Show HN: A platform for women to crowd-source advice in confidence - <AUTHOR> https://shello.com <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here: as a female tech founder since 2009 I found it tough finding a network of women to share my experiences with. More recently but for a while now I've been a member of a bunch of women-only groups across FB, linkedin and a couple forums too and trying to stay on track with whats going on on each platform has got out of control.

So I created Shello to cut down on time spent across multiple plaforms and where women could ask questions on any topic from a single app experience, get great advice and build new female connections in the process. You can find out more about it at: [https://www.shello.com/about- us/](https://www.shello.com/about-us/)

Please let me know any questions, we're just starting out so any feedback as well would be super helpful.

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't get it, what problem is this app solving by excluding men from giving or asking for advice as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey blueadept11, women have very different experiences and challenges to men when it comes to most aspects of their lives, from careers, to body matters and relationships. So the advice we look for and share is often only relevant to other women. The way we talk in person with other women can be different to how we talk in public, much more personal way. So Shello aims to be bring that intimacy and freedom to talk and ask questions openly online and the only way we can do that is to make it just for women.

<comment><USER2> That's quite a leap from saying that certain topics are only relevant for women to saying that it's about freedom. Nobody is preventing women from talking about these topics in any other forum. You're saying that the advantage of perceived intimacy is greater than the disadvantage of losing the broader perspective that includes men. If I was in a bad mood, I'd say it's classic ingroup/outgroup psychology, which is latently ugly.

But I'm in a good mood, so I'll only say that there's nothing intimate about an environment where everyone is anonymous.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand the purpose of your comments here.

The author is creating a platform for one group of people to discuss their common issues. In this case, that the common feature between people in this group is gender.

Other platforms exist for discussion between people with common attributes. An example is cancer survivors. Discussion in a cancer survivor group should probably be limited to cancer survivors. Do you think that people who have not experienced cancer first or second hand would have a good reason to post their problems in that group? I can imagine the posts now - "I haven't had cancer or experienced it in any form but here's how you should deal with chemotherapy." That's probably not appropriate.

<comment><USER2> How about a "no African Americans allowed" forum, for fostering "intimacy" for people who need a place to freely talk about issues limited to those who aren't African American?

I'd say that kind of group is latently hostile because it seeks exclusion rather than to encourage a broader perspective, and discussion topics probably center around the excluded group (ingroup/outgroup). Seems like a good litmus test.

<comment><USER3> I know what you're trying to get at here, that forming a 'women-only' group is selecting against men by allowing them to join, and that selection isn't fair.

Cmon, be real. There are discussion groups that select against other parties. Some of these groups are socially acceptable (cancer survivors, people in debt, _women 's issues_). Other's might not be socially acceptable (excluding people based on their skin color).

In this case, a group to discuss women's issues is socially acceptable to a majority of people. If you're unhappy with this standard then go campaign against it somewhere else, don't try to poo-poo the OP's app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this differ from something like eg. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the question. A key difference is that we use real names and photos, and as Shello is only app-based the conversations stay private behind a login. Also, on Shello we have topic groups and you can sign up to see questions and posts just to those topics that interest you. Other than that there is a lot of similarity in that its a community of women responding and conversing with other women on issues that matter to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, good work I think to have everything in one place is better. I saw it's not your first startup you built another app before (citysocializer). Two questions: How many members do you have on Shello and do you think your crowdsourced advices could be available on the web soon or you plan to keep them in a private sphere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks seapunk, yes my passion and background is building communities. We just came out of closed beta last month and have a couple thousand users who are highly engaged. Good question and something we're still thinking about. If we do release our content on web it will be just that ie. no user data exposed and no planned web experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice Work! Where did you get your first users? Does the platform cater for non-english speakers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jirenandcell. We invited some of our female community from citysocializer initially, then got a whole bunch of new users from product hunt and then it's been through word of mouth referrals. Right now its only in English and majority of our userbase is US and UK, but we will look to implement more languages as we grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks cool. It is all forum based advice or can you message privately?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Julian, yea you can message privately for one to one conversations. It's something being used a lot and helping women to connect more personally

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it only for biological women? Can someone who identifies as a woman use this platform? I don't see any information on the site. Does this platform foster inclusiveness or exclusiveness?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Rinchik, we have an LGBTQ group on Shello so we welcome anyone who identifies as a woman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It says you can remain anonymous, so what's to stop men from joining? Is it moderated?... Just seems like a sexist forum...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi gitgud, you can choose to post your questions anonymously but you still have to sign up with a real and validated profile. We find that only 20% of posts are anonymous and the remainder women are posting openly as themselves. We only allow the person posting anonymously to stay anonymous in that conversation. But no-one is allowed to answer a post anonymously. We use real names and real photos too.</comment></comment>


AMP for email is bad - <AUTHOR> https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/amp-email-bad-idea/ <comment><USER2> Every thread about AMP on Hacker News goes exactly the same way. It's annoying, repetitive.

But here's the thing: while I get criticisms about AMP for web, pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email. The author of this article keeps bringing up points about AMP for web as if they have anything to do with AMP for email.

AMP for email basically does one thing: it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitrary code. It is standard and other email providers can implement it. You'd think this premise would be popular on HN, but it's not, all because people are still caught up over the effectively unrelated usage of AMP in Google Search.

If you don't like AMP in Google Search, fine. I find it fairly annoying too, though admittedly once the URL issue is fixed it will probably stop bothering me. Or not at all, since I actually tend to use Duck Duck Go anyways. But can we stop ruining every discussion with this non-sense? It's tiring, and I don't even like AMP. It's gotten to the point where saying something bad about AMP is probably the easiest way to hit HN frontpage with no effort.

(Disclosure, I work for Google, not on anything related to AMP. Seriously, I still dislike AMP.)

<comment><USER3> Web pages don't have any expectation of durable persistence between views. If I go to Hackernews or Facebook or Google, I expect that the front page will _not_ look the same as it did yesterday.

Email does have an expectation of durable persistence; in fact I would argue that that is a critical feature of email - If you send me an email I can always return to my email inbox and if I open the email I will always see the _exact same message_. I do not want that to change, in fact, as soon as I know that can change, it undermines the trust of the entire channel.

Will Amazon send me an order reciept, then subtly change the delivery date because it loads via Javascript? Wow, I could have sworn they promised it would arrive on Friday, now it's next week? What else could they change in my order as well? If I want an immutable copy do I now have to go back to paper printouts?

Even worse, what if I got an email using interactive features from a website that no longer supports those resources? Am I going to open my inbox and get a 404 because it's dynamically loading content that now isn't there? I have a reasonable expectation that when I open an email today, I can return to my inbox and see _exactly the same_ content next week, next month and five years from now without having to question my own sanity. If I need to look at an order confirmation from a website that now doesn't exist because they didn't get their funding am I SOL because the CDN serving the dynamic email content is gone?

This is why I oppose AMP. This is a serious, legit criticism and I'd like Google to address it head on. User's don't want emails to become ephemeral, ever changing media because they want to feel their inbox _belongs to them_. As soon as it feels like they're visiting a site that belongs to someone else, it's not _their_ inbox, instead it's just a bunch of bookmarks to changing, volatile resources that someone else has put into their face. It feels like an invasion, and it is.

<comment><USER4> Or, maybe Amazon will helpfully add an alert to your order receipt when the shipment is unexpectedly delayed?

At any rate, the other MIME parts aren't gone. In gmail you can just click "show HTML message".

<comment><USER5> > _maybe Amazon will helpfully add an alert to your order receipt when the > shipment is unexpectedly delayed?_

Alternatively Amazon could send a followup email. This way the sequence of events is preserved and not dependent on the sender.

I currently use email as a immutable list of events that have occurred in my life but with this I can no longer continue to do so.

<comment><USER4> So just use a client that doesn't support dynamic email, or disable the feature in clients that do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe this is selection bias or just plain old regular curmudgery, but I can't stand amp. I have a modern device and fast internet everywhere I go with my phone. I find amp sites to be consistently slower, uglier and less navigable than the request-desktop version of a site. My phone, and most other low-mid to high end phones have the sreeen real estate and processing power to handle and use desktop versions of a site.

