Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443862604578032541863652264.html <comment><USER3> Thanks to that blog post by Paul Graham about PR firms, I couldn't read this without thinking it's just a long, pathetic ad for shaving products.

My goal is to get to become so cynical that I only believe what I read in Dr. Seuss books.

<comment><USER4> ...which are blatant advertisements by the much maligned green egg industry.

<comment><USER5> I think it was the pork lobby that commissioned that book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually, since male-pattern baldness is driven by testosterone (more accurately, a testosterone derivative called DHT), it makes sense that people have evolved to perceive baldness as masculine and dominant. In this case, baldness is a signifier -- a sort of subconscious code -- for a host of other traits that are seen as powerful.

<comment><USER7> Wiki actually has the complete opposite theory, baldness seems to convey a maturing and calming instead of power and dominance.

"One theory, advanced by Muscarella and Cunningham, suggests baldness came about in males through sexual selection as an enhanced signal of aging and social maturity, whereby aggression and risk-taking decrease and nurturing behaviours increase."

"A study done among South Koreans has shown most people rate balding men as less attractive, if these results generalize to other cultures, any mating benefit must target purely maternal instincts."

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

So maybe it's because you're ugly but domestic and perceived to be no real threat. Or maybe human nature is more then just animal instinct. Maybe I just wanted to go nananana and call you ugly while I ran my fingers through my head of hair. Maybe it's all of these things.

<comment><USER8> That's about balding men, not shaved heads. The article claims that shaving makes all the difference for balding men. I guess shaving alleviates the effects this wikipedia entry describes.

<comment><USER7> I was going to say 'ya well, wiki doesn't have a head shaving article, but it would appear I would have been wrong.

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

It unfortunately only says a little regarding virility.

It does however link to this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichophilia> which has the statement "Hair does not in itself have any intrinsic sexual value other than the attributes given to it by individuals in a cultural context." I would suspect baldness (shaved or natural) would be similarly linked entirely to cultural contexts. For instance I doubt most people see Buddhist monks as especially virile.

<comment><USER9> I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here, and being prescriptivist, and derailing the conversation, and all that bad stuff, but could we please stop using "wiki" as an abbreviation for Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is _a wiki_ , not the only wiki. That's why it's called Wikipedia; it's a wiki based encyclopedia. Calling it "wiki" is like calling Encyclopedia Brittanica "encyclopedia" for short. It makes no sense. Would you say "ya well, encyclopedia doesn't have a head shaving article"? No, you would say "Encyclopedia Brittanica" or "the encyclopedia" (if one was clear from context) or "my encyclopedia".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Walter White in the pilot - full head of hair and a mustache - he's hapless, blown hither and thither on a wayward course by cancerous winds.

Walter White by the end of season 4 - shaved head and a goatee - large and in charge.

<comment><USER11> See also Sisko in Season 1 of Deep Space 9 vs Sisko in Season 5.

Although I'm struggling to think of many more examples of hairless protagonists outside Star Trek.

<comment><USER12> Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Randy Couture, Vin Diesel...

<comment><USER13> Out of these, Vin Diesel is the only one who has full head of hair but still shaves it. The rest do it because they are all bald. Just my observation :)

<comment><USER12> Vin Diesel is definitely balding. You can see it very clearly in xXx.

<comment><USER13> may be more recently. But certainly not as much as willis, stathom etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think there's something to it about the active choice of a shaved head - <USER2> started going bald fairly early (around 18), and shaving my head really seemed to change people's perceptions of me for the better.

Of course, it could just be that I became more comfortable and confident after it.

<comment><USER7> Well part of that is that (if you do it right, too thin or lanky and you look like a cancer patient) purposely shaved bald looks far better then naturally thinning.

That it does look better probably helped with your comfort level and confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yes!! Grade 0.5 all over, and toying with grade 0 or using a razor.

What I want to know though is when will the US have a bald president? I always thought good hair was a pre-requisite.

<comment><USER16> It is true that the taller candidate typically wins elections. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a significant correlation between hair and votes.

Eisenhower is probably the closest we've come to a bald president.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EisenhowerChiefofStaffPort...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EisenhowerChiefofStaffPortrait.jpg)

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675631,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675631,00.html)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the links. I wonder if it could happen now people can see the candidates more on TV (and hatless)?

As I understand it, a lot of the population didn't even know Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, something that would be impossible today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a great interview with Patrick Stewart where he talks about his experience acclimating to baldness, I highly recommend it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXOK-ZVJMaU>

</comment><comment><USER18> I think same goes for being even remotely fit. Not necessarily muscular, but at least not overweight at all.

Or perhaps I'm just envious to those who can tolerate themselves as bald, and don't look like eggs. :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine, dominant and, in some cases, to have greater leadership potential than those with longer locks or with thinning hair... Wow - my bald head makes me look more masculine. That's definitely a shocker.

</comment><comment><USER20> Things change over time. I was talking to my father about the birth of the original (non racist) skin head movement in the UK. He said that the two enduring images of shaven heads in popular psyche, were of those in mental asylums, and people from concentration camps.

So initially it was about subverting something that was wildly seen as a mark of weakness and abuse. He said there were article and letters questioning why young men would allow themselves to appear like this, and it was at the time in no way seen as masculine.

</comment><comment><USER13> If I shave my head, I would look like a round potato. Forget about anything related to masculinity, machoness etc. ppl just laugh at me.

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems reasonable that bald people seems to be percieved more masculine, men as well man as women. Although I'm not sure if baldness makes those people more atractive. I think it's that they did something unusual. They gained more self confidence and people love self confidence.

In fact, I have dreadlocks and people like it, because I look healthy and self confident. I think it's even better than bald head. In XXI century agression is no longer advantage - charisma and inteligence are much more efficient these days.

However, a bit of masculine look may help women, they seem to look very atractive with no hair. Maybe not every woman, but I know women that looks good with no hair.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not to mention what one saves by not having to get a professional haircut.

<comment><USER23> A lot less than the shaving cream costs.

<comment><USER24> Shaving soap.

Also see double edged razors.

<comment><USER5> I started using the soap, brush, and DE razor about 3 years ago. A year ago, I shaved my head to start off a new job with something different. Maybe I haven't mastered the technique, but the last time I tried the DE on the head, I butchered up my scalp. I suppose practice would help, but I'm too timid to try after the first attempt. I'll stick with the electric shave and touch-ups with dollar-store triple-blade razors for the head.

