Stallman Video: If You Want Freedom, Don't Use Proprietary Software - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/05/15/stallman-software-freedom/ <comment><USER4> I have wrestled with this quandry for years, regularly alternating between Macs and Linux-based computers.

My personal choice is slightly more fine-grained - I use proprietary software, but will not invest in it, so as to avoid lock-in. I won't use anything that requires proprietary file formats. I use a proprietary text editor, but only because it offers a familiar vi-mode interface. I do a brief mental audit every few months - If I expect it to take more than a day to migrate to a fully-open environment, I know I've ceded too much control to software companies.

I think Stallman is a fundamentalist, but an important one. I think he prompts debate and exemplifies practice in a way that is only possible because he simply will not touch proprietary software. Seth Godin recently argued that one of the most underrated properties of the internet is its ability to show us the limits of what is possible and in that sense Stallman is vital. I see him as a figure like Heston Blumenthal or Ray Jardine - there aren't many people with a sous-vide setup in their kitchen or hiking the Appalachian Trail with an eight pound pack, but their example broadens all our horizons.

<comment><USER5> Why wrestle with it even for a second?

If a piece of software is useful, use it. If it's useful enough to pay money for, pay money for it. It's just not an area that requires ideology to enter into your decision-making process in any way.

As you've noted, they've got a guy on the internet saying every possible thing there is to say. Do yourself a favor and ignore pretty much all of them.

<comment><USER4> Because I have personal experience of being completely shafted by software companies. In a past life I was a music technology geek. Recording engineers spend huge amounts of time, effort and money on learning our preferred Digital Audio Workstation software, which has come to replace almost every piece of equipment in a modern recording studio. Think of it as the audio equivalent of Photoshop, but with half a dozen competing alternatives. It's the kind of software you go on training courses for, the kind that comes in a huge box to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, the kind that has multi- thousand dollar plugins available. The market leader, DigiDesign Pro Tools, only works with DigiDesign's proprietary hardware, which can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Two major upheavals shafted a lot of audio engineers.

One of the most popular DAW suites is a package called Logic. After nearly twenty years of development, Emagic sold out to Apple and Apple decided to abandon the PC version. Suddenly guys who had used the same piece of software all day every day for a decade or more were faced with either buying at least one top-end Mac, having to learn to use OS X and potentially a whole bunch of other software, or abandon their preferred DAW and have to relearn how to do their work in a different DAW. Either option would prove enormously expensive for a lot of engineers, both in direct costs and lost work.

When Apple shifted over to Intel, there was a huge lag from many developers in getting updates released. For engineers, this is a serious problem - <USER2> the fastest hardware and the latest software is a significant competitive advantage. A lot of people lost out on work, or had to buy PCs or new audio hardware.

The experience of that world has led to my current position. Professionals in all sorts of disciplines have huge personal investments in particular software and are often completely betrayed by the developers. EULAs are a one-way street and only the most rarified of enterprise software has any sort of reciprocal commitment. What Stallman talks about isn't purely abstract. Relying on proprietary software is dangerous, for very straightforward practical reasons.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't the software continue to work on PCs, or did Apple have a way to remotely kill every copy? If not, why was it any more of an issue than if it were open source and the developer abandoned it?

In other words, what happened to make the software that you were running for 10 years suddenly cease to be useful?

<comment><USER4> You're fine until you upgrade your hardware, or install a new plugin, or need to import a new file type. You end up in the same predicament as people still using IE6 - the software is as good or bad as it was when it was still being supported, but the rest of the world has moved on around you. Beyond that, in most industries there is constant competitive pressure to be using the latest, most powerful tools. If you don't have an upgrade path, your setup falls further and further behind your competitors. The recent fashion for overt Autotune is a good example - in a relatively short space of time it has gone from being a relatively unusual effect to being de rigeur in some genres. If you can't keep up with those trends, you're going to lose work.

<comment><USER6> The outstanding question though is that in this type of case, high-end domain specific software, the pure open source model tends not to produce the ultra- high end software. The reason, though it seems to mystify many open source advocates, is that it takes lots of money to make a unique or novel _thing_ on time spans of less than a decade...and the only way to recoup those costs is by selling that thing at some price and keeping the IP closed. Multi-thousand dollar plugins are one example.

In other words, going open source in this type of sense means that you _won't_ have the latest and greatest anyway. So your particular case example doesn't change things.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't explain why the software couldn't revert to Open Source once that company goes defunct. If I were running a large company, I would think about asking for such terms.

<comment><USER8> It happens all the time.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've heard Stallman's arguments quite a bit and every time I hear them they don't ring entirely true. Pratically speaking, the freedoms granted by free software are primarily meaningful to developers. If you can't modify the software (or have no concept of what source code is) these freedoms largely become meaningless. By the same token, if the source code is absolutely terrible the freedom to modify it is next to meaningless (I've had to deal with this issue a fair amount myself).

There seem to be a couple of implicit arguments in this that I find interesting. First, that others aren't to be trusted. Second, that software is in no way an invention.

Regarding the first, I think that for most people they have to rely on the developer of the software they use. If the developer decides to stop working on it they can get screwed. With open source software they may be able to find another developer, but then they are simply at the mercy of the other developer. Their lack of freedom isn't shaped by whether the software is open source or not, it's shaped by their lack of knowledge.

Regarding the second, it seems that the argument for free software is an argument for free speech. This in essence means that software is exlusively a work of creativity (an thus copyrightable) and is not a work of invention (thus not patentable). I don't completely buy this argument. I think software is unique in that it has aspects of both creativity and invention. On one end of the spectrum _why would definitely epitomize the creative aspect of software. On the other end, software paired with super computers and embedded systems certainly come closer to machines.

Overall, I these are tricky things to deal with. I don't think that all software should be out in the open, nor do I think that every piece of software should be cloesd away. I think the free software community needs to have a more nuanced view of the world and that having one will bear more fruit.

<comment><USER10> I'm a developer but I don't develop most of the programs that I use every day. I don't even read the source code of these programs.

With regard to programs that I _don't_ develop, I'm very much a user who enjoys that almost everything I use comes nicely in packages with Ubuntu. Almost.

A few programs that I use need patches or modifications that aren't included in stock Ubuntu.

Because I use free software the appropriate patches _do exist_ and are available on which ever website their authors have published them. Or they circulate around on the internet. So, the features I desire suddenly become available via side-channel distribution. Often someone keeps prebuilt binaries of the software available with the same patches compiled in. Or they're available via alternate or backported APT repositories. In some cases, being a developer myself, I download the patches and dpkg-buildpackage them into binaries myself, but generally I not.

If I had used proprietary software:

\- No third party could write patches for it;

\- I would have to stick with whatever the author decides to release;

\- I couldn't run old binaries if my OS went through some big upgrade and the author didn't bother to support a yet another binary;

\- I also wouldn't enjoy the vast repository of prepackaged and configured software that comes with Ubuntu: unless the author was agreeing to take part in an OS distribution, I would have to search, download, and install each program separately.

Free software is much more than a single developer's ability to hack on other people's code. Free software is a whole ecosystem that benefits each participant. But since all software will come down to programming, that software ecosystem comes down to individual developers' ability to hack.

<comment><USER11> Just because you do not have the source code nor the right to distribute copies of software (i.e. it is proprietary) does not exclude you from any of the first three--it just makes it harder. Depending on where and when you live it may or may not be legal (Galoob v. Nintendo and 17 U.S.C. § 117 says yes, MDY v. Blizzard says no).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It must have taken him a while to get to that conference, not having used any planes or modern motorized transport that rely on proprietary software.

<comment><USER13> Do you think you could have posted this comment without using any Free Software?