Retaining a familiar interface across devices leads to faster site usage than any speed gains that might be happening because of amp. Measuring the speed of a website in kb/s alone isn't a good enough metric, and the standardisation attempts of amp are ugly imo.

<comment><USER7> It's okay. Google will kill AMP in a year or two, just like they kill everything else.

<comment><USER8> Another view is AMP is killing Google because they are wasting resources expanding a project that already failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> AMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare.

Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load.

At Cloudflare there are other problems. If you're a CF customer and have the option enabled, your AMP page hosted on CF servers will do some nasty stuff. Specifically outgoing links to third party domains will be _mirrored_ onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted. Presented to anyone clicking off your CF AMP page as the actual site but not. Instead CF gets the hits and you never see it. I've seen the CF bots doing this to my domain. But CF never responds to emails from anyone that isn't a customer.

As for AMP for email I don't know the specific downsides besides the obvious corporate centralization and control this gives. But it certainly doesn't have any purpose. And I say this as a guy that only reads email as text and never renders HTML.

<comment><USER10> > When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both > prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background.

Or Bing search or Baidu search or Yahoo! Japan search and so on. The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely preloaded and prerendered, making it faster than any other web page you can create for people coming from a link aggregator. One of the big advantages it has over Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News is that a publisher has to create an AMP page once and then gets to integrate with the multiple link aggregators that support AMP for free. If I want to create my own link aggregator, I don't need a FAANG's clout to get publishers to integrate with me for instant-loading pages — I can use their existing AMP pages.

<comment><USER11> AMP is slower for me because I have to press on my screen twice to get to the actual page I wanted to go to.

Hence AMP requires at least 0.5s between the time I click on a Google link and get to my real destination?

<comment><USER12> When it doesn't crash in chrome on an android phone from GoogleNews. When that happens only the amp is available and because it didn't render you can't get the actual site...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really wish the email standard was markdown instead of HTML.

I only ever switch from text-only when I need to embed an image, and otherwise _occasionally_ italics or whatever is useful. This could be taken care of with a basic markdown-like language, and avoid getting full HTML advertisements, etc. I really, really don't need your newsletter to be properly formatted in my mailbox, just send a link, I'll open it in the browser if I want to.

<comment><USER14> If Google really wanted to make the web fast, they would add native support for text/markdown mimetype in Chrome and ask publishers to just create .md files instead.

<comment><USER15> text/markdown is a bad idea because it's not backwards compatible. It should be text/plain; markup=markdown, since Markdown is perfectly readable without any software support.

See [https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails- usin...](https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails-using- markdown/) for more thoughts on this topic.

<comment><USER16> backwards compatible with what? In my experience anything served as `text/*` that isn't more specifically handled (eg `text/html`) will be rendered as text/plain because the type is still `text`.

Edit: rendered, not tendered

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to scatter the landscape, I can't say I'm against someone actually trying to lock some standards down on the email platform.

The counter is that we don't need all the css and pizzazz in emails, but we've come too far to realistically go back on that.

<comment><USER18> It's a pain because no one wants it!

Emails are for text, if you have something to say you can write it out.

<comment><USER19> Except that html email is used because it works a lot better (i.e. people DO want it)

Try sending your marketing campaign as plain text and then try sending it as carefully crafted HTML mail. Unless your target is a specific small segment of users who love text/plain, HTML will do better and make you more money.

<comment><USER20> I don't know what's the name of this phenomenon but it reminds me of bass- boosted stereos and over-saturated TV screens. Objectively, from a signal processing theory standpoint, it's not superior to a properly calibrated monitor. But subjectively it seems that we collectively like it when dynamics get crushed to loony-tunes levels.

I feel like HTML email is the same way. People think they want it, but in my experience it's an absolutely abysmal experience. Ever been forwarded one of these corporate-type emails where people reply all over the place, each using their own convention of color and typesetting and emphasis markers, with bits of "rich text" signatures and images littered throughout? That's a bloody terrible experience.

Not that plain text email can't be messy, but it's really a situation where less is more. People have to be a little more careful with what they're doing instead of saying "I'll just write this in neon pink and they'll get it".

As for marketing campaigns then yes, I grant you that you can make much more compelling content with more advanced technology but as far as I'm concerned that's cancer so I don't really care about that. I don't really get why anybody would opt into receiving what's effectively spam into their mailbox although maybe I'm wrong about that.

<comment><USER21> > Ever been forwarded one of these corporate-type emails where people reply > all over the place, each using their own convention of color and typesetting > and emphasis markers, with bits of "rich text" signatures and images > littered throughout? That's a bloody terrible experience.

[https://www.prettyfwd.com](https://www.prettyfwd.com)

Created to fix that exact issue.

<comment><USER22> Which is Gmail-only and therefore Google-only. I wouldn't want very sensitive corporate data hosted by Google, so this is a red flag for my use-case.

<comment><USER21> Fair. I'll make an Outlook add-in also, I just haven't gotten to it yet. I've already done the preliminary work to make the API agnostic though so it's really just the UI lift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The article looks a bit suspicious and FUD to me: first they say "here is five reasons why AMP in Gmail is bad" and then just put out five general essays about how Google is bad.

AMP as tech is certainly good for users. Google pushes it a tad too hard and sometimes is at the edge of abusing it, but overall effect on UX is very positive. There's no monopoly here: anyone can take advantage of this tech (and I believe most search engines do). AMP in email is even more innocent: in the end, you already are inside Gmail inbox, what could go wrong from there?

Current Gmail actions[1] are very useful, and if AMP could do even better - count me in.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview#gmail_ac...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview#gmail_actions)

edit: link to Gmail actions

<comment><USER24> Exactly. There isn't a cohesive point about why AMP for the email is bad, just a list of 5 negative things. I can come up with a list of 5 negative things about anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe one should first ask: Is AMP currently good for anyone but GOOG?

<comment><USER26> Really? Seems obviously good for everyone on an expensive mobile connection. Just like old-Opera's low bandwidth mode that proxies all requests through their servers. Never heard much bitching about that, btw. Just praise.

It's kinda like an internet service that doesn't meter your WhatsApp data (very common here in Mexico): it's obviously useful to people, but it comes at an expensive price in the aggregate. Nobody really cares about the aggregate though.

<comment><USER27> If AMP is preloading content on search results pages, it's not good for your expensive connection, since you may not click through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And the author completely disregards the elephant in the room. Why do websites slow themselves down with trackers, etc.? It pays to do so.

Decrying that without presenting an alternative sustainable monetization model for the web is just pointless yelling.

<comment><USER29> I could probably make more money robbing a bank today than going to work.

Nobody needs to provide an alternative sustainable business model to fuel my desire for sports cars and travel I just need to live with what I can make from legitimate work.

Most of the web is either, cheap to run, paid for by other commercial activity, or crap and if it went away tomorrow because people could not pay for it by shoving their crap in your face nobody would care.

<comment><USER28> That's one hell of a false analogy you've got there.

Essentially the entire web is funded by advertising; you are way off the mark with your assertion.

<comment><USER29> By volume the web is mostly crap that wont be missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Email providers that only allow access to your emails using their special clients (instead of, e.g. imap) are also bad for email.

<comment><USER31> I think theoretically you can use AMP email through an IMAP client, if that IMAP client supports AMP. But support for it is probably going to be pretty scarce, particularly in the open source world.

<comment><USER32> You're correct. There's nothing about amp4email that requires a Gmail account.

I'm actually pretty sure that if you use an imap client it whatever, you could view amp email from some site without ever communicating with a third party.

<comment><USER31> It would still need to talk to your email provider's AMP cache, presumably, though, unlike a normal email which you download once and then do not need to reach out to the server for again.

<comment><USER32> I don't think there's a need for an amp cache with amp4email. The privacy concerns that make an amp cache necessary don't apply in the same way, only the security concerns that require a safe html subset. So an imap client could cache the amp js locally, and render dynamic content by querying the sender directly.

I could be wrong though, but I believe that works.

<comment><USER31> Doesn't it reintroduce the issues with senders detecting if their emails were read and where from by tracking requests?