I haven't shaved since May, and now that bead-head is once more a big problem, I might shave before the fall temps get too cold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well a small consolation is better than none.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does it mean they are more attractive to women? not sure about it. Rich men are for sure ,wether you have hair or not.

</comment><comment><USER27> And it puts in you great company with (for example) Mussolini, who started shaving his head when his hair began to thin.

<comment><USER28> On the other hand, Stalin and Hitler both had full heads of hair, as did Pol Pot. Chavez looks like he has a good amount of hair, too, likewise Saddam Hussein. Pinochet and Kim Jong-Il both looked like they were thinning towards the ends of their lives, but didn't apparently feel the need to do much about it. I can't find much evidence about Gadaffi one way or the other, other than a few shots that suggest he was at least not going bald at the front (and certainly not the sides).

So all in all, it looks like responding to male pattern baldness by shaving one's head does not correlate especially well with becoming a dictator.

But then again, correlation is not causation, and that goes both ways.

<comment><USER29> How exactly Chavez, an elected leader of a sovereign country, not a dictator or a mass murderer or anything, fits in the company of people mentioned here?

Or is it just a generic list of people that Americans are told "are bad persons", because some are indeed dictators and others just stand in the way of the foreign exploitation of third world country and it's natural resources?

<comment><USER28> I don't really know how to respond to this, but if any offence was caused then I apologise...

<comment><USER29> No hard feelings.

It's just uncomfortable for people to see their _elected_ leader demonized along with Hitler and mass murderers, especially if said leaders just concern themselves with their own, sovereign country, business.

Doubly so in a region where foreign invasion and intervention has started many dictatorships and cost many casualties.

It's not Chavez that did this: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/guatemala- experimen...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/guatemala- experiments_n_941284.html)

Or this: [http://www.alternet.org/world/us-funded-death-squads-el- salv...](http://www.alternet.org/world/us-funded-death-squads-el-salvador- casts-shadow-over-gop-ticket)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Threats and Violent Attacks Against Muslims in the U.S., Just from This Week - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/12/12/threats-and-violent-attacks-against-muslims-in-the-u-s-just-from-this-week/ <comment><USER2> That is the whopping total of thirteen incidents/news stories in one week. None involving the loss of a single life and few involving physical injury in a nation of over 300 million people with between five and eight million Muslims where about 300 people are murdered every week and many more the victims of violence or threats of violence each week for many different reasons. This at most tiny upsurge against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in France and an apparent terrorist attack costing fourteen lives in San Bernardino, CA likely to inflame passions. I would say good will and tolerance are winning hands down here. Let's keep it that way.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.newser.com/story/217333/seattle-muslims-say- somal...](http://www.newser.com/story/217333/seattle-muslims-say-somal..). I guess since it happened 8 days ago, it doesn't count for this week, but you won't see incidents like these getting the coverage they deserve</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Comment and Recommendation on my site - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to push out my startup.
I just release a first iteration of the code yesterday and i am wondering if you have any ideas/comments/etc in order to make the site behave and look better ?
Unfortunately i dont have all the time in world so development is slow.
Thanx.
www.cygamerentals.com <comment><USER2> 1\. Is there anywhere on the site you say where you're based? It's a big world. If you're based in China, I find it unlikely you'll be serving customers in Brazil.

2\. The plans on the "Register" page make no sense. See:

"Value 2 _Two game rentals per month_ You will be allowed to rent two games each month time. You can not hold more than _one games_ at a time"

Huh?

3\. You need to hire a native English speaker to fix the text on the site.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickety click: <http://www.cygamerentals.com></comment>


An Inside Look at a Facebook Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/facebook-data-center-tk/418683/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Nice article and I'm also a bit anxious about facebook/internet vs internet/phone lines, but I actually got more intrigued by the tilde club mentioned in the article than the Facebook DC.

[http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/)

More info:

[https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple- drinks-...](https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and- woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf#.dv6s6lkcz)

Also, reading about tilde I can't help but think about [http://urbit.org/](http://urbit.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is OT, but can anyone name the office chair in this photo in the article?

[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/12/IMG_3...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/12/IMG_3046/lead_960.jpg?1449257034)

I'd like to research it because it has high locking arms.

Thanks, John

</comment><comment><USER4> Far fewer photos than expected, but a nice article nevertheless</comment>


Gawker can't hide its bad behavior behind press freedom - <AUTHOR> http://www.cjr.org/criticism/gawker_cant_hide_its_bad_behavior_behind_press_freedom.php <comment><USER2> Look, I understand that Thiel may have been on a kind of personal vendetta, but I can't really argue that what he has done is wrong. Gawker regularly does what a number of other journalistic outlets do as well, that being: printing these ridiculous and false stories and then some time later printing a correction in fine print at the bottom. There needs to be more accountability for these "journalists" because in some cases they ruin others' lives and act as if they have done no wrong because they "eventually" published a correction...

<comment><USER3> But this particular case is the opposite: they got in trouble for publishing the truth.

<comment><USER4> The truth about what? Hogan/Terry's cock or Thiel being gay? Is the Freedom of the Press flag supposed to be wrapped around those?

I'm curious. Can you find one of Gawker's character assassinations that targeted somebody with political convictions that they shared? And FYI that is the radical left but you get half points for conventional leftists too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title of this article doesn't seem to accurately represent the contents of the article itself.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I generally lean towards freedom of the press but I'd like to see an outfit like this go into more depth on the privacy issue. Does it matter it wasn't his house? Does it matter it was in the other person's house? Does it matter he probably knew there was video recording in progress? Does it matter the other party definitely knew? Does it matter that the other party or the other party's spouse leaked it? Does it matter that only 3% of the "tape" was published? Does it matter that it revealed key events such as the presence of the husband? Does it matter that the really incendiary content was never published (Hulk commenting on his daughter's boyfriend)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thiel can't hide its bad behavior behind wealth freedom.

<comment><USER7> If you can't describe what it is, nobody will ever know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see how they equate Thiel's participation with Gawker's gutter journalism. Whether Thiel is funding the lawsuit or not is irrelevant; a lawsuit is won/lost not by who's funding it, but by what are the merits of the case[1]. If Gawker had done nothing wrong, they would have won.

[1] The exception being defense, when government is suing. With enough money, you can usually buy your way out of jail from the government's lawyers.

<comment><USER9> > a lawsuit is won/lost not by who's funding it, but by what are the merits of > the case

I think I have a bridge to sell you...

