Login vs Log In - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/406016/ui-terminology-logon-vs-login <comment><USER2> we tested this heavily at mint. the verdict was

sign in/sign out is clearest to the average (nontechnical, mass consumer) user...

...but the problem is, so is "sign up." so when in conflict with a third "sign _" action, the preferred and easily recognized choices are "log in," "log out," and "sign up."

this is a generalization, but "log on" really only resonates with people who had modems.

there you go.

<comment><USER3> "Sign in" is terrible.

Use: "Login" for login. "Logout" for logout. "Sign up" or "Register" for registration.

You don't want any ambiguity in your buttons. "Login" is internationally understood, "Sign in" not so much (and takes more effort to visually distinguish from "Sign up").

<comment><USER4> "Login" is terrible (and you should feel bad for suggesting bad UX as though it was right).

Users want to provide their identity credentials to access your site and verify who they are. They do that via an electronic signature which is their username and password.

Therefore they want to "Sign In" with their signature.

The fact that you're 'logging' their signature is secondary to their needs. And as far as making a compound word out of "log" and "in"... well that's stupid (and wow... "Logout" is a new verb created just so you can leave a website securely? Try explaining what that is to someone who has never used the internet... 'no it's not street slang for going to the toilet').

As for your 'more effort to visually distinguish' between "Sign In" and "Sign up", you already solved that problem. "Sign in" and "Register" are the winners.

And we don't have to involve any lumps of wood (or new verbs that suggest bowel movements).

Once you've registered your signature with the site, the next time you arrive, you merely provide your signature. Register and then Sign In.

<comment><USER2> > "Login" is terrible (and you should feel bad for suggesting bad UX as though > it was right).

seconded

I also agree that "register" is a great alternate to "sign up."

My original intent in responding to this thread is to help educate HN readers between data and opinion when it comes to "good UX." As a designer I've had opinions about these things for years, as we all have. But not all of us have had the opportunity to test our ui lexicon in front of millions of users. So while we might think "oh, register makes more sense," I am simply offering that no, in fact, it did not. "Sign up" was the most commonly-expected term for participating in the system as a non-user. "Register" was viewed as more committal, technical, involved.

<comment><USER3> Did you A/B test the conversion rate or is that from a poll?

<comment><USER2> passive: tested conversion/success rate

active: tested lexicon on focus groups, asked what users expected actions to do, testing hypothetical affordances, etc.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. We did an extensive series of A/B tests a while back between "Registrieren", "Anmelden" and a specific call to action (this was a german top100 site). There was no significant difference between the former two but, as expected, a much better conversion with the specific call.

However, none of this is relevant to the "Login" vs "Sign in" debate. If _that_ button influences anything then it would be in the retention, and I doubt the impact can be measured in insulation either way. It's merely one of the tiny details that make a difference in aggregate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stackoverflow sometimes annoy me in how aggressive some people can be at closing questions. So this is a question that's 3 years old, where Jeff Atwood himself weighed in. But somehow, just because it got a surge of popularity recently it was closed 40 minutes ago.

<comment><USER6> Typically questions linked from a news aggregate site are closed because the question is now a stage for people to shout "me too" without reading the other posts. We end up with dozens of comments that haven't added any value to the discussion. If one of my questions are linked, I request a mod lock it, because it's damn annoying to have my inbox flooded with that kind of feedback. Protected locks are removed after a short time, if you feel strongly that you had a meaningful contribution to the post.

<comment><USER7> This explains the _"protected by Charles 6 hours ago"_ , not the _"closed as off topic by agf, Charles, marcog, leppie, MartinHN 1 hour ago"_.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, protecting questions linked from news aggregators is fine and a sensible thing to do. Closing the questions is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Daily dose of irony for ya: [https://img.skitch.com/20120716-kxcbgabsha7mi6nwxnd4w48wfw.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20120716-kxcbgabsha7mi6nwxnd4w48wfw.png)

</comment><comment><USER10> The title is wrong. The debate is about Login/Logon not Login vs Log in. Could someone change it?

<comment><USER11> Well, the question is about login/logon, but the poster misuses them, since login/logon are not verbs.

<comment><USER12> That's what I noticed as well. Another misuse I see all the time is 'setup' (noun) being used as a verb instead of 'set up'. For example, 'I need to setup this computer today'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this honestly something "hackers" care about? German separable verbs, maybe, but that's probably more of a signifier of the kind of education you had than business viability or hacking anything even remotely useful.

Please downvote me if I missed the meat of what this was really supposed to be about. I think maybe I just don't understand the HN community most of the time.

Also "sign" vs "log" and "in" vs "on" are A/B testable.

<comment><USER14> Is making otherwise innocuous changes which have a substantial impact on user behavior important to the startup culture?

No, no at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What it made me think of is how silly the whole convention is.

From a back end, sure, log your access in or on and out of off. But from a user perspective, why are we logging anything. Why do we need to sign a metaphorical log sheet every time we come and go?

Is there no better way to do it? Are we destined to spend our lives and future signing the log sheet at the metaphorical security desk for the rest of human existence?

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://notaverb.com/login>

<comment><USER17> I prefer <http://loginisnotaverb.com/>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've thought about this for a considerable amount of time last month and decided the simplest way to do it was to use Enter and Exit in our upcoming sports app, because they have real world connotations and also have meanings and symbols that are easy to get, even by utterly non tech savvy people. Hope that doesn't end up introducing even more confusion.

<comment><USER19> Interesting idea.

To play devil's advocate: to me, "logging out" and "exiting" are not the same thing. Particularly, the first is just a change of state--I'm still in your app, but now I'm no longer signed in. On the other hand, "exiting" is more like a motion; I expect to actually leave your app and not just be logged out. In UI terms, I see "exit" as a synonym of "quit".

Now, perhaps this makes sense for your app. However, if it makes sense to interact with it without being logged in, I think that is the wrong terminology. So I would definitely _not_ use it for something like HN because browsing stories works regardless of whether I'm logged in or not.

I'm sure you thought about this far more when you were making your decision, so this is just my impression. You can always try to test the alternative empirically once you have a bunch of active users :).

<comment><USER18> Thanks for your thoughts. I agree one would indeed expect to not be signed out by chosing exit. We happen to use google auth and are in this uncommon situation where the sign out action, actually signs the user out of their google account, which so far has annoyed every sigle one of our testers.

We are looking into a few other alternatives including the most obvious where we convey that they are indeed leaving the app but in the next screen let the user know that their google account is still signed in and provide an option if they still want to sign out. Thankfully we have quite a while to launch, so I have time to run a couple other iterations and pick the one which seems most clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use my Login to Log In.

<comment><USER18> I want you to know Im exercising so much restraint to hold back my reddit impulse to quip,"Yo Dawg". Its amazing how easily we have come to change behavior, attitudes and expectations from other members as we move from one online place to another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The most annoying thing to me is seeing that popularity is mislead for authority or correctness. Why would the options chosen by the majority of people be the most correct one? Pitfalls of democracy...

<comment><USER22> It's not democracy, it's just how non-formal language evolves.

People agree on the meaning of symbols/conventions, and then dictionaries draw targets around the arrows.

<comment><USER21> I agree in principle, but where do schools fit in your picture? Schools should teach you the meaning of things and then, only if the available meanings don't fit your reality, then people should recur to "agreement". I like to think that Shakespeare (or Dante, in my language) words weight more than FB posts to define the meaning of things ;-)

<comment><USER22> It all depends for whom... Schools are inherently conservative, and slow down the evolution, as did the paper medium for written communications (and iPhone auto-correct).

But now, forget Facebook, think SMS and IM. In 50 years, everyone under 75 will be familiar with its vocabulary, and will have used more for personal communication than the "correct" language. I predict that, school be damned, it will replace the current spelling in everyday life for most people.

Note that I love beautiful language and its historical roots. At the gut level, I find it painful to watch it being torn down. But I'm too young to be a curmudgeon...

<comment><USER21> I agree with your prediction, but it scares me that a medium that should make communications easier will actually put more barriers between ages.

I already do not understand SMS spelling: in 50 years, probably a 30 years old person will not understand things written by a 15 years old person.

Conservatism in schools has the advantage that we can still read Shakespeare (or Dante) without translation. Languages that change too quickly defy their own purpose (i.e. being a common ground for people to communicate).

<comment><USER22> I wholeheartedly agree.

Conservatism isn't inherently bad, and innovation for its own sake is idiotic.

