quite get the need for a terminal multiplexer inside a tiling window manager. I also get along with ctrl-Z + fg for 'detaching'.

<comment><USER4> I rarely use tmux on my local machine. But as soon as I ssh in somewhere you will see me `tmux attach` and if that fails `tmux`. Also for unattached sessions hanging around on production servers we kill nightly with a cron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked with that combination for several years, until I switched to Kakoune. (The nice thing about kakoune is that you can connect multiple clients to the same session, instead of doing splits in the editor.) I still use both i3 (Sway when I can) and tmux, at any rate. I recommend avoiding nested heterogenous splits, as much as possible. In other words, the cognitive burden of having vim's "windows" inside tmux panes inside terminal emulators (which can _also_ introduce splits and tabs) inside i3 windows, is just too great. So if I'm running tmux, I try to have it be the only thing running on that i3 screen. If I'm splitting Vim, I try to have it occupy an entire i3 screen or tmux window. If I'm splitting a tmux window into panes, I try not to split vim inside it. And I _never_ use terminal emulator splits or tabs.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is a tmux/vim plugin which let's you move seemlessly between vim and tmux panes within tmux. I use it all the time since I'm running tmux on a remote machine. It would be awesome I'd there was a similar plugin that worked between tmux and i3 over ssh.

Im using windows key for i3 and ctrl space for tmux and i cant say ive ever experienced any problems.

I strictly use i3 for displaying windows at certain monitors and stacking windows

</comment><comment><USER7> Default keybinding for tmux is absolutely awful. Any attempt to press Ctrl-B with either hand immediately leads to strain.

<comment><USER8> Try to remap the useless capslock key to act as a control and you will see how Ctrl+b is a very nice key combo!

<comment><USER7> The same. Even worse in fact, as Caps-B has even larger distance between the keys than Ctrl-B.

Ctrl-T, Ctrl-G, Ctrl-B, Ctrl-Y, Ctrl-H and Ctrl-N should never be used for control key sequences except for something invoked rarely (and certainly not at the beginning of each command).

Besides, Ctrl-B is not even logical. It was decided upon as "well, screen uses Ctrl-A, so we'll use Ctrl-B". Zero concerns about usability.

<comment><USER9> While distance between keys (in this case ctrl and B) is one factor, it's not the only factor. The position of Caps Lock is just to the left of A, which is part of the home row on a QWERTY keyboard, while depending on hand position, control is much harder to get to. I know the curl required for my pinky to engage Control is less comfortable for me than the slight shift to engage Caps Lock.

<comment><USER7> Yes, just have tested it; marginally better, but still not something I'd want to push repeatedly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I moved my i3 arrow keybindings over from jkl; to hjkl. MOD+H does horizontal split, I think? I remapped it to MOD+B to be right next to the vertical split key.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have been using Vim + i3wm for years and have never felt the need to overwrite keybindings; what behaviour would you like to achieve?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't had any problems with vim and i3. i3 behaves sanely. It's adding tmux between them that is muddying the waters.

<comment><USER11> okay. From what I understand there's significant overlap between i3 and tmux - why do you need both?

<comment><AUTHOR> detaching and reattaching sessions.

<comment><USER12> maybe the dtach utility would be helpful.

It's basically just the detach / attach functionality of tmux or screen, without any of the window/frame handling functionality.

(often paired with dvtm but will also work for other setups)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not what you're asking, but I've always had similar problems with tiling window managers. They want to use a lot of keybindings, typically keyed on Alt as the modifier; the problem is that lots of programs such as Emacs and Firefox also want to use Alt bindings.

Eventually I settled on stumpwm because the default bindings didn't interfere. In the same way Emacs commands often start with a C-x followed by some other key (e.g. C-x C-c to quit), stumpwm prefixes every command with C-t. So to split a pane, you do C-t s, then C-t n to jump to the next pane, C-t k to kill the window in the current pane, etc. The only thing it conflicts with is opening a new tab in a browser, and you can accomplish that by hitting 'C-t t' which quickly becomes second nature.