Your statement implies that the quality (and cost) of the legal team does not matter with respect to winning cases, and that's just not true. More importantly, DEFENDING against cases, even if you are not in the wrong, is extremely expensive. It is very possible to use the legal system in the US as a weapon if you have enough resources.

<comment><USER4> Right. And is that Thiel's fault? No. No it isn't.

The reality is that Gawker abused that particular caveat of the system far more than Thiel ever did.

That is part of the reason why this is so delicious. Beating them to death with their own weapon.

This was good old fashioned Western frontier style justice.

"We're not just going to shoot the Bastard. We're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks!" \- The Warrior Song

[https://youtu.be/2Xo3fwddONA](https://youtu.be/2Xo3fwddONA)

<comment><USER10> No greater indication of tribalism than someone salivating over "Western frontier style justice."

<comment><USER4> We're a great tribe. The best tribe. You'll never see a tribe like this I tell you. Wait until you'll see what we do next. Every other tribe will be jealous of us. - Trump-naut

I am aware of the downsides of tribalism.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797803)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11774588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11774588)

But everybody is in a tribe (they were doing it too mom!). Some people just don't know it yet. There is no getting rid of bias, only modest adjustments for it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780770)

And play the Warrior Song! It's so great! The Best Song.

<comment><USER10> You're aware of the downsides of tribalism, but seriously lack self-awareness like most people who complain about tribalism. Especially if you think you've already made adjustments for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In response to the article:

It's a news outlet.

They can use/abuse their position to make hay in ways nobody else can.</comment>


Ansible open-sources Ansible Tower with AWX - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/ansible-open-sources-ansible-tower-awx <comment><USER2> If you're considering using this (or any similar) tool, please keep in mind that you're adding a lot of attack surface.

Your Ansible master is one of the most critical (if not _the_ most critical) machine in your network. It has unrestricted access to everything, including a very detailed list of what and where everything is. If it's compromised, it's over.

Something like Ansible Tower adds a LOT of attack surface. Instead of a locked-down server exposing a public key-only SSH port, you suddenly have a whole web application stack in there. Your browser and every Chrome extension with full page access now has root access to your network (and don't get me started on potential CSRF or XSS vulnerabilities...).

If you don't need any of the enterprise-ey features, just might be better off with plain Ansible and Ara[1], with the latter running on a separate machine. A "sudoers" rule is much more secure than any ACL in a web application backend.

If you do want to use Tower, you need to think about these risks and how you mitigate them. Of course, this also applies to any similar tool like Jenkins, Rundeck, CircleCI or whatever if you give them production credentials.

[1]: [https://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

<comment><USER3> This is a great point. Although...other CI systems already have that kind of privilege, right? e.g. Chef has a master node if I'm not mistaken.

In my experience, ansible playbooks are great when run from a more general purpose task runner like jenkins, which then has permissions to access/modify one's production environment. I don't think I would personally use tower unless it provides something much much better than running ansible tasks in Jenkins... it would be just too much of a hassle to get the security/compliance aspects right.

<comment><USER4> Chef Server has a central server. Chef Zero doesn't, especially when using tools like cfn-init/cfn-hup and S3-backed minimart to self-bootstrap. This is the approach I take, and it's the approach I see becoming more and more common. Letting nodes figure out how to deal with their own problems (better able to auto-scale, more fault tolerant) is, to me, much better than having Jenkins or whatever have to SSH into them in the first place.

You can do it with Ansible, if you're going home-roll it, but I haven't seen too many people do so.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone actually use Ansible server-less? Can it even be done?

(Edit: my bad, ignore this comment, I misphrased my question; the real question should have been: can you run Ansible locally on the target server, just like chef-solo/chef-zero?)

<comment><USER4> You can run Ansible locally with `-c local`.

But, as far as serverless/self-bootstrapping deploys go, it's less common. Ansible has less of a "culture of dependencies"; the simpler, more approachable-looking nature of the Ansible playbook format seems to lend itself to people one-offing whatever they need rather than looking for best- practices solutions that already exist. Because of this, there's no real Berkshelf equivalent for Ansible. The tooling doesn't exist, outside of Tower (sorta), because nobody wants it, and nobody wants it because the tooling doesn't exist. So the people who _are_ doing with Ansible something similar to the Chef Zero stuff I mentioned above are mostly home-rolling it. (I just use a S3 bucket as a Minimart berkshelf endpoint and move on with my day.)

Last-mile configuration is also tricky. In my Chef Zero stuff, I use CloudFormation metadata to provide Chef attributes. You can do something similar with Ansible...but it's duct-tapey. There are times when simple is better; IMO, Ansible's core tooling errs too far on that side and the ecosystem has not caught up to make more rigorous approaches really viable.

<comment><USER6> Apologies if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're not that familiar with Ansible's roles and the public Ansible Galaxy repo for them?

[https://galaxy.ansible.com/intro](https://galaxy.ansible.com/intro)

There are tons of roles available, for just about everything, and the quality isn't always great, but still higher on average than what I've found for most Chef recipes and Puppet modules.

And that's not to mention the very high number of high quality modules that are builtin to Ansible.

<comment><USER4> I am familiar with them, yeah. In practice, across a pretty wide spread of clients, I have never seen them used or written by anyone who isn't me. This is why I referred to it as a culture problem; the tooling problem is the lack of a Berkshelf equivalent.

I would strongly, _strongly_ disagree as to the quality of most Ansible modules that I have dealt with, but it's probably more based on exactly what you need than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quick links:

\- Github Project: [https://github.com/ansible/awx](https://github.com/ansible/awx)

\- Project FAQ: [https://www.ansible.com/awx-project- faq](https://www.ansible.com/awx-project-faq)

\- Demo Video (10min): [https://www.ansible.com/tower- demo](https://www.ansible.com/tower-demo)

\- Remove angry potato logo: [https://github.com/nanobeep/awx- logos](https://github.com/nanobeep/awx-logos)

I do the curation for the 'Ansible & Friends' newsletter and we've been following this closely for a few months...

If you're interested in alternatives to Tower/AWX, see our listing in issue 64: [https://hvops.com/news/ansible/64](https://hvops.com/news/ansible/64)

Kudos to Jeff, he's quite prolific in the community. We've highlighted him recently in the "Community Heroes" section: [https://hvops.com/news/ansible/64](https://hvops.com/news/ansible/64) And in our September issue, we had to give Jeff his own section because there were just too many great articles he had put out: [https://hvops.com/news/ansible/67](https://hvops.com/news/ansible/67)

 _(Full disclosure: Ansible Inc hired me a few years ago to update and automate the Tower documentation systems)_

</comment><comment><USER8> "To be clear though, Ansible Tower itself will still be a licensed product offering from Red Hat, but the code that builds Ansible Tower releases is open sourced, and is available in the AWX Project."