Note that, for Shakespeare at least, even though one can still understand the main meaning of the text, a lot of puns and cultural references are lost to the modern reader (lest he's a specialized literature scholar)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't recall ever hearing a viewer / user complain about what the developer called the thing. I also don't remember ever reading a blog where a start-up founder obsessed over it, although I'm sure there's been one or two that we never heard of.

Therefore, I simply don't think about it and typically just use "login". It's recognizable, it simple, and users know what to do with it. Everything else is simply keeping you away from the more important parts of your project. Just one man's opinion.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just survey the top sites on the web and use whatever terminology they use. It may not be grammatically correct but their users understand what it means.

<comment><USER2> Also not a good approach. Many of the "top sites" on the web are not such because they follow best practices at all, they are top sites because of their content. The stakes are a lot higher for us here in startupland. Clear language and predictable affordances make %s of difference in conversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They forgot connect / disconnect which is easier to translate than anything with 'log' or even 'sign'.

<comment><USER26> That is only a good choice if you are actually connecting to something. In most websites you are connected to the same server no matter what you do, and all the login does is to give you special permissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I always write "login/on" to be cheeky :-)

</comment><comment><USER28> When coding, I also have to stop and think about:

\- website vs web site \- setup vs set up

That is just two examples that come to mind in as many seconds.

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't use any, there is no such action as a {log,sign}{in,off,on} what there is is a session between the client and server so call it what it is a session.

<comment><USER10> I could also further argue that there is no session, there is only a HTTP cookie representing state. And then argue that there are no cookies, just a piece of data sent by a website and stored by the browser, and so on..

The point is that the actions do not cease to exist simply because they are abstractions over a lower level of operation. Users don't need to know what sessions are and it detracts from the user experience, so its not a good idea to expose them to the details of that level of abstraction.

<comment><USER29> I don't believe a user is by default ignorant and I don't treat them as such it also doesn't detract from user experience as now we have session/{create,new,destroy] instead of what this very question presents.

<comment><USER10> I see no reason to assume that a user understands what HTTP sessions are on a site where the userbase is non-technical like gmail or Facebook or the vast majority of sites online. Mentioning sessions to them will detract from their experience. Furthermore, I don't think a technical user would be offended by use of a non technical term like login/signin if there's no need for a technical one.

Finally, I don't see any clear distinction between session/create and session/new. I'm confused about which one corresponds to creating an account vs logging in. I'd say confusing terminology like that is far worse for user experience than any of the log/sign options.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nvidia releases $3000 Titan Z - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/25/titan-z/ <comment><USER2> Most of the current comments are along the lines of "You will only need this card if you are doing _____". ie "Gaming at 4k", "Parallel Compute".

I think it's pretty clear this is a halo product, but I want to point out that having two non-crippled gpu's on a stick is an impressive technical achievement. Sure they will be throttled when the heat constraints kick in, but I am excited to see this sort of technology trickle down into the next "Asus 760 Mars" product.

<comment><USER3> What's a halo product?

<comment><USER4> A halo product is something that isn't there to be the real flagship that's driving the revenue, but instead to be the ultra-cool item that people really lust after, associate that with the brand, then buy one of the lower end models.

For example, the Ford Shelby GT500 [http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/trim/shelbygt500/](http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/trim/shelbygt500/) is probably not even turning a profit for Ford, but when someone picks up an automotive magazine with an article about the car, it makes them more likely to buy the entry level Mustang at 40% of the cost, or any other Ford product.

<comment><USER5> The Dodge Viper is probably a better example, as it's a totally custom chassis, body, etc.

The GT500 still shares a LOT with a production Mustang, and al the economies of scale that imparts. It's also producded in very high quantities, 5000+ yearly. They're making money or they wouldn't buiild that many.

<comment><USER6> The Ford GT ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_gt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_gt)) is a better example than the GT500 as well.

I've heard it explained that halo cars help create brand loyalty with an instinctual response similar to "My dad can beat up your dad" fights on the schoolyard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's pretty impressive. According to the announcement this card will sport 8 Teraflops (or about 112 GIPS), which corresponds to the entire available computing power on this planet in 1990 _. Let 's play some Counterstrike :D

_[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/xbox-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/xbox- one-our-servers-will-have-more-power-than-all-the-computers-in-1999-us-really- expert-almost/276131/)

<comment><USER3> New benchmarking scheme: "Entire available computing power on the planet in year XXXX"

Awesome.

<comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Histo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Historical_TOP500_table)

Another fun one. At 8 Teraflops it makes it equivalent to the top supercomputer of 2000. So our desktops (in terms of raw computing capability) are only about 14 years behind supercomputers, and that gap is closing rapidly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I imagine this is how the Titan Z came about: > We _finally_ have a GPU that can get 60fps in Crysis at 1080p > What about 4K? > ...

</comment><comment><USER10> I definitely see a need for graphics cards like these with virtual reality around the corner.

I haven't bought a new graphics card in 5 years because even next gen games play well enough. But I can see VR changing that with the need to render the same scene twice (one for each eye).

I wonder how much money you'd have to drop today to have a rig that can push 4K to each eye? There isn't a headset that can support that yet but I'd imagine its atleast in the next 5-10 years.

<comment><USER11> It looks like two GeForce Titan Blacks in SLI can do one 4K screen. So if you did two monitors each with its own SLI, it would work for about $4000 in GPUs as of right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This card is more expensive than all the hardware in my current PC, and I am running pretty high end gaming rig with 900D, GTX 680, 3700K, xonar, 16 GB of RAM, roomy SSD, velociraptor, Johny Guru 5 star rated PSU, and custom built water cooling.

<comment><USER13> Out of interest, what do you play on this rig?

<comment><USER14> probably 2048.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't track gaming GPU requirements that much, but this strikes me as past high end. Is this even useful for gaming, or is it really aimed at doing crypto, cryptocurrency mining, simulations, etc?

<comment><USER16> The thing to note about this card is that it's a dual-GPU card - two chips with some sort of intra-card PCIE bus between them. You could get equivalent gaming performance by buying two of the GTX 780 Ti for about $1500. That level of performance is roughly what you want if you want to game at 4k resolutions at 60 FPS, so there are gaming applications for this card, even if it falls into "insanely high-end". The niche for this sort of card is in mini-ITX and similarly small computers, where there isn't enough room for a pair of cards and the builder wants "throwing money away" levels of performance.

That said, the selling point of the Titan cards is that their GPUs don't have the same restrictions put on their general-purpose compute performance as the standard gamer cards. NVIDIA locks this performance on their geforce cards in order to protect their lucrative GPGPU business, so this is really more of an entry-level card for scientific computing and other applications.

Cryptocurrency mining would be an obvious application, but a quirk of NVIDIA and AMD's differing architectures means that AMD cards are vastly more powerful at the specific functions needed to mine cryptocoins.

<comment><USER17> While a few years ago this card would have been great at mining cryptocoins, nowadays no gpu is ever going to be worth it as ASICs are 2-3 orders of magnitude faster and more efficient.

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison)

ASIC won't play skyrim @ 4k though... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dual-GPU...so not very good for VR gaming. The _only_ reason you'd want such an expensive high-end GPU is to be future proof with VR gaming at 4k/120fps. But dual-GPUs aren't great for VR gaming.

Nvidia needs another card between the normal Titan and this one, that's a single card, and is targeted at VR gaming, and costs $1500 at most.

<comment><USER19> Why is Dual-GPU not ideal for VR?

Intuitively, one GPU per eyeball sounds like a good fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pascal seems a lot more interesting: [http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/nvlink-pascal- stac...](http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/nvlink-pascal-stacked- memory-feeding-appetite-big-data/)

(Although I am dreading having to type all those begins and ends.)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how much bit coin you could mine with a whole rack of these.

<comment><USER12> Not a whole lot. Nvidia cards are not as efficient at mining compared to AMD ones.

1\. Single gtx titan gets 300 mh/s [0].

2\. There are two gtx titan chips in this card, so let's say 600 mh/s.

3\. A rack should fit around 60 of these. This gives us 36 gh/s (gigahashes a second).

4\. According to this[1] calculator you will get a whooping 0.00361597 BTC per day, which would be worth around $2.12. Tomorrow expected payout drops to $2.09. Electricity should cost you at least an order of magnitude more.

[0] [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan- perfor...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-performance- review,3442-10.html)

[1] [http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator](http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It mentions supercomputers, but also gaming. Supercomputers aren't known for being particularly good for gaming, to put it that way. Is this product just a new gaming GPU, or is it aimed at a different market, even altcoin miners?

<comment><USER23> Real-time shading/rendering is essentially a massively parallel operation -- the exact type of problems that GPUs (and supercomputers in general) are good for.

In fact, many of the top supercomputers today use GPUs.