The other alternative is to use a mouse-oriented WM like fvwm or rio, but that's easy and doesn't involve memorizing dozens of key bindings ;)

<comment><USER14> I set my key binding in i3 to the super (windows key), and for the majority of the time it stays out of the way of Emacs, Conkeror, and other programs. I don't really have any issues with it taking up the keybinding "space".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find that it is sometimes inevitable that you will have conflicting key combinations, so I added an empty i3 mode called "pause" which prevents i3 from reading the key combinations until you press Escape.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'm going to do something similar with tmux and i3. Do you have a config you can point me to?

I'm thinking I can have a key combination load a config file, which will include loading the command mode key bindings and some visual indication of entering a command mode; another key combination unloads them and returns to an "insert" mode.

<comment><USER15> Sure, just put this somewhere in your i3 config file:

      mode "pause" {
          bindsym Escape mode "default"
      }

      bindsym $mod+p mode "pause"

That should show a 'pause' indicator in the i3 bar when you press $mod+p, and unpause when you press escape

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like to use C-z for tmux and Super for my window manager, but I really prefer chords over modes (as you can guess, I use emacs rather than vim). In my ideal world, applications would handle Ctrl & Meta, tmux would handle Super and my window manager would handle Hyper. But I don't live in a perfect world.

<comment><USER17> I almost live in this world in a VM. Because of the VM I dont use Super because host seems to capture that before the VM either on Mac or Windows.

CapsLock -> Hyper -> mod3 (used for i3wm) Alt+key (used for tmux) Ctrl+key (as usual in vim)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure tmux makes a lot of sense alongside i3wm. For i3wm + vim consistent navigation check this out: [https://github.com/termhn/i3-vim- nav](https://github.com/termhn/i3-vim-nav)

</comment><comment><USER18> I generally work on i3wm in virtualBox on Mac. Add the Mac key into the mix and there goes one more level of complexity. My only other thing to add is i3 may be the most useful piece of software I have adopted in the last 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER19> I created some dwm-inspired tmux pane management that works well for me: [https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux](https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux)

</comment><comment><USER20> Just throw out tmux and write a custom script for that one feature i3wm doesn't provide? I've yet to come across any key binding issue resulting from vim/i3wm cross-usage.

</comment><comment><USER21> this really depends on you configure it the way you want, I went through various dot files and found few very useful.

one tmux lifesaver is this one for me:

# split panes using | and -

bind | split-window -h

bind - split-window -v

unbind '"'

unbind %

I think you should just explore various dotfiles. does not take much time that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I need to sit down with a list of available behaviors and default keybindings and parallelize them, leaning toward keeping vim's default.

But, even better, I think I can make tmux and i3 modal by mapping config switching to a keybinding. In this way they can be put into a command mode and all keybindings in command mode can be shared. Include a visual indicator and I think it'd work really well.</comment></comment>


Azure's Capacity Woes Hurt GCP, AWS, and All the Rest - <AUTHOR> https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/how-azures-capacity-woes-hurt-gcp-aws-and-all-the-rest/ <comment><USER2> so I guess my decision to go with Azure for the next project is going to have to go back. Now what.

<comment><USER3> All the big providers have had and will continue to have challenges. Any issue that is a product of too much success is a good problem to have. MS are still the biggest player in productivity so pandemic affected them differently.</comment></comment>


Gaffer by GCHQ: A large-scale entity and relation database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gchq/Gaffer <comment><AUTHOR> GCHQ is the UKs signal intelligence and security agency, similar to the NSA. They have open-sourced Gaffer, a graph database framework which provides fast queries across a large number of nodes and vertices.</comment>