This is strictly speaking correct but I think the author is implying that AWX code will get proprietized in Ansible Tower, which is not correct. Normally, Red Hat does not alter upstream open source licenses in its product offerings.

<comment><USER9> As of today, there is at least one difference between AWX and Tower. One supports high availability (Tower) and the other does not (AWX).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was pretty excited about AWX, we had finally deployed a few things to provide some of the functionality (Rundeck and some custom runners, also tried but decided against StackStorm since it has no role based task limits in the non-enterprise version).

I gave Jeff's (author of this piece) Ansible role a try and had an AWX system up and running quickly. He's making some really nice Ansible roles.

But I had no luck with AWX. I think if you are using entirely platforms that are supported directly by AWX (OpenStack/AWS/Azure), you might be fine. We run 80% of our stack on Ganeti, and have a custom inventory script that AWX seems entirely unable to use. Even distiling that dynamic inventory down into a static inventory isn't working in my testing because it wants our Vault password to load the inventory, and the inventory task doesn't allow for associating vault credentials. Nor does it seem to provide the boto credentials needed by our dynamic inventory script, even though it has a spot for providing AWS credentials.

I want to try it one more time to see if I can find a combination of static inventory that doesn't need the Vault.

But at the moment, the Rundeck weirdness with our inventory is less than the AWX weirdness, so that is our solution. I'm sure I'm just not getting something about AWX, but I've spent a day with the docs and made no real progress.

It's awesome to have available as an option. I wanted to get Tower but could never secure the funding for it, largely because it was a big unknown.

<comment><USER11> I'm still working on getting a Dockerless install up and running, because I want to be able to tweak the innards that make it all work a little more (I still don't fully grasp the AWX system architecture, because some of it is masked by the Docker setup).

There are still a couple small bugs with my Docker image (if you're testing with that) that I just haven't had the time to work out; you might be running into one or two of them :(

<comment><USER10> Dockerless would be nice, but I don't hold out much hope for it on an Ubuntu host. ;-) I'm guessing that it really wants to run on a RedHat variant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since Jeff's book is mentioned a few times, I'd suggest going for the (updateable) "e-book" if you're interested in purchasing it. I have the hardcopy version of it (and another Ansible book or two) and, with the rate of Ansible development, it got kinda out-of-date pretty quickly.

<comment><USER13> Second this. I bought the PDF ebook years ago and still get an email once in a while with an updated version. Best $20 something I've spent in a long time (thanks Jeff!).

<comment><USER11> You're welcome! Working on a chapter on Ansible Container right now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe someone will finally offer a managed Ansible Tower service. I'm always surprised that Red Hat hasn't to date. Between managed git and CI with deployment to AWS, I have no desire to babysit, backup and patch a snowflake Tower instance.

<comment><USER15> Out of curiosity, would you be concerned with giving a managed service vendor all the passwords to everything in your infrastructure?

<comment><USER16> Yes. I would. Which is why I love the idea of having AWX to run within my own infra, in the way that I'd want to run it.

Arrogant as it may sound, I'd much prefer to take ownership of that, personally. I'd be happy to self-host it and take the operational pains that come with it, and sleep (at least slightly more happily at night) knowing that I'm managing my secrets myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious to know how usage of AWX affects your ability to maintain everything (inventory, roles, playbooks, etc.) in version control.

I'm guessing AWX wants to be the central "source of truth" for all of that stuff instead of just keeping it all in a single git repo.

<comment><USER17> You hook AWX up to git or similar. It will pull playbooks, etc, from git before execution. I was a Tower sceptic at first, but it's actually really great.

(edit: disclaimer .. I am a Red Hat employee!)

<comment><USER12> Oh sweet, that's the best that I could have hoped for. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sorry, I need a video showing me, what Ansible Tower actually does.

I use Ansible in my day-to-day job (I'm a full stack dev learning how to do sysadmin stuff in scale). We use Ansible in a custom webapp to orchestrate bare metal clouds. We build and operate custom High Performance Computation Clusters and this is our SaaS offering.

But the code relies heavily on cron and legacy perl code.

I wanted to rewrite the code and use a queue for a long time, but never found enough time to actually do it. It works good enough and we have customers relying on it.

<comment><USER12> > _I 'm sorry, I need a video showing me, what Ansible Tower actually does._

Click on the first link in this article, "Ansible Tower" and you'll be taken to a page [0] where (above the fold) there are two videos: a two-minute overview and a 10-minute demo.

[0]: [https://www.ansible.com/tower](https://www.ansible.com/tower)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Ansible" and "open source" don't go together that well in my head.

I used to send a whole bunch of fixes to Ansible as they were so responsive in merging my stuff extremely quickly. But after they were bought (or /incredibly/ close to the same timing..) my PRs stopped being merged in a timely manner, often requiring many rounds of tedious rebasing as they looked at it 2 months after submission when the code had moved on. Naturally, I prefered to spend my time elsewhere...

</comment><comment><USER9> The one thing we're really missing from AWX (the open source version of Tower) is the high availability support.

I've seen some discussion in GitHub issues about that; hoping we see it supported soon!

</comment><comment><USER20> It'd be nice if there was a way to have ansible-pull verify GPG signatures (like some puppet setup people use). That way, it doesn't matter as much if AWX gets compromised.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does someone have a quick summary of where this fits into Satellite/Katello v/s puppet, which is already included in Katello.

<comment><USER22> Starting in Foreman 1.10 (Satellite 6.2 is based on Foreman 1.11[1]; Katello is now officially a Foreman plugin), Foreman introduced the Ansible plugin in a more/less primitive form. Essentially, the goal was/is to provide an Ansible alternative for provisioning where Puppet was used previously. Before, you could only specify Puppet classes to apply to initialized hosts but now specifying Ansible roles is possible.

So in a very basic use case where you want to configure a new compute instance in your environment, there's not much difference. However, in cases when you need to do things like hardening enforcement and remediation, end-user self- provisioning with surveys, workflows involving disparate tools which Ansible can coordinate (which may not even involve your hosts), reviewing/analyzing results of a play across 100s or 1000s of hosts, or auditing/rbac controls, Tower/AWX will be your tool. These features will most likely not make their way into Satellite because that's not really the focus of Satellite.