<comment><USER24> Yep. And it would probably be good for altcoins indeed. It just can't be a good bitcoin miner because the ASICs are already out there. If an altcoin can be mined with an ASIC (I believe the purpose of some, like litecoin, are not to be?) then it is near pointless to mine with a GPU (unless in a pool).

Also, I would assume the reason behind supercomputers not being good for gaming is that they are parallelized in ways other than the chips on the GPU (entire machines are networked together via various interfaces). The software behind distributing the processing between several machines, or whatever aspect makes it super, is probably what limits the ability of supercomputers to run video games :0

<comment><USER25> The best performance/watt altcoin miner is the NVidia 760 right now, although the R9 290x has a case for being the best well-rounded altcoin miner (Once you factor the fact that you'll need 3 or 4x the 760s to keep up with a single R9 290x).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm on 660TIs in SLI which are not the newest horse in the stable and can run just about anything out maxed (16x AA etc.) @ 1080p. You won't need this card unless you're going multi monitor and / or retina level.

<comment><USER27> Am I the only one that hates the term "retina"? Just give a resolution. It is way more meaningful than pointless apple magic lingo.

<comment><USER28> If it takes "retina" to get rid of "HD," no amount of silliness will keep me off its bandwagon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, I bet the cost / benefit ratio on this one is not so great for most applications. Just wait a year till a minutely pared-down version is available for 10% the price.

<comment><USER30> I will eat a shoe if this is available in 12 months for $300.

<comment><USER31> Be glad this is not reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> IMHO the only reason you'd want this is to save on a PCIe slot when you absolutely _need_ the double-precision floating point operations to run at full speed.

</comment><comment><USER32> About how many FLOPS is this thing? The specs portion of their webpage doesn't cover that, and I'm curious about using it for CUDA purposes.

<comment><USER33> 8 tera-flops

[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7894/GTC-2014-028_575px.jpg](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7894/GTC-2014-028_575px.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> >TITAN Z is engineered for next-generation 5K and multi-monitor gaming

5K? "all the way to 11" or somebody just didn't proof-read the copy?

<comment><USER35> Pro video cameras record beyond 5K - eg. RED Dragon does 6K. Shortly (probably at NAB this year) we'll be seeing theater projectors and studio monitors at that resolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The only reason to by this card is to get full QHD/4K porn in 3D, to pass the time while simultaneously mining bitcoin.

<comment><USER33> The Bitcoin network is currently hashing at nearly 500 exa-flops (estimated). This thing has what, 8 tera-flops? Not very effective.

<comment><USER34> interesting what human computing endeavor has first crossed 10-20 exa-flops - the estimate of computing power of the brain. 500 exa-flops is something that would be enough to emulate the brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Mmmmmm, OpenCL.</comment>


Boeing Plans Fixes to Make 737 Max Stall-Prevention Easier for Pilots to Control - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-plans-fixes-to-make-737-max-stall-prevention-feature-easier-for-pilots-to-control-11553373777 <comment><AUTHOR> These changes seem like common sense and don't require a lot of retraining. The big question is why Boeing didn't see the need to do this in the first place. It's not yet possible to rule out simple oversight.</comment>


Libertarians/conservatives launch hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://lincolnlabs.com/conferences/reboot/hackathon/

<comment><USER2> Meh... as a Libertarian, I'd be disinclined to attend this, just because it seems to be perpetuating the myth that Libertarians are somehow innately more aligned with Conservatives than Liberals. In reality, Libertarians agree with Liberals on many things, and disagree with them on many, and likewise for Conservatives. And, IMO, the modern Libertarian mindset is a natural successor to the Classical Liberal mindset and is the actual modern Liberalism.

I, for one, certainly do not self-identify as a Conservative in any way, shape, form or fashion.

<comment><USER3> "Libertarian" is sometimes the refuge of "I'm a conservative but don't want to endorse all Republicans"-people.

<comment><USER4> It's also sometimes the refuge of "I'm a liberal but I know some economics." :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The naming was a bit jarring to me since "Lincoln Lab" is MIT's massive off- campus, DoD-funded research complex.

<comment><USER6> Lincoln seems like an odd choice for a libertarian role model. He suspended habeas corpus and expropriated the Southerners' private property (their slaves, plantations, etc). If he hadn't been assasinated, all of that plantation land would have likely have been divied up among the former slaves. Spreading the wealth, the horror!

<comment><USER7> I don't think any libertarian would consider slaves as private property.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough. What about the plantation land? Fair game for redistribution to the slaves, or would that be a violation of the plantation owners' property rights?

<comment><USER8> You, just like everyone else, would have no clue as to what _might_ have happened if President Lincoln were to have not been murdered. For all we know he would have given it back or more likely sold it off to pay for the war debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd be interested in hearing from a hacker planning on attending this conference, their rationale?

<comment> T-A Judging by the "WHO" and "WHAT" halfway down the site, they are looking for the answer to this: [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when- the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/?single_page=true)

<comment><USER10> I heard a talk by this group saying they were the answer.

[http://www.parabellumlabs.com/](http://www.parabellumlabs.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Bing just became the best search engine for developers - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/08/bing-just-became-best-search-engine-developers/ <comment><USER2> First off - this doesn't work for me. I don't see the hackerrank widget, just regular results.

Secondly, even if it did work, I still disagree that this somehow makes Bing "the best" for developers. If you're developing in a language, you are almost certainly going to have a runtime for that language you can access already - either locally, in a VM or on a remote machine somewhere that you have easy access to.

Thirdly, even if you find that sort of thing handy - DuckDuckGo has support for heaps of 'instant answers' and DDG allows the community to define __new __instant answers /bangs/etc.

A simple gimmick like a HackerRank widget on a search results page doesn't make a search engine better.</comment>


StackOverflow for HTML and CSS - <AUTHOR> http://doctype.com/ <comment><USER2> Really wish this site would bill itself as "Web Development Q&A" instead of "Web Design."

Of the three pages of questions currently on the site, none of them would be better described as "design" than "frontend development."

It's time we granted these separate professions the dignity of their own names instead of forcing everything into the hodgepodge of "design."

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't agree more. Sorry for lack of a more fruitful comment, but really, you said it perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Stackoverflow is already geared toward and full of css and HTML questions. What gap is this site trying to fill?

<comment><USER4> The cynic in me sees two differences:

1) Much smaller user base

2) The Litmus ad on the right side of every page

EDIT: The rest of me sees healthy competition and an interesting take on freemium marketing for their money-making app. :)

<comment><USER5> "1) Much smaller user base"

Also a much more focused user base. From an advertising point of view, do you think it's easier to sell 10,000 uniques on a general web technology site or 5,000 uniques on a site that has a very specific audience like web designers?

<comment> brown9-2 I would argue that the SO userbase is already highly focused - on developers. Its not "general technology site", just "general developers" site. Its not as if that's an especially large and poorly defined group.

With a much smaller subset of potential users I think you'll also find a much more "focused" group of advertisers, i.e. a smaller group of interested advertisers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One point: people here seem to be assuming they want to sell the ad space on the right hand side of the page.

Rather, I suspect that the _whole site_ is an advertisement for their services. If they're successful, they'll gather huge amounts of google juice (for good reason, with useful links).

Further, I suggest that people should view this as good, organic marketing, rather than as some sort of evil practice because their intent is to market. There should be lots more marketing like this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've become convinced that CSS is an elaborate trick played upon graphics designers; It's an impressively inappropriate tool for laying out text, but given a few hundred hours of trial and error, you can make anything almost work. I think it's telling that no UI toolkit uses anything that remotely resembles the HTML box model.

</comment><comment><USER8> These sites are 90% SEO focused (even if they don't admit that it's true). I wonder if it's better to separate it all out on these different sites. They have to build up PageRank on each one separately. It seems risky, although it probably will benefit them in the long run because they'll effectively compete with themselves.

<comment><USER9> On the StackOverflow podcast Jeff & Joel frequently discuss their goal to get ranked highly on popular search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't validate: [http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdoctype.com%2...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdoctype.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

text/html MIME-type on XHTML markup

Seems like a great start to a site dedicated to web design.

<comment><USER11> Neither does stackoverflow ( <http://vldtr.com/?key=SO> ). Didn't stop them.

<comment><USER12> stackoverflow doesn't claim to be XHTML

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 The string "stack overflow" is found about 5 times on the front page.

Feels incredibly... derivative. Coattails-riding.

<comment><USER13> Where? I only see the footer link

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I could write this thing in a weekend.

(Forgive me, could no longer resist.)