I thought Gmail started caching images from emails and hosting them to prevent that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> AMP in email was the straw that broke the camel's back for me when it was first announced. I ended up completely closing my paid GApps account and migrating my email over to RunBox instead; I also as much as possible reduced my use of Google properties (basically everything that's not YouTube) and started blocking all Google cookies outright outside of a container tab for YouTube.

If anyone's interested I wrote up how I chose an alternative email supplier at [https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g- suite/](https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Could this kill GMail?

You can filter Google's ads from email if you're not using GMail. This is a significant negative for using GMail.

</comment><comment><USER35> Hope AMP dies soon.

</comment><comment><USER36> All sandboxes are bad. Specially from Google or facebook

</comment><comment><USER37> lol. anyone have to read past the headline to know it's bad?!?!

everyone forgot the only purpose of amp? to give in to google so that you can get not-banished from their search results.

why would anyone apply a pernicious SEO technique to email?

what's next? an article on why rat poison on bread is a bad idea?

</comment><comment><USER38> Off topic, but voting on comments should not primarily be used to signal disagreement. "Good" comments (for some definition of "good") can be upvoted even if they argue a viewpoint you disagree with.

Otherwise all that remains is an echo chamber.

<comment><USER39> On HN, downvoting for disagreement has always been fine: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314).

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256420](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256420) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't belive the neckbeard level in here. "I do all my web browsing with curl and vim. Nobody needs AMP!"

Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh.

AMP is not "bad" or "good". Get over yourselves and your moral peacocking and get back to measuring things objectively. Everyone who upvoted this crap needs to consider why. Is it because AMP fails to accomplish its goals? Or is it because you share a sentiment with the author -- that "Google and AMP are ruining lives and, even worse, the web, the holy web, and that they must be stopped in the name of the holy Linus, who set us free from the proprietary code, and... Where was I?" "God, you're the worst DM." "Yes. Yes I am."

<comment><USER40> > _Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help > developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve > the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a > framework. Duh._

Basically all criticism of AMP is about the fact that this is not true. If Google said "we prioritize fast pages, here's some guidelines and code on how to do that", that'd be fine. But they've tied features to using _exactly_ their framework and nothing else.

Like AMP, but don't want to show 8 seconds of empty page to users without JS, or want to remove any of the other weird issues it had at times? Too bad, changing that code means it is not valid AMP anymore. Want to self-host the AMP source code? Too bad, not valid AMP anymore.

<comment><USER41> >don't want to show 8 seconds of empty page to users without JS

That's incorrect. AMP pages support noscript.

<comment><USER32> Specifically, if you disable JavaScript entirely, they load cleanly (via the no script tag).

If you block just the amp js endpoint, they have a fallback for slow confections that waits a few seconds before rendering to avoid page redraws. This is the 8-second thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> AMP for email is targeting a completely different topic than the issues listed here and in the article. And i am shocked everybody is simply not seeing them with their amp4web hate.

Amp for email is completely different than amp for web and is a very good solution: 1\. Coding emails is really really hard. Every client is rendering emails differently, and Outlook is a beast with every version rendering differently. Amp for email is standardizing a subset of email and css every client should support so email building will be easier. 2\. Email is completely different than the web. You cant do more than basic html like displaying text and pictures. Embedding videos? Slideshows for products? Interactivity like forms? Display realtime information? EVERYTHING IS NOT POSSIBLE! But it will be with amp4email. You will get features in emails compared to the web so they will get usefully again.

And i am afraid nobody is seeing this and only hating amp4web's hiding if the real urls etc.

<comment><USER43> > _You cant do more than basic html like displaying text and pictures. > Embedding videos? Slideshows for products? Interactivity like forms? Display > realtime information? EVERYTHING IS NOT POSSIBLE! But it will be with > amp4email._

Alright, you've convinced me: AMP for email needs to be killed.

<comment><USER44> > Embedding videos?

Let me open this email... oh noes, it's autoplay video.

> Slideshows for products?

Yes, more marketing garbage!

> Interactivity like forms?

Your password is about to expire, change it below or some garbage that will only make shit more insecure.

> Display realtime information

Blow me.

<comment><USER45> Exactly. Couldn't have been said better. Kill AMP completely and don't even think about touching email with that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Belgian air force mechanic opens fire by mistake, blows up another F-16 - <AUTHOR> https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/16/belgian-air-force-mechanic-opens-fire-by-mistake-blows-up-another-f-16/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18211632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18211632)</comment>


You don't need to code to build a tech product - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/learning-new-stuff/building-products-without-coding-18a8110b5589#.hhgt1v3qd <comment><USER2> Sure, but what kind of product? Just got off of their site:

      →so, how much do experts make?

      Kennethdewittsi: very little, very few people actually have work that they are willing to pay for

      →haaaaa

      →so, you folks are monetizing the existing programming chat channels I'd see in IRC?

      →:|

EDIT:

No reply after 5 minutes.

This kind of seems like a scam for squeezing extra dollars off of friendly developers. Sponging off free work.

Folks, don't support parasites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Opening paragraphs: "When building products you should measure your progress by the assumptions you've managed to test, and not by how many lines of code you've written.

In some cases — if it's possible to validate the idea using existing tools — writing code might actually slow you down, and should be avoided."

Worth reading if only for that. I could write an essay on why sitting around & thinking can be far more productive when it comes to coding, rather than -actually- coding.</comment>


Future Pricing for Atlassian Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/cloud/future-pricing#newpricing-monthly <comment><AUTHOR> "However, we expect that the majority of monthly customers will receive an increase in their bill."

No kidding - their price calculator says ours will go up by 70%.</comment>


Which Hollywood movies feature the most ridiculous code? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zxj487h <comment><USER2> I think the worst mock computer interface _ever_ was the scene in "Jurassic Park" where the girl tries to bring the systems back online.

"This is UNIX. I _know_ UNIX!"

But... it wasn't remotely UNIX. It was an unrelated menu system so slow it looked like it was running on an abacus.

<comment><USER3> But that was Unix, and the menu system was a real albeit experimental menu system.

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

It was slowed down for the film, in the same way password crackers find a single character at a time, or people who spend their lives typing enter their passwords r e a l l y slowly, or search engines flash up a "Searching now!" dialog.</comment></comment>


Steal this idea: G+ public hangouts - <AUTHOR>

So, Google Hangouts are actually fun. They can also be made public. A rather interesting application of plus might be doing some conscious people-surfing, by talking to named strangers who make themselves thusly available.<p>There doesn't seem to be a way, however, to list all of the public hangouts currently open on the whole network. Relatively easy to fix (with some minor reverse-engineering). Gladly volunteer as a beta tester :) <comment><USER2> So with:public in GWave, or the default threading in Friendfeed redux?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly.</comment></comment>


Luke Skywalker and the Story Behind the New Design of 1000Memories - <AUTHOR> http://1000memories.com/blog/31-luke-skywalker-and-the-story-behind-the-new-design-of-1000memories?locale=en

<comment><USER2> I think the 1000memories guys might be trying a bit too hard in their attempts to memetically engineer attention-grabbing headlines.

A few days ago it was an appeal to standard-issue "the guvernment is messing with our internets!" rage: _"The Law That Tries To Make Facebook Part Of Your Will"_. Now it's a shoehorned-in, tacked-on Star Wars reference as a way of talking about some design changes.

It's not that these aren't attention-grabbing headlines, it's just that it's a bit too transparent, and the actual articles don't deliver once my attention is grabbed.

<comment><USER3> The first thing I thought when reading the headline was.. "wow, that's some serious linkbaiting"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What the hell? I was quite impressed by the original 1000Memories' look (the simple 2/3 colors gradient background that looks like the inside of a pearl shell). Now with all the shining blue buttons it looks like a tech webapp.</comment>


Git for structured data? really? - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/git-for-structured-data-really-19819a29e6 <comment><USER2> > The goal of this project is to build a functional database.

> neon is a persistent set storing quads ie. 4-tuples made of:

> (graph, subject, predicate, object)

Sounds interesting. And reminds me of Datomic.

