The Dropout Fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/how_failure_breeds_success/2014/05/peter_thiel_drop_out_grant_encouraging_students_to_stop_out_of_college.html <comment><USER3> The whole point of an "education" is to learn how to learn. Some master that without coursework. More power to them. These days, a college degree has become more a certificate in training of specific domains of knowledge. If you can do it yourself, you probably will get a broader and potentially deeper understanding of the subject than you would in a structured course. Getting an employer to recognize that is another story. Since there are not concrete metrics to measure such accomplishment, degrees act as a proxy for potential worth to an organization. This is a unfortunate situation, and wastes a great deal of potential.

<comment><USER4> This. Education should teach you to become an autodidact [1]. Otherwise, you are really only being trained for a narrow set of skills, and those skills may not last when new technology is invented.

I was always curious and hungry for knowledge as a kid, but what I lacked was the knowledge of where I can find more knowledge (the libraries in my childhood were crap; the most complex computer book was how to use Office). It wasn't until university that I realized how to research things and find the best resources to learn that I truly was able to teach myself. That happened at the end of my 3rd year of university, and my 4th year was spent barely attending class and instead teaching myself the required material on my own time, while I was also learning about things not taught in class.

edit: Argh, clicked submit too soon. added second paragraph.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism)

<comment><USER5> I don't think autodidactism can be taught. You either have it or you don't. I like to think I have it, I taught myself software development and now have a career in it despite dropping of college after a year. I'm constantly reading books and improving the quality of my thought. College was interminably boring to me, I did not consider anything I did there to be learning. That's why I dropped out.

I don't know very many people who can do this. Most people I know, once they're out of school, learning stops. It's not that they can't learn anymore, it's that the impetus to do so ceases once they're outside an environment designed to facilitate it. I, and I suspect most autodidacts, have to leave said environment before I can really get engaged.

<comment><USER6> You might be looking at it from the wrong angle. What if we're all intrinsically autodidacts and 12-16+ years of compulsory education successfully trains that quality out of most people?

It's probably not a coincidence that those willing to go against the grain with respect to education seem to be disproportionately represented among the successful entrepreneurial class.

This entire discussion reminds me of the "mappers" vs "packers" theory. It's a bit long winded but a good read:

[http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-th...](http://the- programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-thinking-about-thinking/)

<comment><USER5> > What if we're all intrinsically autodidacts and 12-16+ years of compulsory > education successfully trains that quality out of most people?

It's possible that is the case. I don't think it's by any means proven. But all of the autodidacts I've ever read about, and known, myself included, managed to be able to completely ignore the effects of compulsory education and forge ahead despite active discouragement from society.

Simply removing the compulsory aspects of education is, as far as I can tell, not going to be able to create this sort of resiliency, even if it improves the ability to learn. Perhaps they won't need it, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is sad when people latch on to a narrative and then try to visualize themselves as part of it without asking the really difficult questions.

College is a great tool. You get to mix with other really smart people in a much higher density than you were exposed to in high school. If you visited a number of colleges you may have been recruited by a college that seeks your particular flavor of intelligence and in that you might find many more people like "you" there.

Mostly though college is a great place where you can do something (get a degree) without really anyone except your own desire to finish forcing you through it, and in the presence of numerous temptations to _not_ finish it. Its like the final walk over coals at a volunteer self awareness session.

 _" Can you do what you set out to do, in the face of other people trying to tell you it isn't important or dangling other more tempting activities in front of you?"_

A college degree is a reasonably objective and authenticated 'yes you can' to that question. And anyone who can answer that question in the affirmative will be better off than someone who cannot.

It isn't college that makes you employable, its knowing you can finish what you start does. If you already are doing that for large things you will be successful with our without a degree.

<comment><USER8> I think that college is great. But also, I think it can also be somewhat dangerous to one's ability to think for oneself. There is always one and only correct answer, and there is an authority figure who knows what it is. University culture promotes reading and learning without taking action and making real impact. It also encourages that you seek to be told what is right and what is wrong, instead of endeavoring to figure it out for yourself.

But I guess being a good employee requires a lot of those qualities that I mentioned above. You have to be a good follower.

No one is telling you college isn't important. The majority of the population actually thinks the opposite.

I don't think education is (or should be) about finishing and getting that degree. It should not even be about employability. Why does success equate to employability?

