Ask HN: What is the best Economics read? - <AUTHOR>

Which books/online lectures etc would you recommend to understand detailed Economics like how it works locally/globally, GDP, debt, govt bonds etc <comment><USER2> It really depends on what level of Economics understanding you currently possess. For a complete newbie to economics, I would definitely recommend:

[http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory- Mankiw/...](http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory- Mankiw/dp/0538453052/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1323964558&sr=1-4)

It is a solid book, and you cannot go wrong with it. However, if you want a more thorough understanding of economics, with the mathematics laid out etc. then there are other more advanced economics text for that. Also, I think, given the topics you highlighted, you want to understand more about Macroeconomics, as such these MIT lectures might help:

<http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/>

Also, remember is Economics, like in any subject, there is wide diversity of viewpoints. The best way to choose a side, I feel, is to really look deep into the a topic, delve a bit into the math and make informed decisions as to what gels with your point of view. Ping me if you need any more resources

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes, the MIT lectures. I should have known that. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it is Economics in one lesson you should begin with. Its available for free here: <http://mises.org/books/economics_in_one_lesson_hazlitt.pdf>

It's a classic and easy to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty small text :). Going to begin with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend a commonly ignored part of economics and that is the economics of goods with zero marginal cost of production. The two key texts in this area are:

Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" \-- This text is a bit dated (2005) and the first two chapters couldn't be more dry and boring, but after that the economic discussion in the book about how economics changes when the marginal cost of product reaches zero or near-zero is fascinating.

Hal Varian's "Information Rules" \-- This book covers the same ground at Yochai's book, but is less academic in tone. FYI, Varian is Google's chief economist.

<comment><AUTHOR> You totally sold your FYI. Noted down in the list. Once I am done with some basics, this book is definitely going to be read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Investopedia has tutorials, including a small handful on economics. A quick way to get oriented before studying further and deeper.

<http://www.investopedia.com/university/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if you're into it, but an entry level economics class at your local college / university. You'll learn how to draw supply and demand curves, different ways of calculating GDP, how oligopolies and monopolies curves look, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at this point. I am a developer and I run a consultancy with one more guy, so I am generally short of hours. But I will see how much I can grasp on my own and then may be consider something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The Economist_ magazine.

<comment><USER8> How far does one have to dig down in the archive to understand the basics?

<comment><USER7> A year's subscription is probably enough.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How important is .com for branding and customer acquisition? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to register a domain for a product ending with .com and its taken and the current owner is asking for exorbitant fees. How important is .com for branding & customer acquisition ? <comment><USER2> TLD matters to a certain extent. What is your main woe is that the name itself is already taken, so particular TLD (.com or any other) doesn't matter that much. Which TLD to pick is entirely different concern. It largely depends on your target market. Unless your target market is niche specific, tech savvy or limited to a certain geography, .com is a given.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say the target market is b2b tech savvy. Is there a risk in proceeding with .io, .in or .ly ?

<comment><USER3> .in avoid. Depends on the space. If ai use .ai. .io .ly could work as general hype tld

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Make sure .com owner doesn't hold related name copyrights and trademarks.

Then - the typical concern is that your potential customers will start typing "YourBrand".com instead of "YourBrand".blah and .com owner might as well decide to redirect traffic to competitor or do other unhelpful activities.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depends on your audience.

If you're marketing to tech savvy customers, probably won't matter much

Plenty of apps use .ly, .io and the like. No big deal

If the rest of your branding and marketing is good, probably not a decision to lose sleep over

But again depends on your audience

</comment><comment><USER6> Could it be easier to change the name of the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately a lot of effort has been put into finalizing the name. We are exploring.</comment></comment>


SRGMediaPlayer for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SRGSSR/SRGMediaPlayer-iOS <comment><AUTHOR> I've found this amazing media player library on MIT license with 988(!) commits and I totally don't understand why it has only 18 stars.</comment>


"Eeny, meeny, miny, mo" and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/16/losing-count/ <comment><USER2> In my childhood neighborhood, we didn't let the tiger go, and we didn't repeat the initial line.

"Eenie, meanie, miney, mo Catch a tiger by his toe If he hollers make him pay fifty dollars ev'ry day"

It wasn't so much to "count", as we counted with the named of numbers. It was applied as a pseudorandom selector, with the assumption that the person counting hadn't thought through the math to the point of knowing which child would be "it" for the next game of tag. Whoever starting counting around the circle first got to point to the "eenie" person, then around the circle. Sometimes this would be followed by another rhyme and there were a few options for that.

<comment><USER3> For us it was:

Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by his toe / If he hollers, let him go / My mother said to pick the very best one / And you are not it

I wonder if it's a regional difference -- I'm from Arizona.

<comment><USER4> The variations with those kinds of elaborations towards the end always seem more amenable to ad-libbing more or less syllables (like "very", or "are not" versus "aren't") to change the result when you see how it'll turn out.

<comment><USER3> You could try to play tricks like saying "mom" instead of "mother" or something, but anyone with any sense of rhythm would have noticed it was the wrong number of beats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Similar one in Croatian, where the entire rhyme consists of nonense words:

        En Ten Tini,
        Sava Raka Tini,
        Sava Raka Tika Taka
        Bija Baja Buf.

It kind of looks related to the English/Welsh "Yan, tan, tethera" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera)) mentioned in the article, which is a bit surprising to me since Croatian (and southern-slavic in general) languages haven't borrowed much English words before the second half of 20th century and this is certainly older.

<comment><USER6> Yan tan tethera is usually postulated to be of Celtic origin (it usually uses "dick" for ten, which is presumably a cognate of the Welsh "deg")

IIRC the celts moved all across Europe, but that pushes the timeframe back by two millennia or so

<comment><USER7> Deg seems probable to be a mutation of "dec" from the Roman occupation, ie adopted from Latin? Transliterated Cymraeg numbers (in South Wales) go "een, die, tree".

Old Welsh appeared just before the mediaeval period, coming from the common Brythonic tongue(s) AFAIK. There's a lot of Latin, not all recognisable: _fenestr_ , is easy to see; _ysbyty_ (iz-bit-ee, "hospital") less clear due to modification to a supposed origin of " _ty_ " (meaning house).

Interestingly you can find some English words, often again heavily mutated, that no longer exist in English (see eg [https://archive.org/stream/englishelementin00parruoft/#page/...](https://archive.org/stream/englishelementin00parruoft/#page/13/mode/1up;) don't have my other references handy).

Edit: one other reference that's to hand, [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWpbDAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA335&o...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWpbDAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA335&ots=CKH7D1HisI&dq=barclod&pg=PA336#v=onepage&q&f=false).

<comment><USER8> > adopted from Latin

Maybe just indo-european in origins? Yes, it looks like 'dec'. See singularity2001's answer.

<comment><USER7> Don't think that covers it so well. The area we now call Wales was occupied by the Romans at which time the official language of the region was Latin. The Brythonic that was present across [at least Southern, ie below Scotland,] Britain clearly then adopted loanwords. However, it's hard sometimes to see if they were adopted in to the Briton's language, adopted in to English and then in to Cymraeg, or adopted in to English from Norman-French and then in to Cymraeg. The earliest non-fragmentary Cymraeg documents are from a couple of hundred years after the Norman conquest AFAIK.

Clearly it seems naively to be Indo-European, but specifying Latin origin gives a bit more nuance: it could be wrong nuance! I'm afraid I'm not learned enough to know if it's Cymraeg loaned from English via Norman-French from Latin, or if it's direct, or indeed some other more or less tortuous route.

<comment><USER9> Thing is, it's "dekm" in proto-Indo-European - and for a word that simple and basic, it's likely that it was already well-established as a direct derivative in Celtic before Latin had a chance to influence it. Most other IE languages also inherited it directly - e.g "deka" in Greek, "deset" in Slavic, "dasa" in Sanskrit etc (the s/k difference is satem/centum). It would be weird if Celtic was special.