[1]: [https://access.redhat.com/articles/1343683](https://access.redhat.com/articles/1343683)

Quick correction: after looking at some docs on the RH site, it seems the Ansible Foreman plugin may not be included in Satellite at this time. I suspect this will change in the upcoming versions, but not really a way to tell at this point :(

Edit 3!!: Ansible support is coming but not for a while. See discussion regarding the roadmap presentation from Summit here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/6lb460/satellite_63...](https://www.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/6lb460/satellite_63_dates_and_confirmed_features/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What is the role of Ansible in the world of Docker, Kubernetes and Swarm?

<comment><USER24> I was wondering the same thing and found this recent video on Ansible Containers ([https://www.ansible.com/ansible-roles-as- containers](https://www.ansible.com/ansible-roles-as-containers)). The project overview is [https://www.ansible.com/ansible- container](https://www.ansible.com/ansible-container). It'd be interesting to hear from others with experience combining these.

<comment><USER25> ansible and containers do not mix well. Don't even bother. They take totally different approaches. Use ansible for what it is good for. Using it to automate all the things ... in container world... I mean why have docker- compose or k8s at all. Just launch containers willy nilly and instead of

\- self healing \- automatic failover \- Docker centric tools

You can have a python s*it show where you use containers like processes. In fact they are processes that probably can't handle signals or pipes. Maybe use tini and that at least works, but it misses the point. Ansible and docker are fundamentally at odds.

When ansible was created it had the promise of a simple layer of abstraction over ssh. now It just does all the things because it jelly. Don't give into the h8

<comment><USER26> Ansible works quite well for automating docker deployments. Something still has to execute the docker commands to spin up a container/swarm/cluster/whatever. Better to have those commands be idempotent and checked in to version control.

[http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/docker_container_modu...](http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/docker_container_module.html)

<comment><USER11> And if you control networking, Ansible can manage that... and if you control local workstation management, Ansible can manage that... and if you need something to manage things like CloudFormation with automation...

Ansible fits all the automation gaps that exist between all the different infrastructure tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am not sure, have they open sourced something i can even use

<comment><USER27> [https://github.com/ansible/awx](https://github.com/ansible/awx)

<comment><USER25> Right but it's not clear how to deploy this

<comment><USER28> The second sentence on that repository's readme is

> To install AWX, please view the Install guide.

which links to an installation guide[0] with information on setting it up with OpenShift or Docker.

I'm not sure what part isn't clear.

[0]: [https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/devel/INSTALL.md](https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/devel/INSTALL.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I worked on setting up ansible for running a setup playbook on our new virtualised dev environments complete with VirtualBox bugs. Ansible has been a bit of a pita for me to set up. Try pulling in a git repo with it. It fails and does not even tell you what is up. Helpful error messages anyone? Maybe this tower could help debug some issues. Although it is basically more added complexity. I don't really understand the advantage over running a normal script either, but it was not really my idea. Somehow my team thinks they should not listen when I say something sucks and listen to this rude kid who likes to talk fast, likes to interrupt and call themselves the best ever instead. I might not look cool and my ways are not the latest in cool tech, but I sure as f am experienced and know things. It will be the others problem soon enough I guess. Maybe the advantage is that you get to run it on all servers at the same time. Not that this is a big one when you have like two. Oh well. I guess I'm not quite done with this software until my team realizes maybe I'm not entirely bullshit when I say we should use simple scripts or go straight to docker. Maybe this tower thing can help debug the mess.

<comment><USER13> Strange, [http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/git_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/git_module.html) is pretty robust. If you haven't already, try running the playbook with -vvv to get extra debug info printed. You might be running in to a (possibly obscure) local or remote SSH permission issue.

You can use ansible.verbose="vvvv" if you're calling the play via vagrant's ansilbe provisioner.

<comment><USER29> Of course I tried -vvv and -vvvv. That did not tell me anything for this issue. I also tried the option where you get a bunch of python scripts. That told me a lot more than I wanted to know. The obvious option of seeing which commands it has run and their in and output just does not seem to be in there.

<comment><USER13> No idea then, sorry. The only time the git module has failed with me is due to me fucking up my SSH settings in a convoluted environment (SSH Agent on windows workstation -> ansible controller on vagrant ubuntu box -> remote AWS bastion -> repo host with a very restrictive sshd config).

In that case, running ansible verbosely gave enough info to point me in the direction of fixing what was wrong with my ssh setup (can't remember now what it was).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sets in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lEjuU-XFHg <comment><USER2> As an OSX user, I'm jealous. I'm using Station right now, but this looks like a nice way to group apps/browser tabs together into different functional areas (work project 1, 2, home project 1, side project 1, 2) with different Sets.</comment>


Serelo – Easily find and list a rental property anywhere in the world - <AUTHOR> http://serelo.co/

<comment><USER2> Show HN is explicitly not for email signups. You have to have something for people to try now.

Please read the rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.makefive.com

<comment><USER2> If you haven't researched this company already .... <http://www.rateitall.com/>

Had a friend interning there this summer. The business model is essentially exactly what you guys are going after. I think it's a pretty smart model actually, but you'll have to work out how your product stands out from theirs.

On a side note, I think the "if you have a brain that is" comment is too condescending for me. I think HN users will understand that humor but you are going after commonfolk! Or maybe I'm just reading into it too much ..eh!

<comment><USER3> I too agree with the "if you have a brain that is" being too condescending. You have to note that humor is also culturally very specific and varies across demographics. What you think of humor may not always work. (I, for example, did not find it in good taste though I did understand that it was intended to be humorous).

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken--we're often a little too casual with our remarks and approach. Could be something for us to be a little more careful with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The featured five on the homepage moves way too fast. It switched when I was still reading.

Beyond that, interesting site. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks--we'll look at slowing that down a notch! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Top N lists get submitted to digg and reddit all the time. The comments for those are always filled with people hating on top N lists, but they wouldn't get to the front page without people enjoying them. I think a site like this could go far in terms of popularity. But the lists I always found MOST interesting had a lot of text supporting each item. I'd make sure that this is possible for people to really get what they want out of a top N list, more than needing to click on an item to get a description.

