Why do the shyness articles belong here? - <AUTHOR>

Because many hackers are shy? Isn't this for self-healing.reddit.com or something? <comment><AUTHOR> Well, yeah, an entrepreneur can't be shy. Then again, if that was the only personality change one needs to turn from recluse self-proclaimed technical genius to successful entrepreneur, there would be entrepreneurial psychotherapies. But wouldn't the psychotherapists get rich themselves and not be psychotherapists? _more nonsense rambling here_

You do need a marketing person, no matter how much of a maverick extrovert you are. Marketing is not one of the high arts, but it isn't trivial, and distracts you from focusing on kicking ass. Get a marketing person.

Full disclosure: I'm far from being a marketing person. I'm in a consultancy firm working as an econometrician (that's a type of statistician common in this field). I'm the technical guy in a franz ferdinand t-shirt and dorky converse sneakers.

<comment><USER2> _an entrepreneur can't be shy_

He can as long as he has a cofounder who isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, he can't be shy to find a cofounder with an extrovert personality to begin with. He also can't be shy to bargain percentage points; it's all too easy for some extrovert j[oc|er]k to browbeat you into submission; you need him more than he needs you, unless you're Tarmo Uutsalu or Oleg Kiselyov or something.

Perky social web ideas are a dime a dozen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Being shy is a terrible trait for a founder to have because networking is extremely important. A large amount of very technical people also end up being shy, so in my humble opinion, it is very relevant.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Because many hackers are shy?_

Since the answer is obvious and you know it, why do you ask?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh. Another way to attack shyness: go to nightclubs where people dance and drink. Don't drink anything. Spend countless awkward saturday nights doing that. It beats spending'em reading pop psychology.

<comment><USER5> _"... Spend countless awkward saturday nights doing that. It beats spending'em reading pop psychology. ..."_

I know the feeling.

In following the _"shyness"_ thread, I often get the same feeling I did at school - it's playing the game, learning how to be popular which to me at the time was a complete waste of time. I was more interested in learning or trying to re-definine the game. The big problem with being thrust into social situations that you find awkward is you are at a complete disadvantage. Like a traveler in a foreign land you can simply miss the cues, the locals take for granted. If you are not familiar with the local customs you are going to stumble. It's almost like there needs to be some form of Hackers _"etiquette- school"_ where you can overcome shyness and mind blindness. Where social scenarios are created from modified Jane Austen novels to be practiced to improve your social skills. To pass you have to recognise, decipher and act accordingly in tricky social situations. I partially solve this problem by taking along an _"empath"_ (a tip from StarTrek) who I can consult with. Am I boring someone with technical stuff? Do I avoid that person because their body language is negative? Is it okay to ask this question? But this isn't good enough.

As a budding entrepreneur you need to master these social skills because as in any entrepreneurial activity, you have to some extent with engage human assets. Where I come from this is out of necessity. Like minded people clump together and socialise simply to survive, pass information and advice. Just like here but in the real world. There are advantages in _"keiretsu"_ like activities.

Shyness is simply another hurdle to get over. You cannot let it get in the way. The real problem is in the free market there are other entrepreneurs who are not so reticent or who simply delegate this function. Viaweb hiring Schwartz Communications is one that comes to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> By the way, I was shy until taking theatre classes and taking part in a real- world (not in high school or college or anything) play.

Then again, it could be a schizoid personality disorder undoing itself; it was about the age the frontal cortax finishes maturing -- that's why if you don't get schizophrenic by 17-22 you probably won't. I didn't, so schizoid features phased out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this a comment or a thread?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I'm whining.</comment></comment>


Square Buys Design Firm 80/20 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/square-makes-its-second-acquisition-buys-design-firm-8020-opens-new-york-office/

<comment><USER2> For a second I thought - they are really diversifying, that's a totally different industry. And I started to have my doubts about how well this would work. I also began to worry that 80/20 had gotten into financial trouble. I use 80/20 (<http://www.8020.net/>) a lot in my work and I would hate for something to happen to them. But a quick reading of the link clarified that it was a different industry all together.

<comment><AUTHOR> different company 8020.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps maybe they will fix the design of the square card reader? I saw the iPad + Square combo being used as a replacement for a register at a coffee shop and the lady had to fumble with it and eventually use her other hand to hold the reader so she could slide the card.

<comment><USER4> There's a lunch truck at my school that has the same problem. The problem is that the scanner plugs into the headphone jack and sits on top of the iOS device. It seems like it would be more logical to use a longer wire to get the reader off of the device and onto a nearby surface. This would also allow a more "normal" scanner size (instead of the dinky half inch one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations to the 80/20 folks, and a great acquisition for Square. I had the pleasure of working with Andrew in the past on a couple of projects and he's both a very talented & productive designer, and a very nice guy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Truly GREAT UX designers are, in my experience, at least as hard to find as great engineers.

As such I've always wondered why more small design firms aren't acqhired.

Cool to see Square create a template for doing this, seems like a no-brainer if you can find that much talent sitting in one place

<comment><USER7> There's a higher S/N ratio for UX architect, and it's a bit easier to bullshit your way into a job as a UX architect. Of the great UX people I've met in my time, none of them actually worked as UX architects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Happy for the team - congrats ThomPete! :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Strange move on their part. What's going on?

<comment><USER10> It's hard to hire great people, so Square acquired a company full of great people wholesale. It's roughly equivalent to hiring with a large signing bonus, but with a very different (and more egalitarian) psychology.</comment></comment>


Stanford to host 100-year study on artificial intelligence - bra-ket http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/december/ai-century-study-121614.html <comment><AUTHOR> Headline from 2115: Stanford AI100 study results suggest a strong AI breakthrough a mere 15 years away

<comment><USER2> Indeed. On the flip side, "AI" is a moving target--people used to think mathematical proofs, chess, and jeopardy required "intelligence", but we now know we just need software. I've heard people say "We've made no progress towards AI", but I think that's as hyperbolic as saying "it's right around the corner". Progress (in this case, using machine learning to build cool things) isn't this on/off thing. There are worse fields of study to enter than machine learning. You'll learn things that are broadly applicable. And maybe "real AI" happens someday, this would be on par with invention of flight or moon landing, both of which sounded batshit before someone (a bunch of people) did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of a German legend I recently read to my child, of Till Eulenspiegel. He traveled around in the middle ages and pranked people. Once a couple of professors challenged him to teach a horse to read. He immediately said "of course I can do it, but since horses are not very smart, it will probably take 20 years". His thinking was that before 20 years the horse might die, or the professors who challenged him might die, so he would be fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> Somewhat cynical question, but is the 100 year aspect of this study anything beyond a marketing gimmick?