Anyone looking for Co-Founders in NYC? (24 Year Old Male Here) - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to join someone or a team to work on a start-up. I had two startups before and they both failed. I have learned so much from each one of them. I know about the ins and outs of startup marketing, project management, and sales. Entrepreneurs never quit, so I want to take the lessons learned and try again. I have tried posting on HN before with little luck. I started my first business at the age of 15 in high school and my family is full of entrepreneurs so entrepreneurship runs deep in my blood. Looking for someone who wants to start their own business just as badly as I do.
I am currently in NYC, and I have bunch of savings saved up that I can survive for at least three years without a job while maintaing my current
Here is a little about me:
-I graduated from one of the top undergraduate business schools in America.
-I am willing to work my ass off including weeknights, weekends, or whatever it takes.
-I have worked at Google and Salesforce in San Francisco for about a year and a half prior to moving to NYC. I am a 24 year old male.
-I am really good at people's skills, presenting, networking, and business development. I have high emotional intelligence and am pretty easy to get along with.
-I can SELL! I am also well-read.
-I am a go-getter, and do not need to be told to do things. I literally can do everything and am a fast learner.
I am looking for someone who is extremely dedicated, hungry, and willing work their asses off to make a successful startup. If you are action-oriented, hacker-type, and are looking for a non-technical co-founder that fits the description above then please contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com. I would go more in-depth about my background and experience but HN has a character limit for posts so please contact me.
-Matt <comment><USER2> this is pretty cool that you got to the top of hacker news with this post as a lot of investors and start ups are always reading hacker news. I am actually looking for a co founder for my company somebody that has different skill sets then me . I am a developer living in new york I already have a demo created and have I THINK A PRETTY GOOD GAME PLAN. that I will not post here as I am not ready to release to the public especially hacker news. But I am willing to meet and discuss what I am working on. What I am looking for is someone to help me take my site to the next level. this includes helping me bring users and help with getting funding. If you'r interested I am always willing to meet and greet. it wouldn't be that hard if you live in new york. if anything at least we can discuss some idea's and talk about your prior startups that have failed. email me at firstname.lastname@example.com my name is richard

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't mind me asking, how much can you survive off for 3 years in NYC?

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of aol chats: a/s/l?

</comment><comment><USER5> Learning to code couldn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER6> _I am a 24 year old male._

But, are you a 24 year old human male?

You are well-read, but are you well-red?

You don't need to be told to do things, but can you be told to do things, or are you too prideful to take direction?

Sadly, the only way to get people to believe you is "show, don't tell." Build/make/do then cry out "join me."</comment>


URL rewriting with GitHub Pages - <AUTHOR> http://lea.verou.me/2016/11/url-rewriting-with-github-pages/ <comment><USER2> I'm aware that Lea has done a lot for the web but for someone who's site header says "Life at the bleeding edge of _web standards_ " (emphasis mine) this is frankly a terrible solution.

HTTP status codes mean things.</comment>


9th Circuit: It's a federal crime to visit a website after being told not to - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crime-to-visit-a-website-after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the crazy UK ruling about forbidding people to link to certain web-pages at the request of the party linked to.</comment>


Is Google Instant a Flop? Google Trends seems to say so - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+instant&ctab=0&geo=all&geor=all&date=mtd&sort=0

<comment><USER2> A search for "google instant" on Google Trends doesn't really reflects consumer reaction, right? People searched for it a lot when it was news but now people just use it because it's awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> That might be true, but the news reference volume should show an increasing trend- or at least, some 'bounces' - which is not the case yet!

Also look at the magnitude of drop- from search index volume 25 to just above 0! That's a pretty drastic fall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From the other 'instant' clones out there, including youtube instant, and hacker news instant, I would not consider it to be a failure.

Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

After all, Youtube instant supposedly had traffic in millions, and the chap was offered a job. Was that a kind of PR ploy? May be. May be not.

However, I would be interested to see how Google instant impacts Google Trends.

</comment><comment><USER4> Were these searches for the phrase "Google Instant" done with Google Instant? Probably.

This metric makes no sense in gauging success.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true that mere searches for Google instant might not directly be a measure of it's success. But most certainly, it is a measure of the level of interest sustained.

a)Even if the phrase "Google instant" were to be done using Google Instant, wouldn't Google have done something to incorporate it in the trends? (User clicks on links, right?)

b)Google Instant was not released to the general public all at one go.It was done in phases. So if it really did have a viral effect, and sustained interest, the graph would not be a spike and a fall-off.