<comment><USER12> I doubt it! But, unlike Stallman, I support progress in all its forms, encumbered or not, and enjoy the advantages offered by free /and/ proprietary software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The world has changed so much since Stallman started his crusade. I'm just don't think what he's advocating is realistic which unfortunately makes most of what he's saying irrelevant. You simply cannot avoid proprietary software anymore. It's a nearly impossible standard for even OSS developers & users to adhere to. Think about it. You can't drive an automobile. They all use proprietary software. You probably can't even ride a bike because the traffic signals are controlled by proprietary software. You can't own most major appliances. You can own _any_ cellular phone regardless of the operating system it runs. I guess my point is by advocating this extreme approach Stallman is hurting the cause more than helping it at this point. A more realistic approach has some chance of actually connecting with a broader audience.

<comment><USER15> > You simply cannot avoid proprietary software anymore.

 _Anymore_? You really think it was easier in 1980s?

Over the years Stallman has singe-handedly affected the software ecosystem in very tangible and important ways. Yes he may look like Osama preaching from a cave in these videos, but make no mistakes, software landscape would've been different and even more sad place if not him.

<comment><USER14> I do think it was easier simply because we had far less technology in our lives. Your choice of which operating system to put on your PC is ridiculously easy today but for many people it only accounts for a small amount of the software they buy, use or interact with in their daily lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "If you prefer convenience — well, best to stop complaining about your loss of freedom and/or privacy."

Bingo.

<comment><USER17> But that's not what Stallman believes, that's what the author of the article wrote. What makes a freedom a freedom (to me) is that you have the ability to waive a freedom if you wish to do so -- otherwise it's an obligation. And Stallman is of the opinion that you should never trade freedom (at least when it comes to proprietary software) for convenience. I actually asked him about this a few weeks back, if he thought there were situations where it's reasonable to willingly and in full knowledge give up some freedom (the question was in the context of software as a service). He interrupted me before I finished and said that you should never do that, because even if you're not giving up much freedom now, they'll be taking more and more of it as times goes on. (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his views, but that is the impression I got.)

I disagree. While perhaps it's wrong that many people give up freedom without really knowing that they're doing so, I think it's reasonable to on occasion to do it if you know the trade-off you're making.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If program X is Free Software, but non-Free program Y will accomplish a task I wish to accomplish better and faster, I consider using X to be giving up freedom. The extra time I spend accomplishing the task with X is time that I am no longer free to use for more interesting pursuits.

If it were possible to make a list of everything I wish to do, and then arrange to do those things in the most time-efficient manner possible, there would still not be anywhere near enough time in my likely maximum lifespan to accomplish more than a small fraction of them. I'm not going to further waste my limited time using tools that aren't the best I can obtain for the task at hand.

</comment><comment><USER19> From what I've seen, some businesses/organizations have been successfully employed open-source based business plans. However, they don't seem to be software-product-development companies.Here are the categories I see

1\. Software companies like Google: Google open-sourced Android, but Android isn't their money-making business. They want to use Android to help their primary business - search and advertising. They haven't open-sourced their search code or their ads code.

2\. Consulting companies: These companies focus on generating money from software consulting, not from creating software products. So promoting the open-sourcing of software-products is good for them. The software/consulting division of IBM is a good example of this category of companies

3\. Hardware companies like Sun: These companies make their money from selling hardware. They stand to benefit if software is free/cheap and easily available for their hardware.

4\. Non-profits: These organizations get money from wealthy individuals/foundations and their software products/websites don't need to generate revenue.

I'm curious to know of other open-source business models that have been used to build a sustainable business.

<comment><USER20> RedHat made $653m last year, mostly by selling support.

<comment><USER6> That's an interesting example. I wonder how much of the software stack is profitable in this way? I'm willing to guess very little because most software isn't so horridly complex.

If you need to pay for support services to use a web browser, a text editor, or some other completely normal piece of consumer level software for example, that would be the software's problem and only exemplifies the areas where open source doesn't work as well as proprietary.

Companies make money from software because they devote lots of resources into making software easy to use. Relying on support services to float every random xyz piece of software will make for a very dead industry.

The funny thing is that I've never actually seen any viable business models from the open source community about how to build a business around free software (as in beer and freedom) that wasn't entirely couched in "support services". This creates the unfortunate situation that if a company were to create a consumer level piece of software that was easy to use (say, anything by Apple), they would put themselves out of business. Their incentive then is to simply make the software terrible to use so they can sell support services.

On top of this, the price of support services is often quite a bit higher than the alternative of just buying software. A thousand dollars of custom consulting will get you about a day's worth of labor hours. If I need to bring in a guy for a week to setup some software, or purchase the $3000 easier to use proprietary software, I'll go with the cheaper option. Even replacing that software at some point in the future, due to lock-in or what have you, is cheaper.

Paying a bunch of money so I can figure out how to use an OS to connect to the internet so I can send an email or make a home movie is a waste of my time and money. Ergo, support services only work when the cost of buying a proprietary solution that works out of the box (or with minimal support) is greater than the cost of the free software plus support services.

And yes, I recognize that I'm talking about beer here, but for end-users of software, that tends to be the principle consideration. The truth is, most people and companies that use software care very little if their freedoms are being impinged by using MS-Office.

<comment><USER20> A few things:

Mostly what RedHat sell is server services and a lot of the original market they competed with were similar services from IBM, Sun, SGI etc.

I don't think support services work for desktop software, particularly not for non-business critical parts

I don't think Open Source is really about the cost for larger businesses. It's about having something stable, reliable, predictable and ultimately knowing that you can get it fixed if it breaks. Google, for example made $23.7bn last year, their software stack, as I understand it, is completely either open source or coded internally, so they can fix anything that goes wrong. Had they been based on proprietary software, then they would be at the whims of some company who doesn't want to fix their issue (think Microsoft for example). Facebook have found the software they used was not able to work at the scale and cost they wanted so were able to tailor it to their needs, they would have found it difficult and expensive to do that with proprietary software.

Companies around free software often sell services because that's what people want and they didn't often write most of the software themselves anyway.

Whilst Open source does get a bad rep. for being hard to use, I think it's unjustified and if your people can't work it out then their not very good TBH. Most startups are based entirely on open source software, so there is a certain amount of proof that on the server, at least, it is easy enough to use.

I think you under-estimate the cost of replacing software when large numbers of people have become used to it's intricacies and not forgetting many staff need training in order to use any software effectively. I've been involved in a few big projects and the people time involved usually outweighs the software by 10:1 even with proprietary solutions. Also bigger organisations are less risk adverse so they tend to buy support contracts on everything.

Software is a commodity and the ones making a lot from it have mostly engineered a artificial situation where it's difficult for anyone to compete with them effectively. That is not good for you as customer and is a risky strategy for them.

<comment><USER6> I want to return to something I said because on review I realized it wasn't really clear

 _"The funny thing is that I've never actually seen any viable business models from the open source community about how to build a business around free software (as in beer and freedom) that wasn't entirely couched in "support services". "_

When I said "build a business around free software" I meant as the producers or authors of the software.

The reason I make this distinction is that I think most of your examples involves companies building a viable business around open source software as _users_ of the software. I'm also implying a distinction between authors of software vs. people who modify the source to do something they want -- and yes I realize that's a bit of a stretched distinction w/r to open source. Often times the authors _are_ the same people who use and contribute small bits of modifications to the code.

What I mean is that, say Apache for example, comes from the Apache Foundation. If I make some modification to the source to make it do some particular thing I want, I'm modifying the software in the same way a car enthusiast may modify their Honda to do something they want. (If, what I made is generically useful, I can submit it back to the Apache Foundation and perhaps cross the line to become and "author", but in most cases we're talking about people who mod software in some way).

