You should blog even if you have no readers - <AUTHOR> http://nathanmarz.com/blog/you-should-blog-even-if-you-have-no-readers.html <comment><USER3> This scratches an itch I've had for some time now. I've been off and on with a blog of my own. The problem is, I change my answers to the following questions all the time, so I've been trapped in a cycle for some time now, put it online, take it down again, put it back up, take it down,... Here are some of the negative ones, how do you guys answer these (or do they never even come up for you)?

\- "I know writing is good for me. But why write for other people, why open myself up like this? If it's all in the process, why post or publish it, after all, when I'm done writing, I'm done."

\- "If I write something, expose myself, and nobody reads it, will I not look ridiculous?"

\- "There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

\- "If I have a good insight, why put it out there and take the risk that someone will come and 'steal' it or adapt it and win big?"

\- "Will I not be easily manipulable if I put my thoughts and preferences out there? Someone could take me for a ride by using this material to their advantage or fun"

\- "Ok, blogging/writing/publishing stuff can make you known and perhaps even popular. Now, shouldn't you optimize for 'what people want'? Or leave out unpopular things?" (but where is the fun in writing if you can't say what you just want to say anymore?)

Also, I sometimes read what I wrote years back and cringe at the stupidity or attitude. How embarrassing if all this was online and somehow remained available even after I took it down. But by definition, you don't know that what you are writing is stupid or full of shit while you are writing it.

<comment><USER4> > "I know writing is good for me. But why write for other people, why open > myself up like this? If it's all in the process, why post or publish it, > after all, when I'm done writing, I'm done."

The feedback is important. You improve your writing skills by honing them against the whetstone of your readers.

> "If I write something, expose myself, and nobody reads it, will I not look > ridiculous?"

If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

> "There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to > it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

If there's too much noise, the solution is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio by broadcasting more signal.

> "If I have a good insight, why put it out there and take the risk that > someone will come and 'steal' it or adapt it and win big?"

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Value comes from how carefully and persistently you put an idea into practice.

> "Will I not be easily manipulable if I put my thoughts and preferences out > there? Someone could take me for a ride by using this material to their > advantage or fun"

The more you interact with others, the better you'll get at spotting people who just want to take you for a ride.

> "Ok, blogging/writing/publishing stuff can make you known and perhaps even > popular. Now, shouldn't you optimize for 'what people want'? Or leave out > unpopular things?" (but where is the fun in writing if you can't say what > you just want to say anymore?)

Optimize for what turns your crank. Your readership will figure itself out.

<comment><USER3> Hey, I like some of these comebacks ;)

> If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

Ok, you got me here. Still, if you have a blog and there's tens and tens of entries and nary a comment to be seen, doesn't that look sad somehow?

<comment><USER5> I think part of it is to remove ego from the equation. The likelihood that anyone will be followed by name/blog alone is minuscule.

However, if you treat writing as a personal exercise, and understand that "marketing" (for want of a better word) a post of yours you particularly like, it's definitely useful. Submit high signal posts to here/Reddit/Digg/communities you are part of and you think will enjoy it.

I've had two blog posts hit the HN front page; both garnered about 4000 views. One of them also hit Reddit's /r/programming, pushing the view count to 20000. However, the Reddit commentary was essentially useless, whereas the HN commentary was awesome. In fact, the Reddit commentary was quite scathing, and that bruised my pride for a good couple of days afterwards. Sometimes obscurity is better.

However, I don't regret writing. The writing is the most important bit. The reading... less so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Writing is like exercise for the brain. Not all of us will write like Paul Graham, or anywhere even close to his level, but all of us can benefit from forcing ourselves to think more carefully about our ideas, and there are not many better ways to do so than to attempt to express them in some systematic written form.

Writing is also an iterative process. You write about something once and this causes you to focus upon what you are saying in ways that you had not done before. You re-visit the issue later and often derive more insights on the topic. You get comments and criticisms from others and this also causes you to examine your ideas more carefully. You also may find that, even if your ideas are reasonably well developed, your method of presenting them may be sub- standard. From experience, for example, you learn that it rarely if ever pays to take a cheap shot at someone and, when you get called on it, you learn to express yourself with more class the next time. So, you learn not only to express yourself intelligently but also in a manner that is appealing and that removes unnecessary barriers to understanding.

Do it often enough and you will improve and potentially make an impact. But, even if you don't, you will be better off for the exercise. And that is the main point of this fine piece, a point well worth making.

</comment><comment><USER7> Blogging has been a really positive experience for me. I started with 0 readers 2.5 years and write about a pretty specific niche within investing. I didn't really promote myself. Basically, the first 6 months of blogging I focused on just creating original content. I hated that most blogs were just links to articles by the MSM. It paid off and other well known aggregators started linking to my stuff.

Since then it's been a really wild and rewarding ride. I've had a chance to consult on stories for reporters at the Wall Street Journal and posts featured in the Financial Times, NYTimes, WSJ. I've even been contacted by some of my heroes (really great investors who've been written about in books like The Big Short).

Now, in a couple of weeks I'm being flown out to interview with a firm that I never dreamed of applying to. All because they read some of my posts and enjoyed them.

The key to me is just to start writing. Write all the time and strive to continuously improve on it. I think that if you produce good content, people will come. Most of my most popular posts are things I've worked really hard on. Some examples include me reading 5 years worth of message board posts to track down everything that person X said or visiting the library to dig up a physical copy of a report from the 1980s to scan and then post. If you create value, readers are going to keep coming.

<comment><USER8> "If you create value, readers are going to keep coming."

People subscribe to your blog based on expected future value, not based on perceived past value. Unfortunately there are many scenarios where every single one of your past posts could have high perceived value, but the expected future value is relatively low. For example, if each blog post is about a completely different topic. There are very very few writers who can get away with this, and most of the ones who do are only able to do so because the writing follows a predictable pattern in some other way, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell. The sad truth is that how often you update your blog is usually a better predictor of the number of readers you'll get than the value of the actual writing.

In the end it's maybe 25% about having good ideas and helping people and 75% about putting on a show.

<comment><USER9> _In the end it's maybe 25% about having good ideas and helping people and 75% about putting on a show._

This is very unfortunate, but also true when it comes to pure popularity on the web. However, one would hope that people starting blogs are not doing it just for the sake of popularity. The grandparent's case is a great example of how writing with the intention of creating value with original content can be very rewarding in a way that would be impossible by just "putting on a show".

<comment><USER8> I agree, my point though was that even if you are creating original content with value, you're still not going to be popular unless you're also putting on a show. The exception is if you're already very famous for something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Completely agree. After meaning to do it for a while, I started doing a personal blog at this start of this month, at least once a day now. The big thing for me is I blog whatever observations I have that are quick, even if they're just okay. Then I keep a list of things that'd take me longer to write.

I remember looking at the bottom of a coffee lid and thinking about whether it should be face-up or face-down, so I took two pictures of it and posted it here - <http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=38> \- it's just sort of junk, but it helped get into the rhythym of writing every single day, no matter what. A lot of my entries are pretty mundane, but a couple of them have been quite popular and gotten spread around my friends and a couple other people I've met.

I think the biggest thing is that you're going to bad when you start. If you want encouragement, go look at the early works of prolific bloggers - <USER2> poorly written, tentative, scared, making mistakes, and writing for no audience. But doing it makes you improve. The biggest pieces of encouragement I got were reading the early works of Stephen King and the first Sherlock Holmes book. The Sign of Four (first Sherlock book) wasn't all that great of a piece of writing and was a commercial flop, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kept going until his short stories caught on. Being a lover of Sherlock Holmes, I'm glad he did it. Also, it's encouraging towards getting started.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think of mine primarily as "notes to myself", for things I'm likely to want to read again in the future.