(Edit: formatting)</comment>


2007 Review of Projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/projects2007

<comment><USER2> The trend with his "intermediate successes" seems to be that he started strong but never committed long enough to finish.

I empathize, though, since if I had his money and free time I'd be just as bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Jottit: Moderate success. The site was finished and launched and got incredibly positive reviews_

Is that true? It was just a text box that echoed on a webpage. Pretty mild effort, and if he actually got "incredibly positive reviews" then he's got far too many ass-kissers hanging around him.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've found Jottit to be a cute alternative to <http://pastebin.com> but given that I already have a FreeBSD server, I can't see any reason to use it for any long term stuff.

Unfortunately his "OpenLibrary" is closed to me - clicking on any of the book covers from the main page just takes me to a big blank screen. Enabling JavaScript doesn't seem to make a difference.

<comment><USER2> Pastebin has syntax highlighting, which catapults it pretty far above Jottit for pasting in code snippets.</comment></comment>


Announcing the next generation of Amazon EC2 High I/O instance - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/12/19/announcing-the-next-generation-of-amazon-ec2-high-i/o-instance/

<comment><USER2> Note this is from 2013/12/19

<comment><USER3> Briefly thought they'd added another generation when I saw the headline, and I was like _man_ they are _not playing around_ here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Only ever makes me think of [http://blog.mailchimp.com/the-email-person-at- amazon-web-ser...](http://blog.mailchimp.com/the-email-person-at-amazon-web- services-is-really-really-excited/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is this news now? It's almost two months old.</comment>


How Stoicism can help us - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/life-hacks-from-marcus-aurelius-how-stoicism-can-help-us <comment><USER3> One of my favorite passages from the Meditations is Marcus' observation that Stoicism has value regardless of one's theology and metaphysics:

Either there is a fatal necessity and invincible order, or a kind Providence, or a confusion without a purpose and without a director. If then there is an invincible necessity, why do you resist? But if there is a Providence that allows itself to be propitiated, make yourself worthy of the help of the divinity. But if there is a confusion without a governor, be content that in such a tempest you have yourself a certain ruling intelligence. (XII.14)

[https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/gods-or- atoms...](https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/gods-or-atoms-marcus- aurelius-says-it-doesnt-matter-i-agree/)

I have found Stoicism an ecumenical movement in part because of the above.

<comment><USER4> I find Gregory Hay's translation much more readable, here's the same passage:

Fatal necessity, and inescapable order. Or benevolent Providence. Or confusion—random and undirected. If it's an inescapable necessity, why resist it? If it's Providence, and admits of being worshipped, then try to be worthy of God's aid. If it's confusion and anarchy, then be grateful that on this raging sea you have a mind to guide you. And if the storm should carry you away, let it carry off flesh, breath and all the rest, but not the mind. Which can't be swept away.

<comment><USER5> I love seeing multiple translations of this great man's words. My translation by, Martin Hammond:

"Either the compulsion of destiny and an order allowing no deviation, or a providence open to prayer, or a random welter without direction. Now if undeviating compulsion, why resist it? If providence admitting the placation of prayer, make yourself worthy of divine assistance. If an ungoverned welter, be glad that in such a maelstrom you have within yourself a directing mind of your own: if the flood carries you a way, let it take your flesh, your breath, all else - but it will not carry away your mind.

I particularly like Hammond's recurring use of the phrase "directing mind", which is, to me, is very important to Stoicism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone who wants an alternate view (by Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism #9):

"Do you want to live "according to nature"? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature - extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown - imagine this indifference itself as a power - how could you live in accordance with this indifference?8 Living - isn't that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn't living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And if your imperative "live according to nature" basically means what amounts to "live according to life"\- why can you not just do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? The truth of the matter is quite different: while you pretend to be in raptures as you read the canon of your law out of nature, you want something which is the reverse of this, you weird actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be "in accordance with the stoa ," and you'd like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it - as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of stoicism! With all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves for such a long time and with such persistence and hypnotic rigidity to look at nature falsely, that is, stoically, until you're no long capable of seeing nature as anything else - and some abysmal arrogance finally inspires you with the lunatic hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves - Stoicism is self-tyranny - nature also allows herself to be tyrannized. Is the Stoic then not a part of nature?.... But this is an ancient eternal story: what happened then with the Stoics is still happening today, as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image. It cannot do anything different. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the spiritual will to power, to a "creation of the world," to the causa prima [first cause]."

<comment><USER7> At a quick glance, that passage seems to be almost deliberately obfuscating the difference between living while accounting for nature (the uncontrollable aspects) i.e. _in accordance with_ , versus, living _like_ nature.

<comment><USER8> No surprise there - the "living _like_ nature" part was the whole schtick of Nietzsche's philosophy. More like an Epicurean with a healthy dose of Cynicism than a Stoic, if we have to make that kind of basic comparison. He would probably conflate Stoicism with the (nowadays prevalent and in many ways successful) "English" approach to values, which he considered a reversal of the "true" values that's driven by resentment, and a philosophical dead-end.

Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of _Amor fati_. The fact that he acknowledged this principle so thoroughly despite opposing many other parts of Stoicism must surely be of some significance.

<comment><USER9> >Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of Amor fati.

He looked down on any philosophical idea that uplifts your soul like stoicism, buddhism (deliberately making his work and ideas seem scary to them: happened to me when I first got into his ideas) etc

<comment><USER6> He discouraged philosophical frameworks because he believed that in the end they limit human life. A truly well lived life, according to Nietzsche, is one where the individual breaks free of indoctrination and dogma, and lives life as they want. In the truest sense. This is Nietzsche's goal for humanity, so he spends his time writing philosophy aimed at tearing down religion and systems of moral control. Nietzsche wants to free humanity...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stoicism was an intriguing topic for me in college, but I've since been more drawn towards the works of St.Thomas Aquinas. It's interesting how St. Paul encountered Stoics and Epicureans in Athens (Chapter 17:18+ of Acts). From there, you have Dionysius who followed him and was an author of some influential writings that shaped Christian thought (including Aquinas). It's also interesting exploring Heraclitus' understanding of "Logos", which is very important (and with differences in the Who and What) for both Christianity and Stoicism.

<comment><USER11> I personally find the Meditations (of which I'm not a fan) to seem almost like a Christian gospel with regard to its tone and teachings. It makes me think that either Aurelius was influenced by Christianity, or Christianity represented a belief system that was common in Rome at the time. From my readings of the origins of Christianity, I understand that Jesus was just one of many messianic type leaders with similar teachings that existed in the Roman Empire at that time. So, makes me believe it's more toward the latter.

<comment><USER12> Christianity, especially in the first two centuries AD, was _very_ heavily influenced by Stoic philosophy. (The Stoic influence declined somewhat after Augustine defeated the Pelagian heresy.)

(For reference: Stoicism predated Christianity by around 300 years, and was quite entrenched by the time the Gospels were written.)

<comment><USER11> And, both Christianity and Stoicism were influenced by Buddhism. (Buddhism was practiced in both the Greek and Roman worlds, and scholars note many similarities between the two.)

<comment><USER12> This is dubious, but definitely not ridiculous. Buddhism was certainly known in parts of the Greco-Roman world, but there are significant differences between Buddhism and Stoicism, and there's no evidence of any direct intellectual connection.

(Edit: one difference between the two is the Buddhist doctrine of "nonself", which contrasts with the Stoic view of the self as a part of universal Reason and a member of the kosmopolis.)

<comment><USER11> I am no expert; I only read a lot. But, my understanding is that early Christianity was a reaction _away_ from Judaism. And, that the Old Testament was only added as part of the canon later. In contrast to Judaism, Christianity was must more similar to Buddhism with it's hippy love message. But, yes, I'm sure that's very controversial.

<comment><USER13> Early Christianity is the fulfillment of 1st Century Judaism with Jesus Christ being revealed as the Messiah and King. Modern day Judaism, that is Rabbinic Judaism (which followed some time after the destruction of the 2nd Temple) denies Jesus as that expected Messiah and has an expectation of someone else that is to come.

For Christians, The Old Testament and New Testament are very much coupled together. There's a lot of prophecies and typologies you can read about from the Old Testament that finds its fulfillment in Jesus and the New Testament (such as the suffering Messiah).