College is valuable, but I think society would be better off if we did not focus so much on jobs, status, success, failure, etc. Why not focus on how to create value or make the world a better place? These are things that a college education alone cannot teach you how to do.

<comment><USER7> I have to disagree with much of this comment

       > I think that college is great. But also, I think it
       > can also be somewhat dangerous to one's ability to think for oneself.
       > There is always one and only correct answer, and there is an authority
       > figure who knows what it is.

I find this assertion to be very surprising. In my experience college, unlike high school, the entire point was to get students thinking for themselves, rather than accepting that there was a single correct answer. In my freshman year, and in the freahman year of each of my three daughters, there was always a required class which included a "colloquium" or "discussion" component. These classes were designed to break students of the habit of treating what was said, or read, as 'the answer' and to instead think critically about the facts being tossed about.

       > University culture promotes reading and learning without
       > taking action and making real impact. It also encourages
       > that you seek to be told what is right and what is wrong,
       > instead of endeavoring to figure it out for yourself.

Again, my experience differs. Were I or my kids to discover that the University they were attending felt that way I would immediately withdraw into a more traditional institution of higher learning, which starts with the premise "everything we know may be false, here are the tools we use to understand truth in the world around us."

       > But I guess being a good employee requires a lot of those qualities
       > that I mentioned above. You have to be a good follower.

Again, I would disagree. As an employer I value employees who think over those to simply follow orders. One of the things I try to ascertain in interviewing folks is whether or they do think. Can they reason to their opinion on a topic or do they hold it simply because someone else shared it with them? My experience in high school was that many people held opinions because they were "cool" or "expected" rather than holding them because they believed in them. It was one of the most depressing parts of that period of my life and I was so relieved when I got to college that people weren't like that really.

       > College is valuable, but I think society would be better off if we did not
       > focus so much on jobs, status, success, failure, etc. Why not focus on how
       > to create value or make the world a better place? These are things that a
       > college education alone cannot teach you how to do.

One of the interesting statistics is we passed 30% of the US having a college degree in early 2012 [1]. So if 70% of the people in a group don't have college degrees, it is difficult to reason about whether or not 'society' would be better off or not. You could ask the 30% of degree holders how they evaluate creating value in society, you could ask the 70% the same question, and then you could ask which of those two groups has a better idea of what kinds of things make the world a better place.

But a different approach might give better answer. Ask those two groups this question, "How would you go about figuring out if what you were doing was helping the world be a better place?"

College prepares people to answer questions of that form, ones that require the student to not only come up with an answer, but to construct a process for arriving at the answer that gives them confidence in the result. No pre-made formula, no quick peek at Wikipedia, but basic reasoning from first principles.

I know several people who have that skill and did not go to college, but pretty much everyone who graduated from college had that skill tested many times and had to pass that test in order to graduate.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds- bac...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bachelors- degrees-at-record-level.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER8> >I find this assertion to be very surprising. In my experience college, unlike high school, the entire point was to get >students thinking for themselves, rather than accepting that there was a single correct answer. In my freshman year, and >in the freahman year of each of my three daughters, there was always a required class which included a "colloquium" or >"discussion" component. These classes were designed to break students of the habit of treating what was said, or read, as >'the answer' and to instead think critically about the facts being tossed about.

What is considered "thinking critically." How do you pass this class? Well, the nature of classes is that someone decides if you pass or not.

>Again, my experience differs. Were I or my kids to discover that the University they were attending felt that way I >would immediately withdraw into a more traditional institution of higher learning, which starts with the premise >"everything we know may be false, here are the tools we use to understand truth in the world around us."

This isn't actually a fact. Just your reaction. But it does not disprove anything. It is what you say you would do. And also, you seem to be exerting authority over your kids... I am being a bit pedantic, but you say if your kids discovered [...]then you would withdraw [...]

>Again, I would disagree. As an employer I value employees who think over those to simply follow orders. One of the >things I try to ascertain in interviewing folks is whether or they do think. Can they reason to their opinion on a >topic or do they hold it simply because someone else shared it with them? My experience in high school was that many >people held opinions because they were "cool" or "expected" rather than holding them because they believed in them. >It was one of the most depressing parts of that period of my life and I was so relieved when I got to college that >people weren't like that really.