E.g. what to do if apt-get upgrade fubars lilo (<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=295>), or how to setup mercurial on shared hosting (<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=82>), etc.

They're much easier to find again on the blog, versus in some random config or readme file, lost in my myriad archive folders.

Also, if any of those posts are helpful to other people with the same problem(s), I'm happy to be able to help anyone who finds them.

<comment> mkr-hn I've been doing math-related entries on mine for the same reason. I just recently finished college, and the difficulties of the college algebra and the remedial algebra classes are fresh in my mind. I've been taking all the stuff the books explained poorly (which is everything) and making it as clear as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I blogged, and I haven't gotten much out of it even though I have over 500 rss subscribers and showed up multiple times on the front page of HN and Reddit.

1\. I have not become a better reader. In fact, it made me more impatient because of #2.

2\. Writing blog posts did not make me smarter. It made me realize that a blog post's success is a balancing act between being controversial and saying what people want to believe.

I also learned that the average time spent reading even my longest technical articles was around 20 seconds. Yes, even programmers have the attention span of a peanut. And true enough, I often saw comments where someone says "but you didn't do X" when I wrote I did X in the 2nd sentence. So my articles have gotten shorter and shorter, and so has my patience for reading other articles.

3\. Anything else that came out of it has not really been a benefit so far. I am not even a quarter of the way through the minimum payout for Google Adsense. Needless to say, it is not even feasible to pay hosting costs this way.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps the problem is that you are focusing too much on what people want. For sure to have your audience in mind when writing is important, but to have your audience be your master leaves you aiming for the lowest common dominator.

Maybe you should take less care of your readers and be your own harshest critic. Do you like your post, do you think it is great, might it need something added or taken away.

There are many people out there all with their opinions and moods of the day and prejudices and.... you can't please everyone. Please yourself first and foremost, then perhaps you will find a readership you love :)

<comment><USER12> If I was writing for the lowest common denominator, I would be writing about lolcats and celebrities.

The problem is that even the high-brow audience coming from Hacker News and the programming subreddit (where most of my audience is from) have tiny attention spans unless they are reading what they want to believe. People won't even spend 20 seconds to read your post unless you are a celebrity like Paul Graham.

If you like the idea of a personal diary that no one reads, put it in a text file. Put it online, and you'll have to deal with spammers, hackers, and critics that don't even bother to read the article and insult you. If you want to see what I mean by this, take a look at the comments of my most commented posts. It is really discouraging.

<comment><USER14> I have lost my patience with the programming subreddit. Find a better target audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I spent a good deal of time this past week putting my first serious blog post together after reading Steve Yeggie's You Should Blog: [http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write- bl...](http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-blogs)

Here it is: [http://joshpearce.posterous.com/children-have-bad- business-s...](http://joshpearce.posterous.com/children-have-bad-business- sense)

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't this why we used to write essays in school? Blogging is a self imposed homework schedule of essay writing, except rather than being graded by a teacher we get our grade from readership.

<comment><USER17> It's graded if you have any readership and if the readership is qualified enough to grade you. I know a couple of blogs who seem to be (very) good when you look at the comments, yet the most successful posts are about something trivial and controversial and there's almost no in-depth analysis. In a way, these blogs are like reddit compared to HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have advice for a would-be blogger who has no real expertise or industry experience or sources? Is a blogger without those things a contradiction in terms? I'm a decent writer when it comes to formulating essays, and occasionally I say insightful things, but when it comes to broadcasting an opinion piece to the world it doesn't seem viable. Should I just stick to posting on HN? Anyone else start from this situation? (ie. blogs seem like a good IT career enhancing asset but see no reason why you personally should blog)

</comment><comment><USER19> The problem I have with blogging is the opportunity cost. While blogging may help me as a coder. Does it help more than me actually writing code, or commenting my existing code, or reading an article, or a paper, or spending time reading other peoples code?

I suspect more than anything blogging helps you become a better blogger, and then there are some minor secondary effects. I'm not convinced that if I have zero readers that blogging is the best use of my time.

<comment><USER20> I started blogging purely as a way of improving my coding skills, and I was pretty cynical about it. From blogging I've had good feedback about how I can improve, and the mere act of keeping a blog has kept me motivated enough to keep learning and keep posting. In my opinion, definitely worth the cost.

<comment><USER19> Where did you get the feedback from? From readers or just from yourself as you blogged?

I just feel like I have 20 little projects I'd like to do, but don't have time. Is blogging the top thing on the queue?

<comment><USER20> From myself (telling the story seems to give a lot of feedback) and from readers. And sometimes the flames of Reddit even contain useful information!

Blogging is definitely not top of the queue, but if I'm going to go to the effort of learning something new, I might as well write some notes on it and the extra effort of putting it into a blog seems worth it for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Even if you blog to an app running on localhost that no one will ever see, you're going to be better for it. One of the best ways to fully understand anything (idea, argument, problem, feature, goal, failure, whatever) is to have to wrap words around it. Writing forces you to think things through.

You end up knowing more about your subject than before you began. Guaranteed. When is that ever bad news?

</comment><comment><USER14> As part of a bet between friends, I began blogging at the beginning of this year. (The bet was: write a blog post a week, and if you don't, you have to pony up money for a shared food/beer pool.) I aimed for something a little more ambitious: three blog posts a week.

I've managed it so far, but it takes a lot of time and most of my effort is making sure a post comes out on time. One of the great things about this is that I've really had to focus in on collecting interesting topics to write about; the bad thing about this is that most of the iterative parts of the writing process are cut out; I'm exercising just the "initial drafting" writing muscle, so to speak.

I want to keep blogging three times a week until the end of this year, for the sake of continuity, but from there, I think I'll probably tune down the frequency and work on the post-processing aspects of writing a little more. I'd love to hear peoples stories about how their writing process has changed over time.

</comment><comment><USER22> Everyone starts at 0.

Write something you feel pationate about. Spread the word and you're bound to get 1 person to read it. With Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites spreading the word is easier than ever. If you have core knowledge of something people will want to read it.

People follow people to see what they've had for dinner these days.

</comment><comment><USER23> 750words.com makes it really easy for me to get the words out. I think I'll start transforming those into posts.

</comment><comment><USER24> The internet at this point is just noise and I don't see how encouraging people to contribute to that noise is going to make things better.

</comment><comment><USER25> You should also edit Wikipedia even if you only use dead-tree reference sources. Indeed, if you are familiar with dead-tree reference sources, you especially should edit Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia is good practice in saying something in a verifiable, neutral point of view manner that anyone can challenge.

</comment><comment><USER26> You get the most value out of blogging if you publish it. Period. Writing drafts is great, but it just isn't the same as putting it out there. It's like practice vs. performance. No amount of practice can take the place of the experience gained by performance.

</comment><comment><USER27> What if you are working for a company who might be a bit reticent about letting their employees blog about whatever they want? How would you go about broaching the subject so as to get around this? Comments other than 'quit your job' would be useful!

<comment> mkr-hn Make a case for a policy change to the person in charge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Blogging is Brain Logging

I use blogging to get specific on some of my loose thoughts get around to do some research etc.

Luckily this seems to be thoughts others are sharing. But even without the traffic I would still be blogging.

And yes it does open for opportunity I have to say.

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone want to argue why you should NOT blog? I'm debating starting to blog, but as a startup founder I'd rather put every minute into improving my company - or is writing a blog going to improve my company? Thoughts?

<comment><USER30> Say something stupid and the rest of the world gets to see it. Write about a particular belief or political stance and it may come back at you.

Start a journal and keep that for a month. If you like it and can devote time, then think about making it public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a blog and almost no readers. My take on this is that I write for myself some sort of public notebook.

</comment><comment><USER32> Unfortunately, my blogs all start off sounding like a PBS narrator and end up sounding like Colonel Kurtz.