Also, maybe something about the ordering of the lists. All the lists I've seen so far go 1,2,3,4,5, and then runners up. What about 5,4,3,2,1? Kind of builds up the suspense. :) I might just not have looked enough about this one, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I think it's something to do with the definitive seeming nature of lists, coupled with the need to keep them succinct that's appealing to many. (That being said, I'm of the generation that was excited to watch the top 20 countdown on MTV in the eighties.) We too would like to see more content on the pages, in part to add to how much readers can get from a topic; additionally, it would be great to get the density up for SEO.

The challenge for us is to find a way to collect this content, while appreciating the fact that many users don't want to do much more than click a single button. (I still appreciate what the folks at "Hot or Not" did by reducing the entire site to a one click navigation system.)

As such, our first approach was to reduce the barriers to entry, by cutting things out. In fact, our first iterations of the site had relatively exhaustive voting and content options. We found that most people avoided voting altogether as a result, or skipped adding the content. As such, we kept removing things and refining them until we found that people felt it was easy to click on something. (It seems that once the user now partakes in even a single list, they find that it relatively easy and as such start to get involved in others.)

We're now looking at how to include extended content, and our approach is to center this on the individual. They can list their thoughts on selections, and then maintain an area for themselves alone. As such, they can make relatively personal explanations for their selections, while still being able to include the community in their list. (We're hoping to roll this out early next week.)

We're looking at retooling our points system in tandem with this roll-out. In our minds, it would seem appropriate to reward those who add more content and thoughtful reviews of things. In the meanwhile, this leads us to eventually adding local components that would allow for more in-depth reviews of restaurants and the like.

So much to do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What problem does this thing solve that I would pay money to have solved?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. It gives people a place for dialogue Lists allow for a quick way to exchange ideas. You can skim a topic, make your picks, and then debate with others. It's a fun way to get a discussion going.

2\. It helps brands reach their audience We can stitch brands and advertising into the site in ways that connect with interested parties. (i.e. Dell could sponsor the Technology category for a month and build thought provoking contests around their brand.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like a cool project.

What's your business model? Ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's our thought right now. We're really concentrating on just getting users for the time being. Later, we're hoping to sell branded placement and sponsorships for companies who want connect with specific groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not working for me. I am trying to access it from the Philippines so it can be just me though. Other websites working fine at the moment.

<comment><USER9> Sorry to hear that. If you have a moment, please give it another try and let me know if you run into trouble again. Be great to know if we're are having access problems from certain locations.

<comment><USER8> Retried now, and did once got the header of the page down. After that failed again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like a fun social site, seems more like a possible facebook application than its own site though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have a facebook app as well. It's still pretty basic, but you can find it here: <http://www.facebook.com/applications/MakeFive/16756537785>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.5ives.com/> for the masses.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like those. I wish we could get him on MakeFive as a celebrity list maker. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me, it's on the boring side...doesn't have much on a webforum.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting that you say that. It seems that people who use it tend to get rather addicted, with some online for eight-hour stretches and such. That being said, it could be that the fun of it doesn't translate that well on a first glance yet.

One thing that we're working on aggressively is the ability for users to showcase specific lists they've created as a bigger part of their profile. Our feeling is that this may help us better appeal to the individual who likes to broadcast what they think. (i.e. blog as personal diary, Twitter for brief snippets, MakeFive as a way to list all of the things they love/hate, etc.)

Are there specific things that turned you off about the site?

<comment><USER12> I prefer discussion and elaboration to simple lists, so a site that shares abbreviated opinions to me is a poor man's forum. Again, this applies to me only, and I know that the internet by its breadth fosters simple, microscopic content.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you and I feel that this is something that we haven't quite remedied yet.

The nice part with the brief lists is that it allows almost anyone an easy entry point to a discussion. Plus, the nature of these list forces users to condense their choices, which we feel is helpful. (It does make the site nice to browse and information easy to digest.)

But as I noted, we do recognize the need to make the dialogue more involved. The element that we're adding next week asks users to explain why they made their selections, which we're hoping adds to the amount of content as well as the depth of conversation.

For some this won't appeal at all; however, for people as obsessive and particular as me, it will be nice to compile my list of the best entrepreneurial books I've ever read, alongside extended notes on why I enjoyed them. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bill O'Reilly is the 3rd most evil American?

Heh heh heh...

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to see that he beat out the E-Harmony Pitch Guy. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> \- that pink flicking slideshow makes me feel rather sick

<comment><AUTHOR> It's certainly a powerful element. We toyed with toning it down a little, but reasoned that most would only be on the homepage for a moment. (It doesn't recur throughout the site.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> i don't think you can call this a "startup."

<comment><AUTHOR> How so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't every other submission to reddit or digg a top 5/10/20 list already?

From what I can see people visit the list and discuss on reddit/digg.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. In fact, we're pretty interested in seeing how we can tie MakeFive into other sites. If it turns out that the content our users create gets discussed on Digg/Reddit, or another site for that matter, all the better. (That just means more traffic to MakeFive, which makes us happy!)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how to find HN user's submissions sorted by newest - <AUTHOR>

Is there a way to find all the newest submissions from a particular user? For example:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11 but sorted by newest. <comment><USER2> It _is_ sorted by newest, is it not? Certainly that page has the newest at the top and they progress in strict chronological order.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. Duh. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey man that is actually sorted by date..take a second glance.</comment>


25% of Students Say College Loans Have Impacted Their Career Choices - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/06/25/tuition-debt-impacts-25-of-students-career-choices/

<comment><USER2> What's the average tuition fee in a typical US college/university year?

The UK was about £3300, now under roughly £7000.

<comment> daniel-cussen Like 50,000 USD. About £31300.

<comment><USER3> _"Private nonprofit four-year colleges charge, on average, $27,293 per year in tuition and fees"_ [1]

And that's just the private schools. The public schools are considerably cheaper: ~8k USD for in-state students and ~12k for external students. 50k USD is the full prize for the top private schools like Stanford or the Ivy League. Imagine how expensive some schools would have to be for the average to come out at 50k USD.

[1]: <http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be interesting to see a study focused on student debt and decision making around founding a startup or diving into entrepreneurship. On the one hand, those who graduate without a lot of loans would be financially enabled to dive into e'ship. On the other hand, loans might actually influence and be a driving factor for recent graduates who couldn't land jobs to create their own businesses.

<comment><USER5> but that is micro-business formation where there debt load is not a penalty due to the low costs of setting up a micro-business, vastly different from a start-up where debt load is a penalty factor

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Graduating with enormous debt forces a lot of kids into jobs they don't want, assuming they can get hired at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> I honestly thought about this, back then when stock market had 'predictable returns.' Imagine $100K ($25k X4) in a retirement account for 40 years.