You seem personally offended, if I am not mistaken. I meant that managers in giant corporations generally (not always) expect obedience from their subordinates. I know because I work at a big company. I have read stories and I see it being satirized all the time. Satire is funny because there is truth in it (even if it is just a hint of it).

>One of the interesting statistics is we passed 30% of the US having a college degree in early 2012 [1]. So if 70% of >the people in a group don't have college degrees, it is difficult to reason about whether or not 'society' would be >better off or not. You could ask the 30% of degree holders how they evaluate creating value in society, you could ask >the 70% the same question, and then you could ask which of those two groups has a better idea of what kinds of things >make the world a better place. >But a different approach might give better answer. Ask those two groups this question, "How would you go about >figuring out if what you were doing was helping the world be a better place?" >College prepares people to answer questions of that form, ones that require the student to not only come up with an >answer, but to construct a process for arriving at the answer that gives them confidence in the result. No pre-made >formula, no quick peek at Wikipedia, but basic reasoning from first principles. >I know several people who have that skill and did not go to college, but pretty much everyone who graduated from >college had that skill tested many times and had to pass that test in order to graduate.

If 30% of the population had college degrees, then maybe that just means that 30% of the population is just better than the other 70% at passing standardized tests. Does it mean that they made more value in the world? To say that you need college to answer the question "what would make the world a better place" may have been true 30 years ago. But now you have the internet. You can see what is happening around the world. You can venture out and look for problems to solve.

Again, with the passing of tests. Someone decides.

I am not hating against all colleges. I think MIT is great, because they let students build stuff. I chose to go to a above average college (it's not ivy league, but it is more or less well-regarded. I am not trying to be stuck up. I did not even want to go to college. I forced myself. I was lazy and did not want to study SAT. But I definitely am a lot smarter than I was without, but I can't say what I would have turned out to be if I had not gone. I liked reading about business so I may have stumbled upon YCombinator earlier if I weren't so busy studying textbooks).

There is a difference between giving a verbal answer about how to change the world and actually implementing it. The latter is far, far more difficult. College teaches you how to say the right answer, how to think about what could be the right answer. To actually build the solution with your hands comes from internal motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's odd that the article just drops this figure and then moves on:

> In 2011, Forbes reported that 63 of the 400 richest people in the world > never got further than high school.

That's a really interesting number! Of the richest of the rich, all but 16% have a college degree. Among the general population of adults, 40% have a college degree in the US, and under 7% worldwide. If the richest of the rich followed the same proportion, we'd expect 240 of those 400 to have stopped at high school for the US number, or 372 for the worldwide number.

Clearly there is an extremely strong link between extreme wealth and higher education. We can argue causality and necessity, but it's weird to blow right past such a number.

<comment><USER10> I thought this was a weird omission too, it means that 337/400 of the richest people have gone further than high school and presented that way, it makes a strong argument for higher education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a college dropout myself, I don't think I've ever used this ridiculous "argument" to justify my decision. Are there seriously people out there who fancy themselves "The next Mark Zuckerberg", simply because they don't have a degree?

<comment><USER12> I dropped out too, and while I was perhaps reassured by the fact that successful people had been able to make it without college, really I just fucking hated sitting in school all day.

There are plenty of reasons to drop out beyond "wanting to be Zuckerberg." How about "not wanting $100,000 of debt?" or "Prefering to be paid for my work?"

College just isn't for some people. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing.

<comment><USER13> disclosure: i'm not american

i dropped out because i started college when i was 22. i was already working as a developer for 4 years.

when i got to college, it was more of the same and i was basically learning a lot of things that i already knew -- so for me, it was better to focus on working than working + going to college.

it worked quite well in my case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe a better question to ask is, "What is success?" We tend to focus on the trappings / assets of success - title, salary, neighborhood, spouse - <USER2> neglecting the liabilities - stress, debts, time demands.

And granted, we fetishize outliers such as Gates, but we also fetishize by an order of magnitude greater the "American Dream Death March" that begins once some authority figure identifies an aptitude which might become a prestigious / high-paying job in the future.

Slate, here's a clue - if the education racket weren't so predatory, the Dropout Fallacy wouldn't have so many fans.

</comment><comment><USER15> Conjecture: the point of Thiel Fellowships isn't to bribe everyone to stop attending universities, it is to combat elitism and education-based stratification of society.