The last place I worked for does about $10bn a year. It's a technology company with their hands in projects as diverse as autonomous undersea robots to text processing systems. They've successfully built a business around a mix of proprietary software solutions and some small percentage of open source software. The default OS is some Microsoft Server OS, databases are almost exclusively Oracle or SQL Server, Web servers are almost always IIS. They also write a lot of their own software, typically in Java (even before it was opened) and/or Perl but most of the software jobs involve writing code in some highly proprietary development environment like those you find in finance, HR, or some other types of systems. Java and Perl just happen to be go-to languages because it's easy to find people who write in those. Python was starting to show up a bit as well when I left that job.

They also get _ok_ mileage from really true open source software. Red Hat finds its way onto some fractional percentage (along with Apache, JBOSS, and a few other odds and ends -- including the aforementioned Perl). But in many cases, they could do what they wanted with completely proprietary solutions. Those systems were usually selected due to some client requirement, or because the licensing costs are free (beer). I only ever ran into one true open source advocate in the entire place, and he was usually laughed out of proposal work because his "solutions" options would have extended the development effort by a year and required hiring an entirely new staff of people raised on that ecosystem rather than the preferred and proprietary MS/Oracle/Sun/Cisco ecosystem. Finding qualified staff to work on the open source stuff was frankly a continuous and quite major problem for us -- often times, because those people counted as people with specialized skillsets vs. the average run- of-the-mill trade school "tech guy" they simply cost more to hire. In other words, we ran the numbers over and over again, and open source rarely made sense for us.

I _do_ think that the reverse is also true though, for small startups open source can make a lot of sense in both senses of the term "freedom". For the bottom line, it's free, if you are doing something weird you _can_ , in theory, mod the software to do something unique. It's not always easy, and I've seen many cases where the target goal was too big for the staff and the startup folded. Web startups are also interesting because for the most part, the work they do with open source results in a completely proprietary web app (something RMS has lamented on quite a bit recently).

Many big businesses likewise do great things with and for open source (IBM, Sun and Apple come to immediate mind) in terms of funding the kinds of expensive Open Source development efforts that would otherwise not exist because building world class software by part-time hobbyists is extremely difficult -- there's really only a very small handful of those projects, and most of them have been funded recently by large corporations looking to leverage the initial investment/development effort to make _their_ solution work like they want.

But by and large, large organizations will move to whatever accomplishes their goals for the least amount of $$$. Even startups. If a startup can use a proprietary solution for $x thousands of dollars vs. modifying some existing open project to scratch some itch for $y thousands of dollars, and x<y they'll go with the solution that costs x. For example, how many startups use Windows or OSX as their primary desktop OS vs. some flavor or Linux/BSD? Probably most.

This guy gets a lot of what I'm saying here.

<http://lunduke.com/?p=1075>

It's a great analysis of the problems in the community flavored with a hard dose of pragmatic realism. He _gets_ it that "just do it open source" doesn't really make sense in many cases because the community is by and large made-up of people who don't understand what it takes to make a business.

<comment><USER20> I don't think many of the people who create open source projects want to create a business. It's just they wanted to solve a problem and then share that solution with the world. Typically they get employed away by someone who does want to create a business around it e.g. Linus Torvalds, Rasmus Lerdorf, Alan Cox etc.

That said, there still is a need for support around this products, so people create businesses around them an employ the people who wrote it.

I don't think creating a open source project solely to make a business out of makes a lot of sense in most cases, because profits in the early days will be low and it will take long time to scale that business.

Most businesses don't see the value of open source really and your story shows that the company you worked for didn't either. That's not to say there are aren't lots of companies that do realise the benefits. To use your example, some businesses like the Honda how it is and others want to make a race car and absolutely can benefit from modifying it. Google, Apple, Facebook and so on have all greatly benefited from modifying the Honda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Makes sense to me. Regardless of if the software if free, you do have the choice to use it.

I love the idea of free software, but in practice it's left a lot to be desired for me. For others, more power to them if it works for them.

<comment><USER22> Same. Proprietary software provides unique encouragement for something to be created. In my experience, much of free-OSS has been significantly worse than a cheap proprietary, if it exists at all.

"much", not "all" by any means. Some utterly, incomparably awesome stuff has come out as OSS.

<comment><USER22> To both / all replying to this: I'm not in _any_ way claiming proprietary doesn't have crap. It's got _loads_ of crap. But I'd be willing to bet that a _large_ amount of the _most used_ applications out there are proprietary, in many cases because there is no comparable OSS equivalent.

And remember that _the_ deciding factor in many cases is user interface - <USER3> average user _does not care_ if they can hack it. Many many many OSS projects which _could_ be contenders have absolutely _abysmal_ UI and help documents.

<comment><USER23> _I'd be willing to bet that a large amount of the most used applications out there are proprietary, in many cases because there is no comparable OSS equivalent._

Your argument would be significantly stronger if you actually gave examples here.

<comment><USER22> Photoshop - Gimp can't handle tablet input on any system I've got (lags horribly behind input), and is generally slower and has a horrendous UI which frequently puts windows half off-screen and sometimes cuts off text.

Maya / 3DS Max / Whatever - Are you _really_ going to claim Blender is any good? Functional, sure, but that's about it.

Windows - Linux graphics drivers are often an absolute joke, so Windows really _is_ just about the only real PC gaming option. And don't claim it's because graphics cards are closed hardware - then why hasn't an open-hardware group made anything competitive? Their only major success has been the Arduino (a BIG success, but rather lonely).

OSX - Linux OSes, even Ubuntu, have _all_ had clunky UI and seriously lacking normal-user help documentation. Last time I used Ubuntu, I had to resort to the CLI inside of _30 minutes_ to correct a permissions error the UI could only inform me of. Try telling most people how to do that.

Outlook / Mail.app - Thunderbird's the biggest contender, and has _many_ things right... but while the new UI is much nicer, I ran into _many_ display bugs in less than an hour of use, one of which resulted in my deleting an email I did not have selected (when I didn't hit delete).

MS Office suite / iWork suite - OpenOffice has a UI lagging behind even MS Office, and in many of my uses has failed to have a working updater and lags behind my typing frequently. And then there's the preferences window... most people simply _cannot_ understand 90% of that, and will be turned off the entire application by its mere existence.

Half Life / Quake / Unreal Tournament / PC games of any kind - ?

Console games of any kind - ?

McAfee / Norton / AVG - ? ClamAV? Brought my system to a crawl last time I used it. Not that McAfee / Norton are much better there, but...

And in the other corner, we have:

Firefox / Chrome, Pidgin / Adium (though Pidgin has a bad install process and a nasty UI for most people), Eclipse (though it's slow)... I know there are more, but I'm having trouble coming up with them right now. Just woke up.

I had generally thought the major ones were self-explanatory, and this is rather long, hence its initial omission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem is that often (not always), proprietary software is just better than any free equivalent. I will gladly sacrifice some freedom to gain quality.

<comment><USER8> and you're not even sacrificing freedom. all you're really doing is paying someone to do some work for you.

<comment><USER23> You're sacrificing freedom if the workers you pay don't give you free access to the source code you pay them to write.

<comment><USER8> I don't have to know how something is done for it to be worth paying to have it done.

I'm not sure freedom is what one gives up in this situation. It seems more like giving up control. And one has to do that in life just to be able to delegate tasks to others.

Is it really freedom being given up or freedom obtained by freeing up one's time to do things you value more than examining the code for the microprocessor that makes your clock radio work?

And its freedom that makes it possible for one person to offer the work of their minds to others without having to disclose everything about how it is that they are capable of doing it.