<comment><USER7> I'm well out of my depth as I'm sure you can tell, but I think the phrase is _porque no los dos_?

Sources suggest _dekam_ is Common Brythonic, but that doesn't mean the Old Welsh _dec_ (now _deg_ in Cymraeg) didn't come from Latin?

Wouldn't it be weird if mutation of words in Celtic/Brythonic and Latin happened identically over time. Of course the similarity through earlier common ancestry of counting words would facilitate such a move.

Thanks for your input though, my suggestion was supposed to be tentative as I know there are Latin loan words in Cymraeg from Old Welsh.

Do you know whence comes the support for "dekam" being well-established in Celtic via IE, is it largely based on phonemic evidence?

<comment><USER9> I don't know the exact etymology of this word in Celtic - just mentioning some other languages with a similar relationship to PIE, but not necessarily with the same degree of influence by Latin, for comparison.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mutation of the words happened identically over time"? The Latin for "ten" is "decem" \- it didn't drop the "m" (hence also "decimus", "decimatio" etc). Most Romance languages did drop it eventually - but that came later, and in any case those languages wouldn't be in a position to influence Welsh.

FWIW, I don't think it would be all that surprising for related but diverged languages to evolve in a similar way. Sure, they may have developed some different laws governing those changes since the divergence - but they will also have some common laws from their shared ancestry. And there's "convergent evolution" of languages, as well. Although it would be interesting to find out if this particular change is really governed by some common rule, or some rule that independently arose in two different branches, or it's just a curious coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We said: "eeny, meany, miny, mo; catch a nigger by his (its?) toe; if it squeals let it go; eeny, meany, miny, mo" sometimes adding things like "O, U, T, spells out".

FWIW I had no idea "nigger" could refer to a person and certainly didn't use it in that way. But then no non-Europeans lived in our British village.

For some reason I recollect thinking it was about catching stickleback. Maybe the only thing I could conceive catching by its 'toe' (ie end), as you have to avoid the spines when catching them down in the sluice.

Having kids now, I find it interesting that at a disparate area of the UK they have very similar rhymes, but with notable differences.

<comment><USER10> I made the same assumption about "nigger", that it was some kind of fish that could be caught. We did have several races in my class, but I wasn't aware of it.

But this was most popular at my primary school:

      Ip dip, dog shit
      Fucking bastard, dirty git
      You are not it

There was a clean version, "ip dip sky blue...", we only used it if an adult was listening. I've forgotten the rest.

Also:

      There's a party on the hill, can you come?
      Bring your own bread and butter and a bun.
      Who is your best friend? [child says a name]
      T H O M A S
      You are out!

And

      Ippy dippy dation
      My operation
      How many buses
      In a London station?
      [child gives number]
      1 2 3 4 5
      You are out.

For both of these, some quick arithmetic could ensure I was selected, amid accusations that this wasn't fair.

<comment><USER11>
      There's a party on the hill, would you like to come? (Yes.)
      Then bring a bottle of rum-tum-tum. (Can't afford it.)
      Then pack your bags and get lost.

Most couldn't cope if you deviated from the script in your responses, but if the nominated child _could_ apparently afford the bottle of rum-tum-tum it might go on to a bag of silver and increasingly obscure items. But mostly the counter would just tell you to pack your bags and get lost whatever you said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had this for a few years:

      Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
      Is deterministic, so—

I still need to write the last two lines. Ideally "stochastic" will make its way in there; it can fit the metre.

<comment><USER12> How about

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo

Is deterministic, so

To make the outcome more elastic

Let's try a rhyme that's more stochastic

(Optimally, the speaker would add a variable number of nonsense syllables in the last line. "Let's try a rhyme lalalalalalala that's more stochastic".)

<comment><USER13> Lose "Let's" \- better scansion.

<comment><USER14> Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,

Is deterministic, so

Make the outcome more elastic

With a rhyme that's more stochastic.

(You're welcome.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's about the Denmark Zimbabwe connection?

Denmark:

        Ene, mene, ming, mang,
        Kling klang,
        Osse bosse bakke disse,
        Eje, veje, vaek.

And Zimbabwe:

        Eena, meena, ming, mong,
        Ting, tay, tong,
        Ooza, vooza, voka, tooza,
        Vis, vos, vay.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here is the 1859 version of kids arguing over the right rhyme: [https://books.google.com/books?id=T80XAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA254](https://books.google.com/books?id=T80XAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA254)

 _Or, if that does n 't suit, then take_

 _' Eeny, meeny, mony mite;_

 _Pesskalana, bona, strike;_

 _Parago, walk. '"_

 _" Pooh!" said Frank; "that aint right, nor anywhere near it. This is the way I learned that one:--_

 _Eeny, meeny, mony, my;_

 _Pistolanee, bony, sly;_

 _Argy, dargy, walk._

 _The other boys all objected to this version of the saying, but Frank insisted that if it was not the right one, it was certainly the best._

The oldest versions google books records reached print in 1855: [https://books.google.com/books?id=v4IkAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA120](https://books.google.com/books?id=v4IkAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA120)

 _" Eeny, meeny, moany, mite,_

 _Butter, lather, boney, strike,_

 _Hair, bit, frost neck,_

 _Harrico, barrico, we, wo, wack. "_

and

 _" Eeny, meeny, tipty, te,_

 _Teena, Dinah, Domine,_

 _Hocca, proach, Domma, noach,_

 _Hi, pon, tus. "_

By 1888 there was a whole book on the topic, and the modern (pre-tiger) version had taken hold: [https://books.google.com/books?id=uH8MAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA46](https://books.google.com/books?id=uH8MAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA46)

 _Apparently the doggerel which is the favourite among American children to- day is the senseless jingle:_

 _Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,_

 _Catch a nigger by the toe!_

 _If he hollers let him go!_

 _Eeny, meeny, miny, mo._

</comment><comment><USER17> And here's a French one:

        Am, stram, gram,
        Pic et pic et colégram,
        Bour et bour et ratatam,
        Am, stram, gram.

I could definitely see myself getting lost down the rabbit-hole trying to find out the origins of these things.

<comment><USER15> Did the ancient oracles use hexagrams or just tripods?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Possibly related:

Ein Menetekel (Bible) [0] מנא מנא תקל ופרסין MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN <> Aen Taen Tethera Peddera

Ene Mene miste, es rappelt in der Kiste. Ene Mene Meck Und Du bist weg. Ene Mene Mu und dran bist Du (German)

Enenene maskim gul-a-meš [1](Sumerian adjuration / invocation / conjuration / evocation / incantation ? )

Sumerian numbers AŠ (1) 𒀸 MIN (2) 𒋰 *EŠ (3) 𒀼

[0] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menetekel](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menetekel) "The writing on the wall" [1] DELITZSCH Grundzüge der Sumerischen Grammatik

</comment><comment><USER18> I remember in primary school in the 80's all the kids were actually using "nigger". I went along with it, I didn't know what a nigger was.

I was in north Brisbane, Australia.

<comment><USER19> Down here in Melbourne in the 90's, we used Tigger, as in the character from Winnie the Pooh. It seems like a fair mid-point between the two most common variants of this rhyme.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here in Chicagoland in the 80's we had the Eenie meanie of the article, but also this variant:

Eenie, meanie, hippa-teeny A la la-la booba-leenie Atchie, katchie, booba- latchie Out goes you

Then a whole slew of other rhymes used for picking 'it' in a game of tag, hide and seek, scatter beans, kick the can, etc.