<comment><USER5> Even if the study doesn't live as long as its name states, a clear mission is useful because it guides people's decision making. A researcher in this should be optimizing her efforts for the 100 year timescale and not for the ~5 year one.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how that changes the individual researcher's incentive to make achieving short term, publishable discoveries a priority.

<comment><USER7> One concrete example would be data acquisition. Long term, large sample panel data sets take decades to produce, but are incredibly valuable if well designed / executed.

If you are applying for funding as part of a 100 year study, you won't get continued funding unless you put in the effort up front to design the data acquisition correctly.

<comment><USER8> Another is what a project can offer your personnel. A four-year project will almost solely have temporary jobs.

A hundred-year project will be able to offer more permanent assignments. That creates less 'publish or perish' pressure. It also may attract scientists with different character traits who wouldn't be able to compete in the rat race to tenure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The study's final authors may not be human. As such, they will clearly be biased.

<comment><USER10> Well, humans aren't unbiased either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of a symposium I attended at Stanford in 2000 titled "Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?"[1][2].

(At the time, Bill Joy had written a provocative cover story for Wired headlined "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us: Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species"[3] and this panel was assembled in response.)

Glad to see that the backers of this new initiative agree with the more nuanced folks on that panel, like John Holland--that these will continue to be meaty questions to consider, both in computational and philosophical terms, well past 2100.

[1] [http://news.stanford.edu/news/2000/march29/robots-329.html](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2000/march29/robots-329.html) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvW5zob1PPbbFUZK_LdzU...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvW5zob1PPbbFUZK_LdzU8iJBSFb2Zhyb) [3] [http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html)

</comment><comment> bra-ket [https://ai100.stanford.edu/](https://ai100.stanford.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER12> The headline in 2040: 100-year Stanford AI study to add first Android professor.

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone behind this study clearly has little faith in the imminence of AGI.

<comment><USER14> Well, it's been imminent since the summer of 1956 ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences) )

<comment><USER15> Or, in other words, for about half the time those people are expecting no AI.

Never mind the Moore's Law putting computers more capable than our brains less than 30 years away.

<comment><USER16> Nobody thinks Moore's law will last another 30 years.

<comment><USER17> Nobody thought it would last till here

<comment><USER18> See this graph:

[http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/CPU- Sc...](http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/CPU-Scaling.jpg)

The green line was the only one still going, and it plateaued about a year ago (you'd see that in a newer graph).

<comment><USER19> The green line is the only one that Moore's law is about. Power consumption plateauing is a _good_ thing, clock speed was never going to be the primary driver of performance increases long-term, and instruction-level parellelism (green line) is _not_ a measure of performance-per-clock-cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems to me it's more about the effects of AI on people and society than about AI itself.

</comment><comment><USER21> Related to the impact of AI to society, especially wrt the increase of unemployment. I was reading the comments of this MIT Tech Review ([http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533686/2014-in- computin...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533686/2014-in-computing- breakthroughs-in-artificial-intelligence/)) and I came across this opinion, which gave me the shivers. Two points:

1) AI taking manual workforce-based jobs. I can't help seeing how beneficial the industrialisation of processes has been for humanity. Instead of relying on inaccurate human judgement for manufacturing jobs, we let machines produce perfectly similar assets much better than we can do. This has increased the reliability of the outputs, in addition to lowering the prices of the products, which has made them affordable to many more people. Jobs get more specialised, so like the tools human beings have developed throughout history. Once more, survival entails adaptation. And this is again a matter of supply and demand. In Spain, where the economic crisis is still hitting the markets and unemployment, having a proper specialised education no longer guarantees landing a job (and it's not because evil robots are doing the tasks of leaving scientists).

2) AI taking over engineers, lawyers, etc. AI is difficult per se. Nobody comes up with a human replica made of metal by chance. Things take their time, and improvements are gradual. That's a matter of fact. At present, AI (plus Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition...) delivers a set of tools that allow us to see father, from the shoulders of giants. We had never been able to digest the amount of data we are capable of doing nowadays. Isn't this progress? We haven't yet created a creative machine and I don't see it coming any time soon.

I am so firmly convinced that AI has so much good to do that I just created a blog ([http://ai-maker.com/](http://ai-maker.com/)) solely dedicated to AI and its applications, and I'm going to dedicate my spare time for the following years to grow this side project into something awesome, because that's where AI is leading us.

<comment><USER22> It might interest you to join the LessWrong community, or read up on the work of MIRI (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, [https://intelligence.org/](https://intelligence.org/)).

You can start by reading a few posts at the site: www.lesswrong.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The singularity or humanity will destroy everything within 50 years. If we make it another 100 years, I'll be pretty surprised. Old, and surprised that is.

</comment><comment><USER24> Damn it. I am, like, NEVER going to finish this dissertation.

</comment><comment><USER25> 100 is a nice, round and even number. It's also a marketing ploy. Truth is none of these guys can make an accurate prediction about what AI can do in 20 years.

<comment><USER26> I don't know the researchers in question but Turing's paper [0] was surprisingly predictive in 1936, decades before any of this came to light. It's not out of the question that they could set the direction of research for a decade or two in the future.

I agree, 100 as a number is a marketing ploy. But I like the idea of a sustainable long term mission, rather than the funding rat race and trend chasing you tend to see.

[0] [http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php](http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php)

<comment><USER15> > I believe that in about fifty years time it will be possible to programme > computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9 to make them play the > imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than > 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of > questioning.

He was mostly right, out of only some 25 years, 50% more. A really great estimate for something that changed so fast. But just next:

> Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and > general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to > speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

That was quite off the mark.

Anyway, Turing's prediction was for 50 years in the future, that's orders of magnitude easier than 100 years in the future. And nearly all of the predictions by that time were completely wrong, what makes you think those people are the ones of our time that'll get their predictions right?

<comment><USER27> Playing Chess against Stockfish, there's an setting for "thinking time".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wintermute</comment>


Ask HN: How does Basecamp accept CCs without billing address? - <AUTHOR>

Example: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Premium/signup/new?source=basecamphq.com
I thought the customer ALWAYS had to give a billing address on top of their Credit Card to prevent fraud charges.
How does Basecamp charge with no address? <comment><USER2> It's not necessary. In fact, at some point I hope to write up a larger piece on it.

The only two NECESSARY pieces of data are the CC number and the expiration date. ZIP code drops some of the risk, and, accordingly, drops a fraction off the percent you're charged by the processor.

On the web app we're about to launch, we only have the number and the expiration date. I'm hoping to get my act together to do some A/B tests, but we're going into it assuming that we'll do better with fewer fields to fill out.