I'd suggest C.S. Lewis' book "Mere Christianity" (who was good friends and influenced to convert by J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton) to get a clearer picture of Christianity without the sugar coating we commonly get from the media today. Lewis brings up the Trilemma, which is unique only to the founder of Christianity.

<comment><USER14> It's also worth explicitly noting that Christianity-as-a-Jewish movement and Christianity-as-non-Judaism took a couple centuries to shake out. I would also guess that, and there is decent evidence for, christianity at the time would have looked much more similar to a communist movement (natural communism, think potlucks, not marxism) than the religion we know today—it appears you can thank Paul, in part, for that.

Also, if you're looking to desugar Christianity with empathy, I recommend Kierkegaard's excellent _Fear and Trembling_. Lewis's trilemma falls uncomfortably close to Christianity-through-proof genre of literature—I realize that's not his intent, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I've always found his _The Weight of Glory_ to be more compelling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I myself prefer transcendentalism. I need to be surrounded by more positive emotions. I read this text, "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson - <USER2> translation, at least at once a year: [http://www.youmeworks.com/self_reliance_translated.html](http://www.youmeworks.com/self_reliance_translated.html)

Great discussion in this topic btw.

<comment><USER16> Another thanks for this. Powerful stuff.

I looked up transcendentalism, and found this definition: "an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism."

I found this origin curious because Emerson's ideas don't seem to conflict with rationalism; in fact, a transcendental mindset seems like an entirely rational belief system to adopt if one wants to live well, and there are interpretations that are entirely in line with scientific observation.

<comment><USER17> _Rationalism_ in philosphy means more than being rational: it is the belief that you can deduce true knowledge about the world by mere thinking ("apriori synthetic" knowledge).

Imagine you are Einstein, and you have derived relativity from a few axiom, if you are still interested in experimental verification of your theory then you are an empiricist. If you say: I know for sure I'm right no need for experiments at all - you are a rationalist.

Modern science is mostly empiricist, maybe hardcore austrian economists are rationalists (for them economy is derived from praxeology, experimental verification is not possible and not needed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Aurelius is the most approachable, but I find Epictetus more rewarding. Check out A. A. Long on Epictetus to get more deeply into what Epictetus was all about. Stoicism is like a missing manual for how to live a fulfilled life regardless of your station.

<comment><USER19> I got nothing out of reading meditations after reading Aurelius' quotes. I feel like the whole back can be summarized "Focus on what you can control, don't stress over what you truly can't." Same with ALL of Buddhism.

<comment><USER20> I agree that the teachings from Stoicism and Buddhism seem simple but I have some difficulty consistently putting them into practice in my daily life. I read about one book a week and out the approximately 50 books a year I read, at least 3 or 4 of those are on Stoicism or Buddhism. (The remainder of my reading allowance is about equal parts of fiction and technology.)

While I am a devoted student of technology and I love learning new programming languages and application domains, I find that I enjoy those "aha" moments from Stoicism and especially from Buddhism. I consider myself very fortunate to have enough time to pursue both tech and philosophy.

<comment><USER19> I used to get a lot of "aha" moments from books - fiction, non-fiction, bigraphies, whatever. I almost never do anymore. I do feel like there is a point where books become passive entertainment with few exceptions. That's how I felt about Meditations by the time I read it - I knew every idea Aurelius presented. I don't read nearly as much as I used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In your book, you also write about the importance of following your own > values — and that Stoicism is a personal choice.

> therapists today are increasingly encouraging clients to identify their true > inner values and do things that serve those more fully. The big problem here > is that most people don't know what those values are.

It's important to remember that the Stoics did _not_ encourage us to follow our own individual, personal values, or to look for them as some sort of "inner truth." Rather, they thought that value was objective, and that we should give up our existing values in favor of the correct ones (the ones in accordance with nature).

> It's something they identify with at a deeper kind of more spiritual level, > almost like a substitute for religion.

Well, it effectively _was_ a religion, based on a fairly developed system of theology.

<comment><USER21> Couldn't agree with you more. This "life hack" diluted and "self help" version of Stoicism is horrendous.

<comment><USER22> What do horrendous about it? Adopting the stoic approach to tempering your impulses, accepting that which is beyond your control, and seeking happiness from within doesn't sound horrendous to me at all. There's plenty of wisdom in Stoicism for people to benefit from.

<comment><USER21> I love to read the historical stoics. But there is the good old traditional Stoicism and this new "self-help" stoicism trend that isn't the same at all.

<comment><USER23> You didn't answer the question: what is so horrible about trying to help oneself by tempering one's emotions and seeking happiness within?

<comment><USER8> It's not horrible, but it's not Stoicism either. The notion of eudaimonia (which is what you talk about) is found throughout the schools of thought of the Western classical world, and similar notions pop up all over the place in ancient philosophy, even in such places as India or China. Calling _that_ "Stoicism" just leads to pointless misconceptions.

<comment><USER22> > The notion of eudaimonia (which is what you talk about)

That's not what's being talked about. Eudaimonia refers to the benefits of living virtuously, a core part of Stoicism, but not the part that's directly being discussed in this article. The ideas discussed in this article are about self-control, disconnecting your emotional well-being from things that are beyond your control, and seeking happiness from within. Those are quintessential Stoic principles. A lot of the modern pop-stoicism also delves into the benefits of virtue, maintaining the connection to eudaimonia and Socrates' question, albeit in a slightly round about way. The only Stoic principle that's usually left out of these discussions is pantheism.

> similar notions pop up all over the place in ancient philosophy

You're right, they do. That doesn't make them any less Stoic though. Perhaps if this was a Chinese message board, we'd all be talking about Buddhism instead. The two philosophies do have a lot in common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Stoicism only became popular in Greek philosophy after they lost to Alexander the Great. It was not the glorious philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, that talked about what a society should do. Stoicism only talked about how to cope.

<comment><USER25> > Stoicism only talked about how to cope.

I may be reading your comment incorrectly but when you say "[they] __only __became popular", "[they] __only __talked about [...]" that sounds a bit pejorative. Isn't it as important to talk about how to cope with a situation than what an ideal society should do? To me they both seem to be things to talk about, one isn't more important than the other. To be honest I'm not familiar enough to know if that's something we got from stoicism but that seems to be a great addition to our thinking toolkit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think there's a fundamental human drive to regret - evolutionarily, it makes sense that we'd be optimized to know _exactly how we would do better in a bad situation we recently faced_.

But in the modern world, this isn't a matter or life or death, and it affects our mental health significantly. I always think of Stoicism as a sort of patch to override this bug - the you can't change what you can't change, whatever happens, happens.

<comment><USER27> I like this way of thinking about things. Another one I heard recently is that whatever you do you'll regret it. Get married, you'll regret it, don't get married, the same, etc. So regret is a constant, which is comforting in its way

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I enjoy studying and considering stoicism but I have to think statements like >one of the biggest groups of people interested in it seems to be millennials who work in the tech industry

and considering a simplified description of stoicism

>the endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint.

To be an indictment of our industry. We're not coal-miners. We're not picking out in the fields or roofing in the hot sun. Cafeterias and RSUs aren't hardships.

<comment><USER29> A rich person will by definition not be struggling financially but there are a lots of other problems a person can have. Maybe their wife divorced them, maybe their father just passed away, maybe their kid has a severe learning disability, maybe they are involved in a protracted court battle over the rights to a book they wrote.

Point is that there are so many problems people can have, and you wont notice unless you know the person well.

<comment><USER30> Seneca called out _fear of losing one 's wealth_ as a particular affliction of the rich, and prescribed a day, every so often, of living as a beggar to remind oneself that life goes on even in those circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Marcus Aurelius is responsible for raising and empowering his son Commodus - the emperor depicted in the movie Gladiator.

It's useful to keep this in mind when reading his meditations. Yes, the message can be nice and joyful to read. Yet the man who wrote them created a tyrant and contributed to untold suffering.

<comment><USER32> Consider the existence of good people with bad parents. Should those bad parents be credited with the success of their children? It seems perverse to assume parents deserve full 'credit' in either scenario. There are many things other than parents that may influence that child's direction for better or worse.