</comment><comment><USER33> a further piece of advice. don't let perfectionism keep you from writing. don't be afraid to make mistakes and contradict yourself. getting it all out on paper will help you form a more coherent picture of your own opinions.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Blog like nobody is reading" is what I always say.

</comment><comment><USER35> I second what mcgraw says.

I would also add:

If you have a topic that you love talking about, then go ahead with the blog. You will need to have a regular posting schedule.

Try getting a few posts in draft mode (ready to be published). This way you will have something to post even if you do not have the time to post at that interval (weekly, biweekly etc.)

Letting your readers get used to a regular posting schedule will help a lot.

Twitter/Facebook are good tools you can use to make people aware of your blog.

If you have something interesting to say, people will follow you :)

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER36> Write if you really have something to say, rather than when you must write something out of habit or inertia. ^_^</comment>


Achieving Full Marks on Qualys SSL Labs with Nginx - <AUTHOR> https://danpalmer.me/blog/ssl-labs-grade-a

<comment><USER2> I tried this when I setup nginx for my company's website. Virtually nothing can connect. Getting 95% on protocol is good enough.

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=exelion.net](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=exelion.net)

<comment><AUTHOR> As this is just my personal site, it was much more about the learning process for me. I have no need to support legacy devices, and all modern platforms support the TLS on my site.

As I mentioned in the blog post, I would not recommend this for a company site, especially an ecommerce one. At my workplace I implemented a much more compatible deployment: [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=thread.com](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=thread.com)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find a Business Partner? - <AUTHOR>

I am a graphic designer / programmer looking for a Business Partner and friend. I'm 20 and I live in New York City. I've had problem networking and I go to a crappy community college. I can't find any aspiring entrepreneurs, anyone who knows what a "startup" is or how they work. Why am I so alone?
Most rag tag groups of hacker / entrepreneurs meet in college, but what if thats not an option?
I'm interning now, and no one there is my age or has my mind set.
I'm just looking for someone my age and with basic computer / hacking / programming skills, why is that so hard to find? <comment><USER2> I launched my company alone. My partner read about it in a magazine article.

If you have the gumption to go it alone, you may be able to attract a partner more easily down the road; traction has a way of turning heads and opening doors :)

<comment><USER3> This. I launched Windy Citizen alone. My partner's friend read about it on Hacker news and put us in touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Theres a huge NYC startup scene that exists and continues to develop. You should definitely come out to hackers and founders. During the summer we meet up at shake shack in Madison Square Park around 6pm on the last Thursday of every month. The crowd there is mainly people who have startups or want to be involved with one. Really solid group of smart people. A healty mix of business folks and developers. Almost never any media or sales people. I personally have made excellent contacts there and even some friends.

<http://twitter.com/hackersfounders>

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out meetup.com for tech and entrepreneurship events. Don't worry if the specific topics don't interest you 100% because the point is to network. Go to as many as you can and introduce yourself to people, join conversations, take their business cards, follow up the next day and get involved.

You don't want to partner with someone you haven't met so get out there and say hello.

You can start with me if you like. My email is in my profile so feel free to drop me an email and stay in touch.

</comment><comment> bsnss-mn-cdr I don't think you can go searching for your –first- business partner in the sense you are looking for. I would suggest putting together a few ideas (at least 3 very different ideas) of what type of business you would like to start. Once you have a good grasp of where you would like to go then figure out what skill sets are needed to get there and the level of capital resources it will take to do it on your own. After this you will be able to see what you 'bring to the table' and what is missing. Take this information and start becoming a social butterfly at as many entrepreneur style events as possible. To be frank, my first real 'business partner' and I met online many years ago when we were both looking at doing similar things within a large online community. We started chatting and realized that each party had the skills / assets the other was lacking. Do not be afraid to share your ideas with others as that will only help you find those who have similar interest. In the same light do not take rejection, or the inability of one to understand your idea, as a sign that what you believe is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most of the comments here are completely right. Meetups are the best way to meet people. Here are a few I'd suggest that I think are good for young people / college students involved in tech: * NY Tech Meetup's NY Tech Student Mingle (posted individually on Anyvite each time; the first Tuesday of every month) * Hackers and Founders NYC

Startup Digest (thestartupdigest.com) is a great rundown of events going on weekly - if you're a student, I'd subscribe to the NYC, Tech@NYU, and Columbia lists to get events that are relevant to students.

</comment><comment><USER7> Find someone that you can trust. I've worked with family in the past. They tend to be more on the up and up. Friends can be good if you are both committed to the same goal. As for finding a stranger I would attempt to cultivate a relationship first before committing to becoming partners.

</comment><comment><USER8> On the flip side, I'm a developer looking for someone similar as well. So I'd be interested to know the answer as well.

My luck has been fairly decent - my friends are in some form of graphic design but I haven't truly found someone who can hack it up with me either.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should probably attend this event in NYC later this month: "Find a co- founder Night II" [http://www.eroundtable.net/2010/07/07/find-a-co-founder- nigh...](http://www.eroundtable.net/2010/07/07/find-a-co-founder-night-ii/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Here are some of my random ideas:

On your reggi.com site, make it into a blog (Wordpress is simple) about yourself and some aspect of tech that you are interested in.

Add some personal pics to the blog of your workspace, your pets and yourself so people know who you are. Let people add comments to your blog. Maybe add a short video of yourself to the blog.

Go to a tech conference in your area and just try to make friends with a people. You never who will know who, but it never hurts to have people know you.

We know you in here. Maybe if you were more visible online pics, etc..., maybe you will find the business partner you're looking for in here.

</comment><comment><USER11> One I went to high school with, another I found at TechStars for a Day, another was a designer I worked with on another and the final one I knew through a blogging network from when I was like 12 and we recently connected in the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone live in a small town in the middle of no-where (Iowa)?

How do you find people who you can bounce ideas off of?

Is the best thing to do start a blog and build a reader base to bounce ideas off of?

<comment><USER13> middle of no-where.... geez :)

I live in Iowa. Des Moines to be specific. And our start-up community, IMO, is rock solid. We have a number of organizations who host regular events (<http://www.technologyiowa.org/>, <http://smcdsm.ning.com/>, etc...) along with a very good supply of technology user groups covering all of the major techs (.Net, Ruby, Java, etc).

As for finding people to bounce ideas off of, attending those events, meeting new people, and just talking about what you're doing has worked well for me.

We also have two (that I'm aware of) co-working locations. These are great because it groups together like minded people who are always willing to listen to ideas you want to bounce.

Starting a blog to bounce ideas off of your users doesn't sound like a very good way to go to me. It would take a really long time, and would be a lot more work. I'm not saying it can't, and shouldn't be done. I'm just saying getting out and meeting people will be better.

We're also in close proximity to larger cities too, so we often get talent coming in to work for start-ups here.

And we have a news site to keep tabs on all of this, <http://www.siliconprairienews.com/>. This basically allows a one stop shop for seeing what's going on, and where you might be able to meet new like- minded people.

I guess this turned into more of a pro-Iowa post, but I think it gives you some answers :)

<comment><USER12> Awesome! This is just what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are enough NY tech-related events and meetups each week that you could be networking just about every single day if you wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER15> Conferences. I found my current partner at a Barcamp. He was pitching an idea I liked but which had many flaws. I explained him the flaws I saw, convinced him to change & now we're building the product together. He's the hustler, I'm the hacker.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm building a bootstrapped start-up, and we need a designer with a start-up building mindset. I'm not in NY, but would be interested in at least chatting and seeing what you can do.

contact me @ firstname.lastname@example.com when you have time.

<comment><USER13> I should clarify that, if we find the right person, we are looking for a graphic / UI designer to partner with. The option of revenue or equity sharing is on the table for the right person.