<comment><USER3> I could be wrong, but I don't think the expiration date is necessary either. You have to send one to your gateway, but I don't think it's actually used for anything. You can keep charging cards that expired and have been reissued with the same number; I suspect if you send a valid card number with any future expiration date, it's going to work too.

<comment><USER4> Yep, if I recall correctly, expiration dates are just there to get people to get new cards for accounts because the magnetic strip on the plastic fades after a number of years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's definitely not required, but it gives you a much better case if someone files a unauthorized chargeback. If you used AVS (Address Verification System) or the CVV number, you can in a sense prove that the person who made the purchase was the cardholder.

37Signals, and OrangeSlyce (my company) use Braintree which provides a VERY innovate solution called "Transparent Redirect". It allows you to accept credit cards directly on your site, with your domain, but the form posts directly to Braintree, and transparently redirects back to your site so the customer never leaves your domain. It's very cool stuff and I don't know of any other merchants that offer this.

Most importantly, the CC data never even enters your environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> AVS (Address Verification Service) only looks for matching street and zip in the first place. Since you're allowed to send only a street or zip, I assume that just verifying the zip as they're doing avoids paying a higher transaction fee for not doing AVS at all.

Collecting a billing address or not doesn't do much to stem fraud when you're not shipping anything physical. Unless you're going to have your customers sign and mail/fax written authorization, you're going to have a hard time disputing chargebacks regardless.

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be interesting to see some data on fraud rates in different industries.

It is easier to see the thief's risk/reward proposition when ordering a large screen TV with a stolen card than then signing up for a $50\month service. There as soon as you are discovered you loose access to the data that was the whole point anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> They use <http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/>.

Not sure how Brain Tree handles that thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> No card security code either? That's bound to nip you in the posterior at some point (happened to me, though with tangible goods).</comment>


Social isolation and loneliness in Canada - <AUTHOR> http://angusreid.org/social-isolation-loneliness-canada/ <comment><USER2> 40 years since Thatcher, Reagan and the rest of the world started tearing down everything communal, and community, giving individual "choice" instead. You'll buy a service, seek a product, but you won't know your neighbour.

Seems to be working as intended.

With hindsight, we should have stopped after about 10 years of those reforms.

<comment><USER3> As a counterpoint, the communist countries were extremely communal, and they were terrible for everyone involved (except for people running things).

<comment><USER2> Canada, the USA, UK, and others were not communist in the fifties and sixties, but did have many _community_ group amenities that have mostly been lost in the 80s and beyond. Sharing stuff in groups is not communist or even require people be in communes. Communism generally had little to share anyway.

I'm not sure how that is a counterpoint other than attempted wordplay.

<comment><USER3> Too communal approach and you're looking at ossified society with no innovation and no efficiency - communism (socialism really) demonstrated it. My UK friend told me that UK was already heading somewhat dangerously in that direction right before Thatcher stepped in - it saw little economic growth, unions blocking entire industries etc. I don't know the full brunt of the situation back then, but it looks like people were tired enough to try a different approach, and elected Thatcher.

<comment><USER2> The seventies was indeed chaos on many levels. Know why? The 1973 oil crisis. Most everything else of the dysfunctional, high inflation seventies stemmed from that. I remember once getting 15% on a savings account! Below inflation, of course.

Too much union power, and their political aspiration aggravated that rather than caused it. As the economy faltered they continued to seek above inflation pay rises driving inflation higher. Strikes could have one industry supporting another via sympathetic strikes. Until the oil crisis and rest of the seventies it hadn't mattered much, and no one much cared that some union had elected an extremist. The chaos that led to Thatcher and Reagan being necessary came from 73.

None of this related in the slightest to the many community, but not communist, town clubs, amenities, work social clubs, social care and countless other things that died or deformed in the reforms. Which helped push to the little or no community we see today. Thatcher once said something like "there's no such thing as society, just individuals".

Which is why I think the early changes were helpful, especially putting some constraint on unions, but not neutering them completely. The other 30 odd years of going in the same direction have been as damaging as those long fixed seventies problems, so I haven't been especially surprised at the global crises of mental health, loneliness and isolation we've ended up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The elderly are particularly vulnerable. I'm a Canadian and I'd like to plug an international charitable movement called Cycling Without Age[1]. In helping found a local chapter, I've really started to see how common social isolation is, independent of health and wealth and even in urban density. But I've also seen how even a single short social connection can have enduring benefit. Unlike some afflictions of aging, loneliness is a relatively solvable problem.

Take care of your older friends and family and neighbours, and maybe even offer to connect with a stranger once in a while. It's good for everyone! :-)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ti4qUa- OU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ti4qUa-OU)

</comment><comment><USER5> Well a few decades ago people used to go to church weekly and now people don't, and hey, loneliness and lack of companions for people is cropping up all over the news lately (observation).

<comment><USER6> That leaves an opportunity for organizations who bring people together without propagating silly beliefs. Sunday Assembly is one example of this model.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how I feel about this line of argument, but food for thought:

Is the authoritarianism and coercion a necessary part of church? Clearly left to their own devices, people aren't self-organizing into social groups very well. And perhaps the silly beliefs are an important marker or side effect of social coercion, and can't easily be abandoned. Even if they're not causal, they are a great indicator that you are truly allied with the group.

<comment><USER8> >Is the authoritarianism and coercion a necessary part of church

Speaking about religion in genera:

Authoritarianism, no. I don't see how that's related. You can have a cohesive group without being a dick to everyone who doesn't conform to the exact letter of every little thing.

Coercion is required on some level but unless you really don't conform to any of the social norms of the group you should be fine. A religion can always structure itself to have a bare minimum amount of conformity and accept anyone above that. Being able to conform to group social norms or at leas minimize when you can't is part of being human.

<comment><USER7> > Authoritarianism, no. I don't see how that's related. You can have a > cohesive group without being a dick to everyone who doesn't conform to the > exact letter of every little thing.

I might have used a poor word. I certainly didn't mean for authoritarianism to mean "being a dick to everyone." I suppose I meant hierarchical structure, pressure, and control.

As a corollary, imagine the sort of social cohesion you see in the military. With regard to the values the military cares about, there's a high degree of coercion and authoritarianism. So, counterpoints about how you can be whatever religion, creed, political party etc aren't really valid in my mind. You can Muslim or Christian, but you can't ignore a salute, or a command, etc. The values the military wishes to coerce are nonnegotiable.