<comment><USER33> Raising a bad child is one thing, but handing them the keys to the kingdom is another.

It's not enough to dismiss the philosophy, but parent comment is absolutely correct that you should keep it in mind as historical context.

<comment><USER22> If historical context is important, then you might want to mention that Rome was a hereditary empire. The 5 good emperors were all adopted by emperors who had no sons. In the historical context of Rome, Marcus didn't hand Commodus anything, or empower him to become emperor. He rightfully inherited the position.

<comment><USER33> At the time of Aurelius, I'm not so sure that's an accurate description. The only non-adopted sons given power from Julius through Marcus were those of Vespasian (though a lot of adoptions were of extended family members).

Of course, to not hand power to Commodus would have meant his death. I'm not judging him for his decision, but given his absolute power and obvious clarity of thought, it was a conscious decision to choose his son's life over the good of the empire.

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

<comment><USER22> > it was a conscious decision to choose his son's life over the good of the > empire.

The generally contrived nature of this argument aside, this is really just revisionism. Commodus was 18 when Aurelius died, and he didn't become a lunatic until a fair bit after his fathers death. If you're looking for flaws in Marcus Aurelius (there's plenty), this isn't one of them.

<comment><USER33> Commodus did plenty as a child, even if it was overshadowed by later lunacy. My argument was poorly made though. I'll try to restate:

It's easy to get swept up in Meditations, viewing Marcus as the stoic Philosopher King that has profound lessons for us even today.

Parent tried to remind everyone about Commodus, and in my opinion correctly so; if Marcus lived up to the myth surrounding him, he'd have intuited the situation and dealt with it.

But he either didn't see what was coming, or decided to do nothing. Because for all the hype, he was just a man. Keeping this in mind is an antidote to getting carried away by what is a genuinely compelling piece of writing.

I wouldn't make this argument in a vacuum, but I saw OP get downvoted and wanted to jump in because I thought it was a fair enough point.

<comment><USER22> So if he was as great as people say he was, then he would have intuited the fact that his son would eventually turn out to be a bad emperor, and would have murdered him? Hmmm...

<comment><USER33> Yes, that is my argument.

<comment><USER22> I don't think most people would consider inability to predict events that will occur after your death, and the act of not committing filicide to be very serious character shortcomings.

Commodus renounced Stoicism after his fathers death, and didn't do any of the terrible things he was known for until after then either.

This argument is beyond weak in terms of criticising Stoicism or Marcus.

<comment><USER33> There's a big difference between using Commodus as proof of Marcus' flaws, and using him as proof that Marcus was only human.

If the argument were that weak, you wouldn't bother with the strawman to counter it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would rather recommend reading this book about what Stoisiscm is and how to apply it; by Stockdale.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31201.Thoughts_of_a_Phil...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31201.Thoughts_of_a_Philosophical_Fighter_Pilot)

[https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Philosophical-Fighter- Pilot-...](https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Philosophical-Fighter-Pilot- Reprint/dp/0817993924)

First part: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.usna.edu/Ethics/_files/documents/stoicism1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7jN3upsriAhVKtIsKHaxvAVcQFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw1qeQ6iExCthZtJYaGcutZm&cshid=1559461622318)

</comment><comment><USER34> FYI; The allegorical tale in the "Tablet of Cebes" is also worth reading and pondering over. A good translation can be found in Keith Seddon's "Epictetus' Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes: Guides to Stoic Living".

</comment><comment><USER35> What is everyone's favorite translation of Meditations? I bought a cheap copy and the translation is unsurprisingly hard to read and distracts from the text's content.

<comment><USER36> Tangentially related: it's a pity there aren't more websites like this one: [0]

It's nice to compare different translations in-line. The last line of section 3 is an excellent example of how different translations can be: [1]

Enchiridion is well worth a read (I gather Carter has the best translation but I've gleaned this from places like Reddit so pinch of salt!), and I also enjoyed Derren Brown's Happy [0] which draws heavily on stoicism, summarising a lot of famous works on it as he goes.

[0] - [https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:ec,twh,pem,sw/se...](https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:ec,twh,pem,sw/section:1) [1] - [https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:ec,twh,pem,sw/se...](https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:ec,twh,pem,sw/section:3) [2] - [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy)

<comment><USER37> Hey that's my website! Happy you like it :)

<comment><USER36> That's amazing! Thank you so much for making it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >one of the biggest groups of people interested in it seems to be millennials who work in the tech industry

I'm not surprised after reflecting for a moment. Stoicism seems like a reasonable answer for people who want to escape the sentimentalism packaged as life skills that's so popular at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER39> That's nice and awsome.

</comment><comment><USER40> How is Stoicism different to everyday psychological dissociation covered up with a nice-sounding philosophy?

</comment><comment><USER41> The problem with stoicism, is that it's providing you with a lot of concepts, and zero way to apply them.

It's like saying "to win the race, run faster". Doh.

<comment><USER42> Have you read Seneca's letters? I can't think of anything more straightforward and applicable.

Live simply, don't value external things, have principles and stand behind them, think in term of "long term happiness" not "short term joys", be nice to your fellow humans, being rich in material things is nice but not sufficient while having virtues, knowledge and a strong community is necessary. It really isn't rocket science, especially compared to other/newer philosophical movements.

It's life, no one is going to hold your hand and lead you to your happy place. Educate yourself, read the masters, follow the ones that seems aligned to your beliefs and move on if you find something better.

I really like these:

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/L...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_1)

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/L...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_22)

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/L...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_28)

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/L...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_96)

<comment><USER41> Of course I did. I even tried to follow some things to the extreme. E.G: one letter advice to have "poverty days" so that you never get afraid of being poor. So I went to sleep in the street from time to time.

But most of the content is not that straight forward. Take for example:

"Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day's task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow'"

Yeah. How do you do that ?

It's nice to say "carpe diem" or "focus on what's important". "Do the hard things first" and all that.

You can also tell a fat guy to eat less calories. Great. Now what ?

That's why I prefer philosophy when it comes with a method.

Meditation. Wim Hof method. Intermittent fasting. Psilocybin retreat. Whatever. But something to actually help you apply a thereory that otherwise get completely uncorrelated from one's life.

<comment><USER42> Well these advices are thousands of years old so obviously you can't take it as a step by step guide for the 21st century. The principles behind them are usually simple to understand but hard to practice if you don't self reflect and actively try to better your life.

> Yeah. How do you do that ?

Look at your life, everyone is wasting time, maybe you're fine with it or maybe you feel like shit every evening when you look back at your day and notice that you could have done much more / spend your time doing something better.

Want to start a business but watch 3 hours of netflix a day ? Maybe something is wrong. Spend all your life in a job you don't like because it pays well ? Are you sure you value money that much ? Are you always thinking about the next weekend, vacations, retirement to rationalise doing tasks you don't value ?

Imagine being 60 and looking back at your life, did these X000 hours/year of netflix / video games / whatever bettered my life ? Or did they made my shitty life slightly more tolerable by occupying my mind outside of work ? Did I have a plan or did I just went through whatever life through at me without thinking about it?

> You can also tell a fat guy to eat less calories. Great. Now what ?

Telling him is not enough, it has to come from the fat guy himself. Once he truly want to lose weight he'll find a way (unless he has some medical conditions preventing it). It's the same with life, you can read every single book about how to be happy and successful, if you don't truly want it and invest serious time and efforts in it it's not much better than reading fiction.

> That's why I prefer philosophy when it comes with a method.

That's all good too, but I wouldn't be surprised if you eventually feel the urge to take your life in your own hands and follow less strict regimen at some point. Meditation or psychedelic drugs are a good example, at first you want a very safe and guided thing and once you kind of know what you're doing you experiment. You can spend 10k to spend a week in a monastery or on top of a mountain in underwear, if you come back and fall in the same patterns as before you just blew 10k for vacations.

> that otherwise get completely uncorrelated from one's life.

Or maybe our current way of living is so convoluted and disconnected from our origins that we lost the ability to understand the most basic principles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> >donjohnr

There's no way Donald Robertson is on Hackernews?!