<comment><USER21> I never heard that variant but I just read it to my kids and as soon as I got to "atchie katchi" my 16 y/o daughter shot up and grabbed her 14 y/o brother and the two of them broke into a paddy-cake like routine to this:

 _eeny meeny sesalini ooh ah tumbolini achi achi liberachi i love you

take a peach take a plumb take a sip of bubble gum no peach no plumb no sip of bubble gum

saw you with your boyfriend last night how did you know i peeked through the window nosy didn't take a bath dirty stepped on a baby must be crazy that's why they call me

eeny meeny sesalini ooh a tumbolini achi achi liberachi i love you_

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Exists in Italian too, although the wikipedia article cites research perhaps linking it to something in Latin:

[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambarab%C3%A0_cicc%C3%AC_cocc%...](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambarab%C3%A0_cicc%C3%AC_cocc%C3%B2)

        « Ambarabà ciccì coccò
        tre civette/galline/scimmiette sul comò
        che facevano l'amore
        con la figlia del dottore;
        il dottore si ammalò:
        ambarabà ciccì coccò! »

The text is a bit more risque than in English. "ambarabà ciccì coccò" is the nonsense part.

        three little owls (civette) on the dresser
        that were making love
        to the doctor's daughter
        the doctor got sick

<comment><USER22> This is great! I don't know any Italian, but that won't stop me from hazarding a guess that the word _cocco_ perhaps may be derived from _coco_ , which in turn reminded me of a translation given in Hofstadter's _Le Ton Beau de Marot_ (p 52b). Here it is:

      Mia coco,
      Io ti do
      Il buondi;
      Stare qui
      Ti fa mal.
      L'ospedal
      Lascerai:
      Aprirai
      II porton.
      Con passion
      Fuggirai
      Dai tuoi guai:
      Stando a me,
      Cosi e.
      Non poltrir!
      E perir
      L'indugiar!
      Va'a mangiar
      Un boccon
      Di bonbon.
      Se ristai,
      Smagrirai
      Di pallor
      E languor.
      O Gesu,
      Pensa Tu
      Al suo pro.
      Mia coco!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This counting-out game is known as the Josephus Problem, and dates back many centuries. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem). I have a wood-block printed Japanese textbook from around 1700 with a good account of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER24> Lexicon Valley did a great podcast on this subject.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/09/the_invisible_language_of_nursery_rhymes_on_this_episode_of_lexicon_valley.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> As with many others, "Eeny, meeny ..." was for selection. I remember using the School House Rock lyrics/rhyme for counting by 5 for counting (Who's not ready, holler I) during "Hide and Seek".

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting we said nigger but we're told to use possum cause that was a bad word.

Always assumed it was a localisation but it seems also multicountry.</comment>


Mochi Media Acquired By Shanda Games For $80 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/mochi-media-acquired-by-shanda-games/

<comment><USER2> The TechCrunch article doesn't mention it, but Mochi has made some major contributions to Python/Erlang open source and Erlang evangelism for quite a while, including the MochiWeb HTTP server: <http://code.google.com/p/mochiweb/>

<comment><USER3> Yep, agreed and I believe they created the MochiKit and SimpleJSON projects as well.

FWIW, MochiWeb is also used by CouchDB and some other Erlang projects too.

<comment><USER4> as well as facebook chat

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations to Bob Ippolito, a true hacker and co-founder & CTO of Mochi Media and a guy behind many open-source projects such as MochiWeb, PyTyrant and MochiKit :-)

<comment><USER6> I'll toss in my congratulations to Bob and to Jameson and Ryan as well. Ryan doesn't get a lot of credit, but he's one of the few people out there who can pull off a Web 2.0 design that's clearly identifiable as such but isn't derivative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats to Heyzap, which competes with them.

<comment><USER8> How is it beneficial to Heyzap?

<comment><USER9> Successful competitors are God's way of signalling that there is money to be made in a field. Most markets are not winner take all and can support several firms, so if you're trying to demonstrate to a skeptical observer that your idea has value, you can say a) "Look at X, they're successful." and b) "You can't buy X at any attractive price, but happily for you, we're still cheap. Comparatively speaking."

That assumes you care about acquisitions. If you don't, though, same deal except you get to convince yourself. If one of my competitors mentioned they're making, say, a few million, that would be great news for me: it would mean there's a few million to be made. (I used to think my entire market generated probably $100,000 in sales a year. I'm thinking that probably substantially underestimates the current total, and think the size of the pie can still be increased.)

<comment><USER10> I agree with the benefits mentioned. There are probable drawbacks too, however.

Usually the acquirer has some strengths that will expand the market penetration of the company being acquired, in addition to larger coffers to invest. This could mean tougher competition for their competitors (except when the acquirer focuses on different market segments from these competitors.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Take a Bill Gates-Style "Think Week" to Recharge Your Thinking (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://lifehacker.com/take-a-bill-gates-style-think-week-to-recharge-your-t-5670380 <comment><USER2> This isn't magic because he's a billionaire. It's called a holiday and we've known about it for some time.</comment>


Show HN: Mapping travellers staying in hostels around the world - <AUTHOR> https://hostelhawk.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Creator here: I built this while travelling as a solo digital nomad for the last 1.5 years. It's been useful to me to meet other travellers, so I decided to release it to the public. I would greatly appreciate any feedback from the HN community on how to improve upon it. Thanks!</comment>


Why Write in English? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/04/18/why-not-write-in-foreign-language/ <comment><USER2> The article is about writing, in the higher sense of book authoring, in a second language and the emotional issues related to that. I can't fully identify with it, as the most I've written in my second language are posts and comments like this one.

But there's something to be said about the connection between a language and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. I believe they form an ensemble, so much so that our emotional response to one is inevitably tied to the other.

For example, I spend more time reading and writing in English than in my native language, which happens to be Italian, even though I live and work in Italy. This has certainly a lot to do with the subject of my education, job and interests (guess what...) but I cannot exclude that it's also based on a certain feeling of "otherness," or alienation, from my country's mainstream culture.

That being said, I do consider contemporary English to be technically superior to Italian in almost all respects. It's easier, more flexible, more expressive, more concise, and more complete. The only exception would be its utter, inexcusable, almost criminal, irregular spelling.

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

<comment><USER3> > That being said, I do consider contemporary English to be technically > superior to Italian in almost all respects. It's easier, more flexible, more > expressive, more concise, and more complete. The only exception would be its > utter, inexcusable, almost criminal, irregular spelling.

For German I consider it exactly the other way round. German is much more exact: Long compound substantives are very easy to express in German but difficult in English (in this sense I consider German as more expressive and concise). The grammar in German might be ugly and unforgiving (it really could be simplified - just my opinion) but makes it much more complicated to express sentences that can be misunderstood. English might be easy to learn at the beginning, but becoming really good in English takes a horrible amount of time. For example it is in my opinion much easier to become good in French than in English. Additionally there is no really "standard English" as there is in French or in German (Hochdeutsch). What is actually the authoritative ressource for English to clear up what spelling, punctuation etc. really is the correct one?

<comment><USER4> The correct one is whichever works best at the time. In English it is, or use to be, common to use different registers for different occasions.

<comment><USER3> How can one even say then that a spelling a punctuation is wrong in English if there is no authoritative ressource with which one can answer the question?

<comment><USER5> as long as you are consistent, it really doesn't matter. Even in academic or technical writing (i am in Australia), you can use american spellings or british spellings and noone really cares. Perhaps you have to let go of the "one true way" of spelling/grammar, if things seem to work fine without it.

<comment><USER3> I rather think about school: How can teachers even mark wrong spelling if there is no standardized spelling? The same holds for punctuation of course, for which up to now I really could not find any ressource with authoritative character where to put commas in the English language.

<comment><USER6> There are specific guides within certain contexts. An educational setting may use the Meriam-Webster dictionary as the definitive for spelling, and the English textbook as the definitive for punctuation. Outside of specific contexts, there is no absolutely correct way of doing things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My impression (and I believe that it's a good thing) is that English is swallowing languages word for word. Polish for example - Poland is a country pretty much positively obsessed with US, especially the older people. There's a lot of concepts that we literally take over from English, for example "pro choice". We're living in an increasingly Western global culture. It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages.