There can be no doubt that the military is good at systematically building cohesion in troops. I'm just wondering how well social cohesion can work without any of these aspects. In other words, does strict individualism harm social cohesion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The part where it shows the responses with regard to social interaction with neighbours is a huge part of this. A lot of my friends have been neighbours or people I met out and about. If you do not have social interactions with complete strangers, and your family is disappearing from your life, you will probably be alone.

</comment><comment><USER10> Social time, no go back to your roommate filled apartment with an one & half hour commute one way to work to be downsized, underpaid, under trained, miss manged, and pension sold off to pay for your boss kids' toys. Why would anyone in Canada feel isolated or lonely?

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a micro-version of whats happening in Japan. Looks like most civilisations have a curve of social development. Japan is post-prosperity.

<comment><USER12> The idea is that all you need is money, business, and technology are not true... but don't tell people that because they have adopted these as virtues of some sort of new syncretic religion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One prosaic explanation for social isolation in Canada in particular would be its relatively harsh winters which make being outside uncomfortable and unpleasant (i.e., cold, wet, dark) for much of the year, especially if you're old. If you're cooped up inside your house you're much less likely to have chance encounters with your neighbours or strangers.

<comment><USER12> Another major issue is immigration. You have lots of people living together that don't share any sort of social cultural connection... and then you have work which occupies most people's existence most of the time therefore there is almost no time to build a new culture outside of work... and no one even knows what that would look like to strive towards something like that. Modern capitalist man is one dimensional isolated man whose sense of self is more or less based on providing for him or herself and the things that they care about whether that be people, pets, or the material things which own them such as their financial obligations to the banks for their housing and their employers.

Before that in the Middle Ages, Westerners in the upper classes who had any sort of wealth were much more social living very much like people in the so- called third world live today where they would throw parties to show their wealth and took pride in showing off their children and their accomplishments. When that culture was bulldozed, people forgot that it even existed... and perhaps it never did in the frontier like Canada like it did in old Europe. The immigrants were always busy working to be productive and industrious and always not closely related to the people they lived near.

<comment><USER14> More than the immigrants or capitalism , I would boil it down to breaking up of the family as the fundamental building block of society.

The 'very recent' social engineering has thrown western societies in a depressive state.

Even in the age of plenty, we miss the family bond in our solitary lives.

<comment><USER12> Well liberation came through technology and politics where women who were quite dependent on men became no longer dependent on men economically or in fear of being impregnated by them. You could not escape that reality before, and so single families proliferated alongside a legal system which encouraged that rather than the patriarchy which forced people to stay together for the kids even if they could no longer stand each other -- or one party was abusive towards the other.

<comment><USER15> An alternative theory, and I think much larger reason for the destruction of the family unit is that individualism was heavily marketed by mainstream media through the 20th century. People shifted their wants and desires in marriage from one of creating a family unit to that of finding personal enlightenment.

The excellent documentary The Century of the Self covers the evolution of marketing, the baby boomers and the psychology behind individualism:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Social isolation is probably the result of too much wealth. Y Combinator should have it on their request for startup list. Snapchat is doing something in this space.

<comment><USER5> Friends as a service, ha :) Naturally money can pretty easily promote companionship but I'm guessing people might need a few hints how to perform the conversion.

Edit: Thinking about this more, it seems like there could be room in the market for "like Tinder, but for arranging social events" (ie party, soccer, whatever)

"John from 3 streets down would like you to play soccer this Saturday (26 people are going, you've met 5). Accept/Decline?"

<comment><USER17> > _Friends as a service, ha :)_

That's what streaming services like Twitch are, aren't they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Same here in NZ and I blame the winters with short daylight.</comment>


Pavement LED strip traffic lights for smartphone users - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/15/dutch-led-scheme-smartphone-traffic-lights-whatsapp <comment><USER2> Even if you have the green light you still need to make sure cars are yielding to you.</comment>


Ask HN: For those that are developers what are your favorite brands/products? - <AUTHOR> Specifically, what products/services leave you feeling delighted. Also, what about those products/services is most delightful? <comment><USER2> LEGO. I'd say on average developers/engineers like LEGO more than non developers.

I'm a sucker for furniture that I can take apart and put together again. There's German brand ([http://www.floetotto.de/en/products/profilsystem/](http://www.floetotto.de/en/products/profilsystem/)) who make the same product line since 30+ years. Impressive resell value on ebay, I bought 20 year old spare parts. Same for [http://baltonliving.de/baltonbroschuere_e.pdf](http://baltonliving.de/baltonbroschuere_e.pdf) and some product lines of IKEA (less durable). Maybe it's the adult version of LEGO?

</comment><comment><USER3> Linux, docker, emacs, GCC, golang, PostgreSQL. They are the best in class tools, making me much more productive and interested in software than any paid product ever could. They are free, as in beer.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love Airbnb - simple, straightforward and easy to use. Their app on the iPad needs some work though, but other than that their design is quite simple and easy to follow. Their customer support is awesome - the other day I had asked my renter to check if there was a key and she didn't find any. A few weeks later, when she found it, airbnb immediately reached out to me to let me know something was up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks the the initial feedback. Let me clarify one thing. I am more interested in the services/tools that you use as developers during the development process. I'm just trying to get an idea of what companies/brands are doing a good job at capturing the developer community.

<comment><USER5> Most of the good stuff is free. The only paid for software I'm using is Sublime.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, forgot about Total Commander.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Resharper (plugin for Visual Studio), I barely know how to use it, but it already makes me miles more productive with VS

</comment><comment><USER7> Warhammer (both 40k and AoS). I'm literally powerless against it.

</comment><comment><USER8> beer - most types and brands

</comment><comment><USER9> As a front end engineer, I fell in love with Slack first time I used it. The UI is well crafted. Those buttons & their states...

</comment><comment><USER10> I love how Ask HN has turned into a place to take surveys.

<comment><USER2> In the last day you have complained about HN four times. I'd prefer to read real answers over snarky comments. 'Ask HN' was always a mix of good and bad/weird questions.</comment></comment>


The Next Feature Fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-that-the-next-new-feature-will-suddenly-make-people-use-your-product/ <comment><USER2> I've seen this fallacy used in startups by technical (co)founders to justify procrastinating various other, "less interesting" parts of the business that are vitally important. I've done it myself more times than I'd like to admit.

It is very easy to say "I need to add/improve feature X, fix bug Y, or refactor Z" when what you really need to do is outbound sales activity, balance your books, or write blog content. You may already not enjoy those activities because they are some combination of hard, not fun, and something you don't really understand. Couple that with some engineering task of perceived equal importance, that you do know how to make progress on, and you can almost convince yourself its really not procrastination.