Thiel specifically picked "safe bets" from elite universities (most of which are extremely flexible when it comes to students returning to finish their degrees after the fellowship) to demonstrate that elite university graduates' success is not due to the fact that they've graduated from said universities, but due to other factors (intelligence, grit, curiosity, etc..)

That in turn will make traditional employers think twice before turning someone away because at 17 years of age an admission officer (who, of course, knows nothing about the employer's industry or the position the candidate is applying for) looked at myriads of factors on their application (most of them irrelevant to the employer's industry) and decided -- with a very different acceptable margin of error and optimizing for very different goals -- that they should attend their state's flag-ship public university as opposed to Stanford. Most startups and younger established technology firms already know this: while they may only send recruiters to specific campuses, as well as form partnership with only a handful programs (like the Waterloo co-op program, for example), once one has been in the industry for a few years, all else being equal, the university they've attended matters very little. The _quality_ of education they've received matters -- but how they've received it doesn't; this may be obvious to many of us, yet if you speak to someone in another field or industry and a different picture emerges.

I see messaging as fairly clear in that Thiel isn't telling a 20 year old me (a first generation immigrant working on BS degree in CS/Math without taking any loans) or a 23 year old me (having an employer pay part of my tuition for an MS degree in CSE, again, without any loans on my part) to drop out: I was seeking a degree for the purpose of (wait for it...!) education and not signalling, I chose a field of study I both love and that had great career prospects, and I did not go into debt. On the other hand, he is telling society that "attending an elite school for the purpose of signalling" should not be considered an investment that can never lose its value.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it succeeds in that goal at all. All it does is replace elite- university signalling with fellowship-winning signalling.

(And since most of the Thiel kids are from elite universities anyways, it's not even really removing that factor.)

YCombinator does the same thing, incidentally. It's more valuable as a stamp of approval that somebody influential is impressed by you than it is for the actual money or support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I dropped out, not to avoid education, but to seek it out in different ways. It's been a year since and I've found employment that is as good, or better, than I would have coming out of a traditional university.

It wasn't about becoming the next Gates, it was about getting educated in a way that made me a more valuable team member. I just felt like I could do it better than the universities could.

</comment><comment><USER17> Author chooses the examples of Gates and Zuckerberg, who are both Harvard dropouts, substitutes Harvard with "any college", and then viciously attacks this straw man.

Top tier schools and rest of the schools produce different dropouts. Someone who was deemed fit to enter Harvard (or any of the top 20 school), was good enough to survive the first few year(s) and then decided to pursue an idea of their lifetime is actually taking _less_ risk than someone who got into a local college and then decided to forego the actual degree.

Both Gates and Zuckerberg were actually on a "leave" from Harvard with option to come back in case the things don't work out. Both of them had enough of a financial cushion to focus on building the company without repo man taking their car away and kicking them out of an apartment for defaulting on a rent payment.

</comment><comment><USER18> This whole conversation is so stupid. Dropping out isn't the same thing for everyone. You really can't talk about dropping out without looking at context and consequences, namely why and how they dropped out and the options that are available to them afterward.

I mean, say you're a kid from an upper middle-class family who's parents are paying for your education at some top-tier college, and you drop out because you have a startup that's growing and making money or got funded by some deep- pocketed investors. Or you're a genius who's been recognized as such by one of the world's most famous and well-connected venture capitalists and given a grant to go off and do something entrepreneurial.

Then you REALLY CAN'T FAIL. Say your company goes belly-up. Who cares? The school doesn't care, you just go back to class and your parents start paying tuition again. You graduate with your degree, except now you have valuable experience and connections that help you get internships and jobs and maybe funding for your next startup.

You dropped out because you had a plan and a social and financial safety net that meant you had meaningful choices about your future. Dropping out was taking a shortcut, the life equivalent of jumping over the edge on Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64. If you make it, you're hugely ahead! And if you don't, well you get picked up and put back on your original path and maybe you're a little behind but really it's no big deal.

Now think about an alternative scenario. You're a low income kid who was the first in your family to go to college. You're working 20 hours a week because your student loans cover tuition but nothing else at the giant-ass state school you go to. Your parents (you're one of the lucky ones whose family stayed together) are cheering for you but they're also laid-off and unemployment is running out and they're not sure how they're going to pay for dad's pills and anyway they're not sure you're cut out to be in college and they're worried you'll fail. So you drop out because you're struggling in some of your classes, and the shift manager at work offered you more hours and you say why the fuck not because the extra cash can't hurt.