Being able to write code is a step in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> you may not like this answer, but working in the tech industry is probably the best way to meet great people. you need to be in a trust relationship with people to start a company.

</comment><comment><USER17> You live in NYC? Go to hacker/startup meetups. Easy.

</comment><comment><USER18> Since you're designer / programmer, you need a great _salesman_ as your business partner.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like other people like me designers and programmers. I know enough business to get by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any pointers for people who live in Europe?

</comment><comment><USER20> builditwith.me</comment>


Bayesian stats book banned in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2011/01/i_guess_they_fi.html <comment><USER2> Hi Guys,

I am from China, and of course the Bayesian is taught in China. Only in the culture revolution time, this crazy thing may happen; but it's long time ago when Mao was alive. Now China is a modern society; of course, the Bayesian theory is taught in schools; otherwise how could they send the spaceship to the outer space and have the fastest super computer in the world so far. you are smart hackers, not a bunch of kids controlled by traditional biases. As to censorship, that's right, china has notorious censorship. I guess the author's book must have some contents/examples regarding political issues; not Bayesian itself was the reason for the book being censored. These days, when people talked about censorship, I always think of wiki-leaks ......

<comment><USER3> Launching a spaceship almost certainly uses Bayesian methods for tracking (e.g., Kalman or particle filters for position tracking), but I seriously doubt that building a supercomputer _requires_ a dedicated use of Bayesian statistics.

On a different note, perhaps you could be slightly less condescending in your future posts.

<comment><USER4> Is a Kalman filter considered a type of Bayesian statistics? It doesn't seem that way to me, but I'm not so hot at higher math.

In any case, many years ago, I worked on a radar system for a fighter plane. Its air-to-ground radar (at the very least; this was the part I was involved in) did indeed use a Kalman filter.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you can describe tracking and Kalman filter using bayesian statistics. Although, my prof said that originally it was not developed that way, but it is easier to describe it using normal distributions as priors and likelihoods of the position of the object being tracked.

<comment><USER6> And I guess thanks to those crazy generalizing mathematicians, nowadays you can use something like Kalman filtering with distribution other than normal ones.

<comment><USER3> Check out particle filters if you want crazy mathematicians. Fun stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I think that the next printing of our book should have "Banned in China" slapped on the cover. That should be good for sales, right?"

I would buy that in a heartbeat

</comment><comment><USER8> Strange that it was banned. Maybe it had to do with the vignettes---some of the examples are from political science (e.g., election results, polling) and another deals with arsenic in drinking water...or maybe Hu Jintao feels the way to deal with hierarchal data is to cluster standard errors.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any way to find out the specific reason the book was not allowed to be published?

<comment><USER10> The author doesn't know, but he hypothesizes that it's because "the idea of prior distribution [is] contrary to Communism".

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure it has to do with the material of _examples_ used in the book rather than with the actual theory.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. If it's Gelman many examples will be from elections, which in itself might be enough to give the communist party in china pause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. You can still buy this book in Chinese online book stores

<http://www.51eng.com/cn/bookdetail.asp?id=602871>

<http://www.51eng.com/cn/bookdetail.asp?id=602870>

2\. As a Chinese myself, I can confirm Bayesian is not taught in high school statistics, but defintely taught in college statistics course. It's called 贝叶斯概率 in Chinese.

<comment><USER14> You can probably also download a photocopied PDF of it, as you can many English books, as well as American TV shows and movies. Actions in China is divided into the "official" and the "unofficial". Officially, only 20 foreign movies a year are allowed in. "Unofficially", you can choose from hundreds at your local DVD store, nowadays usually with 8 or 10 movies, or an entire season of TV episodes, on the one disk, going for less than US $1. Sometimes when they build a brick wall here, someone else will come back within a day to smash an ugly-looking hole in it. Officially, no-one's allowed through, but unofficially, you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pfft, frequentists.

<comment><USER16> 1.3 Billion can't be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I realize the "Death to the Shaw" spelled out by the first word of every seventeenth page was _supposed_ to be a joke, but it is not very funny in light of the recent events of the last handful of days:

[http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle- East/2011/0105/Suicide...](http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle- East/2011/0105/Suicide-of-Iran-Shah-s-son-Alireza-Pahlavi-caps-life-of-sorrow- in-exile)

Though I viciously dislike of all forms of royalty, they are still human beings and they did not get a choice about being born into the nonsense.

<comment><USER18>
      I realize the "Death to the Shaw" spelled out by the first
      word of every seventeenth page was supposed to be a joke

According to the Amazon search facility, none of the 26 instances of the word "death" appear first on a page. So yeah, I think it's a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember when I was taking an entry-level Economics course in China. We were using Paul Samuelson's classic textbook "Economics". The English version mentioned China in some not-so-pretty examples. Apparently the translated Chinese version replaced "China" with a generic "One country".

</comment><comment><USER20> I didn't realize that things in China are that crazy...

<comment><USER21> "Bayesian Statistics are just a theory. Teachers should be required to state this to students and also to give equal time to alternate theories, such as the theory of Intelligent Predetermination."

Are things in China that crazy?

<comment><USER22> Unless you are forbidden to publish books on Evolution in the US, then yes, things in China are that crazy.

<comment><USER21> i don't mean that specific kind of crazy, but rather an overall suggestion that humans of all extractions have a habit of arguing with the facts for various reasons.

But yeah, since you ask, I believe that the kind of people who want creationism taught in public schools would ban books on evolution if they thought they could get away with it.

<comment><USER22> Sure, there are people crazy enough that they would ban books on evolution, just are there are undoubtedly people who are crazy enough to ban books on creationism. Those are probably not even near the top of the list of crazy things people wish they could do.

The reason that it is the case that "things are this crazy in China" is that there is a difference between the existence of people who would probably enjoy implementing crazy policies and the actual implementation of crazy policies.

<comment><USER21> Oh, we're in violent agreement. The thing about the USA and Canada is that we're constitutional democracies. That doesn't mean that as people we're any less crazy than places with a different system, but our constitutions act as a brake slowing down implementation of crazy policies and providing a kind of "undo" when things go wrong.

As we saw in the FLQ Crisis and again during the G20 summit, Canadians can lock thousands of people up without due process of law. As we saw in Kansas, certain Americans can ban the teaching of established science in the classroom.

But our system at least makes these things aberrations and provides dissenters a way to rectify the problems in the courts.'

edit: I think what I'm trying to say is "Our system provides us with an undo, but it's only good when we remain vigilant against craziness. If we become complacent and assume that we as people are somehow too intelligent or too morally centered to do crazy things, wham, we do crazy things too."

<comment><USER23> "But our system at least makes these things aberrations and provides dissenters a way to rectify the problems in the courts."

What a lot of people don't get when they try to tu quoque US/Canada/etc on particular events is that their protection of essential liberties is defense in depth.

If a book was banned:

\- due process means that this incident can be taken to court

\- freedom of press means the mass media can inform others of what has happened

\- freedom of speech means you can raise awareness about the banning and denounce the agencies responsible

\- with freedom of assembly, those who want the ban overturned can take to the streets and protest

These freedoms are mutually supportive -- abuse of any aspect would be mitigated by the presence of the rest.