The best solution I have seen is to track progress on a macro level, so that product advancement is put on par with the other critical activities of the business. Having someone kick your ass when other areas slip is very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: [https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840](https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840)

"Can I ask people to upvote my submission?

No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><USER4> Upvote begging (and knowingly using the /newest trick) is pretty unethical, although fortunately uncommon in HN.

I'm working on a blog post about the problem of upvote begging. Usually, it's in the minority of users, although some websites don't explicitly enforce it well. (Case in point, Product Hunt makes upvote begging part of the _status quo_ , which compromises the integrity of the site as a whole.)

<comment><USER5> It's common because the likelihood of escaping /newest on the basis of "intellectually interesting" alone is miniscule. The traffic just doesn't work that way.

Solve that, and you have much more traction to complain about what people should or shouldn't be doing.

<comment><USER4> What? No it isn't. (See my submission history for URLs to minimaxir.com, and I have negligible influence in the tech world)

Even then, two wrongs don't make a right. It comes down to luck, and sometimes it doesn't pan out. "Growth hacking" to correct bad luck is not necessarily ethical.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, we can't act like the front page is a meritocracy either when there is a significant element of luck involved. Would be be "growth hacking" if I analyzed upvoting patterns to determine the "correct" time to make a submission to maximize the chance of hitting the front page? Don't I gain an advantage over someone that sees an interesting link and just immediately submits it to HN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The other side of the coin is that there are many products that lack that one feature that makes me not use them or makes me less interested in using them.

Example is sorting products by some variable or filtering products by some property. If I can't do that, that means I have to write a greasemonkey script and it is much easier to go to a competitor.

<comment><USER8> The challenging sales cycle (if there is one) is this, "If this feature were added, would you commit to using this product?" that question is hard to ask and answer in a web based freemium world. In the enterprise sales cycle I've seen customers decline to buy 'for lack of a feature' and having that be a way to say "no" without explicitly saying no. When I worked closely with the enterprise account teams at NetApp that was always something to consider.

<comment><USER9> That's a good way to qualify features, too, so you don't end up building a Franken-product full of half-baked ideas from people who aren't even paying customers.

Bad salesperson: "Here's a laundry list of features that people say that they'd want in our product. Go off and implement them to make my job easier."

Good salesperson: "I have a firm commitment from Company Abc that they'll buy a 5,000 seat license if we implement this one feature. Is this a worthwhile investment?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We've been guilty of this over at [http://www.staffsquared.com](http://www.staffsquared.com). It's far too easy, and sometimes fun, to build better/more features than the competition. It's equally difficult for the sales department (and me at times!) to say "no" to new feature requests from potential customers.

Conversely, the work to deep dive in to customer usage metrics that tell the story of how users use the app and reach their "Aha!" moment is comparatively dry and time consuming but nonetheless essential. We've set up a number of KPI reports which tell a detailed story of where our triallists and paying customers spend their time in the app and extract value.

We use a combination of Google Analytics and custom KPI reporting to watch customers use the app. We've tried 3rd party apps, like Intercom and Mixpanel but keep returning to google analytics.

So the good news is that we've identified key KPIs that tell us how likely a trial is to convert. For example, we know that a triallist that has logged in more than x times is > 90% likely to upgrade to paying. This is powerful, as we don't invest time attempting to sell to these. Likewise, we now automatically filter out customers that are not at all engaged with the app, and aim to sell to just those that sit between the two extremes. We've also taken the time to customise life cycle e-mails to triallists according to their levels of engagement. Again, very time consuming work but essential and very rewarding when the results are positive (more no/low touch upgrades = more £'s).

Obviously all traillists regardless of engagement level get top notch support. However I'm sure more sales intelligence could be shared with the support team as they're also key to the selling cycle, albeit in a more reactive manner. Support also need to feedback to the onboarding team, as support are front line for people who get stuck and frustrated as a result during a trial.

I could talk at length on this subject, conversion rate optimisation is something enjoy and definitely don't spend as much time as I would like actively working on...

<comment><USER11> If people who have logged more than x times are 90% likely to upgrade, why spend any time on them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting insight with the "engagement wall" concept, but I wonder if following this idea means you spend more time in "viral" features without adding meat to your product basics. In the long run, you really want engaged customers rather than casual customers (unless perhaps you can monetize the casual users somehow).

<comment><USER13> I think the point is to add features to the part of the lifecycle where you're bleeding the most users.

The desired outcome is a certain number of engaged customers, but which part of the lifecycle to target deserves serious consideration, certainly beyond the all-too-popular default choice of "let's build a feature for a fully engaged customer".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recommend a few tablespoons of salt with regards to this advice if you are a B2B Saas/have a sales team. First experience is definitely important, but features will always be something businesses will consider when deciding which product to go with.

For B2B, the only way I've seen features move any curve positively is A) if you have lost sales consistently due to a specific requirement[0], B) a customer pays you to build a feature[1].

Note also that sometimes features are a great way to introduce sticky- ness/price inelasticity in a B2B product: you just need a few people who really love a specific feature and that 15k/m customer wont think about switching.

Also, the 20% signup is pretty big based on my experience but maybe it's standard for freemium+ B2C startups? For B2B Saas, I've been happy with 5% with 8% being a cause for celebration after a bunch of copy/messaging tweaking. Am I way off here? Would love some pointers if so.

[0] Note that this has to be a overwhelming consensus amoungst your sales guys. It can't just be excuse du jour that's used when someone loses a sale. I would also suggest listening to some lost sales calls: it might help you ascertain whether the lost sales was due to the missing feature or if the feature was just cited as being the cause.

[1] Only build it if you see it being a useful feature for the market and not only that customer (so maybe integrating with twitter rather than the customer's specific DB or something) then it's always a good idea to build the feature. This is especially powerful if you are an underpriced new-comer trying to lure customer away from the big names.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does an average web app really get 20% of visitors signing up, or are we talking about a subset here, such as web apps running a freemium model? If any of the (commercial) web apps I've worked on could get 20% of visitors to actively start a sign-up process and 80% of those to complete it, everyone involved would have been celebrating for weeks.

I'd guess most of the apps I'm familiar with are around an order of magnitude lower, but none of them currently uses a freemium model. Some are considering shifting to one, and if it really does get this dramatic a bump in initial sign-ups in a typical case then that would be a good argument for doing it.

</comment><comment><USER16> A 2% conversion rate is actually pretty good.

The attrition identified in the article may have less to do with having a killer feature, and more to do with how an existing feature is marketed to the correct audience.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's drop dead hilarious that he ends with a solicitation for contacts for his newsletter. I'd venture that his visit/signup/onboard curve is more severe than the one he shows.