What do you think your options are when that company cuts back and lets you go in a year or two? Think you've saved enough after paying down the interest on your loans that you can go back to school and not work? Think that 2 years of credits and work experience at a dead end job is going to translate into a high-paying position at some solid company?

The point is, if you have a specific plan in which dropping out will advance your career and life interests and also have enough of a backup that you can recover from failure, then you should totally take a break and go do something exciting.

If you don't, if a college degree is your lifeline to a better life than your parents' and you're skating on a razor's edge to be there in the first place, then just Stay In School, kid.

And now the rest of you stop debating the value of finishing college as if it meant the same thing to everyone and get off my lawn. Go back to work.

<comment><USER19> Zuckerberg, Gates, Gaga, and Dell all had upper class parents and attended exclusive private high schools. Jobs was brilliantly smart but did come from a lower class family. Oprah comes from a very poor background and did make it successful. However she works in a completely different industry so I don't think it's at all fair to compare her to the tech folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >> The sad reality is that for every person who drops out and achieves great success, far more do not.

Also accurate: The sad reality is that for every person who finishes college and achieves great success, far more do not.

There's also a major sampling bias here, in that "all dropouts" includes those who dropped out because of laziness or similar reasons, rather than just those who dropped out because they found the cost of a degree to be far greater than it's value. Also, the cultural premium put on college degrees likely encourages many who could easily be successful as a dropout to finish anyway.

There's a false argument here: the question isn't whether everyone should drop out or go to college, but whether or not there are cases where going to college is not the best decision (which is empirically true).

</comment><comment><USER21> If college really isn't for you then so be it, it's your decision. But dropping out because these famous people did it is really stupid. For every one dropout who turns into Gates, there are thousands who go hungry every night (anecdotal, yes, but I know at least two).

Dropping out != a path to success in its own right. The reason these famous dropouts are successful is because they were either intelligent and worked hard, or they got lucky (iirc, Zuckerberg only dropped out _after_ he had a viable product, so that should hardly count).

It seems to me that the media is pitching dropping out of college as a magic pill. If you're ready to put your head down and work your butt off then more power to you, but getting out of school isn't even half of step one.

<comment><USER22> > there are thousands who go hungry every night.

Hyperbole much? I don't think a single person ever went hungry because they didn't get a piece of paper that says they're super duper smart.

<comment><USER21> As I said in my post, it's anecdotal yes, but I know at least two people who are in this situation.

Take one of them for example: She can't afford to eat every night. She can't get a good job in this economy, and she's got debts from the portion of college she did attend that are weighing her down. The loan providers aren't going to forgive those debts just because she didn't finish.

But yes, I knew someone was going to call me out on hyperbole as soon as I posted that. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the vast majority certainly don't become humongously successful like we are being led to believe they will.

<comment><USER8> She probably should not have gone to college in the first place if she had to take out a large amount of debt.

She doesn't sound like a Gates or a Zuckerberg. They voluntarily dropped out of college because they knew there was something better they could pursue. Did she drop out because she had a business idea or did she burn out? There is a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To start off on a tangent...

I often wonder if the 'Like' button and its kin subconsciously encourage thinking in terms of false dilemmas?

As several others have pointed out this question and so many others in life come down to 'It depends' yet the lobbying for one definitive stance or the other goes on endlessly.

I consider myself a high school dropout success, but I'd be hard pressed to recommend that anyone follow in my footsteps. Also, I'm now persuing a degree online, nearly 20 years later.

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't it a fallacy to say that the correlation between dropouts and decreased success means there's a definitive link between them specifically? It's easy to imagine that people going through a very rough period wound up dropping out as a result, but that the dropping out is not what put them into a bad spot in the first place.

<comment> loup-vaillant While correlation isn't causation, it is certainly _evidence_ for causation.

Plus, in many cases, careful analysis alone can reveal the presence (or absence) of causation with great certainty.

<comment><USER25> Correlation is not evidence for causation.

<comment><USER26> Why do you say that? It seems clear to me it is. Do you disagree that A being caused by B usually means A and B correlated[0]? That's all that's necessary to say correlation is evidence for causation.