<comment><USER21> V. true. Sadly, those who prefer a tyranny seem to have figured this out and are assaulting all of the freedoms you've listed. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which of these liberties are currently under assault.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Seven New Startups from Silicon Valley's Favorite New Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/03/seven-new-startups-from-silicon-valleys-favorite-new-demo-day/

<comment><USER2> I would like to hear the story of how the rug merchant invested in Dropbox, some tech blogger should write about that.</comment>


YC Help: Getting a rather small user base - <AUTHOR>

I'm part of a research team that is on a mission to quantify beauty. Of course, such an objective is based solely off public opinion. I was asked to create a hotornot-ish type site with additional features, which is definitely feasible for me. The problem, however, is that as with any experiment that relies on polling the public, we need a statistically sound number of ratings, roughly in the thousands.
How would you go about marketing something of this sort? This isn't startup status; I'm not looking for millions of users. I just need a way in which I can generate several thousand ratings per picture. I go to UCI, so the student body is definitely a resource. Would spamming yield good results?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Amazon Mechanical Turk

<comment><AUTHOR> The assignments on there seem very 'one time'-ish. Sure, I can put a set of 10 pictures and have them rate them, but we're looking for a much higher volume, and the ability to constantly add more pictures.

<comment><USER2> I have never tried it, but I think people do high volume stuff there. If one rating costs 0.1$, 1000s should be doable? You should be able to constantly add new pictures, too, with the web services API they provide.

It seems likely to me, though, that if you complete the application and post it on digg, people will help you out in the name of science.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I've been writing a weekly newsletter for 164 weeks––what can I improve? - <AUTHOR> I've kept the same style and format since I started on day one, over three years ago.
I'm ready for a change. How can I make this newsletter better for readers?
Any/all advice welcome
Archive here:https://torinrittenberg.com/archive
Latest Issue here: https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?u=6e8a950a4cef43469078fd6ea&id=e79e6b592f <comment> open-source-ux _" I'm ready for a change. How can I make this newsletter better for readers?"_

I posted this link recently about writing and it might give you some ideas if you are interested in trying a different writing style. For example, are there other "weekly briefings" style newsletters you read or like? Can you learn from their style of writing or approach?

In the video, the person tries the "copywork" approach to writing which is an exercise to emulate the style of another writer. Does it work?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By- _gbXjEEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By-_gbXjEEM)

</comment><comment><USER2> Have you asked your actual subscribers?</comment>


Total bankers: Twitter and LinkedIn's cynical API play - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/05/api_hedging/

<comment><USER2> Twitter made a mistake by proliferating its information and then trying to build an advertising business off of it. Great engineering with an unimaginative monetization strategy. It's almost as if Twitter is trying to be two different and mutually exclusive things at the same time.

Totally agree with the platform argument. I wrote a blog post the other day about hedging platform strategy: <http://www.connersc.com/blog/?p=154> </shamlessplug>

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're interested in pushing the open-API idea, you might be interested in the Franklin Street Statement: <http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street- statement/>

I'm aware that these ideas wouldn't appeal to either Twitter or LinkedIn, as both derive much of their value from locking in users.

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess I don't understand. How does one go about writing an open API for someone else's platform? Won't that require support by that someone else who created the platform?

Otherwise, aren't we stuck with having to recreate Facebook, Twitter, etc. in order to write an open API for it? And therefore stuck requiring the adoption for the new platform that someone else's platform already has? Therefore "rolling your own" entirely in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER5> I intend to publish an API. What can I do to reassure developers that I won't behave like this if they build on my platform? Charge money?

<comment><USER6> There's no way to guarantee you won't behave like that (I don't specifically mean you, but anyone in a similar position). People have the best intentions, but things change as time goes on.

In fact, charging money might make it all the more insulting if/when a company later does something to piss off its developer community.

Platform integration is a risk, but I think it's better to take that risk than not pursue an idea because some day the platform will cut you off from the API.

<comment><USER5> > There's no way to guarantee you won't behave like that

True, but I'm not just speculating here, I really DO want to release an API from a big company and have it taken seriously and trusted by the development community.

Let me try answering my own question. One thing I could do would be to publish a statement guaranteeing access to the API for the next 5 years. Perhaps people would find that reassuring. I suspect that our legal department would have a problem with it -- it would prevent us from making changes if we needed to... perhaps even from fixing a vital security flaw.

Maybe something weaker, like publishing a policy detailing the process for deprecating APIs? The process could say that deprecated APIs will continue to be supported for at least a year. It could also specify an exception for security issues. Would this reassure developers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> what a good idea, a similar license for apis that forces access to the data in the same way gpl forces access to the source code

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but who would enforce it? A class-action suit, maybe?

<comment><USER7> anyone that can. e.g. a smallish company basing their business on top of an api from a bigger one like twitter or google could feel safe knowing that they couldn't legally remove access later. and if they did that small company could recoup their potential earnings through litigation.

it works just the same way as gpl does to code.</comment></comment></comment>


Thinking about Graphs (Grammar of Graphics) - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-chart.com/2010/07/thinking-about-graphs.html

<comment><USER2> An entire article (both this one and the linked WSJ article) on language influencing thought and vice versa, and not a single mention of the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis, that's sad.</comment>


The Google Home Mini Is Google's $49 Answer to the Echo Dot - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/the-google-home-mini-is-googles-answer-to-amazons-echo-dot/ <comment><USER3> Does it have a headphone socket? All I want from my google home devices is better control over the audio, and it seems the only way I can do that is plug it into my own amp.

Edit. Nope. However the latest software lets you change default audio device for media playback to a chromecast audio. That's halfway there - what I'd like is to redirect the entire audio stream (so spoken answers too!)

Alternatively, can we get a software update to add EQ on the google home? At moderate volumes my neighbours can hear the bass through the walls for a home :(

<comment><USER4> Google Home Max : "it also has an auxiliary port so you can connect it to a turntable or other speaker".

<comment><USER5> No, that's only for audio in to play with the Max's speakers. What he wants is audio out to play google's responses on something else (Which is a feature of the Echo Dot, so you can use a better speaker)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is Google twice as smart as Siri?

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/02/google-ai-has-almost- twice-t...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/02/google-ai-has-almost-twice-the-iq- of-siri-says-study.html)

I'm considering adding one of these to my family of iOS devices. Siri is cool when it works, but I'd like something a little better. That, and I won't have to watch my watch, phone, and tablet competing to answer my questions.

Finally, and most importantly, according to the article, Google appears to be improving the fastest.

<comment><USER7> I love and use our 2 google homes on a daily basis, but they get significantly more useful if you are in google's ecosystem and have home automation.

For me, i'd give a super rough guess at my usage like this:

* 60% home automation (turning on and off lights when hands are full, ensuring doors are locked and garage door is closed, running "shortcuts" like "i'm leaving" which will lock up and arm the alarm in 5 minutes, etc...)

* 15% playing and controlling music/tv shows on various devices in the house (tv's with chromecasts, the home itself, etc...)

* 10% as a shopping list (it makes a damn good shopping list and it's nice as hell to be able to just yell at the thing to add "frosted mini wheats to the shopping list" the second you run out and have it synced to the whole family's phones)

* 9% as a "day planner" of sorts. Generally each morning I tell it "good morning" and it tells me the weather, things on my calendar, and starts playing some news snippets I setup.

* 5% for timers/alarms (really useful while cooking to be able to shout at it to start a timer for 15 minutes then walk away)

* 1% for the dumb trivia lookups/random information. Stuff like "how many calories in X?" or "when was the Apple II released?"

<comment><USER8> Sorry to be the luddite, but these devices just seem like first-world-only interest to me.

I have no desire to automate my house (I can see why others do). I don't have a home alarm. I have one TV in the house for several kids.

The day planner/shopping list is good, but I pull out my phone instead and speak to it (when I press home button).

Finally, is everyone really comfortable having always-on listening in their home? The convenience/creepy ratio just doesn't seem prudent for me. It's amusing to see how privacy oriented HN is yet these devices are so popular here - they're an unaudited vector into your most private moments.

<comment><USER9> What's the difference between having something like Google Home in your home and carrying a cell phone in your pocket, other than the fact that the cell phone can listen in on you even when you're away from home?

I really don't get why everyone carries listening devices 24/7 and then freaks out about these smart speakers.