</comment><comment><USER18> So I get the takeaway to be: abandon all hope if you don't hit and capture that big, first-day spike. Just move on to the next thing.

<comment><USER19> Yep, unless you are planning on catering to the long tail from the beginning.</comment></comment>


Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34797/supercomputer-takes-40-minutes-to-simulate-1-minute-of-a-human-brain/index.html <comment><USER2> Better writeup (cites sources!) and discussion from 5 months ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157)

And the Riken Lab press release

[http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/](http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/)

This is a link to the poster presentation. There does not seem to be a full paper associated with this research yet.

[http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163)

The NEST simulator (The researchers Morrison and Diesman are integral people on this project):

[http://www.nest- initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST](http://www.nest- initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST)

<comment><USER3> I looked up NEST, written in C++ with Python. What, no LISP?

When I hear AI being discussed LISP comes up fairly often. In the book "Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega" by Greg Chaitin, he mentions that Kurt Godel's work had a notation that was uncannily similar to LISP code. On the other paw he compares Turing's idea of code as something more akin to machine code.

<comment><USER4> Historically speaking, Lisp was the de-facto language of AI for quite a bit of time. That's only been the case for classical AI research, however. People working on AI and machine learning these days aren't necessarily all working in Lisp -- they're usually working in high-performance languages, or in interpreted languages with high-performance libraries (e.g. Python plus numpy or scipy or what have you).

<comment><USER3> Greg says he wrote his first LISP interpreter in FORTRAN, around the early 1970's. I was thinking that NEST might have code that emulates certain properties of LISP, I've heard of many LISP interpreters being written in other languages over the ages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion > virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses

So... 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. From Wikipedia:

> One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and > 100 trillion (10^14) synapses

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain)

Assuming linear scaling, that would put an actual simulated second of human brain neural activity somewhere between 6 hours and 2 days.

<comment><USER6> If it's 2 days that puts us about 26 years (2040) away, compared to the original assumption, which would put us 16 years away (2030), assuming "Moore's Law" continues to happen every 18 months (regardless of whether we'll be able to double the number of transistors per same amount of space anymore or not).

<comment><USER7> Except Moore's law most likely isn't continuing for much longer, if it hasn't stopped already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even if this was actually simulating a proper human brain it's still a silly comparison. Even now a modern computer struggles to simulate an old SNES perfectly at full speed. A SNES is vastly slower than a modern computer but the additional cost of emulating something can be very high indeed depending on how accurate you want the simulating to be. A computer is also very general purpose. I'm sure that some custom built chips and electronics would be much better at simulating these kinds of networks.

<comment><USER9> I've been running SNES emulators for a decade at full performance. What are you referring to?

<comment><USER10> He was referring to accurate emulation, rather than the approximate emulator you get with a normal emulator. Here's a related story: [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes- power-o...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one- mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great, we're only 11 doublings away. By Moore's Law, that means we should have AI ready just in time for it to fix the Year 2038 problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> _it is still hard pressed to compete with the brain in your head reading this article.

It took K around 40 minutes to simulate just 1 single second of human brain activity, even with all of its performance prowess. The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses, with every virtual synapse containing 24 bytes of memory._

There's no way the brain in my head could simulate 1.73bn nerve cells in 40 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER13> We still can't properly simulate the puny _caenorhabditis elegans_ brain with some accuracy. Don't hold your breath on this one.

<comment><USER14> This. And we've had the complete wiring diagram for its brain for over 20 years.

There's a wide-spread assumption that knowing the brain's connectivity will be sufficient to emulate its function, but there's so much about the underlying molecular and electrical properties of neurons that we know nothing about.

It's somewhat analogous to having a circuit diagram where the components are missing. Dropping in random components but preserving the wiring structure won't result in the same functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An ACTUAL simulation of rat brain would be 1000 000x more useful.

<comment><USER16> And would carry a lot fewer disturbing implications about mistreatment of simulated former neurological patients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If they really were simulating a human brain, that would have some pretty serious moral implications.

<comment><USER18> I think in the short term, companies that develop these things will behave ethically without any oversight (by making machines "enjoy" what they are doing) because doing something else would be inefficient or counterproductive. Why would you make an expensive thinking machine miserable? Humans that are happy are way more productive - and machines that are based off humans will be as well.

In the long term, if and when these things become mass-produced and cheap, people may want to do terrible things to them, in the same vein as animal torture. That may be when laws get put in place to protect them.

<comment><USER19> Ethically? I bet they will kill them thousands of times during development.

Suppose you, at one stage, have a simulation of a brain that isn't quite there; it talks and sees, but it's audio system doesn't work right. What do you do?

Even live debugging to repair it can be controversial ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_Controversy))

<comment><USER18> I don't see anything unethical about shutting it off. If nobody is emotionally attached to it, and it doesn't suffer when it is shut off, who is harmed by the shutdown?

<comment><USER19> Consider a person without relatives or friends. Would you consider it ethical to shut him/her off, as long as that person didn't suffer from it?

<comment><USER18> As long as they do not care that they could be "shut off", I see nothing wrong with it. If they dislike that notion (like real humans do), then the possibility of shutdown would cause suffering and would be immoral/unethical to allow.

You're assuming that the machines will care about being shut off - we would probably design them so that they don't care about this, because this makes them easier to work with. And then it's no longer unethical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One thing we have to understand here is that 1 second of human brain activity is quite a lot of computing! It's not 'just one second'. This incredible experiment shows how the human curiosity has gone so far to build a artificial thinking machine. It would be great to see the compute result of if we could add 10 Supercomputer.

</comment><comment><USER20> If we simulate a human brain as a way to make computers solve new types of problems, then we will have bored computers who procrastinate solving problems in favor of playing WoW.

</comment><comment><USER21> What does simulating the human brain mean? Would a simulation lead to artificial intelligence or just quite a large neural network?

<comment><USER22> Seems like just a large neural network (which could be of coursed used for AI purposes).

More detail is here in the original press release: [http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/](http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/)

<comment><USER21> Hmmm... I wonder If we could record the state of an active brain and "run" it in the computer creating sentience. Without getting theological, what would the difference between the brain and the computer be if they were exact copies and functioned in the same way?

<comment><USER23> The problem currently is that we actually don't know how the brain works. I know a lot of people claiming that they've found out - but if you dig deeper you'll find most experiments only work in certain cultures and are far from being THE theory which explains everything. I mean nobody today can actually be sure that the power at which a synapse is firing has a meaning. We simply have no idea - it may have significant influence but we're far from proving it (can't find the paper describing this, as I'm not able to connect to the university network currently).