<comment><USER8> At 6% APR after 40 years it would be over $1 MM.

<comment><USER9> Discount that $1M with 40 years of inflation to give some idea of what the purchasing power might be and it doesn't look _quite_ so impressive.

<comment><USER8> Let's use historical data instead of back of the envelope guesswork.

Over the last 40 years (1970-2010) the average S&P 500 return has been 11.61%, while inflation has been 4.4%. Past performance not necessarily but usually predicting future performance, but, with those rates...

Over the next 40 years $100k would grow to $8.1 MM in future bucks, or $1.45 MM in 2011 dollars.

<http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm> for returns, [http://www.moneychimp.com/articles/econ/inflation_calculator...](http://www.moneychimp.com/articles/econ/inflation_calculator.htm) for inflation, and <http://apps.finra.org/Calcs/1/Savings> for savings calculations.

<comment><USER9> Somehow I don't expect the next 40 years to look a lot like the last 40 years.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMP Adds Support for Server-Side Rendering - <AUTHOR> https://blog.amp.dev/2019/08/07/faster-amp-on-the-origin-amp-ssr/ <comment><USER2> The beautiful irony is in how many seconds it took this blog post to load. At least five or six seconds.

<comment><USER3> It took 8 seconds on my Firefox mobile... also on the second reload.

<comment><USER4> Google's AMP code creates an intentional 8-second delay if you're blocking their tracking scripts. Could be that.

<comment><USER3> Lol, thanks - didnt know that. Then that's very probably the case here as I'm of course blocking their stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is Google pushing this crap so hard? It can't be just because of "speed". Can it?

<comment><USER6> Control.

Control gives you all the options to make the future you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sad to see Next.js supporting AMP.

</comment><comment><USER8> Now there is Angular 1, Angular 2+, material design lite,material design not- lite, Polymer1+2, Polymer3, lit-html, Flutter and AMP. What is the main purpose for google producing all these often competing and proprietary frameworks?

</comment><comment><USER9> No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER10> But why?

<comment><USER11> embrace extend extinguish

Google is using the old Microsoft strategy</comment></comment>


Peter Norvig's Address at the UC Berkeley Computer Science Commencement (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/speech.html

<comment><USER2> The top two increases to GDP are inflation and population growth. Adjust for both of them and your looking at ~2.5x growth over the fifty years from 1960 - 2010 which is about 2% growth per year.

PS: 2000-2010 it's flat to slightly negative despite better technology.

<comment><USER3> What's your calculation to adjust for both?

from 2000 to 2010, nominal GDP increased by 45% (from $9.9T to $14.4T), or 3.8% annually

[http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTableHtml.cfm?reqid=9&step=3&...](http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTableHtml.cfm?reqid=9&step=3&isuri=1&910=X&911=0&903=5&904=2000&905=2010&906=A)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "serve others", can't figure out exactly his intention by sayin' that but it's a quite weird statement, IMO.

My opinion is: do what you want, if that pleases you, great! If that pleases even more people, greater!

<comment><USER5> It's clearly stated that he's quoting Franklin -- "America's first great scientist."

Here are some other statements about Franklin from Wikipedia which might illuminate the meaning (and maybe Norvig's assessment of the quote's relevance to computer science, information retrieval and Google):

 _Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self- governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat."[3] To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."_

 _Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote,_ "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

 _His inventions also included social innovations, such as paying forward. Franklin's fascination with innovation could be viewed as altruistic; he wrote that his scientific works were to be used for increasing efficiency and human improvement. One such improvement was his effort to expedite news services through his printing presses._

<comment><USER6> Great comment.

Everyone should read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_F...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_Franklin)

Many good quotes and lessons therein.</comment></comment></comment>


Intro to Social Hacking: How we lowered our cancellation rate by 90% - <AUTHOR> http://blog.joingrouper.com/intro-to-social-hacking-how-we-lowered-our-ca <comment><USER3> This reminds me of a really funny image I saw recently. It depicted the perceived consequences of a status update against the "reality". At the top, Obama was presenting to a cheering crowd and just below, Tom Hanks sat marooned on an island screaming desperately at his inanimate volleyball. It's easy to feel like the master of the universe when the whole world is there to cheer for you through digitally mediated approval metrics. But people are not toys sitting idly to provide us a convenient hit of oxytocin when we need it. It's crucial to be reminded of that! Providing a number to call someone and apologize for bailing on them is a spark of genius. Using all this digital stuff should enrich interactions in meatspace, rather than allow us to decouple from it. Bravo!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Really well put.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I rarely upvote things to boomark them, but this is exactly the kind of thing that I like to read about.

We are building a platform for groups of people come together, kind of like grouper does for 3 guys and 3 girls, but a different approach. And psychology is a huge part of it! Making people want to do what you want them to do, or not want to do what you don't want them to do, is an art. But it is also a science, and there should be some sort of knowledge base of psychological tactics, in social apps or otherwise.

Anyone know of anything like that?

<comment><USER5> There is a reason there is no Knowledge base of psychological tactics in social apps or otherwise. It's because those that really understand people and these tactics appreciate how valuable it really is and more importantly know how to make you want to throw gobs of money at them for this information!!!

Here is what I can tell you without getting in trouble. People take action because of emotional reasons, and justify that decision with logic and "objective" reasons to defend their decision to others.

Every single thing you want your users to do is causing them pain. They do not want to click... Before they do even the simplest thing possible, they will rack their brain for excuses to not do it and avoid the pain you created for them. Your job is to make it MORE PAINFUL NOT TO TAKE ACTION!!!

There are two ways to do this. (you should do both) 1\. Make the process as painless as possible. 2\. remind them and aggravate the pain that led them to your app in the first place.

Make sure your messaging not only hits on the emotional triggers at play and focuses on the benefits, not the features... (People buy the hole, not the drill) but more importantly gives them the tools to defend their action to their friends and everyone else who they need to defend the decision to. \</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

You should read Napoleon Hill's book "Think and Grow Rich," if you read it carefully, you will see it is literally a bible of understanding human nature and the world, etc...