Edit: I guess it is. Just really surprised you even know what HN is. Never thought you'd be here posting articles.</comment>


Show HN: Startup Bakery – MVP as a service - <AUTHOR> http://startupbakery.biz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

Startup Bakery is an attempt to turn into the services I've already been doing (helping clients build their MVP) into a repeatable process and package as a process.

Where this differs from plain outsourcing is that we're putting focus on customer and product discover first, figure out what to build, and only then approach the development. This may be no-brainer for HN, but a surprising amount of my clients have come in with concrete grand visions and assumptions about user base and needed "just" to implement the code, and in every case, the startup failed miserably.

So this is somewhere between a startup bootcamp, and an outsource offering, trying to combine the lean/discovery knowhow/mentorship focus from typical startup events, and the actual operational knowledge to execute.

Would love to hear your thoughts about this :)

<comment><USER2> Seems like this would require almost 2 services, an initial evaluation and then a decision to move forward or not.

If you and the client find out that there probably isn't a business before building an MVP then what?

<comment><USER3> I had the same reaction as bruceb. Maybe offer the initial evaluation as a separate service?

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about having it as a separate service, but I believe there are a lot of consultancies that do that (basically, everyone peddling Lean Startup), but are often ignored (client goes through the motions, but then does a 180 when it's time to implement things).

By guiding them on every step of the way, we ensure that they keep the discipline and the focus. (That's the idea, at least).

Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacking Ticketmaster - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/hacking-ticketmaster

<comment><USER2> Part of me feels like this is a natural phenomenon since ticket prices are artificially deflated, so as to be accessible to the broadest range of fans. This creates a gap between what people are willing to pay and the price they are offered, and the gap creates services like this.

Perhaps ticket sellers should keep the very best seats and auction them off, uncapping their price. The rest could be put in a lottery, and kept open for two weeks or so. Then, only fans who win tickets pay money for them, for a low and accessible price. That would be far fairer than the current first-come first-served, overload the server system. You could also introduce a delay between closing the lottery and announcing the results, giving you time to scan for bot submissions.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious, is there a lottery-based alternative to TicketMaster? Or an option to use lottery rather than FCFS within TicketMaster?

If not, I think that would be a great project for a handful of enterprising engineers. There would be some legal and payment-related related problems to solve, I'm sure, as well as whatever barriers are supporting TicketMaster's current monopoly. But if there were ever a foothold for a new contender to take them on, this seems like it.

<comment><USER4> a) The barriers supporting Ticketmaster's current monopoly are pretty significant - mainly, exclusivity deals with venues. Ironically, the most successful challenge thus far has come from LiveNation... which managed to one-up Ticketmaster in some markets by owning both venues _and_ artists. (And is now trying to merge with Ticketmaster, pending fairly blatant antitrust issues).

b) Interesting sidenote: in its day, Ticketmaster was the tech-savvy upstart, aggressively competing on both the business and tech side with the then- dominant Ticketron. (That's not to say that they're not a monopolist ripe for the picking...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand how this counts as fraud. Ticket master got paid for their tickets by the purchasers right?

Today at Old Navy they were offering 20% off my jeans if I gave them my email address. Should I go to jail for giving them an invalid one?

<comment><USER6> That's exactly the rub, proving that this is fraud, or creating new legislation that make it fraud, is very difficult.

I hope you at least agree that they do not provide a service of any kind? They grab a limited resource and resell it, while adding no value whatsoever. They just grab it first and capitalize on the difference between the long-term and short-term best market prices for tickets.

I'd say the best solution to the problem is simply to take the thing partially offline again. Botnets can always out-crowd users, but you can't outcrowd actual people.

<comment><USER7> OK, I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but aren't they providing value by making the market more efficient? ;) That is, they're providing a service to the music industry and the artists it represents by enabling ticket prices to reflect their true value rather than some artificially-capped value.

I don't really believe this of course, but from a 10,000 ft view, it's not such a different argument from the one hedge fund folks would make to justify the "value" they create. Yes, I realize the two situations are different, but there's still a point to be made somewhere in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have the same question as when this story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648578> was posted.

Why would anyone ever do this while operating from the United States? There are countries with much laxer law enforcement. And, as a bonus, $6 million/person will go a lot farther in most of those countries.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stuff like this was part of the reason some artists (including Springsteen) started experimenting with "paperless ticketing" (i.e. they check the purchaser's ID at the gate, so it's basically impossible, or at least significantly harder, to resell tickets).

</comment><comment><USER9> Jeeze...sleazebags hacking sleazebags.

I saw the headline and thought "cool!", but then read the article and was disappointed -- I'd been hoping for some kind of stick-it-to-the-man, fight- the-monopoly sort of thing...sigh.

Personally, I've just got ticketmaster.com mapped to an invalid IP address in /etc/hosts -- reminds me not to give them any money (or traffic, for that matter).</comment>


Locomotive — Open source CMS for Rails with Heroku & Amazon S3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.locomotivecms.com/ <comment><USER2> I worked on the design of the site and the CMS. We're very excited to finally be launching!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's beautifully done. Congrats.

Will install and play with it later tonight.</comment></comment>


Johnny Chung Lee to donate $5k for Khan-style linear algebra lectures - <AUTHOR> http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/01/khan-academy-closest-thing-to.html

<comment><USER2> This is something I've thought about frequently. I would like to find a non- profit who would take donations and apply them towards finding and paying very good experts on any number of subjects, help them design and record their lectures, collect supplemental materials (required reading materials, exercise questions, tests, etc), and post it online for free (public domain?).

Khan is great but he cannot teach everything. Programming, history, literature, graphic design, etc. all deserve similar treatment.

<comment><USER3> You described a university.

<comment><USER4> Universities would be very different if their sole purpose was to put great educational content online for free.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps not the _sole_ purpose, but check out opencourseware: <http://www.ocwconsortium.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how to pass the _clearly understandable Khan academy style_ test, but Gilbert Strang of MIT has a series of 35 excellent lectures on Linear Algebra, starting here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c>

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. Strang makes it seem really easy, perfect lecturer.

The lectures are available on iTunes University too.

You may find his style slow though, I used to watch his lectures at about 1.5x speed using Quicktime (opt+ff). You can use vlc too on Windows.

<comment><USER8> I am watching those lectures as well. I ordered the previous edition of the textbook to follow along with. One thing that really irked me was that the quality of the audio in some of the lectures was spotty. I had to turn the audio up all the way in my headphones and then it seemed to only come in on one side. I know it is a minor detail but when I think about the high quality feeds dedicated to celebrity gossip it gets a little bit depressing.

I clicked into some of the other courses and was disappointed to see that video lectures weren't available for all the courses. We really need to get to a point where all the math, comp sci, etc is available in high quality format. Another thing we need is redundancy. I think G. Strang is an excellent lecturer but we need variety for different learning styles. Still I am impressed with what MIT is doing and hope to see more of this in the future.

<comment><USER7> Yes, the book is great as well, it's written in a very friendly tone.

These lectures were recorded long ago (1999), recent lectures (on calculus and another course) by Strang have higher video quality.

I have experienced mono audio on some too, you might be able to fix it with your video player though. ( If you are watching on iPhone/iPad, there is a mono setting in settings-accessibility btw.)

Check out <http://www-math.mit.edu/~gs/> for the other lectures by Strang. Also in this paper: "too much calculus" <http://www- math.mit.edu/~gs/papers/essay.pdf> he discusses why linear algebra should be emphasized more (and calculus less) in the digital age.

<comment><USER8> yea I caught that point about too much calculus. I studied math as an undergrad - 3 semesters of calc, 2 real analysis, 2 more of topology and have not used any of it as a programer. I did linear algebra and discrete math but it was not enough to really make a difference. It seems like history is more at play here than anything else. For 300+ years they have been polishing up that continuous math track and it was what all the scientists and engineers found useful.

I also think this is the reason everybody uses doubles and floats for doing financial apps. It makes so much more sense to use integers and talk about "how many" pennies one has rather than "how much" money one has. Floats and doubles were designed to estimate continuous quantities not exact figures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summary: He might be willing to "donate" $100 to Khan Academy (not you) if you spend several hours producing a high quality educational video for him on specific linear algebra topics he doesn't understand, and he reviews your videos and finds them to be completely to his satisfaction, according to criteria he will not specify.