This is bad news - especially for the AI-robotics guys, as they need this knowledge to implement the next generation of smart robots. They hope to get some "self reprogrammable robots" as this is what your brain seems to do all the time.

So what do we technicians do? We're trying to build a machine to simulate a brain (and hope we're right in our assumption how the brain works). There is a huge project like this going on in the EU too [1]. This is the bottom-up approach and it's far from all the press releases as there are too many assumptions in it - even if those guys hate to hear it. There is a nice documentary film with Jospeh Weizenbaum (former professor at MIT and close friend of Chromsky) about this very issue and its ethical aspects [2].

The up-down approach is researched by system biologists (and other related sciences). They aim at the bio-chemical and physical layers to figure out how a brain works and it seems like this is complicated as hell. We're some kind of programmable - even if nobody can tell how far this actually goes. Just being raised in different cultures can have significant influence in how a brain reacts in situations. Even siblings with the same DNA and are being raised within the very same family you can find differences in how their brain reacts...

So don't get too excited about all this - we're far away from being "downloadable". Which is maybe not the worst thing if you're thinking about it for a while. What would life mean if it's endless? And by the way: even if you were downloadable, what tells you that you're still alive if a copy of your brain is stored within an robot? There are hard philosophical questions behind such issues...

[1] [https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/](https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray)

<comment><USER24> Well isn't the real hope that we'll get the hardware close enough in capability that one day a learning general AI just kind of pops out of it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this mean we are ~216 months away from having 1:1 performance?

</comment><comment><USER25> Does this mean we are ~100 months away from 1:1 performance?

</comment><comment><USER26> Actually a shorter amount of time than I was expecting.

<comment><USER27> This article from last summer speaks of 1% of human brain activity:

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu- super...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu- supercomputer-simulates-1-second-of-brain-activity/)

It also says "The synapses were randomly connected" among other more even handed discussion of what happened.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Guggy V2 – Smartly predicting the GIFs and stickers you want to send - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
We are extremely excited about Guggy V2. This is what we've done in the last few months.
- Introducing "Guggy Stickers" - Context-based stickers as well as GIFs
- A major overhaul of our image rendering server (generating GIFs and stickers under 200 milliseconds - we are now the fastest GIFs generator in the world)
- Added multiple choices (as the users requested)
- Significantly improved our prediction abilities
- Added /guggysticker command to our slack app
Go to https://guggy.com and try it out, you will love it! <comment><USER2> Interesting. Similar in concept to Dango: [https://getdango.com/](https://getdango.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah it is similar but quiet different. I invite you to go to [http://guggy.com](http://guggy.com) and play around with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Send us all your conversations, we'll send funny pictures in return!"

<comment><AUTHOR> What is this?

<comment><USER3> It's a plain misunderstanding on my part.

From looking at your home page and your description of the service, it looked like a background listening service, suggesting GIFs interactively (actually, that's the showcased UI on the home page, as this is your app). And I reacted to that, as it felt misguided. My bad. Sorry. I wasn't drunk, I was hungry at the time.

Second deeper read, I understand that the user has to trigger guggly first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, don't worry about it.

It is depends where and how Guggy is implemented. In Telegram for example you will need to enter @guggybot to get results. In Hop (messenger) you'll need to press on the GIF button.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MacBook Air finally gets its upgrade, but it's minor - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/macbook-air-finally-gets-its-upgrade/ <comment><USER2> Can this be considered an "update" at all? I had naively hoped that the updated MBA would finally be an affordable mac notebook that is up to date, but apparently the MBP at $1299 (even more here in Germany) is the most "affordable" option that can be taken seriously.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Air is perfect for professional wordsmithing (the other kind of pro that Steve Jobs always seemed to remember). If they could stick a retina display it, they'd sell a ton of them.

This was a kiss off, kind of like the IPhone SE.</comment>


Futures of distributions - <AUTHOR> http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/futures_of_distributions/ <comment><USER2> As a Guix person, I pretty much disagree with Joey's conclusion that some things—essentially QA and license checks—may "need to be jettisoned". Those things, to me as a user, are one of the big pluses of Debian (and hopefully Guix).

Yet, it's pretty obvious that today, traditional distros can no longer pretend to provide every single free software package that's out there—let alone providing them with the level of QA and polishing that Debian, Fedora, Guix, and others provide.

In Guix we currently semi-automatically import package definitions from third- party repos like Hackage, PyPI, and the likes, for which we do some additional QA: [https://gnu.org/s/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix- import...](https://gnu.org/s/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-import.html) .

One idea we discussed would be to offer as an option the ability to to "live imports": users could install packages imported on the fly from these repos, while still taking advantage of the Guix user interface, transactional upgrades and rollback, and other goodies.

That could be a way to address user needs without throwing the baby with the water. There are technical challenges before we can get there, though…

<comment><USER3> I'm kind of surprised to see Guix described as having a high level of QA and polishing, akin to Debian and Fedora. It's not that I have experience with it being otherwise, but I thought that I couldn't expect it to be any more polished than NixOS, given that, at least as I understand it, it's basically a remake but using scheme in place of the nix language and running in an (almost) pure GNU OS instead of linux and friends like systemd. It's younger, uses less tested technology (linux-libre/Hurd and shepherd; with the exception of scheme (not that I dislike the nix lang)), and I imagine has less of a following to test it on this niche that NixOS and Guix belong to.

I'm going to install GuixSD one of these days to try it out. Installing directly from third-party repos is something I don't remember seeing in NixOS when I tried it a year ago. I'm interested to see what other differences in design choices have been made.

<comment><USER2> The QA part has to do with processes, not technique (Scheme vs. Nix, etc.) I think we (Guix) are doing pretty good with our review process for packages and general attention to packaging issues—bundling, security issues, package size, integration, etc. These are practices similar to those of Debian, though I must say Debian remains the gold standard to me. :-)

As for GuixSD, you are right that the Shepherd, for instance, is not as mature as systemd (it's also much simpler though). My comment was referring to packaging QA.

I do think that the ability to statically check a number of properties on a GuixSD config before it's even instantiated (something that using a general purpose language buys us) helps a lot, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a fundamental level I really dislike the "always as root" operation of apt,yum and every other package manager.

In a security focused world we should be trying to minimise the privileges needed to do anything - and in that should gain a lot of portability.

I want to apt-get my desktop environment into my home directory, and then be able to migrate system to system by rsyncing that bundle and I want user namespaces to enforce security within that space.

<comment><USER5> Nix does this. And it has a global package cache, plus many more things.

It's also distribution agnostic. It even works on Darwin (macOS). Although under its own distribution, NixOS, there are some extra advantages.