0: I know there are some exceptions, but they seem rare. [http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26300/does- causatio...](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26300/does-causation- imply-correlation)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Download Visual Studio 2019 Preview - <AUTHOR> https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/preview/ <comment><USER2> Looks like there's a feature to one click format a project! Woohoo!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think is the current best Go webframework and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER7> Without making grand pronouncements about The Right Way, I at least get why the Go community shies away from all-inclusive frameworks after years of using Django. An all-inclusive framework is super helpful for getting started quickly, but the way its components can be deeply tied with each other can make life tricky when you want to do some things that weren't quite what the framework authors envisioned. If you glued the components together yourself, you at least know they're separable and where they fit together.

There are popular packages for the sorts of things that a lower-level Python framework might:

\- [http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/](http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/) has a more flexible router, sessions, and some other basics on the Web side

\- Built-in html/template is a pretty good place to start. (The context-aware escaping is something I wish I had.)

\- Popular database tools include jmoiron/sqlx and jinzhu/gorm on GitHub.

\- gokit.io is mostly about internal services rather than frontends, but may have parts of general interest. It includes example services.

\- godoc.org links to a bunch of popular packages and has search and such. Incidentally, its own source is available: [https://github.com/golang/gddo](https://github.com/golang/gddo)

I'd say Go is not going to get you to a releasable DB-backed Web app anywhere near as fast as Django or any of the other well-known dyn-language frameworks. I think the language has the bones where you could _get_ that sort of app to faster time-to-first-usefulness, without entirely giving up the easy-to- follow-what's-happening and pick-your-parts aspects, but probably not there now.

<comment><USER8> While I agree with you and I tend to stay as lean as possible, it always perplexes me why people want a Django/RoR/Phoenix in Go.

These other frameworks are mature and battle tested enough in agreeable enough programming languages, why attempt to reinvent them in Go?

Go's strength and afaik original purpose for Google was for creating smaller services, not a web app monolith.

<comment><USER7> The wanting part I get: a lot of people do database-backed Web apps, some of them (us!) see some useful attributes in Go and would like to have access to them in our world too.

Personally I get that appeal more strongly now that in Django-land we're well over 100K LOC and dealing with a lot more traffic and so on than when we started. Helping folks scale gracefully from "tiny app you can get going very soon" to "larger app that's still cool to maintain" might be where there's the most unfilled need.

The truly hard part is figuring out what improvements you can achieve without host/graft disease, where either the language itself or softer factors keep the mashup from working satisfactorily.

That is, one way to fail at improving DB-backed webapps in Go is the obvious one: you don't actually make them easy to build. Another is if you _do_ make it easy to get started, but in the process lose the things that made it appealing to use Go. Those might be "hard" technical attributes like static checks and decent perf, or "soft" human- and standards-oriented things about Go: flexibility in choosing libs you want, or norms favoring explicit code where it's possible to work out what's really running from what's on the page.

Feeling out those tradeoffs is probably a long, communal process with a lot of trial-and-error. Certainly it's slower and harder than just trying to translate the dyn-language tools already out there. But I think it is possible and could be really useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I prefer just using the standard library with a muxer like gorilla/mux.

<comment><USER10> Because the more fully kithensunk ones are worse/bad/negative or just because you keep it simple?

<comment><USER9> I prefer less opinionated where possible. "Worse" is really subjective, I just don't need bells a whistles for many of my projects, so the stdlib is just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OP's question is far too broad to elicit useful answers.

Start with a feature list of what you require from the framework.

        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>
        - <USER4>
        - <USER5>
        - <USER6>
        - Data binding
        - Component reuse
        ...

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the idea of a web framework in Go is too application level oriented where as Go is a great language to write infrastructure. If you implement a microservice, look for microservice frameworks. A web application itself seems to broad. I would almost always recommend to find a custom implementation.

</comment><comment><USER13> Really really close to flagging this. There is no "best X" for any X. At least not without adding lots of context (and then it gets boring for other people since these details probably are not interesting for them).

<comment><USER14> If I am starting to learn Go and want to try my hands at building a web service, what should I use?

<comment><USER15> For learning purposes, I might suggest the Go implementation of gRPC[1]. As the name implies, it is RPC focused and so doesn't necessarily translate well to a complete web service (HATEOS and such), but still provides some insights into how you might structure your code for that kind of project.