<comment><USER8> One is designed to be listening at all times, the other one may not even have the explicit capability (I turn off voice-activated Google/Siri on all my devices).

Trigger words can be accidentally spoken, they can be spoken by other devices, etc. Hidden trigger words can exist.

I think it's logical fallacy of extremes to say that carrying an e.g. iPhone is an equivalent security exposure to having GoogleHome/HomePod/Echos littered around your house, just because they both "could" be hacked/backdoored.

<comment><USER9> Many (most? all?) modern smartphones are designed to be listening at all times too.

You turn this off on all your devices. Do you trust the manufacturer to actually stop listening when you do?

I don't see how it's a logical fallacy to point out that there's another device with the same capablilities that most of the complainers don't give a second thought to. I really don't understand how the risk from something like Google Home is any higher than the risk from a smartphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't want X Company's answer to Y Company's product.

I want all this siloing to disappear and fricken make technology better.

</comment><comment><USER11> I notice on the tech spec's page that the Mini also has bluetooth [0]. Would love to know if this means all connected homes will play (the same) audio via bluetooth.

[0] [https://store.google.com/product/google_home_mini_specs](https://store.google.com/product/google_home_mini_specs)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's unfortunate the amazing advances Google's been making with its ml software are being packaged up into a bunch of happenstance hardware offerings.

</comment><comment><USER13> I choose Amazon for this because they are dedicated to it, it's a contributor to thei e-commerce business, and there is plenty of reason to believe they will still work a few years from now.

I have no such belief with Google in this case, it's one hobby among many disconnected from their main business. It is search but not web search.

I'm also building a snips.co device and am very interested in offline speach recognition both for pricacy and utility reasons.

<comment><USER14> Google has voice-based functionality pretty deeply embedded into Android - <USER2> really don't think it's going anywhere.

By contrast, I chose a Google Home over an Alexa because I think Google is better at AI - I am consistently surprised by how many random questions the Home can answer.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, Google is really throwing their weight behind "AI". It seems like it's the most likely candidate that could eventually replace search as their "main product".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a whole universe of Chinese software that we don't see? - <AUTHOR> China is obviously a major world player, but we rarely see articles/repos/posts/etc., that seem to originate from there, translated or not, or simply referred to. Are we missing out on lots of cool advancements from China? Or do Chinese engineers generally publish in English? Is there some massive Chinese GitHub with cool stuff we don't know about? Science is science and I can't shake the feeling that we're missing out on stuff, but I really have no idea. Would love to hear people's thoughts. <comment><USER2> I mostly know about software relevant for game development, and there are indeed some very interesting products (most of them open source) coming out of China which are mostly unknown in the West. Some examples from my list:

\- FairyGUI (UI framework for games): [https://en.fairygui.com/index.html](https://en.fairygui.com/index.html), github: [https://github.com/fairygui](https://github.com/fairygui)

\- LayaAir (HTML5 game engine): [https://github.com/layabox/LayaAir](https://github.com/layabox/LayaAir)

\- Egret (HTML5 game engine): [https://github.com/egret-labs/egret- core](https://github.com/egret-labs/egret-core)

\- Cocos2D-X (2D game engine, this might be the only one that's also really popular outside China): [https://www.cocos.com/en/](https://www.cocos.com/en/)

\- everything by Cloudwu (but especially pbc, protocol buffers in C): [https://github.com/cloudwu](https://github.com/cloudwu)

<comment><USER3> > \- Cocos2D-X (2D game engine, this might be the only one > that's also > really popular outside China): > > [https://www.cocos.com/en/](https://www.cocos.com/en/)

Yes, we are fairly lightweight and popular outside of China.

We offer Cocos2d-x, a c++/lua based game engine. There isn't a built in GUI editor, but FairyGUI works well.

Also, Cocos Creator, a JavaScript/TypeScript based game development environment. Creator is a complete development tool, GUI tool, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work for a multinational tech firm, at their Beijing office. There is no equivalent of massive Chinese Github. Github is used heavily by Chinese developers. There are projects incubated in Chinese tech startups and eventually open sourced, for example the Beego Go web framework.

Due to the Great Firewall of China, there is almost a Chinese-only tech ecosystem of Android apps, and other "mini-apps" built on top of Wechat. For example, Jinri Toutiao is a popular app that is almost unheard of outside of China.

<comment><USER5> There are Chinese GitHub clones but many companies there use enterprise solutions for version control: there's one by Alibaba I think and I've seen a few deployments of GitHub Enterprise and Atlassian/Microsoft solutions.

Work on open source isn't very popular in China in general due to culture differences.

<comment><USER6> Could you outline the cultural differences that make open-source work unpopular with Chinese?

<comment><USER7> It has more to do with economic conditions I believe. Here in India it's the same, most people get into software engineering because of easy availability of jobs and don't really care about Computer Science itself. So the concept of Open source feels alien to most engineers here, especially "working for free" when you have to struggle so much just to get a very basic salary.

<comment><USER8> Also who has time for side projects when you work in the 996 work culture.

<comment><USER7> I don't think this can be generalized for China. Plenty of companies in India, Japan and US have the same shitty culture too. Tesla, Space X, Apple are infamous for such workaholic cultures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Reactjs, the Ant Design library is built and maintained by a Chinese company called Ant Financial: [https://ant.design/](https://ant.design/) I believe they're the second most popular React UI library on Github by stars

I believe the Chinese web world is pretty big on using Vue.js, Golang and React from what the top Chinese tech companies talk about in their blogs

Also I can read Simplified Chinese and the most popular Github repos in Chinese seem to be individual blogs, tech interview help and like frontend/backend guides. Github seems to be almost used as a content-based social network by Chinese users based around blogs and tech help

See: [https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects- ar...](https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-are-written- in-chinese-six-contain-no-code/)

<comment><USER10> I think GitHub gets used there as a social network because it isn't fully censored. I've read about Chinese using it to share/collaborate on unsanctioned information because it can't just be blocked: unlike Facebook and Twitter, it's too important to their software industry.

<comment><USER11> Trivia: This effect is called colleteral freedom

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Chinese researchers are in many state of the art projects along with others. Maybe that's why they are often overlooked (or they aren't, because they are doing really well inside/outside China). Even VueJs was created by a Chinese.

If you can understand a bit of Chinese you can search on Baidu, or CSDN, Zhihu, Jianshu etc (kind of like SO, Quora, Medium in Chinese). In fact, there's a Chinese clone of almost any major international website that the majority of people in China use. They also have their own translation of programming terms , which you'll see in code comments.

</comment><comment><USER13> Eye-opening to me was browsing [https://eu.alibabacloud.com/](https://eu.alibabacloud.com/) We talk a lot about Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and smaller ones like Digital Ocean, Linode and such but Alibabacloud I hardly if ever see articles or tutorials about.

<comment><USER14> Huawei Cloud and a few others are also quite massive, but signup is so insanely difficult (+ "Real Verification" bullshit) that if you're a foreigner you just wouldn't bother.

<comment><USER15> Not that it changes the situation, but in case anyone's not aware that's due to government regulations[0].

You need the same licenses if you want to sign up for AWS's Chinese regions as well.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apache Kylin was actually China's very first top-level Apache project. It did come out of eBay, but the work all originated in China. It's a really cool solution to query acceleration.

You can learn about it on the community page here: [http://kylin.apache.org/](http://kylin.apache.org/)

It's pretty popular across China, and I've seen it come up a bunch in Europe/South America, but in the U.S. it's pretty new to a lot of folks.

</comment><comment><USER17> Chinese social and ecommerce companies contribute new features to Mariadb (MySQL.)

Quora mentions GitCafe and Coding.net in China.

Chinese people write in Chinese mainly, but I imagine programmers can get around in English. (If you go to an airport in China, often none of the staff speak English except for perhaps the foreign visitor kiosks, but even then.)