As much as I like Debian, I think switching the whole distribution to a package manager like Nix would simplify and speed things up greatly. The whole package tree would not need to be in sync, and different releases would become just package channels. Besides, brittle dist-upgrades would disappear.

Actually whole Linux distros could become just Nix configuration expressions...

<comment><USER6> Nix is not distribution agnostic because it works only with Nix distribution.

<comment><USER7> Nix can be used in other distributions, separate from the distribution of NixOS.

<comment><USER6> Any package management tool can be used in any distribution. So any package management tool is distribution agnostic then. Fedora had 4 system package managers at same time: apt, yum, smart, dnf.

<comment><USER3> Sure, with enough work, you can probably make Debian work with pacman, and Archlinux with apt-get. The problem with those package managers is that they install everything on /. If you try to use both package managers at once, they'll most likely conflict with one another.

Nix on the other hand will install each package under it's own version- or build-specific directory under /nix. ~/.nix-profile will be a symlink pointing to your profile under /nix, and ~/.nix-profile/bin will contain the executables of what you installed with nix.

This isn't just a question of putting files under something other than /. pacman (and maybe apt, too) has a way of installing packages under different directories, but the files in the packages themselves will typically have references to the libraries, executables and other files they depend on assuming they've been installed under /. So, in order to use those installed packages, you'd have to chroot into the directory you've selected to act as root, so the references will work right. Nix, on the other hand, made sure to edit the references each package has to their dependencies so you can simply execute something in ~/.nix-profile/bin and each successive dependency will resolve its dependencies to build-specific directories under /nix.

You can use nix with pacman or apt-get or yum or any traditional package manager you'd like and they won't conflict. This is what is meant by being distribution agnostic.

<comment><USER6> So, if I will recompile whole distribution with other values for system directories variables, say /rpm/etc instead of /etc, /rpm/lib instead of /lib, etc., then rpm/yum/dnf/apt will be finally distribution agnostic in your eyes?

<comment><USER8> Nixpkgs is a whole collection of software (a distribution of sorts, but not a Linux distro), managed by Nix, which works identically on all Linux distros. It's also the package collection for NixOS.

Nix is cross-distro in the ordinary sense you describe, of course. It is also more deeply cross-distro in that: • if you are trying to package for Nix in a normal way (the tools make it easy to do things this way and hard to do things otherwise by their nature), _all_ package collections for Nix will be cross- distro in this way • The Nix community has a collection of thousands of cross- distro packages you can already use right now

`pkgsrc` is similar in this respect, and takes a more conventional approach, like the one you describe in this comment. I think that's a meaningful sense in which it is cross-distro.

Another way to think of this is that tools like `rpm` and `dpkg` or `dnf` and `apt` are portable between distros _as far as distro developers are concerned_, whereas package managers/package collections like Nixpkgs and pkgsrc meet the portability needs of users of _existing distros_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems that the time is ripe to reconsider what it means to be a distribution. I'm not equipped to take a stab at an answer, so let me provoke a wishlist. What if...

\- One could compose together (arbitrary) combinations of a kernel of choice and userspace of choice?

\- In "userspace" one could cobble together dependencies as needed for any project, and run sandboxed applications, which can only share information through common parent packages.

\- No single package version for the "system". (This is already being done, in many examples)

\- Maybe the kernel is just another package to be managed. Just something that starts when the computer boots, and lets you invoke the package manager to change state.

\- Distributions would then just become snapshots of how different pieces are combined together. Sort of like what Docker images are created from dockerfiles today.

It would be enlightening to understand which aspects are possible today or in the foreseeable future, and what are the impediments to doing this. Or reasons why one might not actually want such a structure.

<comment><USER10> Distribution is a set if programs that are known to work _together_. It is also a dependency graph.

Making it work together is a lot of work, testing, and tweaking.

<comment><USER11> > Distribution is a set if programs that are known to work together

this is only relevant for core utilities though. It does not mean anything for my mail client to work "together" with my music production application. Apps in appstores do not work "together" yet they are wildly successful.

<comment><USER12> > It does not mean anything for my mail client to work "together" with my > music production application.

Correct, but they both might use pulseaudio, xorg, desktop notifications and much more. A lot of stuff is "core".

> Apps in appstores do not work "together" yet they are wildly successful

Only because of the ubiquitous hardware. appstores did not invent anything new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article to which the post links is just as worthy of consideration. Linking here to add emphasis to the post-link:

[https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2018/02/17/what_is_debian_all_abou...](https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2018/02/17/what_is_debian_all_about_really_or_friction_packaging_complex_applications/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I use node, npm, js all the live long day but the last thing I would want is NPM packages as part of my distribution. Maybe I'm being obtuse - but I use js because it's rough and ready. Seems to me that being part of my actual OS is not what it's for.

<comment><USER15> The problem here is that, users generally have some small subset of things they really care about. A particular app, or their own dev environment, etc.

For these things.. they want that control. But the allure of distributions is for all of the other things that you don't care about, e.g. I just want to use this command line tool, you can just install the package and have it work. And also know you can uninstall it, in many cases receive security updates, etc.

That is primarily where the two worlds collide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The downside that I think about when I hear "pinning package versions" is how you go about distributing a patch to a security hole that affected many versions of a library.

<comment><USER12> Allowing multiple versions of the same library to coexist has always been a security problem.

With multiple versions (and pinning) available, developers stop doing the required work to keep forward/backward compatibility.

As the number of versions piles up, the amount of work required to patch vulnerabilities and backport those patches becomes unbearable. And distributions care about security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If packages worked more like containers then:

* the producers of the package could produce a universal container that would run on all distributions.

* the distributions would only need to be sure they properly included a suitable container runtime. After all, Microsoft doesn't worry about packaging every third party software.

* the registry of software packages would need to include the software package

* this would work regardless of the technology a particular software package uses. (eg, whether it's written in C, Java, Python, .NET, etc) The package would pull in the dependencies.

* another thing that would be really nice, that I wanted since 1999, is that when you install a package it doesn't vomit files all over the filesystem.

* it might even be possible to install multiple versions of the same package (eg, Gimp 2.6, Gimp 2.8, etc)

Aren't Snap and Flatpack somewhat like this?

What I am describing may work great for end user software applications -- like Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, Eclipse, etc. It might not work so well for languages, eg Python 2.7 vs Python 3.6.

<comment><USER18> Appimage can solve some of these problems, though it lacks a central package manager (but there is no reason we couldn't have one).

<comment><USER11> One is in development: [https://appimage.github.io/apps/](https://appimage.github.io/apps/) ; I think KDE Discover shows appimages too</comment></comment></comment>