<comment><USER8> >> It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages.

What languages, outside of neighboring ones, are being heavily influenced by Chinese?

<comment><USER7> I'm saying that it's surprising to me given their population and economic force. This is the moment I realized that they have gone a completely different direction.

<comment><USER9> Is the initial comment

"It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages."

missing a 'not'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Straightforward reason: English is now the true globally significant language.

Another point, English is the most prestigious language in most parts of the world. In Asia, where I am from, English has already become or is fast becoming the most prestigious language. So, you gain lots of more respect, larger audience and more consequent benefits if you write in English rather than in any other language.

It may be bad for many other languages but that's one of the facts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Writing in your non-native language:

* Czech-born Milan Kundera started to write in French after having moved to France.

* Jack Kerouac was born to French-Canadian parents and brought up speaking French; yet, he wrote in English.

 _" French novelist Proust said that a novelist that wants to have a defined style should write in a foreign language,"_ said Algerian-Italian writer Tahar Lamri. _" That's because a foreign language forces the author to hunt for the proper imagery because they don't have an extensive vocabulary at their disposition."_ (From DW's article "Non-native authors bring fresh perspective to language", [http://www.dw.com/en/non-native-authors-bring-fresh- perspect...](http://www.dw.com/en/non-native-authors-bring-fresh-perspective- to-language/a-14910840))

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra More interesting question - why sing in English?

There is a huge number of bands around the world who end up singing in English, as if they never considered using their native tongue. And it's not that they have anything unique to say in English! You could make something that stands out but you end up sounding like a clone of clones.

This puzzles me to no end.

<comment><USER12>
       This puzzles me to no end.

The answer is economics. When you want to sell a product, it makes sense to fine-tune it as much as possible to the largest, most profitable market, and then re-use the product infrastructure (e.g. production, design, marketing, delivery) to other markets.

For a very long time, starting with the British empire, the largest, most affluent market has been English speaking, and since the end of WWII it was the US.

This lead to the emergence of a US-focussed music industry that resells its goods in the rest of the world . A similar phenomenon is at play in other domains like films. As US customers can always easily access products tailored to their preferences, which includes a strong preference for English-language lyrics, it has become economically essentially impossible to be globally successful with (non-instrumental) pop music that is not sung in English. This is a self-reinforcing phenomenon.

Interestingly, the dominance of English as voice of pop-music, evaporates as soon as instrumental music is considered: Techno, House, DnB, Dubstep etc shows no dominance of native speakers of English.

For a variety of reasons, I expect that English will not be as dominant in the future:

\- Rise China as biggest, most affluent unified market for pop-music. This will lead to a preference of the Chinese customer for music. This market will be so large and lucrative as to compensate for the lack of Chinese as second- language, which is powerful for English.

\- The massive lowering of the cost of music production, marketing and (in particular) distribution. The more cheaply we can produce music, the more it makes economic sense to target niche markets.

<comment><USER13> China is already a huge factor in film - remember that awful Red Dawn remake where the North Koreans were inexplicably invading the West Coast? The original script had the antagonists being the ChiComs, which makes more sense (at least as much as the original did...). The studio decided that wouldn't play in Peking[1], and those sweet, sweet international box office dollars won out.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_it_play_in_Peoria%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_it_play_in_Peoria%3F)

<comment><USER12> Agreed.

The rise of China can be seen in other markets too, e.g. luxury car makers increasingly factor-in Chinese taste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> English is a hub language. I travel outside of the US, I meet the locals, I meet other foreigners also visiting, and chances are we all speak English.

Learning a foreign language is a time consuming and expensive endeavor. If you are not blessed to have English as your native language, and you are struggling financially but interested in upping your skill level or marketability, which language do you study? Which language makes the most sense?

In many cases, the answer to those questions is English. I also pity students of English. It's a horrible, horrible language as a student. I say this being a native English speaker with moderate literacy in Japanese and Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very similar reason the answer to "why are manhole covers round" is that manholes are round; because you want to make money by selling your English test to the large number of people who read English.

</comment><comment><USER16> Network effect.</comment>


How to Code Your Own CryptoKitties-Style Game on Ethereum - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/loom-network/how-to-code-your-own-cryptokitties-style-game-on-ethereum-7c8ac86a4eb3 <comment><USER2> Pretty detailed explanation, I was particularly interested in the ERC-721 tokens. Unique items on the blockchain is going to be a big new area</comment>


Ask HN: How to find a marketing/sales partner?  - <AUTHOR> I've been running out of time developing since I've been doing a lot of marketing/sales type things. Seems like a very inefficient use of my skills. Any tips on how to find a marketing/sales partner/pair? Are you a marketing/sales guru looking to pair up with a developer in software type sales, drop me a line in my profile (note I'm not interested in building major corporation but rather self-viable income). <comment><USER3> It really depends on what you are building. If your domain is say Retail, then you should try and find someone with that domain expertise. I am of course assuming that you are a techie and do not have much experience in that domain.

One source of such partnerships that people often overlook are - <USER2> customers. If you have a customer who is really passionate about the project, there is a chance he might be interested in working on it with you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Though it might not fit your requirements, can I suggest SideProjectors (disclaimer, I maintain the site)? It's a market place for side projects and several developers have used a site to find a co-founder/collaborator.

[http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com)

It's an incredibly difficult thing to find a right partnership though whether it's a marketing person, tech co-founder etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm looking for one myself as well :) Seems to be a rare species (marketing/sales guru willing to partner early)

<comment><USER6> Hey I do marketing consulting but am currently open to partnering up with someone as "the marketing guy." I'm curious about ApBox -- looks like an idea with legs. I couldn't find your contact info, so shoot me an email if you want to chat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You might want to consider looking at Linkedin, or the best way is to check within your network first.

</comment><comment><USER8> Same here. Especially for ios apps :-)</comment>


CES Is the World's Greatest Hardware Show Stuck in a Software Era - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/01/ces-2013-software/ <comment><USER2> The real magic of CES isn't any new products that come out, it's the relationships. A supplier meets a manufacturer. Sometime later it shows up in the new must have gadget.

<comment><USER3> That's the point... There aren't any new must have gadgets anymore, because they're now apps.

<comment><USER2> The apps have to run on something. Apple is one of the largest companies in the world by making some of that hardware. Yet, Apple's hardware is assembled by another company and is made up on components from hundreds of other companies, most you have never heard of. Those companies are all at CES and are all fighting unseen battles for the next generation of electronics. There's no need to have a flashy keynote or booth babes, but the back conference rooms are where the real CES is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I cannot really understand is why would you go there to make new releases of hardware when _everyone_ is doing exactly the same bombastic releases. It becomes almost like a cook fight, and ultimately it dilutes your news.

I think what Apple (and also now Google, Facebook..) does by having their own event, it's a much better approach. Of course this is something you can only do with size.</comment>


Caddy 0.10.11 Released with Distributed Auto-HTTPS and Service Discovery - <AUTHOR> https://caddyserver.com/blog/caddy-0_10_11-released <comment><USER2> An almost obscenely convenient piece of software. Welcome back from the hiatus, Caddy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm excited about the snippet feature. I've duplicated a lot of the same lines across different hostname blocks that this would make much simpler.</comment>


Decentralize Messaging - <AUTHOR> https://rodarmor.com/blog/decentralize-messaging/ <comment><USER2> > These extensions could include:

        delivery receipts => XEP-0184: Message Delivery Receipts
        optional read receipts => same as above
        user presence information => XMPP RFC
        binary serialization for efficiency and extensibility => XEP-0231: Bits of Binary
        end-to-end encryption => XEP-0373: OpenPGP for XMPP, XEP-0384: OMEMO Encryption, XEP-0378: OTR Discovery
        WebRTC signalling for negotiating VOIP and video chat => XEP-0343: Signaling WebRTC datachannels in Jingle
        signed introduction tokens to reduce spam => ?
        a standard extension mechanism => https://xmpp.org/extensions/

Can we just stop prettending that XMPP is not ready and/or outdated, all those things are there, used and implemented in more clients than Matrix has.