Japanese Open Source in the 1995-2010 era always meant 1-way forking and localizing it in Japanese, but that might have changed as projects increasingly added i18n support. (If you're familiar with Japanese writing, there were obvious reasons for that.)

Most people don't consider programming science, but ok.

</comment><comment> jon-wood From the consumer side there's a totally different ecosystem of apps (or A-P- Ps as everyone calls them) used for almost everything. I travelled to China last year for work and would have been completely stranded without the person our supplier assigned to us to look after us.

Cash is basically not used, with everyone using either WeChat or Ali payments via mobile apps (which as far as we could tell you can't activate without a Chinese bank account). Even the person hawking souvenirs in the the queue at the great wall only accepted mobile payments, the only place that would accept a western card was one particular Xiaomi store.

On the second day we were there we decided to buy a coffee near the office before going in, only to be thwarted by the fact you could only order via a mobile app. The person working there literally could not accept an order manually via the till, and we couldn't install the app to place one because it was only available on the Chinese version of the app stores. After that we mostly just accepted the fact we weren't going to be able to function independently.

<comment><USER18> There's no way this is good for China long term, right? I mean, I am an entrepreneur, game developer, and English teacher, and I went to China in 2003 and had no issue whatsoever. Based on this info, I have no motivation to go back and start an English learning school or any other business ....

<comment><USER19> It's working okay for one billion people already.

Chinese economic restrictions generally tilt toward keeping the majority of capital flowing throughout China and strategic investments abroad. They are definitely not geared to someone who wants to start an English-learning school and repatriate earnings back to the UK or wherever. WeChat/Alipay support this - you can't really spend that money anywhere except in China.

<comment><USER20> All the malls in Toronto take WeChat and Alipay.

<comment> blaser-waffle Vancouver too -- go figure; very common in Richmond, reasonably common elsewhere.

And I've seen it a few places in Edmonton and Calgary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure there is. In fact, I love this charting library:

[https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/](https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/)

Now an apache project but comes out of Baidu.

</comment><comment><USER22> One project I use on a daily basis that isn't well known (and is by a Chinese developer) is Vimium C ([https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c](https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c)). It has similar functionality to Vimium, cVim, Vimperator, Pentadactyl and the like—browser navigation using vim-like shortcuts. Vimium C is quite customizable, offers great functionality, and the developer seems quite responsive to issues. The code is written in TypeScript and I found it easy to read. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ant-design, ECharts, Vue.js, fastjson, Kylin, dubbo, RocketMQ, Pulsar, Harbor, SkyWalking... Actually more repos are contributed by the worldwide developer but not just one country or person (such as vue.js, the founder is Chinese but runs by the open-source community power, and that's why we call it open-source software, everyone has the opportunity to contribute and use. That different from Company behavior).

</comment><comment><USER24> I do think there is. For me, part of the realization was to play around with the explore feature of Github and sort by most stars / trending in a given language (in my case Java).

[https://github.com/trending/java?since=monthly](https://github.com/trending/java?since=monthly)

A VERY large portion of the repos are actually written in chinese :).

</comment><comment><USER25> The fact is that almost every resources are written in Chinese. If you can read Chinese you can find plenty of, tons of useful and interested stuff. The reason those are not written in Chinese is that they don't actually need western people to read and discuss with them. Chinese developers are enough for discussion, tech talks...

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, that I know of, we have a "better" grub in grub4dos and a "better" grub (GRUB2) in A1ive's version, thanks to Chinese developers:

[https://github.com/chenall/](https://github.com/chenall/)

[https://github.com/a1ive](https://github.com/a1ive)

</comment><comment><USER27> Very probably. We don't normally see it because English-Language websites will consciously downvote to oblivion anything that isn't in English.

Turn on "showdead" in your HN profile, and you'll generally see at least one foreign-language article every day in the hidden [dead] posts that's been bundled out of sight.

<comment><USER28> It's a shame - we have automatic translation so articles in a language most visitors can't read are still useful to them.

Of course the submitter could fix this themself with some effort but we will lose good content if we rely on that.

Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

<comment><USER29> > Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles > into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

Err... no. Machine translations are awful at least half of the time. It's even worse for CJK languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's CoC - "conquer of completion" among others (sick name btw), a JS based language server for Vim that gives it VSCode like powers. I've seen a lot of code editor tooling from China (I like hover over GH user thumbnails of interesting tools).

</comment><comment><USER31> I actually liked WPS Office which does not seem to be based on Open/Libre office and looks more compatible with MS Office.

But in the recent years, I just purchase MS Office licenses, so I am no longer aware with the current state of MS Office alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's a giant ecosystem of Chinese tech on the consumer side, which is radically different from what we experience in the West. There's also Alibaba Cloud, which by some measures is bigger than GCP but is just a clone of AWS.

</comment><comment><USER33> In the Go community, there is a significant portion of libraries and development from China. When visiting the Github's Trending page for Go, sometimes I need to filter by written language because everything is in Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a lot of Chinese software and libraries in the Go ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER35> Honestly, I dont think so. I think they mostly use our code. If you look on github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent state of the art implementations of things like distributed queues that are better than what we have

<comment><USER36> > If you look on github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent > state of the art implementations of things

Wow, I'm impressed! Such a unique skill! I've never heard anyone do this! Be able to judge the implementation of an entire group of Github repo's grouped by language! Can you do Japanese repo's next?

<comment><USER35> I work in machine learning research and keep up with all of the top papers. I have exited on an ml startup that I founded. Very few coming out of china are top papers. Anyone can publish to arxiv. Measuring whether a model is state of the art is incredibly complex, overfitting to specific datasets is rampant.

Its also ridiculous that I am being downvoted.</comment></comment></comment>


Leave A.I. Alone - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/opinion/leave-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> Just a random op-ed (read: Rando with an opinion that happens to be under the auspices of NYT) that provides nothing new to the discussion.

Poo-poos concerns of AIs influence on the economy and human safety, with laughable comparisons.

For example it argues that people don't agree on what AI is therefore somehow regulating it is premature... (Why would that matter?).

The clarity of thought is this piece is negligible.

So let's clarify:

\- Some people are [rightly] concerned about technology in general. As it becomes more powerful (knives then guns then nukes) the ability for a few people to ruin the world for everyone increases.

\- Some people are [rightly] worried about technology's role in concentration of wealth.

\- Some people are [rightly] worried about existential threats "grey goo"/black-mirror/robocop/Ex-machina.

The role in AI is that it makes each of these threats much more dangerous (e.g. putting AI in drones, AI's effect on the uneducated people's employability, Robocop)

[Author doesn't attempt to provide evidence against any of these claims, but just argues the concept is used in a vague way therefore somehow doesn't count]

<comment><USER3> The takeaway I got was that the author more or less wants the conversation about regulation of AI to be less of a top-down approach to a broad reaching and loosely defined topic. The scenario of a, "grey goo" apocalypse verses, say, a bank hiding otherwise discriminatory lending practices behind a neural network black-box, are radically different in terms of plausibility and likelihood. Given the esoteric nature of the topic it's all too easy to see where this is headed when it comes to representative governance. Knee-jerk legislative umbrellas based on the comments of eccentric megalomaniacs made to the news media is a fool's errand, and there's a hell of a lot of foolish people out there.

<comment><USER2> Well if his position is there are various real AI threats that need to be discussed and handled differently, then I'd agree with that position. However that's not how I read it, particularly given the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article is a poorly argued response to a strawman.

The NYC and federal advisory councils would be tasked with providing lawmakers with impartial advice on A.I. writ large. That's reasonable. Bias in algorithmic credit decisions and bias in algorithmic sentencing are different problems, but share a lot of the same underlying technological realities/problems. These areas _do_ have cross-cutting concerns, so a legislative brain trust dedicated to disseminating knowledge about these cross-cutting concerns is a wise use of resources.