We are free to make such a deal and then later if we choose another alternative. There is no loss of freedom at any point, just the exercise of one's freedom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I doubt that proprietary software will ever really go away, but I think that its importance will diminish over time as the heap of free software grows ever larger.

Over time the issue of freedom in the digital domain has become increasingly important. Today perhaps more than ever there are an array of forces who are trying to snatch away people's control over their own computing and put it into the hands of highly centralised technocrats, usually by dangling the carrot of convenience. The personal computer is in danger of no longer being personal.

</comment><comment><USER8> isn't this just another way of saying that nobody should ever pay for others to write code?</comment>


LinkNYC Turning Off Web Access to Curb Squatting - <AUTHOR> https://www.link.nyc/service-update.html <comment><AUTHOR> Porn watching aside, (always a challenge to block endless urls etc), 'squatting' at the terminals seems like an unsurprising result ...surely should have had a feeling this would happen when designing. A foreseeable challenge - not sure of solution other than time limits.

Also unfortunate. I feel like the terminals and free access are somewhat made with those down on their luck in mind, so hoping the project continues to afford them the opportunities. I suppose wifi is really the solution so someone has to use their own device...</comment>


Ask HN: What do you like about the Hacker News community? - <AUTHOR>

Apropos of the usual angst about whether or not Hacker News is degrading as a community, I thought I would emphasize the positive by asking what you like about the community that brought you here in the first place and has kept you here till now.
I was brought here by reading Paul Graham's essays on his personal website. Way back in 2003, a local friend recommended that all of the parents in my homeschooling support group read pg's essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular." She seemed to know of pg's name from his contributions to the Internet research community (of which she was part), but I had never heard of him. I read and thought about the essay, and in 2005 a friend recommended that I read "What You'll Wish You'd Known," which I have since recommended to each of my children as they approach high school age, and have often recommended to friends. As I heard about more Paul Graham essays, I learned to browse around his personal site and at some point followed a link to "News," which links here. At first I only lurked on what was then called Startup News, but by November 2008 I had an account here, which has become quite active. I was drawn here by Paul's interest in education policy, a passionate interest of mine since 1972, but I have found other interesting topics to discuss here.
What brought you here? What do you like about Hacker News? <comment><USER2> Hacker News was key for me to feel comfortable moving away from San Francisco. I realized that I was getting most of my Silicon Valley news from a source that I could read from anywhere.

The comments here are so good that I often read them before or even instead of reading the article. HN is a superb collection of items well-aligned with my interests in startups, business strategy, and major technology trends.

<comment> wh-uws This.

Slightly different though.

HN has made me a lot more comfortable with the fact that I have chosen not to move back to the bay area yet.

I did an internship at Yahoo out there before I finished school. I'm in Austin, Tx now and thinking about moving to New York

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is so far as I know the biggest concentrated population of people starting or working on technology businesses. It's also historically our best hiring vector†. It's a lot of other things I don't like so much, but you take the good with the bad.

† _We are always hiring;<http://www.matasano.com/careers> _

</comment><comment><USER4> Practically none of my friends are interested in tech/startups and I don't have co-workers. HN is one of the only place where I feel amongst my peers in that respect.

</comment><comment><USER5> Until I read Paul Graham I had never heard of another entrepreneurial programmer who liked Evelyn Waugh and Wodehouse and placed such an enormous value on doing hard things. I came to news looking for other people like that.

My experience here has been quite positive; I have learns a great deal from recommended books and programming languages. I also discovered Richard Hamming's famous speech which changed the way I work in several ways.

Unfortunately, I absorb more than I contribute and sadly realize I am of the generation that dilutes the vision and modeled behavior of this community's best members, reducing the ability of those following me to even notice what I saw and did not emulate. I hope to do my part to increase the quality of posts by adding to the site rather than shouting down low quality.

</comment><comment><USER6> Slashdot, some time ago, had a link to an article "A Plan for Spam" that led me to Paul's essays, and thence to here. That led to meeting some folks and actually a gig.

The articles and commentary here have a depth and quality in topics that I am interested in that cannot be found anywhere else. There are a large number of friends that I now have that can be traced back to making connections here on HN.

And like most things that are truly interesting, it is reasonably difficult to get to the bottom of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Predictability. Not a lot of randomness. I don't have to worry about being sucker punched with porn etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> There is a lot of fresh thinking shared at HN, and I check New Links and comments here more often than I check any aggregated news sites or NYTimes or Merc.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like that stupid comments are consistently voted down.

</comment><comment><USER10> Show HN. Love seeing / sharing / things we build, gives me a good feeling :)

</comment><comment><USER11> pg remains personally invested (in the sense of interest and care).

Lacking such leadership, projects seem inevitably to turn into "Lord of the Flies".</comment>


0x5f3759df and the fast inverse square root (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://h14s.p5r.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html

<comment><USER2> If anyone wants a fast atan2 that I wrote a while ago (2007), for making a microcontroller navigate, it's at [http://robots- everywhere.com/portfolio/math/](http://robots-everywhere.com/portfolio/math/)

<comment><USER3> how's it compare to a CORDIC?

<comment><USER2> I wrote it for the Parallax Propeller, which is slow at doing divisions - so I tried to keep those to a minimum (one, which isn't too bad).

<comment><USER3> With a CORDIC the only divides should be by powers of 2 in the main loop and taking out the gain factor at the end, all of which can be turned into multiplies?

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I'm going to go back and try it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tl;DR :

The fast inverse square root is based on the fact that the integer representation of a floating point number is a rough approximation of its logarithm.

So convert floating point to its integer representation. So now you have its approximate logarithm. Now take half of that and improve that with some Newton raphson.

<comment><USER5> So convert floating point to its integer representation.

Would something dirty like this be feasible in rust?

<comment><USER6> AFAICT transmute would work: [http://rustbyexample.com/staging/unsafe.html](http://rustbyexample.com/staging/unsafe.html)

That's what's great about Rust, you can write unsafe code when you need it and it's isolated in `unsafe` blocks for easy auditing.

EDIT: Didn't test it too much, but looks like it works.

        fn fast_inv_sqrt(x: f32) -> f32 {
            let f: f32 = unsafe {
                let i: i32 = std::mem::transmute(x);
                std::mem::transmute(0x5f3759df - (i >> 1))
            };
            f * (1.5 - 0.5 * x * f * f)
        }

        println!("{}", fast_inv_sqrt(1.0));
          //=> 0.998307
        println!("{}", fast_inv_sqrt(255.0));
          //=> 0.062517

EDIT2: Shorter, more readable version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm really impressed by the generalization to other powers, including the regular square root. It's the first time I've seen that hack (actually even the author mentions he found nothing on google). I think I could definitely have used that when I needed to compute square roots of fixedpoint numbers with no HW support, it looks very significantly faster than the iterative "by digit" method.

</comment><comment><USER8> There is also a Wikipedia page for this:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> And the moral of this story is: Never trust any floating-point number whose bits you haven't polished yourself.

</comment><comment><USER10> how does he adjust his σ value ?

</comment><comment><USER11> Rarely I'm that amazed at encodings.

</comment><comment><USER12> I may be going on rampage here but " _It does contain a fair bit of math_ " really grinds my gears!

Of course it does, it is about square roots and inversions.

In most of the cases, in order to optimize an algorithm or solve a problem, mathematics will do it for you, and that ranges from simple arithmetic properties to base changing theorems in linear algebra.

You just can not tackle such subjects without expecting it to _contain a fair bit of math_ .

<comment><USER13> loads of things do not require math (in the sort of "doing stuff with functions in (R -> R), or multiplications/division).

Pretty much no sorting algorithm requires mathematical knowledge to work through, nor do many data structure algorithms. Concurrency resolution issues neither.

This is of course, so long as you consider math to be "do stuff with these numbers." Group theory and the like can help guide your results on a more abstract level.