Doing decentralized social media, on XMPP, is possible. Take XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe, add Atom 1.0 (yes it's the power of XML, you can put a standard in another) and boom you have a social network with feeds, comments, subscriptions and everything, fully ready.

I'm doing that for years with Movim [https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/). The several major XMPP servers are handling that perfectly as well. How many Matrix servers are out there ? One, that is still in beta (Synapse).

XMPP is standard (IETF wise), is already massively deployed, is used by universities, governments, companies…, is exensible, is stable and is maintained by a big and motivated community.

Don't reinvent the wheel once more, just implement the standards.

<comment><USER3> > How many Matrix servers are out there ? One, that is still in beta > (Synapse). Worth noting that Matrix as a protocol and Synapse as a server > implementation left beta in June 2019 > ([https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing- > matrix-1-0-an...](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing- > matrix-1-0-and-the-matrix-org-foundation)). Matrix is deployed by > governments and civic institutions the world over including emergency > services. It is literally trusted in life or death situations.

While Synapse is the most mature server implementation there are others under active development listed here \- [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try- matrix-now](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now).

<comment><USER4> Thanks Neil. It's difficult to find alternative servers on that page so I will help by linking to The Construct which is the only other federating server. Though it is not yet stable, it is the only functioning third-party server and has more progress than your own reference implementation's rewrite!

Check out [https://github.com/matrix- construct/construct](https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct) and join us at #admins:matrix.org

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Protocols and privacy and chat features are all great, but let's not lose sight of the two absolutely killer essential features of every successful chat app / system:

(1) The address book.

(2) The easiest possible signup and setup.

More generally for #1, whatever method(s) you use to find people's contact information and connect with them.

Without that, you could have created the perfect chat experience in every way, but people still won't use it. Because their friends aren't on it and/or they can't find their friends.

A ton of chat apps fail because engineers sit around talking about how to architect things, when the truth is that once you've gotten past the almost- insurmountable hurdle of getting two users onto the system and starting a conversation, the actual mechanism for actually sending messages back and forth is not much more than an implementation detail.

Not that those things aren't important, but they are like 10% of the formula for success, and the other 90% is getting to the point where they can start a chat session.

People's primary need is to communicate. With the people they want or need to communicate with. And via the contact information they have available. (Exchanging contact info for a new service offline is a huge hurdle.) A better experience is better, but at the end of the day, these other concerns will nearly always win out. So you don't get very far trying to use a superior experience as leverage to get people using it. You need to attack that problem more directly.

<comment><USER6> So true. One of my most active channels of communication is actually Instagram's chat despite it lacking many features I prefer in a messaging service like a desktop/browser interface and search functionality. But it's what my friends use, more actively than Facebook even, and so it's what I use. If you have Instagram then you already have this messenger, so it becomes a no-brainer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what I'm working on with Aether ([https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net)). A mass-communication method owned by no one, like email is owned by no one. It's a modern, decentralised Usenet.

I used to call it _'email for mass communication'_ but it confused people, since it's not based on email, so I stopped calling it that. That's the goal though.

I also gave a talk on it at the Internet Archive last week, if you want a quick intro in video from. [https://archive.org/details/12120iadweb](https://archive.org/details/12120iadweb) (My part starts at 1:13:30). If you have any questions, happy to answer.

<comment><USER8> "In Aether, spam prevention is accomplished by requiring proofs of work".

Now, I recognize that regular e-mail uses proof of work as a spam prevention measure these days, so I don't want to be too harsh on a decentralized alternative.

That said, I've watched the energy expenditures of Bitcoin etc. with alarm, and I've become very concerned about the sustainability of anything using proof of work if it should become popular. Fundamentally proof of work makes people waste energy in order to accomplish tasks such as sending messages, at a time where we need to use as little energy as possible to reduce emissions.

Have you considered sustainability at all with Aether? Have you considered any alternatives to proof of work for dealing with spam?

<comment><USER9> I suspect that the PoW energy costs of things like this would be negligible compared to that for cryptocurrencies, but I haven't justified my guess.

<comment><USER7> You're correct. Besides, proof of work in Aether is user adjustable, everyone can choose their own threshold. No need to turn it up unless you see spam. As you turn it up it becomes harder for other computers to pass your filters, which will cut down on spam (or anyone who's trying to create too many posts for any reason).

<comment><USER10> While reading this, an idea popped up in my head about monetization. Sending a message needs spending a PoW token that can be mined or bought. The price is set by the recipient and can be different for different senders. Zero for friends, a high number for potential spammers. The author, however, has a private key that can produce PoW tokens cheaply, but still in a limited amount to retain trust and prevent diluting everyone's share to nothing. Some companies may want to send spam and will be happy to buy PoW tokens. Users that suddenly start getting spam, raise the bar, as it costs them nothing. Those companies now need more tokens and they come to you. This is inflation. As long as SEC understands what's going on, it shouldn't have problems with this sandbox economics.

<comment><USER7> I thought about monetisation and it's also in the talk linked but ultimately I've decided to not monetise it. Instead, to make it sustainable, I've created a separate app called Aether Pro at [https://aether.app](https://aether.app). It's a much better version of Google Groups. You would use it if you wanted the modern features of Slack like channels, guests and integrations, but you also want to keep email discussions as your main work tool, and not move to chat.

By having them separate, I can make sure that the the P2P version isn't influenced by money-making concerns, since we have a product explicitly made for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Completely agree. For anyone who hasn't come across it, check out the exciting work being done by developers of the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol:

"Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a peer-to peer communication protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media ecosystem. Each user hosts their own content and the content of the peers they follow, which provides fault tolerance and eventual consistency.[5] Messages are digitally signed and added to an append-only list of messages published by an author.[6] SSB is primarily used for implementing distributed social networks, and utilizes cryptography to assure that content remains unforged as it is propagated through the network."

Read more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt)

Join us! There is a fully functioning client, and bustling Solarpunk community: [http://scuttlebutt.nz](http://scuttlebutt.nz)

<comment><USER12> I'm really worried about the total amount of data each user will end up lugging around though.

Also, append only => no deletes, correct?

<comment><USER13> Yes, no deletes. Since there is no company in the middle, the GDPR rules don't apply to this P2P network, so it isn't an issue legally (in Europe).

This is something that will probably take some puzzling to get to a sustainable mechanism. The strategy I've heard talked about most often is to append metadata that marks it as 'deleted', so when things populate or 'gossip' further, it won't show up in the user interface. Instead it's labeled as 'archived' or 'deleted', or has a link to it's replacement.

<comment><USER14> It should be noted that while you can't delete / edit messages you _can_ delete blobs (binary attachments). They'll come back if you load a post that references them, but that's where the majority of size comes from and it is manageable.

Also, how much you download is related to how many people you follow, and text doesn't take up a ton of space.

<comment><USER12> Sure. But where do the blobs "come from" when they "come back". Since it's fully P2P, _someone_ has to keep them around.

As for text not taking up a ton of space. Sure. Except it's text with it's metadata, and possibly text generated by a few hundred people.

A friend and I managed to exchange ~24k messages on Slack over the last 3 years (~4k each / year); using it like some kind of "private twitter" where we would just post anything that might be of interest to the other.

What would it be like if I follow 300 or 1000 people doing the same, over Secure Scuttlebutt?