It's a very insulting offer rather that inspiring as he no doubt hopes. $100 for an instructional video is nothing. $100,000 per video might get you some nice PBS style ones. In between is the realm of hope to get something good. Wanting custom lectures tailored to your private needs though, and payment is contingent on if he feels like it? Sheesh.

I suggest instead depositing the $5000 prize money in trust, establishing clear criteria for winning, and then empanel impartial and qualified judges to choose winners according to the established criteria. For the 10 best videos there will be a $500 prize each, and maybe an extra $1000 for the top one overall. The prize must be awarded no matter what, even if they only get 10 videos total that are not as great as they would hope. The credibility that comes from actually awarding the prizes will improve the quality of entries of the next round.

As it is, the terms are so wishy washy that most likely the $5000 will never be awarded and a lot of people will waste a lot of time and then be frustrated to find a whiney person explain why nothing was really worthy of his precious prize money.

Another way to structure it would be to award grants of production equipment and software for video and virtual blackboard work to assist talented teachers in producing videos. These could be granted to the most promising 20 videos, with the hope that they would come back to enter phase 2 of the competition where they produce things with their new pedagogic gear.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the name of the software for the electronic blackboard used in Khan's videos?

</comment><comment><USER11> Ive been going through Khan's Linear algebra vids after having Lee's problem - I'd highly recommend them for this use case. I'm hoping the same goes for the Khan's diff eq vids!

</comment><comment><USER12> What is he going to do, if several people post lectures of acceptable quality?

<comment><USER13> For each acceptable one posted he will "donate $100 to Khan Academy up to $5000"

<comment><USER14> The author should post a rubric, so that others can determine what's acceptable and what should be covered.</comment></comment></comment>


Redesigning the Economy Airline Seat - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90169957/the-miserable-economy-airplane-seat-just-got-a-major-redesign <comment><USER2> One of my least favorite aspects of airline seats is that it seems like the curvature is designed for someone of average height--which I totally get--but extraordinarily uncomfortable for people outside of that range. I'm looking at you, United economy regional planes. I'm 6'2", and the base of my skull lands exactly at a sharp, hard edge on those planes and leads to utter misery. I'm not sure how to fix that. Just bitching. This is the internet after all.

<comment><USER3> You get to enjoy yourself at concerts, and society apparently prefers tall men. Appreciate what you do have in life, thats what I try to do (as someone closer to the other end of the scale by western standards at least).

<comment><USER4> We tall people also die sooner, require more back surgery, can't find clothes that fit, slouch to fit in. Tradeoffs. I'd be okay with being average.

\---

Being broad and preferring to not touch strangers, I lean away. So after a long flight, I'm generally in quite a bit of pain, more as I get older.

I've like the design proposals showing staggered seating.

Alternately, I kinda wish my culture (and myself) was okay with touching. Like soldiers packed into troop transports. Everyone's suffering the same, so they just accept it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The contoured spine follows an ergonomic curve all the way up to the > headrest, which the company claims allows for a more comfortable posture in > the upright position. "Our back is more contoured than most, which places > the head more naturally above the body to stop it falling forward," Pearson > says.

Why do airplane seats not place my head _naturally_ above my body? I get a stiff neck when awake, and as for sleeping, they are like church pews - as if the airlines purposely want to make it uncomfortable. Is there a safety reason to push my head forward?

<comment><USER6> My guess would be to prevent whiplash. Some car headrests also force your head forward into a more active position for this reason.

<comment><USER7> I wonder what the crash rate of western airlines are at this point? For fatalities it is about 0/year. Maybe it is time to re-evaluate plane interiors for the trade-off between safety and comfort.

<comment><USER6> What you want is turbulence frequency and severity, not crash rate.

I suspect metrics like these are what primarily drive these kinds of decisions rather than crashes since actual crashes are super rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember reading years ago about a neat idea: airplane seats where the reclining control causes the seat pan to slide forward instead of the back leaning back, so that if you'd like to recline it's _your_ knees that get smashed.

What ever happened to that? I've never seen it implemented anywhere.

<comment><USER9> Some airlines use these, such as ANA. They're much less comfortable than the traditional seats when you're trying to sleep though. On long-haul where everyone wants to sleep, it's preferable to have all the seats recline. You lose less knee space by someone reclining in front of you then sliding your seat forward.

<comment><USER10> > They're much less comfortable than the traditional seats when you're trying > to sleep though.

For you, not the person behind whose knees you're crushing.

<comment><USER9> Airline seat pitch and recline is pretty well documented, and you can do research before you book your flight: [https://www.seatguru.com/charts/generalcharts.php](https://www.seatguru.com/charts/generalcharts.php)

If I'm going to be on a plane for a long time, I do research to find the right balance between comfort and price. Part of deciding on that comfort is whether or not I can recline the seat and whether the seat in front of me reclines. Part of my purchase is the ability to recline the seat for my comfort. If I'm going to be a long flight, I certainly don't want to sit upright the entire time because the person behind me didn't research whether or not that seat would be comfortable for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was recently on a flight with Frontier that used similar, thin-profile seats. They were definitely less comfortable, but I really appreciated the sight lines. Plus, it felt like there was substantially more room between me and the next seat.

All in all, I felt like it was a good trade.

<comment><USER12> > All in all, I felt like it was a good trade.

Well, it's a good trade until Frontier decides to use that additional room to cram in more rows of seats. Which they _will_ do, sooner or later. And then you'll have just as little leg room as before _and_ a less comfortable seat. Gotta love the race to the bottom.

<comment><USER7> If airplane ticket search sites reported the seat dimensions (Google, you can do this. Do good?) and let you filter on them, then the airlines might have some motivation to have larger spaces for passengers. Since price is almost the only thing one can easily understand about the flight, that gets the focus. With my build I touch the seat in front of me on most seat configurations. I'd pay at least $20/hr for an extra inch.

This is also what is causing flight times to go up. Airlines are flying slower to save fuel and I bet only 1% of people know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why don't we have bunk style bed racks for international flights? I'd gladly take a sedative, crawl into my cubby hole and wake up at my destination 6-12 hours later with no recollection of time loss. Of course, some sort of health screening would be necessary to ride Anesthesiologist Airlines.

<comment><USER14> Safety regulations. Such designs usually can't be evacuated in a manner that is timely enough to meet requirements.

<comment><USER7> Safety first might not be a good rule to guide civilization by. It basically means doing nothing is the best path. Maybe safety third would work better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The willingness of design houses to be complicit in an assault on the passenger never ceases to amaze me.

None of these people would take the contract to design an ergonomic guillotine. Would they?

To be slightly less hyperbolic, some people might want to reflect on the role the FAA has in regulating seat density and some recent hints the passenger escape test is now felt to be unreal, and a bad test of real life risk.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just put a bunch of Aeron chairs in an airplane! Done! Jokes aside, we've all sat in comfortable chairs and uncomfortable chairs, in airplanes or otherwise. What makes a chair comfortable? What's the most comfortable chair you've used?

<comment><USER17> For me comfort is all about leg room and has nothing to do with the chairs themselves. I don't want my knees touching the chair in front of me. If better designed chairs means more leg room, then I'm more comfortable.

<comment><USER18> I just want two goddamned armrests so I don't have my elbows pinned to my ribs for a half dozen or a dozen hours. I'm an average-sized male and have no issues with legroom in economy; as long as I've got 1-2" in front of my knees I'm golden -- most seats provide more than that.

I'll rant about this until the cows come home; I can pay $39 to upgrade to slightly-more-legroom class, but all I really want is some armrests. Premium economy, fleetwide, nationwide, STAT. Currently the only real PE products are on international flights (from the US perspective).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think they are solving the wrong problem. It's not the chair it's the space between them.

<comment><USER20> The space between chairs is not going to increase. It will remain at the narrowest flyers are willing to endure for cheaper flights. If the seat designer can claim some extra space, they will be used to cram more rows. That may lead to cheaper flights, but not more legroom in economy class.</comment></comment>