EDIT: what I meant by this is the sort of "number-y" math that people usually mean when saying "warning: Math ahead". I realise that abstract modeling is also a part of mathematics, but that's not what people usually _mean_ when said in the context of what parent post was mentioning

<comment><USER14> > ...math (in the sort of "doing stuff with functions in (R -> R), or > multiplications/division")

This is not what math is. It's more what calculus is and math is a lot more than calculus. Most mathematics is not about numbers at all.

BTW: Interesting results about sorting algorithms (e.g. the lower bound of O(nlogn) complexity for comparison-based sorts) require maths (specifically combinatorics, permutations etc). Concurrency involves math, too. See the famous happens-before relationship which involves notions of sets (of executions), transitivity, partial ordering, etc.

<comment><USER15> > See the famous happens-before relationship which involves notions of sets > (of executions), transitivity, partial ordering, etc.

[OT] What's the probability of two comments with very similar views appearing at the same time :-). I too did comment almost exactly same thing!

PS: Ducks from down-votes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Snowden's Box – The human network behind the leak - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/snowdens-box/?single=1 <comment><USER2> I pity Dale when NSA reads the article. Telling everyone that you have the whole snowden material? Mate, that's irresposible and stupid

<comment><USER3> You're right.

"We brought the material down. Now it's hidden somewhere else — off Dale's property in a location known only to him."

Good lord.

<comment><USER4> "Yet we hang on to such items."

Jesus, as if its some sort of folksy thing you're going to pull out and show your grand kids one day.

<comment><USER5> You scoff, but I'd wager that a USB stick _would_ count as folksy in 50 years.

<comment><USER4> well in 50 years they can speak about it that way.

besides, im talking about the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      The institutions and endeavors we regard as ironclad — from
      parenting to politics — are actually held together with chewing
      gum and duct tape. Nothing truly works, at least not for long,
      or not in the way it's supposed to. This reality is terrifying,
      because it exposes the precariousness of the existing order.
      But it's also liberating, because it encourages the individual
      to act, to defy the ominous mythology of competence and control.

<comment><USER7> It's called the "social contract". It would be more concerning if it wasn't this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why the files didn't get encrypted and then massively uploaded, like the wikileaks insurance files.

That turns it into a problem of securely archiving a 256bit string and escrowing it or doing some k of n thing such that it gets released if Poitras/Snowden/etc. go missing, ensuring they don't go missing. That's a much simpler problem than dealing with 8GB+ of data.

(And it only really works if you either publicize this or let NSA and any other potential adversary know about it; and you then end up with the "anyone who wants to cause trouble for NSA knocks off enough people to trigger the insurance file" problem if it's public...)

<comment><USER3> Maybe if your fear is that the NSA tapped the entire Internet, you might think they can trace the origin location of such a large upload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm gobsmacked by that choice of return address. From "B Manning"? Only one digit off from his real address?

Maybe it was a test. Let's say that he in fact mailed the package anonymously. So interception would arguably have told him that he was under observation. But still, using "B Manning" seems like a confounder, even if a small one.

I'm guessing that he used different return addresses for the other two boxes. Controls for the test, as it were.

</comment><comment><USER10> For those who'd rather have the article displayed as a single page: [http://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/snowdens- box/?single=1](http://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/snowdens-box/?single=1)</comment>


Ask HN: Watching movies online - <AUTHOR>

There are a lot of websites today on which you can watch, for "free", the last top movies. It is clear for me that they are infringing in a way or another the producers copyright.
What it is not so clear is about a person that watches an almost certain pirated movie posted online. Does the watcher also commits some sorts of felony ?
I'm not concerned with morality here, just with the legal implications of watching "free" movies online. <comment><USER2> When you stream something online, it's no different than downloading- it's just an instant version of it. I'm not sure into the details why mostly downloading makes it into lawsuits (maybe because it's easier to make a case), but from what I've read, it's still illegal if it's a copyrighted movie.

Those sites that lets you stream free movies are legal, at least in the United States. I built one of those sites myself so I know a little about them. As long as ALL your content are links posted to 3rd party sites, you're basically just an index. You don't expect people to sue Google for indexing bittorrent sites do you? Needless to say, you will still face legal complications- Sites that stream tv have been served before and shut down although the verdict usually results in a not guilty. If you check out the footer of those streaming sites, you'll notice almost all of them states explicitly "We do not host any content on blah blah.com. Please serve your DCMA copyright notices directly to the 3rd party websites that host them..."

Even the 3rd party sites that HOST the content is arguably hard to convict. The terms and agreements state that the responsibility lies with the actual user. The user agrees prior to signing up and every time they're making use of the website that they are not uploading copyrighted content.

</comment><comment><USER3> AFAIK, it is currently not a crime within the United States, although there is legislation in the pipeline to make streaming a felony[1]. These websites rely on having links to the copyrighted content, rather than hosting it themselves.

[1] [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20071913-17/senate- group-b...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20071913-17/senate-group-backs- prison-time-for-illegal-streaming/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've never tried one, is the steam worth watching? Is it a good copy? Is there advertisements in the video or just along side?

I'd be very interested in hearing about the legality of the users of these sites.

Currently using the (currently) legal www.zediva.com - $1 a movie, and I love the concept of renting a DVD player over in the states. I hope that it takes off.

<comment><USER5> I had a flatmate once who used dodgy online streaming websites. They were riddled with pop ups and advertising but no ads in the actual video. The quality of the movie also varied in source from "Cams" to "dvdrips".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Take a look here: <http://cuevana.tv></comment>


Why I stopped reading biographies - tefo-mohapi http://tefomohapi.com/post/150912193488/why-i-stopped-reading-biographies <comment><AUTHOR> Biographies shouldn't be read as a manual to learn what made those women and men successful.

Read them as a lesson in understanding people, personalities, traits, follies and to give an occasional spark to the fire within you. You'll never be able to replicate success by following what someone else did, but you can almost always find something inspiring about how they went about doing it.

<comment><USER2> And ultimately, remember that the biography is just one person's version of the story of another human being. You don't necessarily know what was left out, or left in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most real (good) biographies are not written by the successful person itself(autobiographies).

In most real biographies you learn a lot about the sacrifices the person had to do in order to be successful(success meaning getting the outcome they wanted to get). Most people won't make the sacrifices because they want the output, but not the way to get there.

You see the Ads? Get slim and strong without effort. That is what people want.

For example, Mother Teresa was successful in helping hundreds of thousands of people, that was what she wanted, but did tremendous sacrifices for getting there.

I personally met Vicente Ferrer and talked with him(I was very young and was shocked for what he told me) when Indian usurers wanted to kill him or at least exile him from India. He had to renounce Spanish citizenship to continue his work and was very successful in the end.

My father met Almodovar when other people called him a failure, shouted and insulted him on the street for making the films he did.

It is only thanks to early aviation pioneers, most of them died in accidents, that planes fly.

Explorers like Christopher Colombus or Livingstone changed history. But Livingstone wife died in one of his travels, Colombus became bankrupted following his dream. He had to give his child in adoption.

Gutenberg spent his entire life perfecting a machine, the printing press, that only worked well after he had died.

Elon Musk personal life is a drama. But he is hell bent on getting to Mars and he will get there. Period.

</comment><comment><USER4> I stopped reading autobiographies for the same reason. No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.

But non-auto-biographies!! So many history books are the high level "this happened in that year caused by whatever-just-trust-me" while biographies dig into how the world actually worked. Especially if they're set in the last few hundred years and not the last 30, there's a tremendous amount of primary sources to base the writing without over politicizing the topic. What kind of history won't have a survivor bias? Is this an excuse to ignore history entirely?