\- At 1 byte per character (from what I've gathered, Unicode characters actually take up 1 to 4 bytes) \- 140 characters / message (because Twitter proved it's usually enough) \- messages' metadata (50 bytes?) \- 4.000 messages / user / year \- following 300 people

We'd get... 228MB / year?

That's actually way less than I expected!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mentioned in a separate thread, but DeltaChat [1] offers a WhatsApp-style messaging interface over standard email.

[1] - [https://delta.chat/en/](https://delta.chat/en/)

<comment><USER16> Like the idea. It was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216827)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I miss the days when one chat app could easily connect to multiple protocols. I didn't care if my friends had AIM or Yahoo or ICQ or whatever, they all showed up as a tab in Adium's window and a name on its floating buddy list.

<comment> VvR-Ox Matrix has bridges to solve this: [https://matrix.org/bridges/](https://matrix.org/bridges/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm working on a sort of ancillary project which may help with this at Valyrio [[https://valyr.io](https://valyr.io)]

Counter-intuitively, the current goal is to _centralize_ the messaging interface, providing a common platform for users who are willing to pay for a consolidated system that saves time and confusion, and to reduce the waste of niche use cases (e.g. having the entire [name here] messaging app on your phone because one weird family member or friend insists on using it)

Bringing email, text, and (aspirationally) all other messaging systems into one.

In doing this, we cannot possibly hope to uniquely integrate each of the countless hundreds of services with their weird quirks and formats, so I aim to establish a standardized language for async messages equipped with the basic common features and extensions for prevalent (but not universal) features like read receipts, "liking/reacting" to messages, etc

It would be really cool to open up that standard to the world if we do a good job of designing it, or collaborate with anyone else who wants to participate in this goal. Our core service will be a niche, paid, closed system, but the underlying language I would like to be open source and interoperable with whatever else turns out to develop (Twitter's new endeavor and Matrix are the two efforts I am most aware of)

After all, Valyrio _means Language_

I've also been working on an adjacent concept with [[https://jwmza.com/polymath](https://jwmza.com/polymath)], which is a new comprehensive markup language meant to define long-term compatible, human readable documents and websites/document structures which intermix existing standards like (La)TeX, HTML, CSS, Markdown etc.

Perhaps the underlying language and concepts here will mix with the effort to decentralize messaging as well, as messaging is fundamentally the asynchronous bidirectional transfer of documents of mostly text and sometimes other media or information.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this, at least in part, the goal of OStatus/Mastodon? It's a great idea but I find it humorous and ironic that many mastodon admins circulate block lists specifically meant to cut off nodes. I would prefer that users just use the block features available (and adding the ability for a user to block nodes or apply blocklists if they want to, but not for admins to make that decision for them).

<comment><USER20> It's a shame you say "Mastodon" when we want to say "ActivityPub".

Federating an RDF graph is powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > messaging apps are all the same, making them easy targets for > standardization and interoperability.

This is patently false. Look no further than the other comments in this thread. Nobody can agree on what they want out of the messaging experience. Some want a rich experience like telegram and others want a minimal one like IRC. Should this protocol's features maintain parity with the proprietary and centralized services? Better develop them rapidly to keep up. Should they stagnate to maintain interoperability across an ecosystem? Good luck being competitive. We haven't even gotten to the features themselves and I promise you there will be irreconcilable differences. Does the protocol maintain message history or is it ephemeral? What is the privacy model? Can we delete messages on other servers due to GDPR? When you spend time at the business end of the messaging space, these dichotomies flow endlessly, without consensus, and they cover the entire horizon of the space.

If you think you know the answers to these questions, you don't, because you're solving the wrong problem. If you want to decentralize messaging you have to solve the problem of how to agree to disagree while maintaining interoperability for a shared experience. Let me just make that last point clear: you cannot design a messaging protocol where one party sees emojis and the other doesn't. That doesn't work because you can't lose social information.

Matrix has failed to solve this problem. We need a new approach. What will emerge to finally conquer this space?

<comment><USER18> I feel like you're overestimating the differentiation and not accounting for the fact that 99% of the population basically just uses the minimal subset of features (sending plain text and images)

Two services don't need to have identical feature sets to interoperate, because you don't need _perfect, full interoperability_ , if you can send _most_ of your messages across platforms, that's still pretty good.

> Let me just make that last point clear: you cannot design a messaging > protocol where one party sees emojis and the other doesn't.

Which service doesn't show emojis? Literally every mainstream mobile operating system and desktop browser supports emojis as regular text.

<comment><USER4> > the fact that 99% of the population basically just uses the minimal subset > of features

The tendency is for people to invoke features situationally. If you are communicating with someone who is using rich-replies there is a tendency to also invoke that feature yourself. If people are using emojicons there is a tendency for others to play along rather than use plaintext characters. Feature invocation is situational and relative.

> Two services don't need to have identical feature sets to interoperate, > because you don't need perfect, full interoperability, if you can send most > of your messages across platforms, that's still pretty good.

This has proven to result in an unacceptable user experience throughout the history of messaging. When a system loses social information from the environment it is no longer an effective communication tool. Worse, it is _dangerous_. If you send me a message and I respond to your message with some thumbs-up emoji, and your platform doesn't support it (e.g. a text-based IRC client) that information gets lost. You believe I have disregarded your message. You may assume I have been rude when the opposite is true. This is absolutely unacceptable UX.

<comment><USER18> > This has proven to result in an unacceptable user experience... Worse, it is > dangerous. If you send me a message and I respond to your message with some > thumbs-up emoji, and your platform doesn't support it ... that information > gets lost. You believe I have disregarded your message. You may assume I > have been rude when the opposite is true. This is absolutely unacceptable > UX.

This is an assumption that bad implementation is the only possible implementation, and it is wrong.

Obviously omitting content from missing features is bad UX - but it's absolutely not necessary to interoperate. It's easy (and should be expected) to avoid this by simply telling the user something from a missing feature has been sent - they can then inquire and get back the lost information / clear up the confusion.

Furthermore if interoperability is implemented on both ends, the sender's client should know to alert the sender before they attempt to use features missing on the receiver's end.

None of this is a difficult issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > I see two promising and complementary paths to decentralized messaging: > building on the new and shiny Matrix protocol, and gradually extending > email.

COI is chat over IMAP[0], I think it's one of the best solutions I've seen in the sapace.

[0]: [https://www.coi-dev.org/](https://www.coi-dev.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> It feels like we are saturated by messengers and social networks. Twitter, fb, slack, discord, matrix, signal, whatsapp, wechat, telegram... I am not sure what decentralization could bring there.

</comment><comment><USER23> I talked to Twitter's CTO, Parag.

He said the move is to specifically reduce fragmentation in public conversation.

I'm in the decentralized (dWeb) community (we have 10M+ users monthly, in- production, running thru GUN) and admittedly, I think we all get distracted with the war cry of privacy, p2p-for-sake-of-p2p, etc. but is not many other people's end goals.

</comment><comment><USER24> Make using standardized and simply enough protocols, such as IRC, Message Send Protocol, NNTP, Zephyr, etc

<comment><USER25> Like gtalk using XMPP?

<comment><USER24> XMPP uses XML. IRC is simpler and can be used without any specialized software, and was designed like that, so that you can use without specialized software (I have used IRC on computers before installing a IRC client)

<comment><USER26> typing PONG every ten minutes isn't entirely practicable

<comment><USER24> I am aware, and is why I normally install a IRC client soon, but when I want to ask something first before installing a IRC client, it helps anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know why everyone hates XMPP. There are multiple solid open source server and client applications for just about every platform. It is decentralized and works well but without google, apple, and facebook making it practical for grandma to use, it doesn't catch on. Well the big players have no incentive to cede control to decentralization.

<comment><USER28> As a person involved in XMPP development for over a decade, I can tell you why.