No one is suggesting "regulating" general AI, so the author's red herring question about "what is AI anyways?" is completely off-topic. Even "alarmists" like Musk and Hawking are proposing much more concrete legislation, such as banning algorithmically generated kill orders in weapons. And to the extent that those people are interested in safe _general_ AI, they're currently trying to achieve that goal by throwing research money at it (rather than proposing concrete legislation regulating _general_ AI). Which is hardly a reasonable thing to criticize!

Furthermore, the proposed approaches in NYC and at the federal level _aren 't_ incongruent with the author's proposed sector-by-sector approach toward regulation! These are, after all, simply proposing _advisory councils_.

Therefore, the author does not provide a compelling reason to oppose any of the _concrete_ legislation mentioned at the beginning of the article. And the arguments that the author _does_ make betray, IMO, a superficial understanding of the proposed legislation.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm working my way through the "Blueprints for Armageddon" series in hardcore history. The attempts to regulate AI remind me of the Russian efforts to regulate war before WW1.

In the first part of BfA (I think) he talks about the peace conferences in Russia whose goals were to limit the progression of technology. Partly because Russia wasn't prepared for a high tech war, and partly because large scale efficient killing was kinda scary. Anyways, they wanted to limit what technologies could be improved by freezing combat technologies where they were at the time.

Dan talks about how it wan't really that far-fetched of an idea to to artificially limit the spread and extension of knowledge at the time. This is in contrast to today, where it seems impossible for technological advancement to stop. Tech changes so fast it's difficult to imagine that it'll be slowing down soon. Could we even slow down the advancement of AI if we wanted to? How?

Is there any dangerous technology whose development could be stopped even if we saw it coming?

<comment><USER6> IMHO it should be illegal to develop an artificial mind capable of consciousness. There are a lot of good reasons to avoid this, not just that it could be potentially unethical to subject such a mind to torture/pain.

A super-intelligent artificial mind is probably going to come up with its own agenda and convince us to work in its interest and potentially against our own. Given the state of computer security today, can you imagine how easily it could spread as a worm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The AI industry regulates itself by periodically going bankrupt

</comment><comment><USER6> About the author: "Andrew Burt is chief privacy officer and legal engineer at Immuta, a data management platform for data science, which enables companies to create and manage A.I. and machine learning models."

Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER8> >in the summer of 1970, Newsweek ran a cover story titled "Is Privacy Dead?" detailing the "massive flanking attack" of computers on modern society. Growing awareness of that threat led to broad appeals that echo modern proposals to regulate A.I. "Eventually we have to set up an agency to regulate the computers," Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina said in 1970.

>But instead of regulating all computers, the government sought a targeted approach tailored to specific problems, passing regulations like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974.

Thereby solving the problems of digital intrusions on privacy, and credit scores forever. Oh wait, no, I guess those both those things are incredibly broken. Digital privacy is notoriously non-existent, infringed on by the state, criminals, and business. Credit and financial information is impossible to keep safe and available to any cyber criminal who wants it.

It's odd that the author's two examples of when the government got something right by not preemptively intervening both turned out so poorly.

AI is fundamentally different from privacy, credit, or any other invention that has happened before. The implications of this technology are too vast for us not to spend time and money thinking about how to proceed safely. We may only get one shot at developing true AI correctly, and establishing a public office to help figure out how to do that seems like the least we could do.

If anyone finds themselves agreeing with this author, I highly recommend Nick Bostrum's book Super Intelligence. If you don't have the time for a whole book Sam Harris has a good TED talk on the subject.

<comment><USER6> > Credit and financial information is impossible to keep safe and available to > any cyber criminal who wants it.

Which is why legislation should be aimed at preventing law-abiding entities from ever storing it in the first place. Obviously, criminals cannot steal what is not there.

Enforcement of these laws has been mild, and all companies and criminals know this. Only the odd major embarrassment seems to motivate companies to protect user data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 'AI' is such a meaningless buzzword that you could simply rename a product to sidestep any pointless regulation.

<comment><USER10> Regulations generally start out by defining the thing they're regulating. You can call it whatever you want, but if it fits the law's definition, it's going to be covered.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but pretty much all software qualifies as 'AI'. However most people think about Hollywood interpretations of AI, which is a thing that doesn't exist. It's strictly a matter of interpretation, and figuring out where on this spectrum a particular piece of software exists is basically the equivalent of throwing darts at a board.

<comment><USER11> In my private taxonomy, hello world through Excel are weak AI, the state of the art mostly narrow AI but fast becoming more general, and the endgame is general AI.

<comment><USER9> What worries me is the 80 year old judges (and other clueless participants of the judicial system) who don't understand how computers work and will ultimately be responsible for deciding people's fate regarding this stuff.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Groupon explains why Google is in takeover talks  - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/8160878/Groupon-explains-why-Google-is-in-takeover-talks.html

<comment><USER2> If he can persuade Google that they should part with $3 billion because _Google's local search assets will add value to Groupon_ then Andrew Mason really is a genius. It's not exactly as if Google lack the ad sales team or consumer reach to launch their own voucher program, should they feel inclined to do so.</comment>


The Solid State Future. - <AUTHOR> http://laserlike.com/2009/05/01/the-solid-state-future/

<comment><USER2> Chart combining pricing with sequential and random I/O performance data: [http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/18/SSDVersusEnterpr...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/18/SSDVersusEnterpriseSATAAndSASDisks.aspx)

<comment><USER3> The non-enterprise SSDs (including Intel's -M line) are now at under 40% of the price (i.e. USD 5/GB), and can probably deliver 80% of the performance for realistic workloads.

I'd also guess that by this time next year we'll be seeing the consequences (and USD 2 or 3/GB prices, if the demand doesn't drive prices up instead).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest change will not be the HDD -> SSD transition, but rather the SSD -> MRAM transition or, equivalently, the point at which there is suddenly no speed difference between RAM and secondary storage.

At that point, there WILL be no secondary storage. Or, rather, CPU cache will become very large and be the primary storage and (M)RAM will be the secondary storage.

In either case, given that CPU cache is (designed to be) transparent, the whole computing landscape will be irrevocably altered.

Think about it... what would a computing environment look like if it was based around a system in which all your data and code was just as instantly addressable and accessible as all your other data and code, and it was just ONE address space?

</comment><comment><USER5> Summary: solid state disks cost more per GB than spinning disks. But they make computers go faster, so you need fewer computers, so you may save overall.

In fact, it's only in very specialized situations where having faster disks means you need fewer computers.

<comment><USER3> More than that. A two orders of magnitude kick to the backside of the memory hierarchy necessarily has a ripple effect (e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557961>).

It's not only the savings in current applications - it's the new ones that are made possible, or cost-effective. Note the tail end of the piece, and comment #6 - avc.com's ears are pricked up ;-)</comment></comment>


Starting up - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maineONEder/starting-up-41d9083a19d6#.f4q0j2kyd <comment><USER2> It's one of the things Barbara Corcoran always says. The best people in business and sales are those who take the hit and then get up again over and over. She said that amongst her own sales people, it wasn't even down to sales talents, the top performers were simply the ones who never let a hit keep them down.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Think of your startup as a project until it has revenue.

2\. Don't launch until you have a hundred paying customers, that forces you to be a long way down the road towards product market fit.

3\. Get your first hundred customers face to face, the learning is 10X that of trying to drive traffic to your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, agree!</comment></comment>


HP posts Pre 3 WebOS update - <AUTHOR> http://www.reghardware.com/2011/12/21/hp_posts_webos_firmware_update_for_pre_3_smartphone/

<comment><AUTHOR> Their sub-title caught my eye:

"Last patch before open sourcerers set to work?"</comment>