> I also try to read as many anti-biographies, i.e. people who don't like the > subject

That's introducing it's own bias. But you might as well read The Power Broker if you're going that direction. Fascinating story.

<comment><USER5> > No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.

You and OP make way too much of this. Have you actually read any autobiographies? As with any piece of writing, you have to form your own judgements, but people can't completely fabricate their life stories or delude themselves about the reasons for their success.

Autobiographies I've read, and enjoyed, even though I think the writers are all in different ways dishonest, include Malcolm X (street gangster turned religious leader), Gandhi (moralistic prig with weird sexual perversions), Bertrand Russell (projects saintly calm but had weird bouts of rage) and 50 Cent (claimed he never smoked crack, and it only accidentally ended up in his bloodstream). Still, I believe all four are accurate when describing the reasons for their success.

(For more honest auto-biographies, I'd recommend Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, and Richard Feynman, off the top of my head).

Either way, no-one writes "I achieved X by doing Y and Z, it was simple", it's more like "I tried to achieve X by doing A, and that went disastrously, then I tried B, and made some progress, then I realised X was a waste of time and went after Y, and noticed most people who wanted Y did Z but that didn't work for them, so I tried doing C, then D, and then E, and that's when things began taking off".

<comment><USER6> Of Churchill's work, I found Savrola, a novel he wrote at 24, to be the among most revealing . . .

"Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what? A people's good! That, he could not disguise from himself, was rather the direction than the cause of his efforts. Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it."

In source: [https://jupiter.ai/books/awgm/?hl=plV](https://jupiter.ai/books/awgm/?hl=plV)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He seems to reduce biographies to some kind of self-improvement books or life lessons. Maybe some are marketed as such, but the genre is much more diverse than that!

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me this relates to contemporary books that are chosen for self- mentoring purposes.

There are other sorts of biographies, and other motivations for reading them.

</comment><comment><USER9> I admit I was fearing a long drawn out answer. This was nice and short.

I think I agree with the point, too. Reading of failures is typically clearer, because you can sometimes get good answers there. Not always, of course. But many successes include the hidden, "also, we did not get very unlucky."

<comment><USER10> On my phone it was nice and short becauze the article had its own non- functioning scroll bar. Only about one-eighth of the article was actually visible but it was more than enough to understand his feelings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The world might be chaotic and exhibit 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' (One year ago, how many people could have predicted the snowball of Donald Trump's campaign?), but it would be disingenuous to claim that biographies are complete noise. Even the genre of Fiction, despite its nomenclature, elicits truths about the world, possibly even _the_ most profound truths that non-fiction cannot otherwise capture.

Right before coming here, I had just watched 'The End of the Tour', a drama about a Rolling Stones journalist writing a biography about writer David Foster Wallace (and now I'm writing about it, how meta is that?). In my opinion, David Foster Wallace's work is a paragon of fiction eliciting those profound truths. Ironically enough, one of the themes explored in the film was about being in-tune versus out-of-touch with reality specifically in the context of success / fame. I leave you with an excerpt from the film (Spoiler Alert):

 _All your protesting "I'm just regular guy". You don't crack open a thousand page book because the author is a regular guy. You do it because he is brilliant. Because you want him to be brilliant._

</comment><comment><USER6> Relevant lines from Emerson:

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

In source: [https://jupiter.ai/books/vKv9/?hl=mAy](https://jupiter.ai/books/vKv9/?hl=mAy)

<comment><USER12> And I might add, Smart men believe in luck, believe luck is probabilistic, and believe their actions can significantly alter the probabilities, even if they can't guarantee an outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I actually LOVE reading biographies, in fact this year I made a special point of reading as many biographies as I could. And yes, like this guy I read biographies with the very specific goals of learning life lessons and ideas that I could implement in my own life.

But I agree with his logic:

(1) He is referring to autobiographies and not biographies. As he points out, plenty of biographies are critical and even extensively point out all the subject's flaws and failures.

(2) The value of reading biographies comes from aggregating them not extrapolating from one. If you read 10 biographies of entrepreneurs and you notice the same 3 recurring themes in all their stories, that's a good hit that those themes are not random.

(3) There is definitely a danger of survivor bias, but the best biographies do a good job of trying to figure how much luck played a role in an individual's success.

But the bottomline is that no matter what you read, you do have to take it with a grain of salt and consider that there are probably many other factors which were not included.

</comment><comment><USER14> "The answer became clearer, you can work hard, persevere, get degrees, etc. and still FAIL."

Sure. Does that mean you should not work hard, persevere, get degrees, etc. ?

Because what you learn from biographies is not a 1:1 plan to succeed doesn't mean you can't learn ways to systematically improve your odds of success (regardless of the way you define that).

<comment><USER15> I'm not too sure about this. I know quite a few artists biographies, here things often involve being broke in NYC* and some drug abuse. This is the other extreme, but shows how wrong things could be.

If you know include the costs of the positive examples you quoted one should give it a second thought: Hard work and degrees do cost time, effort and in the worst case they trade in happiness. These choices might also cause broken hearts for those who did everything right and still blame themselves for not having their dream career. Or even worse: having the dream career and only than realizing they missed the youth of their kids or something.

* something that's also totally different today, I think there is not much room (especially literally) for the poor in NYC (at least that's what I've been told, never lived there)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you have a fire, you gotta stoke it once in a while to keep it burning. For me, that is what biographies and self motivation/help books are. They are not the source one one true secret to help you find the way. They are a bit of fuel to the fire to fuel your motivation and keep you going.

</comment><comment><USER17> I stopped reading "Why I stopped..." articles

</comment><comment><USER18> In Warrant Buffet's biography "the snowball" (in which according to the author she had freedom in what to write and was directed to highlight the negative as well) he acknowledges that he won the genetic and country lottery, so there are biographies and biographies, and it's true that many are hagiographies or ghost-written and basically made up like "Trump's" The Art of the Deal.

</comment><comment><USER19> Author doesn't seem to realize that most of us already know that autobiographies by business types are full of bombast and self-glorification and are mostly ghost written anyways. I guess I'm glad the author came to this realization, but I don't know why it needs to be on the front page of HN. For example, I've never read anyone referencing Trump's Art of the Deal in any serious way.

</comment><comment> obj-g The author conflates biographies with autobiographies, makes strange claims about the purpose of biographies (to learn how to succeed?) and generally doesn't have much of interest or clarity to say on the topic. Why this is here completely baffles me.

</comment><comment><USER20> For me, reading biographies is good to find something inspiring what people did. But, people are different. "Success" has different meaning among ourselves. People have different path/map that to success. So, find your own path!

</comment><comment><USER21> Not having native scrolling to read an article on the phone is incredibly annoying...

</comment><comment><USER22> I will continue to read autobiographies. Every single person on earth is writing her own autobiography, either on paper on in her head. I am writing my own and it is greatly entertaining and educational how others go about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems you're mostly referring to auto-biographies.

<comment><USER15> Especially non auto-biographies will not even be written for the non- survivors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just to clarify, who is Marcelle Reich? Is March Rich a typo? (Marc?) Is the biography you're referring to the one by Daniel Ammann?

<comment><USER25> The late Marc Rich was a commodities trader who founded Glencore. He got into trouble for tax evasion and striking oil deals with Iran during the US hostage crisis there. Lived as an international fugitive in Switzerland for many years, surrounded by armed guards. Was pardoned by Bill Clinton. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For me it would be more interesting why did you start reading them in the first place.</comment>


My Dog's Activity Tracker Is Letting Me Watch Her Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/activity-trackers-watching-your-dog-die/

<comment><USER2> I think this indirectly highlights one problem with fitness tracking, which is that, it works really well while we are improving and constantly hitting new goals. However, after a decline, there is a period where it takes even longer to catch up and then exceed past your previous goal (if it ever happens).