Take the case of Google wave- Here 's the Google trend of October 2009, (It was released on Sep 30)

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+wave&ctab=0&ge...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+wave&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=2009-10&sort=0)

Compare the news reference volume of this and Google instant. Google instant seems to have a sharper fall in news reference volume than even Google wave! This has to be linked in some way to the number of people using/ enjoying Google instant! My hunch is that, there haven't been as many takers for Instant, as Google might have wanted-- at least,not yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Noticed a thread on HN about some 30 year old guy who didnt like Google instant. Anyone has a link to that thread? However, there hasnt been a single verdict yet...It's been just 20 days since launch!</comment>


Politics in the Facebook Era: Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Elections [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/389-2018_redoano.pdf <comment><USER2> I think this paper's methods are suspect. They are 'measuring' politic spend/targeting in 2016 by assuming that price increase for a specific targeting segment = more targeted political spend to that measured audience. But political spending is a tiny % of FB spending. I strongly doubt this method gives any actual insight, first into what/who these campaigns spent/targeted in 16, and second on the persuasion effect of that spend. Also how would you control to only FB ad exposure effect using the survey data mentioned in the paper...

I actually buy FB ads for political candidates as a big part of my business. We've done some 'lift/persuasion' type experiments where we do 1:1 targeting with a control group and do an IVR to measure changes pre and post exposure. This feels like the best way to do this experiment - but that would require academics to work with actual spenders (or to spend themselves).

I actually really wanted to use FB's new attribution reporting with voting results this year but our accounts weren't given access until like a couple days before election and it wont let me look back in 'time' (e.g. we uploaded 'votes' as a purchase with the voted date timestamp, but FB will only show attribution window from date we setup the reporting tool, which is after the votes...).

</comment><comment><USER3> > [O]nline political campaigns targeted on users' gender, geographic location, > and political ideology had a significant effect in persuading undecided > voters to support Mr Trump, and in persuading Republican supporters to turn > out on polling day.

No mention of any targeting beyond what has been on user's profile for a decade, and it transparently used by most ads.

> [W]e use variations in advertising prices across political audiences as a > measure of the intensity of Facebook political campaigning.

Political advertising represents less than 5% of ads on Facebook at the peak of a campaign, in swing states: I'm puzzled you can measure anything. Actually:

> As illustrated in Figure 4, average worldwide prices sharply rose during the > last two months before the elections (an average increase of around 50 USD > cents, which corresponds to about a 25 percent increase in prices), and > steadily dropped over the three months after the election date.

That's unlikely to be the election unless people spend money for three months after. That's more likely to be US Holiday Season.

<comment><USER4> > No mention of any targeting beyond what has been on user's profile for a > decade,

The story about Cambridge Anal. was specifically that they had build a dataset that could infer a lot of information, such as sexual orientation and political affiliation from a small set of apparently harmless information.

> Political advertising represents less than 5%

A market's reaction to such variation can be widely different. For bread, it's probably nothing. If it's the last batch of the only medication that is effective against some just-discovered deadly pandemic, the price could rise from %1 to a billion.

> That's unlikely to be the election unless people spend money for three > months after. That's more likely to be US Holiday Season.

The chart & data here are average over 40 different worldwide elections. Unless elections cluster around certain dates, the data should be pretty well spread out over the year.

<comment><USER3> > The story about Cambridge Anal. was specifically that they had build a > dataset that could infer a lot of information, such as sexual orientation > and political affiliation from a small set of apparently harmless > information.

Yeah. That story is false. They used magazine subscriptions and car model. Source: talked to the employees.

> The chart & data here are average over 40 different worldwide elections. > Unless elections cluster around certain dates, the data should be pretty > well spread out over the year.

I'm fairly confident no political advertising is significant _after_ the election in most of them. The big secret here is that US ads still represent the largest share of Facebook's market and that commercial markets have a strong yearly pattern. I don't know how they averaged to get a ratio number, but I would compare years with and without elections.

And, yes, elections tend to be around the same date in most countries (except, notoriously, the UK): it doesn't have to be the same in each country for an aggregated commercial pattern to be prevalent.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Could Have Bailed Out Greece---Twice - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/apple-bailed-greece-twice/

<comment><USER2> Why would you though?</comment>