To date, no one ever developed XMPP chat applications as a product, which can be easily deployed and will work consistently on every platform. Client and server developers were always disjointed, working separately from each other. This lead to great inconsistencies in implementations of even such basic functions like adding a contact. Also, it often happens that when a client developers need some feature that honestly should be done by a server, a developer still does this on a client, because it's all he has, with subpar results.

Absent leadership from XSF also plays a role. This club now mostly cares about bureaucracy and following a set of self-imposed rules instead of developing a set of working standards that would allow XMPP apps to compete with the best messaging apps out there. That's why it is unlikely for any great product to appear under such guidance.

We're trying a different approach, maybe we'll even succeed. If so, you'll hear about it on HN.

<comment><USER29> >...following a set of self-imposed rules instead of developing a set of working standards that would allow XMPP apps to compete with the best messaging apps out there.

That is no excuse for doing embrace, extend and extinguish as your Xabber seems to be attempting with the XMPP standard. I can't help but note that the Xabber project has outright rejected OMEMO capability.

If you are extending XMPP in incompatible ways (as Whatsapp did) it is only ethical to clearly state that to potential users.

<comment><USER28> 1\. We don't do embrace, extend and extinguish. All we do is open-source, with products available to download, and docs fully available.

2\. We don't 'outright reject OMEMO capability'. I reject OMEMOdiots who moan excessively because their wishes aren't satisfied on the spot.

Why are not they satisfied? Because XMPP does not have a reliable control of message delivery, no way to remove messages from message archive, no good group chats, no client sync protocol, no way to revoke session tokens, no way to know which messages in archive were read, no way to add reactions to messages, no way to do threaded conversations, and while we're building all that we're constantly attacked by individuals who demand us drop everything we do and urgently add OMEMO so they can feel safe (and do it at our own expense, of course).

We'll provide some E2EE capability, but only after we are finished with everything else that we consider more important than this.

3\. Extending XMPP in incompatible ways, I'll cover this a bit.

Do you even remotely imagine an amount of shit an XMPP client (say, a web client with no stored history) built on 'compatible' XEPs must do to display a telegram-like interface, with all the recent chats? How much time does it take? Best result we could achieve in our web version with 'compatible' server and 200 contacts is like 5 minutes. With our custom XEPs, it's currently down to 15-20 seconds, and our goal is to trim it to 3 seconds. Does it break anything with s2s? No. It only adds methods of how a client interacts with a server, that's it. Does it break legacy clients? No, they still can do it the old way, if someone is willing to wait 5 minutes.

Next, we have our group chats. They are powerful: archive search, moderation, anonymous mode, public mode, pinned messages, replies, mentions, extremely agile restriction/rights management. They are very easy to implement (on a client) and provide a nice fallback compatibility for any XMPP client even without support for them. You don't need support on participant server to use it (not as in MIX, to say). You can chat using multiple devices, with legacy clients alongside supporting clients, all working nicely with simple Carbons.

Documentation for all improvements is open, (it's not in english yet, but we're getting there), implementations are open-source and distributed under GNU licenses. No, I don't think your point about extending in incompatible ways is valid.

Probably, the more correct way to call it is that we are forking XMPP. Like, in git. We'll be sending XSF pull requests on every XEP we create - hopefully, one day XSF will come to their senses and see that their platform is fading into obscurity and irrelevance, and that to prevent it from happening they should do something differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We could decentralize things more, but then people will point to decentralized communication and claim it's dangerous because it helps drug dealers and pedophiles.

<comment><USER31> thats why its best to extend email . it's already decentralized and people don't claim it helps drug dealers. i think the worst part of centralized services is they made police and states complacent and depend on constant spying

<comment><USER32> For 99% of the population email is extremely centralized.

<comment><USER31> hm not really, thanks to corporate / institutional email silos . sure there is gmail, yahoo , outlook ... but also a huge long tail that is not going away

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> xkcd 927, I'm not even going to link it because you know what it is.

</comment><comment><USER34> Unfortunately, it's probably too late. Email caught on because it was the first option, and it's become ingrained in spite of itself.

At this point the closest thing to a standard for person to person messaging is SMS... which like the old guard of ICQ, uses a number rather than a screen name.

That said, I would love to see a good standard for person to person chat, especially one that doesn't rely on magic numbers.

</comment><comment><USER35> It is astonishing to me that, after skimming the spec, anyone believes Matrix is the future. Or ActivityPub. Or XMPP.

The future of messaging, decentralized or not, is certainly something with a tractable protocol.

<comment><USER36> I agree, and this is one of the reasons I use (and contribute to) XMPP. For the Extensibility part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Social media has more problems besides the need to "decentralize"

The biggest problem with social media is how it is ruining our mental health.

It's sad that almost no one looking in to this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Does Matrix allow for anon communications?

<comment><USER39> Yes, for better or worse.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does This Python REPL Exist? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by the recent discussion on notebooks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22164916
I would like a Python setup a la RStudio. This means that:
- it works with unmodified plain text files - I don't want to use notebooks and I don't want cell magic (#%%) in my scripts
- at any point I can run a keyboard shortcut which executes the current line* of code
- if the cursor is on a part of a code block like the top line of a function definition or an if statement, the REPL is smart enough to figure out that I want to run the entire block of code
- after running, the cursor moves to the next line or to the line after the block that was just executed
- selecting multiple lines will obviously run all of them
- I don't need to insert an empty line at the end each block of code that I want to run (this is a problem with VSCode's "Send to terminal" option)
- selecting multiple lines allows you to run all of them of course
- the Python session stays live and can be inspected after the code finishes running
Open to suggestions about any editor/IDE/config file that can do this. <comment> a-saleh It was possible to setup Light Table to work like this. The project is unfortunately dead.</comment>


Tech backlash: 'Maybe Silicon Valley needs to be taken down to size' - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/19/has-silicon-valley-lost-its-cool/ <comment><USER2> Who are the real enablers? The Valley or The Hill?</comment>


FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE is now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflash.html#event20121231:01 <comment><USER2> It's currently on the front page here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986471></comment>


Rising solar generation in California coincides with -ve wholesale prices - <AUTHOR> https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30692 <comment><AUTHOR> More duck flattening required (March sun is shaking the GB grid too):

[http://m.earth.org.uk/Hey-Siri-Help-Flatten-The- Duck.html](http://m.earth.org.uk/Hey-Siri-Help-Flatten-The-Duck.html)

Rgds

Damon</comment>


"It's expensive getting hardware to test on" not an excuse to avoid IE testing - <AUTHOR> http://dennisdel.com/blog/mac-ie

<comment><USER2> you can install IE on Linux using winetricks, so actually it is free (apart from your time)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also this: [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=11575) \- all you need is VirtualBox. So the end investment goes down to $0.</comment></comment>


Stripe is ruining our business - <AUTHOR> We set up our Stripe account about a month ago and things were going rather smoothly then, all of a sudden I get an email saying they are closing our account.
This has put our whole business on hold and I've tried to contact Stripe for an explanation and no one will respond.
I have seen in the past that sometimes companies will pay attention to you if you post on hacker news. So if you work at Stripe and you see this please help us! <comment><USER2> You need to explain the type of business you are in, if it is in the high risk or prohibited list then you can't necessarily blame Stripe. Also, if you have had lots of charge backs or complaints in only a month that could quickly lead to any merchant service to shutting you off.

What are your charges basically for? Have you had any chargebacks or complaints? Even 1-2 in 30 days if your account is new could get you shutdown at a lot of merchants.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're low margin, "high risk" in their opinion. They kicked me off too, I tried appeals and that was just a waste of time. On PayPal for last few months, no problems. Switching was easier than fighting.