<comment><USER15> A good rebuttle to that general notion: [http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out- ha...](http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/)

<comment><USER14> Pistos1 would've realized it was a joke.

<comment><USER15> My bad. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is your company's on-call compensation scheme? - <AUTHOR> I am helping to develop a compensation scheme for on-call developers. I have my own ideas about this, but I need to get more information to validate/invalidate my current ideas.<p>How does your company compensate developers for after-hours on-call work? <comment> pickle-wizard I think it is good that you are looking at compensating on-call. I've never worked at a place that gave any kind of compensation for on-call.

One of the things I've like to receive is not money, but extra days off. An extra few hundred bucks isn't going to make much difference in my quality of life, but a three day weekend would.

<comment><USER2> Allowing participants to choose between financial and time off compensation (at roughly equivalent hourly rates) is kind of a cool idea.

Of course, PTO is less of a clear incentive at places with "unlimited" PTO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At my work place (which is the best place I've ever worked, hands down), we are considered highly paid engineers and on-call work is just part of our normal comp. On your given team, you do one week of on call work, and then rotate to the next team member. Usual team size is about 5 people. If something happens and you find yourself brutalized over night, the manager usually gives you a comp day.

Edit: we've done a lot of work around auto-remediation and removal of non- actionable alerts. Alerts should need human intervention. Some on call rotations we don't get a single page, some are noisy. But usually, I might wake up early or in the middle of the night once or twice every other rotation. Figured that was worth qualifying my answer.

</comment><comment><USER4> 2 hours pay for each day I'm on call, increased to 4 hours for weekends or bank holidays (since we aren't in the office during the day so it's effectively another 8 hours on call per day), plus minimum 2 hours at double time for any actual calls received.

So effectively 18 hours pay per week for being on call then 4 hours pay for any calls received, since it would be extremely rare for a call out to require more than 2 hours.

<comment><USER5> Are you a salaried employee?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but I still have an effective hourly rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There isn't one, but my team also hasn't been paged after hours in the entire time I've been here. Even if we were, most of our stuff has no direct revenue impact if it fails for a little while, and the real time requirements are on the order of hours or days before anyone outside the team notices.

Theoretically, if one of us were up at 3 AM fighting a fire, nobody would expect that person to come in at their normal time and just work as if it never happened. Coming in later or not at all would be well within bounds in that case.

</comment><comment><USER7> it depends if you're scheduled to be on call or not. Both are possible, i.e. deploying a new system to production will usually require a scheduled watch, where a service crashing in the middle of the night is an unscheduled call.

schedules are rewarded by a fixed amount ($10'ish) per hour for as long as the watch goes on, with 2-3 hours of 150-200% hourly wages per call, depending on the time of the call.

Unscheduled calls are in the 3-3.5 hours of 150-200% hourly wages per call.

calls during vacation days are rewarded with the above, and a replacement vacation day.

The rules are specified in article 19 in the following : [https://www.fanet.dk/system/files/publication_files/standard...](https://www.fanet.dk/system/files/publication_files/standard_collective_agreement_2017_en_0.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not specifically software developers but several of the places I have worked at broke their on-call positions as follows

Non-salaried -10% base pay differential for on-call employees -2 rotating employees were scheduled at a time as first point of on call contact. This gives people a bit of buffer to plan their lives even though they are technically on call. -All time called in paid as over-time (1.5x base pay rate)

Salaried -10% pay differential -For each on call hour worked, received 1 hour of vacation time. This kicked in after working more than 8 hours over their normal 80 hour pay period but applied to all hours worked. Kicked in immediately if they were called in on hours that were not pre-scheduled. Vacation time paid expired in 1 year and was paid out at 1x salary rate as of time of accrual if not taken.

Some work environments and hours commanded additional pay bonuses. i.e. overnight work was paid at +15% of base.

Most importantly, whatever you work out, run it by legal and HR to make sure you aren't violating any labor laws and make sure you don't abuse your employees.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was salaried and shared a weekly 24/7 on-call rotation with three other engineers. We had higher salaries than engineers that were not on-call (though I don't have specific numbers) and we were given the day off when the on-call shift was over. It was a pretty small company.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's optional for all team members after around a year in, when they are familiar enough with the systems. The reason it is optional is that not everbody is able to do it - due to family, health etc.

There is additional pay for on call, based on numbers of days served. It does not matter if there were alerts or not - this is especially important: we don't get paid for work but availability. This incentives to harden systems and adjust monitoring well.

We also rotate regularly.

Each alert is followed up with incident report. If there was a lot of work, manager would give extra time off.

Hope it helps :)

</comment><comment><USER11> My team had a fixed ~$300 per week for out of hours/weekend oncall. The philosophy was that by not having payouts per oncall, it would incentivise the team to prioritise more stability / resilience work.

<comment><USER12> Did anyone on the team volunteer to be oncall in that case?

<comment><USER11> It was a team of four, and barring vacations, we took it in turns every week.

When the system was buggy, we all dreaded it. When it was good, we all got basically free money.

Over public holidays, we did volunteer as the pay rate was higher still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Make it enough that most people wouldn't want to freely take themselves out of the rotation and take the loss, if they had the option. I'm on a 5 person team, and we rotate weekly. $500 per shift. So that's $5000 per year. I hate on call, but I'll take that pay. It used to be $100. At that price, I would rather never be on call and loose the $1000 year ( pre tax).

Make on call pay enough that people might want to trade shifts.

And then maybe let buy and sell their shifts.

That's my 2 cents.

<comment><USER14> Would be funny to see PagerDuty launch an auction/market for taking on-call slots. Price goes up until someone takes it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You don't say where you are, but I hope you are including your company's lawyers in the conversation. Some countries have very particular rules that you need to be aware of.

</comment><comment><USER16> Two colleagues did a survey of on-call compensation: [https://oncall.wtf/articles/2019-02/on-call- survey-2019](https://oncall.wtf/articles/2019-02/on-call-survey-2019).

It's quite skewed towards the UK due to the social circles and reach but still useful nonetheless. I'm sure they would appreciate more data points!

</comment><comment><USER17> I get monthly wage divided by 700 per hour on call on weekends or 1400 otherwise.

If I'm called/pinged and I have to do something remote I get 1h pay with monthly wage divided by 72 added to the hourly wage.

If I need to move my ass I get 3h atleast.

</comment><comment><USER18> We are not compensated monetarily, but we get one day off for each week on- call, and any time worked is also added up, so we can take extra days off later.

</comment><comment><USER19> We get payed some sort of hourly rate for every hour we're on call (obviously excluding business hours), and then the hourly rate increases sharply for the duration of any incidents.

</comment><comment><USER20> We got 1/6 of hourly pay for each hour on call. If actually called, paid straight time for time spent actually working. If required to come into office, 2 hour minimum.

</comment><comment><USER21> We get full day salary if we are required to work on Saturday with free meals.

p.s regular day meals are compensated, we pay half of actual price.

</comment><comment><USER22> "It's part of your job so do it".

I'm not in charge of it, and don't particularly like the answer.

<comment><USER23> If you are salaried and aware of the on call requirements prior to being hired then I don't see an issue with this. It is just another factor to be considered as you negotiate your compensation.</comment></comment>


Do Things, Tell People. - <AUTHOR> http://carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. This is why I think every programmer should have at least these two things: a twitter account, and a github account. A github account to publish what you do, and a twitter account to tell people. You can do this sort of thing from anywhere with an internet connection, and it's free and easy. (I also think every programmer should have business cards. Can't be contacted if nobody has your email address).

<comment><USER4> I would question the need for a twitter account. I see programmers with twitter accounts, and it seems like they invest so much more effort to maintain it (retweets, circle-jerking, etc) than they get out of it. A github account should do just fine...if people like you, they follow you and/or your projects.

<comment><USER5> Also, if you're not very good (you're still kinda green) why advertise it?

Once something is out there, you can never take it back.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you can really grow or develop your skills in a vacuum. We should encourage people to put their work out in the open. And discourage the negative ego talk that's so prevalent in our communities.

<comment><USER7> Very true! We can all learn from each other regardless of our level of experience. No one person knows everything. There's nothing wrong with making a mistake and learning from that and nothing wrong with others knowing that you have the balls to make a public mistake. No one will know your name otherwise.

Edit: Your comment reminds me of over-hearing a man make fun of another man who had asked a question in a forum. The irony of this was that he was sitting in the corner of a dark, smoky bar at night while making fun of another man _who had the balls_ to ask a question in a public forum during the light of day. No one knows the guy who was making fun because he himself was too afraid to ask questions and always thought that someone like himself would criticize him as he criticized others. Technology could use less negative egos!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's easy to forget today, but this was how academia began 350 years ago.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society>

<comment><USER9> What was there before the Royal Society? There were still universities, wasn't that 'Academia'? Or is there a specific meaning to the word 'academia' I don't know?