Here is a slightly relevant excerpt and list from the book, "The 10 Mind Stimuli. The stimuli to which the mind responds most freely are:

1\. The Desire For Sex Expression 2\. Love 3\. A Burning Desire for fame, power, financial gain, money... 4\. Music 5\. Friendship between either those of the same sex or those of the opposite sex. 6\. A Master Mind Alliance based upon the harmony of two or more people who ally themselves for spiritual or temporal advancement. 7\. Mutual Suffering, such as that experienced by people who are persecuted. 8\. Autosuggestion 9\. Fear 10\. Narcotics and Alcohol.

I hope this helps... Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> For what it's worth, anyone who liked this post would probably really like this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online- Communities...](http://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communities- Evidence-Based/dp/0262016575)

<comment><USER7> They would like a book that hasn't been released yet?

<comment><USER6> All the chapters are available for free on Bob Kraut's website, I didn't realize that the book hadn't come out yet.

<comment><USER8> Link for the lazy: <http://kraut.hciresearch.org/content/books>

<comment><USER9> Supplementary material: the Onlinesmanship WIki <http://onlinemanship.wikia.com/wiki/Onlinemanship>

Curated by Theresa Neilsen Hayden, who at one time modded comments at BoingBoing. As a former forum mod myself, I can attest that there are LOTs of great crowd-hacking insights here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hahaha! I love the "don't click the hook" image on your web site. Brilliant! Did you guys create that yourselves or is that some sort of plugin?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha thanks!

We hand-rolled it with jQuery and a hook image from iStockPhoto (what can we say, we couldn't avoid the the easy fish pun), but if people are interested we could release it as a jQuery plug-in.

<comment><USER11> I think using too many fish/aquatic puns is unhealthy psychologically. You otter look into finding someone who can kelp you with this issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great solution _and_ great job on making sure they're not getting each others phone numbers!

</comment><comment><USER13> Let this be a lesson: not all your problems can be solved by code. Sometimes you need to take a step back and think about the root cause of the problem. Often times (as well as in Grouper's example), the solution is to reconstruct your model so that your incentives and/or consequences are clearer to your users.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is so smart! A lot of tech is awesome but lets never forget that its humans with actual psychologies using the technology. These users face social pressures to be upstanding and responsible like we all do in real life - <USER2> online is not an excuse for bad behavior - this is a great example of the merger b/w virtual and real lives.

Seems like LinkedIn pioneered this, HN also does this to a great degree, but now Grouper is taking it to the next level as it holds you responsible for your online actions offline.

The wheels are turning in my head about ways to leverage people's desire to manage their personal brand into a mutually beneficial situation for all parties involved. Good job Waxman! You might have stumbled upon something profound here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Abbas!

We're actually soon going to roll out a big, new feature that will take this notion to the next level. We're really excited about it. Stay tuned...

<comment><USER15> I really like this idea as well. Are you pitching it as a dating site or just as a group of people to hang out with? Making it groups, in my mind, takes away a lot of the stigma of online dating websites, though I wonder what you gender breakdown is like - do you have many groups of men compared to women? Is there a wait time before a night can be organised?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazing. And it totally makes sense. Congrats on using clever thinking to improve a very important metric for your business :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> i dig how you changed the cancellation process, because it encourages ppl to do what your app is intended to do - get groups of 3 together in real life. your old policy was giving incentives for your core mission NOT to happen. i wonder how your service plans to thrive in nyc, where a similar service - ignighter - had to go to india to really succeed. would love to hear your thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've visited the website and I'm confused: are Facebook-less creatures unable to partake in the service? Wouldn't that be kind of weird?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, @weff.

Right now we require Facebook, because we heavily rely on the graph to match groups while requiring minimal work from our members. For instance, we want to make sure the two groups don't already know each other, and we haven't figured out a good way to replicate this functionality without Facebook (e.g. "tell us all the people you know!")

If you have any ideas, though, we'd love to hear them.

<comment><USER19> This is one of the very few fair reasons to use facebook. However, I would have liked to see the explanation in the website (why only facebook?) and a stronger wording telling what you will and won't do with facebook. You're saying "We won't post on your behalf" but you don't say anything about what you will do. You might not post on my facebook, but you might be looking through my messages; that kind of thing is unfortunately the hallmark of facebook itself. Without an explanation, a facebook-only site looks very fishy. (heh)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So you give the canceller the 3 phone numbers of the other 3 people? I'm not sure if I'd want my number to be given away...

Or do you use another number that temporarily redirects/connects them to the other people anonymously? If so, I'm curious to know how you do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's definitely not their real a number. We built a simple Twilio app.

<comment><USER21> IMO, I'd highlight that its actually not their phone number rather its a Twilio number etc which is used to call them up.

So I would change:

      we would give you a number for the other group, and YOU WOULD CALL THEM (not us) TO APOLOGIZE.

To something like:

      we would give you a number for the other group which does not reveal their actual phone number, and YOU WOULD CALL THEM (not us) TO APOLOGIZE.

The reason for this, is if users read your company blog it may put them off when/if they read it as, I immediately assumed that their number is be given out which could lead to confusion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed! Good call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really great article and solution!

This is a company I would invest in today. These guys know the game and are playing it accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Did overall Groupers scheduled also go down once people realized they couldn't cancel without having to do it themselves? also, is the no-show rate still 0.2% after implementing this policy? I find it hard to believe these other metrics didn't move at least a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very cool! What happens if a group just does not show up?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's extremely rare (see above), but when it does happen we do everything we can to make it up to the other group (free drinks, free Groupers, profuse apologies, etc.) and lay down the law on the other group (including removing them from the community).

<comment><USER25> Have you sought statistics for no-shows that aren't reported. There's a general prohibition against reporting other people's failings particularly when trying to appear warm and accommodating.

Not sure how you'd do it except perhaps as an exit question for people leaving your community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> nice post, Wax. can't wait to go on one come the summer!

</comment><comment><USER27> Brilliant integration, Waxman!

</comment><comment><USER28> Cancellations through the service went down, but did actual cancellations (as in, the person just doesn't show) go down?

If you make it harder to cancel you're relying even more heavily on the integrity or conscience of the cancelling party to notify the other group members of their desire to cancel. 90% seems like a really drastic decrease which is why I bring this up.

<comment><AUTHOR> We call these "no-shows" and, fortunately our no-show rate is less than 0.2%. In other words, both groups show up more than 99.8% of the time.

This will likely be the topic of a future blog post...

<comment><USER29> Just a hypothesis, but is this because users are committing in groups of 3? I bet no-shows would increase if you paired groups of 2 or 1.</comment></comment></comment>