Maybe Patrick (Stripe CEO) will respond here. He has for the last few Stripe complaints.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is the nature of your business? Do you have a website? Have you tried other payment service companies?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It is just a standard e-commerce business. We sell electronics online</comment>


Don't Sell Your Product, Sell Your Concept - <AUTHOR> http://mindpetals.com/blog/2007/05/don%e2%80%99t-sell-your-product-sell-your-concept/ <comment><USER2> I think this is bad advice for just about everyone. Tossing out the hard sell of all of your "solutions", when a customer came looking for something specific? I'm pretty sure I'd hang up and call the next vendor on my list. I want expertise and personalized service, not some greedy doofus doing a half- assed job at a dozen different things and expecting me to consider that a positive thing.

As a small company, you must focus. Be the best at one thing, before even thinking about being a dozen things. When you're bigger (and have established yourself as the best whatever in the world) you can expand. Be strong in one area, and leave everything else to others. Maybe later, you'll have to resources to tackle multiple areas...but even then, the moment you take your eye off of your core business, there will be a half-dozen competitors who are more focused who eat your lunch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nobody has a need for "solutions"... you use the word "solution" in your pitch, unless its saying "I've got a solution to your specfic problem and its product X" is going to lose customers.

People have learned to tune out that smarmy vague marketing junk.

And, by the way, his two examples are off the mark-- lowes advertises products. Google doesn't advertise but when they do talk about their service they talk about the products.... the specifics of the product.

I am constantly amazed at the number of people who put vague bs on their sites.

I can't count the number of times I've gone to a website where I thought they might have a solution to a problem I'm having (specific) or a need I have (again, specific) and seen a lot of vague bullshit that left me wondering, or unable to determine exactly what it is they do.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure is useful for web2.0 companies. Websites, are different. The most important thing I've learned (from the YC community) about startups is: Pick an important problem to solve. Build the bare-minimum solution to that problem and get feedback. Improve iteratively.

Startups are forced to grow at a rapid pace. Why? Because web2.0 companies need a _large_ number of users before they can monetize. The only way to grow rapidly is to send a clear message. You go to reddit, and bam, you're using reddit. So, the product has to be the message.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hard selling your customers is something you resort to when you're in an over sold market. I'm not sure how that would apply to a startup at all, being as your goal is to come up with the next big idea, not rebrand the same old thing without any innovation or unique twist. You know the only major retailer that still does this? Radioshack... ideas why? Nothing new or unique to offer and not enough volume to offer prices low enough to keep customers coming back.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations, you just annoyed your customer when all they were looking for was a simple business card.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. This guy must be kidding. If I ask for business cards and someone starts spamming me and interrogating me on the phone, that's the last they hear from me.</comment></comment>


Two-man start up can't afford chi-chi branding, could use your advice. - <AUTHOR>

We're about to launch our first product, and we got attached to a name we had picked for it early on. Turns out there's another company who goes by that very name, and they also work in the same field that we do. So we scrambled to pick something new.
Our product is a video-based hosted application that organizations can use to train and educate their members. It's more virtual learning than an LMS. Our customers can upload their own training videos, and if they want they can subscribe to packaged content made by professional trainers. Reporting is an important part of our application, and we can accommodate organizations large and small.
Since we're two guys, and neither one of us are experts in the field of naming products, the past 48 hours of creative thinking has left us exhausted. We're left with three potential names, and if we're lucky you'll let us know which one you prefer.
Idea 1: Leaderboard
Leaderboard urges you to reach for the top. A leaderboard inspires competition, aggressiveness, and acknowledges performance. A Leaderboard is physical, concrete and highly visual.
Idea 2: GoldStar
GoldStar is reminiscent of your childhood, when performance was rewarded with gold stars on your homework. GoldStar is also concrete and visual, and symbolizes a reward more than an acknowledgement.
Idea 3: Canopy
A Canopy sits atop of tall trees, and invites you to stand on the shoulders of giants. A Canopy is a place in a forest where life thrives, where collaboration and coexistence is most evident, a safe home for an entire ecosystem. A Canopy is literally where the Sun meets the earth, and a Canopy urges you to reach for the sky.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and other names that come to mind.
Thanks in advance,
Max and Cam from Big Bang Technology in Toronto. <comment> w-ll Canopy, Its a strong sounding name. Not as sketcy as Goldstar, or leaderboard.

<comment><USER3> Definitely not GoldStar. Reminds me of the third rate electronics company (notorious for cheap products). That being said, they did become LG. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should setup a Google Adwords account and test the different names. Just put the different names in there and use the same description. This will give you quickly a feeling what attracts clicks (and therefore also views) and what not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Dont like any of them to be honest. all sound very 'old web'. You really need a 5,6 or 7 letter domain name that is humanly speakable and brandable.

Tying to track a brand called 'Leaderboard' on the web is going to be impossible as there are so many other search results that will use the same word but rank much higher. Same for Canopy.

Use a good domaining tool ( I like justdropped.com ) and pick a good domain that you are going to be able to make your own and stamp with your own identity.

For a website use themeforest.net if you cant afford a designer. Sell your car to pay for a good designer logo though. its essential. Get good quick at writing web copy for your site.

Hope some of this helps. all of this advice was passed to me and I havent a clue when it comes to branding, but its helped me on more than a few occasions. good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point about tracking leaderboard on the web - that would be a mess. Not to worry - we hired a kick ass designer for logo/identity/UI revisions - <USER2> hated having to tell him that our first idea fell through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Canopy sounds like Canopus, which did something with video or something. Might be confusing. Plus it sucks.

probably some of these are taken but...

ideas: ladderboard, tugboat, spryboard, scrycam, scrysat, canoworms, pandabox, unlift, topknot, teachr, learnr, smartr, trainr, dumdum, bighead, fathead

my favorite is pandabox, it's an oblique allusion to pandora's box (knowledge), it's a "negative" or "dangerous" connotation (which helps stickiness, see the Igor article) but yet still cute and cuddly, and also has obvious ideas for branding and mascot, etc..

This is a good link about naming. [http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide- produc...](http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product- company-names.php)

<comment><USER7> Joel,

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions, you've got our brains working!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is "shee-shee branding"?

Google did not help me figure out what shee-shee means.

Edit: Submitter changed title to say chi-chi.

<comment><USER9> The correct spelling is chichi.

According to dictionary.com it is an adjective which means "showily or affectedly elegant or trendy; pretentious."

<comment><USER10> Aka, "sour grapes" in this instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like Canopy as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I also prefer Canopy.

</comment><comment><USER13> imho laderboard is perfect for what you do. sounds inspiring and smells like work! All the best - apologies for broken english, been up all night traveling.

</comment><comment><USER7> (this is Cameron the other half of Big Bang Technology)

We really appreciate any feedback or questions anyone has on this.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like 'Big Bang Videos'

<comment><USER15> That does have the advantage of consistent branding.

<comment><USER14> bigbangvideos.com is actually available.. You should REALLY go for it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> did you try to run this by PickFu to see what happens? <http://pickfu.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> +1 for leaderboard!

</comment><comment><USER18> It doesn't really matter what it is called. Call it turtlepoo.com if that helps. Branding is less about describing your services and more about sticking in people's heads. That's the problem with most of these tricky names. Most people can't remember them. But something like fishpajamas or thundergnat would probably stick in the mind of people who heard of you. BTW I'd upload my instructional videos if I knew people would subscribe to them. Let me know when you go live. Paul

</comment><comment><USER19> My intial thoughts, I hope they help you in your search:

Leaderboard implies a competition. Are you going to ranking my progress against other students? How do I win?

GoldStars are for children. Are you going to have exclusively elementary education videos? Is this some sort of achievement system, like in Halo?

A Canopy casts a wide shadow and protects me from the elements. Do you have such a breadth of video-training programs that it covers everything in which I might be interested? From what are you protecting me?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're definitely not after the kids market, but we love the idea of incorporating gaming elements into the app, like achievements.

Competition is a tricky subject: it's good to compete in some circumstances - but education isn't always about beating your opponents.</comment></comment>