<comment><USER8> There was teaching, yes, but there wasn't modern, peer-reviewed research. Even Newton spent half his lifetime as an alchemist. It just wasn't that clear that science was the more fruitful endeavor.

I'm not claiming the Royal Society 'invented' peer-reviewed science. It wasn't a dramatic moment of epiphany, just a gradually growing insight that spread through society. And the Royal Society was at its forefront.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Do Things, Tell People" == "Show HN: .*"

I'm sure most of the folks here enjoy the" Show HN:" posts the most - <USER2> like github has become the standard for putting your code out there, wish there was a dotcloud/heroku/appengine like standard that would provide a "Cool projects" feed to discover and get inspiration from. Ideally an integration of = "github + dotcloud + Show HN: feed" is what I long for - "Do things, Tell people" and get inspired from others in the network!

<comment><USER11> Not sure if this fits the bill but I'm building <http://swym.me> for a similar purpose.

<comment><USER12> I'm interested to see your Swym project in relation to a side-project of mine called Labradoc.

Where Swym seems to be focused on the "short form", Labradoc is more "long form".

Here's an example of my current projects & notes: <http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower>

My main interest is ongoing project development logs but I have had people mention they would be interested in a way to "follow" developers which Swym seems to cover in an interesting way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From my experience (non-technical), it's more about who you know rather than what you do. But, people don't know you unless you do something. It's a vicious circle.

<comment><USER14> That's not really a vicious circle. People not knowing you shouldn't prevent you from trying to do something.

Do something cool and show it to an online community related to whatever you did, or even Hacker News or Reddit if it has general appeal. If it isn't cool enough to impress them, you'll generally at least get some feedback with which you can make your next attempt better.

If you keep at it and care enough to improve, people will start to know you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of Derek Powazek's strategy: "Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again." <http://powazek.com/posts/2090>

Great to frame that more in the context of "personal brands" vs "not SEO".

</comment><comment><USER16> I think what you are trying to say invariably translates to people learning to enjoy the process and journey rather than the destination.

You have to do things because you really like doing them and hence you somewhat abstract yourself away from the actual results.

</comment><comment><USER17> Didn't you guys already visit Game Closure? I think I remember seeing you at AOL over the summer. Congrats to both of you on securing great positions - <USER3> way you've presented yourselves definitely makes you easy to hire.

<comment><USER18> You remember correctly! If you don't mind me asking, who were you with? I (their 15 year old intern) was there from August-November and got to know the place pretty well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is what I don't like about the startup community. I love making things but hate talking about them.

Of course I want my startup to get publicity, I just don't want my name attached to it. Solution?

<comment><USER20> I think either find a cofounder who can handle the social/promotion side for you or give up the idea of running your own startup and instead get in early as a dev for someone else's.

I have just quit my job to work full time on an idea I have (still very early stages atm so nothing public right now) but I'm the same as you i.e. self promotion doesn't come easily or naturally (frankly I hate it!).

But... I've accepted that if I want this to go anywhere I'm going to have to work on the self promotion side and somehow learn to be comfortable with it. In the last month I've created a twitter account (still learning the ropes on that) and a github account and I'm also thinking about how I could run a small blog (but I'm only going to do this if I think I've got enough worthwhile things to say - there's nothing worse than a neglected blog with boring content!).

I find all this social stuff a bit scary (and a potentially large time sink) but there's no way around it if you want to get your idea out there, make connections and get noticed.

One plus, as a single founder working in isolation at the moment, is that developing the social side a bit will help keep me honest and motivated because working in a vacuum isn't easy (or healthy).

<comment><USER20> Something else I forgot which I'm going to try: use something like meetup.com to find a few startup groups in your vicinity and go to one or two. I think it will help break the taboo a bit and make it easier in the future to talk to strangers about your idea (face to face or online).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> in summary, toot your own horn

<comment><USER22> Not quite. To continue this analogy:

In summary, write songs worth tooting and then make sure to actually toot your horn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is massively inspiring to me. This article is now hanging on my cubicle wall. Thank you, Carl.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really glad that you thought it so good! :)</comment></comment>


Barack Obama is spamming the hell out of Twitter  - <AUTHOR> http://launch.is/blog/barack-obama-spamming-the-hell-out-of-twitter.html

<comment><USER2> I personally find this a more effective use of his twitter account than general meaningless PR. He's trying to initiate social action, I get that it can be annoying if you don't care. But if you don't care, you probably shouldn't be following Barack Obama.

<comment><USER3> It seems counterproductive. Surely the number of people getting pissed off and unfollowing the account would be quite large compared to the amount of good it would actually do.

I guess the world is still learning the answers to questions like "How many times a day _can_ you tweet before you piss people off?"

Oh, just one other thing:

 _He's trying to initiate social action_

Well no, the political posturing is what's important here, not the question of whether some random jerk leaves a message at some random congressman's office. The point of the campaign is to try to claim credit when the eventual compromise comes through (or else to be able to blame Republicans for refusing to "compromise" when the negotiations fall through). As always in politics, what you're _seen_ to be doing is far more important than what you're doing.

And remember that in politican speak, "We want a bipartisan compromise" always means "We want the other party to vote for our bill".

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm a bit too naive, but I think that if it was just about claiming credit for the compromise he could do that whether or not he takes his case to twitter.

<comment><USER3> He could do it without it, yes, but in the PR game every little bit helps.

The twitter thing creates a full-blown narrative with a media-friendly hook (the media will publish any BS involving the word "twitter" at the moment) and the conclusion "Barack Obama saves the day".

Look, the whole thing is, at this point, an _incredibly_ complicated political dance, and I've lost track of exactly who is dry-humping whom. But it's far beyond the point where you can take anything that anybody says at face value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't spam.</comment>


IDE in the cloud: Mozilla Labs' browser-based IDE prototype - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/ide-in-the-cloud-mozilla-labs-browser-based-ide-prototype.ars <comment><USER2> The idea is very similar to devunity.com

Adding the code folding feature would be very nice too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see it replacing Emacs for me, at all.</comment>


Making transistors on paper - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12415202 <comment><USER2> Hmm... it would be a huge twist of irony if these can be developed in conjunction with OLEDs to create paper-based displays.

<comment><USER3> OK, I'll be the one to ask... how is that ironic?

<comment><USER2> Well, the paper-based displays may be used in e-books, thus eliminating/reducing the use of paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There goes the rest of the Amazon.

<comment><USER5> Most of the paper comes from tree farms.

The Amazon is being fucked because of two things.

1\. Furniture - old tropical tree are too valuable for paper.

2\. The Brazilian government subsidizes farmers turning jungle into farmland. Because jungle is "unproductive" and farm products can be taxed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Heard of any good startups? - <AUTHOR>

Three times a week, I write about a new startup at Venture Pimp (http://venturepimp.com/). It's actually really hard to find cool things that haven't gotten much press.
So, as always, I'm on the hunt for interesting startups. If you've got a startup, or have heard of something nifty, let me know. I'd really appreciate it. :)
Happy Sunday, folks. <comment><USER2> <raises hand>

Loggly - <http://loggly.com/> is a cloud-based log management service funded by True and Trinity. Logs are normally a real PITA, especially on something like EC2, but we make dealing with them fun and easy.

Basically you point your logs at our servers where we catch them and store them safely away. We apply a fulltext index to the logs to make them searchable. Results can be processed with custom scripts you write and then run from our shell-in-a-browser interface. Our API provides a way for you to programmatically view raw data, searches, facets of searches, or results of MR jobs to drive charts, graphs, or other mashups. We'll also support streaming of logs in via a persistant HTTP connection (and Mongrel2!) so you can send data from webapps or other client based applications.

We're planning on launching a public beta in the Fall, and we have a fun madlibs form you can fill out to be notified when we're getting close to release: <http://loggly.com/signup/>

<comment><USER3> Just a quick point: Your beta signup form (<http://www.loggly.com/signup/>) requires far too much thinking in order to complete.

After almost a minute of figuring out how I can fit what I want to say into your pre-structured dialog, I gave up.

<comment><USER4> I'll second this feedback, and add one other minor point: I wouldn't use the acronym (or is that an abbreviation since it is not pronounceable?) "IaaS" as part of that signup form. I do a lot of work with SaaS and it took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about. (It didn't help that in your chosen font upper case I and lower case L look quite similar. At first a thought you mean "logging as a service" which seemed like a strangely narrow expression.)