So basically, I don't think fitness trackers tend to handle peaks very well. Especially the apple watch, which I own and love.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you suggesting trackers need to understand when there is outlier activity and properly normalize?

<comment><USER2> I'm saying that trackers expect constant growth (probably because young people use them mostly). What happens when an older person, around 50+, uses it? Most people at that age are on a physical decline. It's just like the article, where you could be watching your body deteriorate through statistics and bioinformatics.

Not exactly motivational.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Oh no, I think I have serious competition - What do you guys think of this? - <AUTHOR> http://www.geticeberg.com/

<comment><USER2> This types of products always fail because the more you dumb it down the less control you have and the less like what you want you will get. Thats ignoring the performance issues and design flaws non-professionals will make. I've worked on a number of very expensive consulting jobs where my only role was to fix an in house application that Jenny from sales wrote and the company now depends on.

I just listened to the short video intro as well as I suspect it will have the target audience(non-programmers) saying "WTF?". Iceberg makes it easy to connect your objects to your forms. Great but will your audience know what an object is? Will they understand why this is useful?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, sanswork. That's exactly what I was thinking.

Aside: That's 2 _excellent_ responses to comments I made today. Please be kind enough to put an email address on your profile or contact me offline. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm having difficulty understanding exactly what it does... And I'm a technical person.

If your product does a better job of being simple, you can beat them.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's supposed to be a way to build web apps without programmers. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like another Visual Basic IDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excuse my ignorance but what is your app?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have spent the last several years writing apps for small and midmarket businesses (accounting, inventory, order processing, etc.) I want to convert my service business into a product business; that is, an app that does what I do.

I know, it's a tall order. It also looks like what these people are trying to do.

<comment><USER5> OK, once again - what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's good, it means your not building something nobody wants, there's a market. If there is no competition, there's probably no market.</comment>


How to Host Your Own Delicious Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/host-your-own-delicious-altern.php

<comment><USER2> Delicious isn't a collection of bookmarks.

It's a community of developers and plugins.

That's why these solutions aren't right for me, and neither is copying and pasting my delicious bookmarks to an evernote page.

The developers and plugins that worked with delicious let me do cool things like auto-store and auto-tag the links that people tweet at me.

<comment><USER3> Looks like what we need is a distributed P2P implementation of Delicious. That way it's no longer dependent on any one provider.

<comment><USER4> That's part of what the CouchDB based Scrumptious does.</comment></comment></comment>


Causal inference in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/akelleh/causality <comment><USER2> I'd love for someone to explain about this "inferring causality from observational data". I've read a little before, and it sounded really exciting, but I wondered if it was just the same as instrumental variables with multiple instruments. Anyone know more?

<comment><USER3> Statistical modeling often involves two parts, model selection and model inference. As it turns out, many models have a causal interpretation. For example, a simple linear model could be interpreted as x causes y using the equation y = b*x + error.

If you get a bunch of variables and relate them through linear equations where some cause others plus some error, then different patterns of causal relations imply different covariance matrices. Classically, people have used these covariance matrices to choose between possible causal models.

There are different approaches, but a common one in the behavioral sciences is to choose a few causal models to represent theories, and then perform model selection (like choosing between multiple regression models with different variables).

To answer your question, though, instrumental variables are a specific causal pattern in a model, but there can be other models, such as those with latent variables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is also Tetrad. It's written in Java and has a GUI. [https://github.com/cmu-phil/tetrad](https://github.com/cmu-phil/tetrad)

</comment><comment><USER5> Haha, was wondering if this was by Adam Kelleher. I've been to a few of the meetups he hosted about causal inference. Really smart guy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I always wish the readme included a real-world example to help make the libraries more accessible.</comment>


This Is Our Reality: Why I Couldn't Hold Back About BART's Real Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a20019/taylor-huckaby-bart/ <comment><USER2> Now if only the some of the "technocratic" and "forward-thinking" VCs and corporations of the Bay actually gave a rat's ass about public infrastructure and lobbied for improvements to the system, maybe it would be somewhere.

Alas, I guess moving millions of people is too boring and too close to admitting that maybe the government _is_ better than private institutions at solving a variety of problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is not an infinite supply of money at the state level. Unlike the Fed, California has no ability to create money out of thin air. Therefore, choices must be made.

IMO spending money to maintain BART, which is used by many people every day, is much smarter than funding Governor Moonbeam's train to nowhere.</comment>


Tell HN: Sendgrid increases price by almost 50%, weeks after acquisition - <AUTHOR> Just received this email.<p>"As a valued SendGrid customer, we would like to inform you of an upcoming price change to SendGrid's Essentials plans, effective January 1st, 2019. This change reflects ongoing investment in our infrastructure, products, and services, ensuring that we continue to provide you with a best-in-class experience.<p>Your Essentials 40K plan price will change from $9.95 per month to $14.95 per month. Please note, this pricing will be in effect for new customers on December 1st, 2018, but as an existing customer, we're providing you with additional notice in case you have any questions. Your January bill will reflect these changes." <comment><USER2> If you save a half hour of developer time per year by not switching, you come out ahead.

</comment><comment><USER3> "valued SendGrid customer"

<comment><USER4> 50% more valued by the looks of it

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Possibly related? [https://www.fairfieldcurrent.com/2018/11/28/investors- purcha...](https://www.fairfieldcurrent.com/2018/11/28/investors-purchase- high-volume-of-sendgrid-put-options-send.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> We signed up with them 2 months ago. As a small but rapidly growing company, we have to keep a close eye on our costs. We'll be cancelling our service with them today because of the price hike.

<comment><USER7> You'll be canceling over a $5 price increase? Seems a little excessive. Paying $15/mo isn't unreasonable, imo, for sending up to 100,000 emails. Mailgun charges $79/mo for the same, if I'm not mistaken.

<comment><USER6> Seems excessive on the surface but over the course of a year, that's $60. Still pedantic? Sure, but $60 in adspend for us generates $1200 in revenue. As a bootstrapped company, every dime matters to us.

Why sacrifice that when there are alternative options for cheaper, especially when we're only sending out a handful of emails/mo?

<comment><USER8> If every dollar in adspend nets you 20x in revenue, why are you quibbling about 5 bucks a month and not pouring money into advertising?

<comment><USER9> I'd like to know as well. If you're getting 20x ad spend, you've hit the jackpot.

<comment><USER6> Couple things:

1) We're services/project oriented. So for each $1 we spend, we receive ~$20 back on revenue. That unfortunately doesn't compound and isn't recurring in the normal SaaS sense.

2) That's $20:$1 on revenue but not profit. We average between 15-25% net profit. Not great and we're trying to focus heavily on increasing this but it's quite tricky. Incrasing this usually means very expensive equipment purchases for automation.

3) I wish we could pour more money into advertising but we have to save up for additional equipment to purchase to expand services or pay for future software projects that could help us generate recurring revenue. We don't have deep pockets to leverage since it's bootstrapped. Otherwise, we'd have gone in guns blazing on advertising!

<comment><USER10> If every $1 becomes $3 ~ $4 in profit, makes no sense at all to "save" for equipment.

The progression with only investing in ads, each cycle multiply by tree your profit:

$1 -> $3 -> $9 -> $27 -> $81 -> $243 -> $729 -> $2187

The progression with "saving" the money

$1 -> $2 -> $3 -> $4 -> $5 -> $6 -> $7 -> $8

<comment><USER11> I think they're saying that they are unable to meet the demand (lack of either equipment or people) for the new business those extra advertising dollars would bring in. So they can't just continually pour $ into that pump.