For what it is worth, I would either spell that out, or even better, change it to something a little less jargony, such as "cloud based services" or something like that (which is still a little jargony).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My own startup: Visual Website Optimizer <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/>

And, yes, we haven't gotten much press. Proof: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520001>

<comment><USER6> Oh Hi. It's funny who you run into here. :-)

I'm a developer at 99designs and we've been using Visual Website Optimizer to do A/B testing. Our marketing guys love it.

<comment><USER5> Hi Dennis, glad to find a customer here on HN!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stormpulse <http://www.stormpulse.com>

Bootstrapped, just went profitable, 2 co-founders, recently hired employee #1 (me) and #2.

<comment><USER8> How do you guys make money? Sorry, didn't have time to explore the entire site

<comment><USER9> Looks like they have a 'pro' account, which gives you access to a lot more data (radar maps), plus email alerts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TimeInB5 - <http://www.timeinb5.com>

This is an angel backed startup from Grand Rapids, MI. The idea behind the site is to build a communication platform for mass transit (namely flying). The site allows semi-anonymous posts between those waiting around at the same airport. There is a chatbox feature for live anonymous chatting.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.nearmap.com>

Based in sunny Perth, Australia :)

We have high-res PhotoMaps of the major Australian cities and allow you to see change over time by flicking through the dates of places we have captured.

[http://www.nearmap.com/?ll=-31.959417,115.859435&z=17...](http://www.nearmap.com/?ll=-31.959417,115.859435&z=17&t=k&nmd=20100529)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My faves include <http://jamlegend.com> <http://gotreehouse.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all your suggestions, folks — this has been a great turn out. I'll check each and very one of them out.

</comment><comment><USER13> Chitabox - Mobile Video Start-up. 3-4 Weeks away to launch for private alpha participants, iPhone's required to be in this!

Really could do with peeps from here. Bootstrapped Non-programmer sysadmin founder, outsourcing webdev team. Time is very scarce, up late nights and most weekend, but persistence it key.

Thanks to all here for the great articles. They provide great support and motivation for someone in my shoes. Shout-out to <http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>. HND saves me an hour each day!

Android users - Apologies in the delays. App planned for late September release, ready for Beta.

And before people say it...no were not harvesting emails. Any email given will only be sent one email invite!

Chitabox Team (Me and my fish!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Send me an invite?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi Mark,

Xtify - <http://www.xtify.com> \- We're bringing the supposed "holy grail of marketing" to a smartphone near you - efficiently (and judiciously) delivering a notification to a consumer based on that person's location.

Xtify provides application developers (publishers, marketers) with a platform for creating and managing mobile push notification campaigns across multiple smartphone platforms - and offers the ability to trigger those messages based on rules including user preference and location.

We are based in NYC and backed by Acadia Woods and Seventy-Six Ventures. Many great businesses live and coming live soon (real estate, retail, web publishing).

Thanks! Josh

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi Mark.

You've already covered my startup, a bike reference for cyclists (VenturePimp writeup at at <http://venturepimp.com/post/673622703/brightspoke>; my site lives at <http://brightspoke.com/>) but I'd like to thank your for your kind writeup.

For what it's worth, your post sent a few hundred visitors my way, and they seemed more engaged than those from some other blog links we've had.

Thanks for your blog, it's great to have a feed of new stuff people are working on, especially when presented in such a clean and straightforward way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks — that's great to hear. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> CareCloud <http://www.carecloud.com>

<comment><USER16> It sounds a bit risky to put your medical records in the cloud.

<comment><USER17> The idea is that with your medical records in the cloud, an ER doctor in europe treating the ankle you broke skiing in the Alps would know right off the bat whether you were allergic to any particular meds. It would prevent the need for redundant tests if they had your access to your health data, thus saving money in an industry fraught with wasteful spending. I personally think this is a great idea, and to encapsulate the service in such an elegant and refined user experience is the stuff of startup success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'll throw in my own startup here as well:

www.adsreloaded.com - It's an alternative iPhone advertising platform.

I'm a 21 year old student founder, and am always open to answering any questions you might have, just let me know.

</comment><comment><USER19> @markchristian

Sending you an email with more info, but in the meantime, check us out <http://www.repustate.com>

And we're Canadian, too. Double-double anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would kill someone for some Tim's at this point. ;)

<comment><USER20> Wow. I must be the only person living in Canada (though not Canadian) who does not like Tims. Though timbits are a different story.

<comment><USER21> Tims coffee is gross, brown water.

<comment><USER13> I Live in the UK, but I get some Timmies imported. I dont even drink coffee, but try The French Vanila Coffee, Abso. Awesome!

And Don't forget the Garlic Cream Cheese Beagle,Apple Fritter, Boston Cream, Blueberry Fritter.....

Why have you done this to me!!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Favetop <http://www.favetop.com> : A social web desktop for saving and sharing favorites. Check it out and let us know what you think.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'll put my workplace out there: Akaza Research <http://www.akazaresearch.com/> <http://www.openclinica.org/>

We create open-source solutions for the clinical research field.

Also of note: <http://opower.com/> \- tracks energy efficiency with solar power + software. Something like that.

</comment><comment><USER24> some that aren't mine but I'm finding useful recently:

<http://pinboard.in> # delicious alternative

<http://extension.fm> # collects mp3 players from sites you visit

<http://invisiblehand.com> # offers cheaper price listings for products inline in web pages

<comment><USER25> That's <http://www.getinvisiblehand.com> :)

<comment><USER24> thanks! can't update the comment now. good plugin btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Check out Gigayo in the online banner and advertising space <http://www.gigayo.com>

</comment><comment><USER27> GuruFi - <http://gurufi.com/> : Service for directly connecting essay editors with clients.

We are still very much an alpha site, but we are bootstrapped and breaking even. We hope to add transparency to an otherwise obscured industry and to generally give people a chance to get writing help from experts.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great idea. A while ago, I had brainstormed something like oDesk + Etherpad for writers that would be based on reputation/ratings, and it looks like you're well on the way to something similar. Best of luck. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> (Self referential) The Great Books Project: The Great Books Project aims to distill the wisdom of the greatest and most useful business and self- improvement books of all time. Till date, they have done 120+ books <http://thesuccessmanual.bighow.com/greatbooks.html>

</comment><comment><USER29> Wordzoku - Site a friend and I created. <http://wordzoku.com> \- free service to help people improve and learn vocabulary. Take a new word and use it in a sentence. Site live but still in development. By creating a sentence with the word you're given, you put word to use and into a context.

</comment><comment><USER30> We're launching this week (Sleep.fm) an updated site (<http://sleep.fm/coming- soon/>) to announce our iphone app.

We just learned & became skilled at Objective-C; stoked to finally be releasing a product outside of web browser. Appreciate any/all feedback on new site UI/UX.

<comment><USER31> The "Stop" button, used when testing, needs to be more... conservative.

Until I click "Set Alarm" I have no idea what those icons at the bottom do. Title them so that I can also click them. It will save users a bunch of time.

I know I shouldn't, but if I type www.sleep.fm/[special_char] I get a 503 page. Make that fancy or forward it with htaccess.

I really like the voice, as well as, it telling me my flight, weather ect. All of that is awesome.

<comment><USER30> Hi thanks so much for the feedback.

Re: icons at bottom yeah they are just static - they add color to our dark design. Though I have heard this comment before, so I'll c how it looks without & a bigger clock window.

Re: [special_char] ... when it goes live will get our alarm links working as they do on live site (<http://Sleep.fm/7am>, <http://sleep.fm/8am>, etc). Maybe that' what u meant?

Not sure what you meant by "Stop," button. Is it too big?

thnx again

<comment><USER31> A fellow Raider! I'm doing my final semester of Criminal Justice, along the way I learned how to program and I'm too lazy/far in to change majors.

Here is a rough idea of what I had in mind: <http://imgur.com/5HHOQ.png> . The Rooster is active so the "Test" link appears under it. When you click "Weather Alarm" a test link will appear under that and disappear from the under the Rooster. You can arrange the icons any way, but I think labeling them would help the user know what they do.

I wasn't aware you weren't fully live yet, it looks nice so far. I would recommend creating a nice 404 page so that users who go to [http://sleep.fm/<>](http://sleep.fm/<>); or <http://sleep.fm/7> are either directed back to the homepage or to a pretty 404 page telling them they messed up.

>Not sure what you meant by "Stop," button. Is it too big?

Yes :). A simple stop would be more than enough, although the big button did work- i.e. I knew how to stop the test alarm.

I see potential here. The name is awesome, there are some nice design aspects. Give it a few more features- tweet the alarm time, intergrate pandora/last.fm/grooveshark- and I think you have a nice piece of work.

Good luck!

<comment><USER30> Thanks for all the helpful feedback.

So what languages are you skilled in? Feel free to say hi im email@example.com or ryanspahn on Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> <http://www.chompstack.com> : A mobile website builder for restaurants.

The biggest source of traffic we've gotten so far is the Ask HN thread I posted 2 weeks ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492184>

</comment><comment><USER33> Hi Makchristian, great idea and thanks for helping us get the word out.

<http://www.gmbhnews.com/> is my try, bootstrapped but not yet generating revenue (still in Beta RC), it targets mobile devices and webkit browsers with the goal of bringing the web/blogs to mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER34> Notifo - Mobile Push Notifications platform <http://notifo.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it already :) <http://venturepimp.com/post/526176519/notifo>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well, im from midwest...Chicago to be exact...i started TuneCloud.fm (though we are not live yet). But some other midwest music startups im cool with are merge.fm, g2.fm, and bln.kr. Check em out. By the way, I read and subscribe to VenturePimp...sweet. Keep it up

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) I covered bln.kr last week: <http://venturepimp.com/post/802527796/bln-kr>

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, mergefm is today's pimped venture: <http://venturepimp.com/post/832618806/mergefm> — thanks, sabredata. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Some Nebraska Startups

<http://www.rockdex.com>

<http://www.hudl.com/>

<http://www.tripleseat.com/>

</comment><comment><USER37> Check out <http://www.twimpact.com>, or their japanese licensee <http://twimpact.jp> while they are upgrading. It's like Google PageRank for Tweets.

</comment><comment><USER38> Friends of a friend started <http://www.chictopia.com>

It's fashion oriented, but I don't know much else about it other than that they appear to be successful.

</comment><comment><USER39> <http://isitnormal.com> \- Niche Q&A site that's been around for a while. Recently added a lot of cool features and it hasn't gotten much press in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER40> <http://www.gogyc.org>

How about non-profits? We're focusing on using web and mobile technology to help microfinance institutions extend loans to youth.

</comment><comment><USER41> My own startup: Pdfcrowd <http://pdfcrowd.com>

It lets you convert HTML to PDF online - either directly in your browser or in your apps using the API.

</comment><comment><USER42> <http://webchiever.com> \- web achievements

<http://inquiryapp.com> \- faq hosting service

</comment><comment><USER43> Our startup is <http://www.IActionable.com> We're what some call 'Game Mechanics as a Service'. I'll send you an email as well.

<comment><USER16> I left a message. I'd like to test you guys out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> We created Active Interview (activeinterview.com) and have helped screen candidates from around the world by organizations such as One Laptop Per Child, among others.

</comment><comment><USER45> <http://www.flockengine.com> \- Android Multiplayer Framework & Hosted Infrastructure

</comment><comment><USER46> <http://www.trafficspaces.com> \- alternative to OpenX. Bootstrapped and profitable :)

</comment><comment><USER47> <http://www.briefcam.com> \- Automatic summarisation of video footage.

</comment><comment><USER48> NewsCred Platform (<http://platform.newscred.com>)

</comment><comment><USER49> www.isocket.com -- Commission free direct ad sales, works with adsense too.

<comment><USER50> Hey, I work at isocket - thanks for the shoutout! I didn't recognize your username though?

To the OP, ping me if you have any questions at alabut at gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> TaskRabbit is neat if you haven't written about them yet.

</comment><comment><USER52> <http://www.facecash.com>

Designed to kill the credit card.

</comment><comment><USER53> www.taroby.org

<comment><USER54> I've tried it. It's a really cool application for messaging and collaboration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Robert X. Cringely is doing a startup tour that's short on details but seems interesting. Might be worth a plug. <http://www.cringely.com/2010/07/slouching-toward-sunnyvale/></comment>


Shaper Origin now taking orders  $2499, ship Jan 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://store-us.shapertools.com/?_ga=2.116106958.938715007.1540306765-1875358498.1540306765 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty excited about this. I've wanted a big CNC machine to be able to cut plywood parts. But I lack the 10'x6' area to put one in. I can set up on saw horses in the driveway and cut away. As I get waste on one end I can hack that section off so I'm not reaching across the entire plywood sheet.</comment>


Startup Quote: Mark Pincus, co-founder, Zynga - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/3032181284

<comment><AUTHOR> We did anything possible just to get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.

\- Mark Pincus (@markpinc)

<http://startupquote.com/post/3032181284></comment>


Ask HN: Has Anyone Reinvented NvALT as a PWA? - <AUTHOR> I was a long time user of nvALT on my Mac before switching to Windows a couple of years ago.
Aside from Quicksilver and Terminal, nvALT is the app I miss most on Windows. I'm especially attached to two features: 1) the search and compose field are the same field, just hit enter to create a new note with the search query as the title, and 2) the application is designed to index a directory of txt files.
Has anyone reinvented nvALT for the web?
It's a separate topic, but I would also be interested in Windows or Linux apps in this vein. I imagine on Linux the answer is vim or emacs? I haven't yet tried either. <comment><USER2> Someone is trying: [https://notational.co/](https://notational.co/)

For what it's worth: I was also heavy nvAlt user and this looked promising but it's half cargo-culting.

They did copy some aspects of nvALT but as a whole it's missing the big picture: nvALT was build to maximize utility.

For whatever strange reason this re-imagining decided to use only 50% of available screen space. Completely missing the spirit of utility.

There might be a business opportunity to build a real re-imagining of nvALT on the web that doesn't just copy few UI ideas but also embodies the spirit and translates it to the web.

I use [https://notion.so](https://notion.so) now.</comment>


Show HN: Tise – Easily sell on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://tiseit.com

<comment><USER2> Are there any other comments? Obviously feel free to check out the iOS app as well: [https://itunes.apple.com/no/app/tise/id948050708?l=nb&mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/no/app/tise/id948050708?l=nb&mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks beautiful. But it does not tell me what it does.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. That's obviously and enormously important point you're making, and we'll make some improvements right away.

To enlighten the discussion, Tise is a service to create online classifieds that can be posted on Facebook. The idea is then to use it as a tool to post on various "Buy / Sell / Swap" groups on Facebook.

In my opinion it can be compared to how Instaweather built on Instagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice. Hello from Finn :-)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Hi, Finn! :)</comment></comment>


Backpage Founder's 93 Charges Lack Actual Sex-Trafficking Claims - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/blog/2018/04/09/backpage-founders-93-charges-lack-actual <comment><USER2> It was always about censorship and an aside of blocking sex workers/prostitution.

The founders have been ad hominem attacked but they are big in civil rights [3], personal freedoms and started the New Times and Village Voice alternative media which is a check on authority [1][2], Backpage was originally the New Times classified section.

The government filter/firewall is the authoritarian goal in this journey. Backpage and SESTA/FOSTA are solely about censorship and a step towards the internet filter/firewall [4].

Meanwhile Backpage really only added a filter to block words as any profanity/bad word filter does per direction from the government and lawyers [5].

The Backpage report claims of 'trafficking' amounts to simply a profanity filter that backpage created to PREVENT people posting bad ads or possible 'trafficking' not encouraging it [5].

The report says Backpage 'knowingly concealed evidence of criminality' for removing bad terms being posted due to a profanity/word filter? They didn't want people posting ads with these terms because they were bad words, not that they supported it[5].

That argument is like saying, because a site profanity filter removed racial slurs that the site was 'knowingly concealing evidence of racism'.

New Times has been kicking up dust on authoritarianism since the 70s. Lacey and Larkin also won a lawsuit against Arizona as recently as 2013 for false arrest which is still used to attack them [1][7]. They had exposed Sheriff Joe Arpaio's real estate corruption and his home address was in the article and is public information. Arpaio demanded all information on every visitor to the website, the article and previous articles about him for who knows what, they refused and published that and they were arrested for not turning over private user data for merely reading an article about Arpaio [7].

> _In December 2013, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay > Phoenix New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin $3.75 million to > settle their false arrest lawsuit against the county defendants._

Massive authoritarian overreach is happening on the internet from many sides.

When authoritarian overreaches begin, you first go towards censorship, attacking civil rights, alternative media and funders of rights.

The crazy thing is they literally had these guys in a jail cell in the courtroom [6] like they were Hannibal Lecter, it feels very authoritarian and a bit scary considering their civil rights / alternative media / anti-war background and they merely ran a website [6]. The money laundering charges are because they tried to move ownership of the site offshore due to authoritarian overreach attacking it [5][6].