Although I agree it's unusual to see that metric used (revenue per ad-spend) for a product that seemingly can't be scaled very much.

<comment><USER12> They probably could benefit from some finance. Or at least factoring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is not good for customers.

<comment><USER14> It makes them even more valued!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is very competitive space. Hiking the price will make competitors happy and customers not.

<comment><USER16> Probably why Twilio isn't interested in making their money at the bottom. (Can't tell if they are increasing price at Pro tier - I haven't seen any such email however)</comment></comment>


Super cool tool I use for leetcode/hackerrank practice - <AUTHOR> `npm install -g warp-prism`
If you're like me and you hate developing in web IDEs, this Javascript module lets me generate formatted modules as instantly invoked function expressions.
So lets say I'm on leetcode, and I'm stumped on a Hard level problem that has expected input as some arbitrary Linked List node data structure.
You use this tool say `warpin listNode .` and it will automatically create the JS module for you. That way I write quick tests in local (so I can run them with mocha) and use all my terminal keyboard shortcuts to test each piece of the functionality
Documentation seems to cover it pretty well https://www.npmjs.com/package/warp-prism <comment><USER2> > Documentation seems to cover it pretty well

Sorry to break it to you, but this thing doesn't have any documentation at all, it only has some shortish README. You should step out of your little pile of JavaScript to see how the rest of the world looks like.</comment>


Curse of Knowledge - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge <comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a good description of the state of the US presidential campaigning currently:

"... sales agents who are better informed about their products may, in fact, be at a disadvantage against other, less-informed agents when selling their products. The reason is said to be that better-informed agents fail to ignore the privileged knowledge that they possess and are thus "cursed" and unable to sell their products at a value that more naïve agents would deem acceptable"

<comment><AUTHOR> Another application of Curse of Knowledge of interest to programmers from the article: "... programmer fails to comment their code because it seems obvious at the time they write it. But a few months later they may have no idea why the code exists. "

I often experience something like that but not like I didn't write the comments. I wrote the comments but a few months later I find it hard to understand what they are about.

<comment><USER2> It also applies to magicians and mentalists, but in a slightly different way.

A magician hopeful might watch a magic show and be completely overwhelmed. Eventually they learn their first secrets, and there is a sudden case of "Oh, really? That's it?" and something they were previously enthralled with is now a bit of a bummer. Magic shows become more of a technical puzzle to work out, instead of the spectator amusement they were before learning the secrets. For a while, they forget what it actually was about magic or mentalism that got them so excited. And it is so easy to forget that YOU know the secret, but your audience doesn't.

The methods may very well be not so dazzling when you know them, but it's the performance that makes it magical in the first place. And that's where the fun is for the magician or mentalist, and why it's important to not give away their secrets (unless you're like Penn and Teller, where sometimes the secret IS the dazzling part!). Knowledge, to an audience, can immediately make the show very uninteresting. But as the performer, you have to remember they don't have the knowledge you have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Talking about magic, Arthur C Clarke put it well:

[http://lab.cccb.org/en/arthur-c-clarke-any-sufficiently- adva...](http://lab.cccb.org/en/arthur-c-clarke-any-sufficiently-advanced- technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic/)

What you are saying is "Any Magic is just Sufficiently Advanced Technology" which I guess is the corollary :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: The ultimate secret to success! - <AUTHOR> We have three major modes (states of mind):
1. Present, -- Emptiness of the mind
2. Future -- Dreams/Worries
3. Past -- Lessons/Regrets/Sadness
I have found out that I'm most productive/happy, when I'm mostly in the Present mode. I say mostly because if I was only in Present mode there was no way I could get anything done.
Solving a problem (say creating a feature for my product) requires combination of all the three modes. You need to predict the future (worry about if this then thats) and also remember the past (all the lessons, failures, and more).
But, without the Present mode there is no free space in our mind for us to get things done! We need that free space like computers need the free RAM.
The secret to success is a healthy combination of the three modes!
Meditation is the art of switching the mind to the Present mode 100%. We need Meditation most when things get too messy and we need to empty our mind and start from scratch. Think of Meditation as a hard restart!
But what is even more important than Meditatio is to constantly monitor the Mind and make sure it has a healthy combination of these three modes. Let's call this constant awareness of the Present!
Going back to the computer analogy,
Meditatio to computers is the hard restart. Let's say there is a memory leak in one of the programs or there is a wild thread.
And "constant awareness of the Present" is smart memory management -- to make sure we remove unnecessary data from RAM.
Some call this living in present time but I like to call this having a stable brain (mind) that is capable of working properly and getting things done!
To running a stable brain and being happy! :)
P.S. This is an answer to a comment (asked on HN) on how I clean my mind and avoid mental congestion and motivate myself.
Edit: formatting. Edit2: changed the title. <comment><USER2> Check out zen buddhism. Concept has been around thousands of years. It is the doing part that is difficult.</comment>


Update uTorrent and find your computer hijacked, mining Bitcoins for BitTorrent - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-quietly-installs-riskware-bitcoin-miner-users-report-150306/

<comment><AUTHOR> "The hugely popular download service uTorrent is still taking heat after announcing it would no longer freight downloads with software that slows the user's computer for the parent company's bitcoin-mining purposes -- a practice most users weren't aware of and hadn't agreed to. The software, known as Epic Scale, hijacks a user's computing and memory power in order for uTorrent owner BitTorrent Inc. to generate computing power to mine for bitcoin." [http://www.ibtimes.com/slow-computer-utorrent-epic-scale- bit...](http://www.ibtimes.com/slow-computer-utorrent-epic-scale-bitcoin- mining-software-slowing-down-computers-1840466)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Comment by moeburn on [http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/epic-scale-and- utorre...](http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/epic-scale-and-utorrent- bitcoin-mining-riskware-investigated) "Your investigation neglected to point out the fact that the choice to install Epic Scale only appears about 25% of the time, but installs 100% of the time. Try going through the installation process a few times, I guarantee you that you will find it doesn't always ask you."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Recent, related discussion: "Newest version of uTorrent has Bitcoin mining offer during install (utorrent.com)" [http://forum.utorrent.com/topic/95041-warning-epicscale- risk...](http://forum.utorrent.com/topic/95041-warning-epicscale-riskware- silently-installed-with-latest-utorrent/) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156405)</comment>


"…beard removal (virtual shaving), beard synthesis, and beard transfer." - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/imageshaving/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. But I notice none of the examples have a _real_ beard.

</comment><comment><USER3> They should have used Lenna in some of the "beard transfer" photos.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure they solved this problem in the 70s - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBcrTucxiRc> (from 3:45)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this would be useful for law enforcement?</comment>


Genetic transmission of reading ability - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X15001662

<comment><USER2> > " We conclude that parents and offspring tend to resemble each other for > genetic reasons, and not due to cultural transmission."

Interesting, but not earth-shattering. Reminded me of studies such as those referenced here ([http://freakonomics.com/2011/04/11/economics-and-genetics- of...](http://freakonomics.com/2011/04/11/economics-and-genetics-of-parenting- a-guest-post-by-bryan-caplan/)), finding that "with a few exceptions, adoption and twin researchers find that nature overpowers nurture, especially in the long-run."

<comment><USER3> Assuming that the "nurture" is roughly comparable. It's a weird paradox that societies put great effort into countering environmental factors make genetics more important.

For an extreme example, if I "nurture" a random selection of people by killing them, then their genetic gifts will not make that much difference to their IQ, GPA or salary, because they will be dead. In a society where they all get to experience 12 years of education and socialized medicine, those random environmental factors will be dampened and genetic factors boosted.</comment></comment>


The Postmodernism Generator – random graduate-level essays - <AUTHOR> http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ <comment><AUTHOR> See the footer for background info.</comment>