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

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

[3] [http://www.laceyandlarkinfronterafund.org/](http://www.laceyandlarkinfronterafund.org/)

[4] [https://www.wired.com/2017/04/internet-censorship-is- advanci...](https://www.wired.com/2017/04/internet-censorship-is-advancing- under-trump/)

[5] [https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...](https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report%202017.01.10%20FINAL.pdf)

[6] [http://time.com/5233804/backpage-prostitution-money- launderi...](http://time.com/5233804/backpage-prostitution-money-laundering- scheme/)

[7] [http://www.laceyandlarkinfronterafund.org/the- incident/](http://www.laceyandlarkinfronterafund.org/the-incident/)

<comment><USER3> I read some article that claimed that the sex workers are really against the new laws. If I'm to believe the article, there are apparently a bunch of sex workers who weren't forced into the sex trade by some evil person (I think most do it because it is the "easiest" path to making decent money). These workers used craigslist and backpage to have clients contact them and then there is some way they screen the clients (is luckydude some creep or just some normal schmoo who wants his ashes hauled? They network and talk to each other about clients somehow).

Now with the internet removed as an easy way to screen these workers are claiming they'll have to work the streets or work with pimps which is far worse.

I hadn't really thought about that but I can see it. So perhaps these new laws are not so great. Who would have thought our awesome congress would do that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly, it is also apparently quite difficult to find actual trafficking victims, at least in the US.

<comment><USER4> Most of them are both (a) minors and (b) minorities, so it's no surprise people assume this is a rare phenomenon. It only happens to black and latina girls, thus, it doesn't happen at all.

Why do you think the NCMEC is so up in arms about Backpage? They know damn well what happens to runaway girls. Not all of them see themselves as victims.

When more underage white girls start turning up in prostitution busts you won't have a problem finding victims.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cynic in me asks what NCMEC would do, if there were no great epidemic of trafficking. And a nice easy target to pin it on.

Interestingly, all the examples below talk about grown up Asian women.

Not to say that trafficking never happens, or should not be stopped, but if it were as prevalent as they say, _somebody_ would have presented a few by now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those unaware of the previous run at Craigslist by several States Attorneys, here's a summary:

Questioner: "If you close down this safe forum, workers will just go to another forum." State Attorney: "Then we'll sue them too."

So States Attorneys don't see themselves in any way as social workers, just as law enforcement willing to play whack-a-mole forever without regard to the societal cost.

<comment><USER6> States Attorneys's salaries and power depend on a steady crime rate, not reducing crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And the recent closure of craigslist personals section while keeping the "therapeutic services" section where the actual sex work solicitation occurs is worth consideration also.

<comment><USER3> I emailed Craig about that and they are gone now.</comment></comment>


The Case of the Missing Barrels (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n24/william-carter/diary <comment><USER2> That seems like an awful lot of work to put in for barrels even in a war zone. If they were going to use them to make barrel bombs, why not simply seize the bombs from what were obviously lightly/not guarded compounds?

<comment><USER3> Presumably the country manager knew there would be a difference between selling barrels which had cleared security reviews and selling actual explosives to Ghadaffi, something which would have come back to bite him. Also perhaps not as much work as it seems for barrels considering the likely quantity of them and the ability of the company to transport to wherever they were needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reads like J G Ballard's tales of life during wartime.</comment>


Natural compounds, chemotherapeutic drugs may become partners in cancer therapy - <AUTHOR> http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2009/aug/natural-compounds-chemotherapeutic-drugs-may-become-partners-cancer-therapy <comment><USER2> Interesting press release about chlorophyllin, but natural compounds are already used as chemotherapeutic drugs, for example Taxol. Some drugs are wholly synthetic and others are found in natural sources. Whoop de do.</comment>


Just saying "A.I" in marketing language increases willingness to pay (data) - <AUTHOR> https://www.priceintelligently.com/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-pricing <comment><USER2> Interesting...</comment>


Google's trust problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/21/googles-trust-problem/

<comment><USER2> The Google Reader and Pycon stories are coming in about as ad nauseum as the Aaron Swartz ones did after he died, but this article makes a very important point for both users and vendors of free services:

Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless, so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum.

There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope they'll monetize later.</comment>


Spanish Flu: Epidemiology and pathology (Wikipedia) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Epidemiology_and_pathology <comment><AUTHOR> > A large factor in the worldwide occurrence of the flu was increased travel. > Modern transportation systems made it easier for soldiers, sailors, and > civilian travelers to spread the disease.[citation needed] Another was lies > and denial by governments, leaving the population ill-prepared to handle the > outbreaks.[73]

Sounds just like early 2020

> In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very > ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, > preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection > was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the > severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, > spreading the deadlier virus

Sounds just like Shelter in place (mild cases, asymptomatic & those who's immune system can fight it stay home, sick people leave home for medical attention)</comment>


Quantum microphone counts particles of sound - <AUTHOR> https://news.stanford.edu/2019/07/24/quantum-microphone-counts-particles-sound/ <comment><USER2> > "Quantum mechanics tells us that position and momentum can't be known > precisely – but it says no such thing about energy," Safavi-Naeini said. > "Energy can be known with infinite precision."

There is actually a time-energy uncertainty relation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle)

<comment><USER3> The original quote is too ambiguous for me to parse, but I feel compelled to mention that we should be careful with time-energy uncertainty. Time is usually not considered an observable in quantum theory, so it can be tricky to talk about time uncertainty.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Resolving the energy levels of a nanomechanical oscillator [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1386-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1386-x)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is 23rd Century Technology.

Let me explain.

See, the general pattern here is transducer + miniaturization. Maybe that makes for a microphone if you apply it to sound, but what I would like to see is the ability to fabricate ultra-small transducers for every known wavelength / electromagnetic spectrum phenomena.

Then for Act II... put those suckers in an array...

Can anybody say Star Trek Tricorder?

Actually, even a would-be Tricorder is a limited application... the real applications range from everything from electron microscopes to radiotelescopes, and everything in between.

Reversed, you could possibly get different types of field modulation out of such an array... need an electromagnetic field of whatever frequency and form for whatever purpose? That is, a universal field generator?

First step, right here.

Not just brilliant, but utterly, utterly, utterly brilliant!

This is my new #1 favorite EVER, on HN!

</comment><comment><USER5> I find this totally amazing. This feels like it could be an extremely sensitive and fast signaling channel. I wonder what the relationship of these atomic vibrations have to the microscopic behavior of electric current. I.e. can current be described as phonons traveling through metal?

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps of interest as an aside:

In trapped ion quantum systems the shared motional phonons ("sound quanta") are how 2-qubit gates are effected. If I remember the steps correctly:

1) Cool a string of ions to their motional ground state in a shared harmonic potential (the ion trap) 2) Issue laser pulses to ion 1 to create an entangled state that couples the ion's internal excited state to 1 quanta of one of the shared motional phonon mode 3) Issue a similar laser pulse to ion 2, this one exciting it conditional on the presence of the motional phonon

Now your two ions are entangled.

</comment><comment><USER7> > _Like unruly inmates, the trapped phonons rattle the walls of their prisons_

This is pure poetry!</comment>


When Mesmerism Came to America - commons-tragedy https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/24/a-compelling-power-when-mesmerism-came-to-america/ <comment><AUTHOR> Mesmer was a technologist, as well. He used Ben Franklin's Glass Armonica to deepen trances -- and had groups of people hold on to iron bars while submerged in water baths to fantastic effect (it put people into transformational states).

The mechanism of mesmerism was disproven by the Ben Franklin committee -- there is no "vital force", akin to a magnetic force, that a mesmerist taps into. Nevertheless, the Franklin committee didn't dispute the effects of mesmerism. As a placebo effect, it is a particularly strong one. Placebo effects often comprise the greater part of accepted medical psychotherapies. While the esoteric/ magical qualities of mesmerism may make rationalists shudder, if it worked well (it did) we might still learn from it.

<comment><USER2> "Just because it's all in your head doesn't mean it isn't real"

<comment><USER3> As someone who used meditation to reduce opioid usage post surgery, I agree.

If the effect is all in my head but it works, then who cares if it's all in my head?</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists say it is 'just not true' that most of the BP spill oil has gone - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/05/oil-spill-white-house-accused-spin

<comment><USER2> Throughout the whole catastrophe, the white house has been suppressing scientists' statements, impeding 3rd parties from examining the results, and permitting BP to basically hide the evidence. As Carl Safina said in his TED talk about the subject, "We put the murderer in charge of the crime scene."

Who's in charge here, BP or the US Federal Government? Seems like BP is.</comment>