[1] [https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go)</comment></comment></comment>


USO at the bottom of the Baltic Sea - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2164912/UFO-the-Baltic-Sea-cuts-electrical-equipment-divers-200m.html

<comment><USER2> DBM, I think UFO is the better title choice. Your change is cute but unless you read the link it does not make any sense. Like jejones USO makes me think of the organization that sends Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders to boost morale in the sandbox...

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like an odd place for the USO to be; are there any troops there that need support?</comment>


Increase your dependencies - <AUTHOR> http://www.drinchev.com/blog/increase-your-dependencies/ <comment><USER2> Yes, use more modularized components. This has always been good advice. Rolling all your own code is obviously a waste of effort and bug-prone.</comment>


Hacker defaces 49 congressional websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/01/28/national/w082316S36.DTL

<comment><USER2> s/Hacker/Cracker

<comment><USER3> Its time to accept that the meaning of the word hacker has changed.

<comment><USER4> Actually the meaning hasn't really changed at all. The original "hackers" broke into computers and networks to play pranks on their collegues in the AI lab. Later "hackers" hacked the phone system to make free long distance calls. I find Paul Buchheit's definition of "hacking" the most accurate: find and exploit differences between the perceived rules and the real underlying mechanisms of a complex system. This can be perfectly legal in some cases, and illegal in others. It is all hacking nevertheless.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I should rather have said "The word hacker will never be fully reclaimed".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my e-commerce dashboard? - <AUTHOR> http://flic.kr/p/7V9yur

<comment><USER2> I really like the "New vs Return customers. Number of past orders. Time since last order." section. It's a really nice way to see how well acquiring and keeping customers, and how often those customers are going to return.

A great way to see a lot of information.</comment>


Ask HN: Why HN doesn't allow collapsing comment sections? - <AUTHOR> Why HN doesn't allow collapsing comment sections?<p>Right now, HN displays all comments in an indented tree structure so the reader can follow a discussion chain. But sometimes I want to checkout an alternative original topic regarding the link. I would go and look for the second highest ranked top(root) comment. But not being able to collapse comment sections make this really difficult. Why don't we do it like Reddit does? <comment><USER2> It does. Comments have a little "[-]" next to them - click on that and the comment and its tree of descendants collapses. It was implemented nearly four months ago - here's the announcement:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have Javascript enabled, you should be able to now. It was implemented a few months ago. It even remembers which comments you collapsed, so it's actually better than reddit's implementation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why do you ask us? Mail the mods.</comment>


UK: Government unlocks £150M from dormant accounts for coronavirus reponse - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-unlocks-150-million-from-dormant-accounts-for-coronavirus-response <comment><AUTHOR> > an account is 'dormant' at a particular time if the account has been open > throughout the period of 15 years ending at that time, but during that > period no transactions have been carried out in relation to the account by > or on the instructions of the holder of the account.</comment>


SpaceX Falcon aims for telecoms market with SES-8 launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25087861

<comment><AUTHOR> The launch is scheduled to be broadcast at 5:00 PM EST.

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


Ask HN: I have a list of 20 potential customers. How to reach out to them? - <AUTHOR>

My idea is very niche focussed and related to my current field. I know quite a few people in the field already. So I have this list of about 20 people that I want to start a discussion with. How would you go about it ? Should I just use something like survey monkey ? personalized email ? custom form ? phone call and ask questions ? <comment><USER2> Call them, introduce what you are doing and ask them if you can meet.

If you can solve a problem they have, they will make time for you.

Most buyers care about three things: Cost, Productivity, Revenue. Think "CPR". If you can reduce costs, increase productivity, or drive additional revenue, they should want to meet.

Skip email or surveys. You want to talk to them and ask open ended questions about their needs to see if you can help.

<comment><USER3> from selling two productivity related products I often run into customers telling me "Revenue, Cost, Productivity" is the priority and productivity is a long way behind cost, so I fingers crossed you have a cost or revenue idea :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start with a personal email. Keep is short. Your ask, in the initial email, is for a phone call. That's it. Your objective is to set a time for a call. One sentence on what you're building, and one sentence on why it is applicable to them. Indicate that you respect their opinion and that you would like them to help shape your product roadmap.

On the call. Don't sell them anything. Ask them questions about what they are currently doing, and what solutions they would like to see for the "problem." Even if you just talk to 1 out of 20, listen to what they want and tweak your product to make them happy. If that customer is happy, then there is a good chance that other users will want what you've built. "Do things that don't scale" \- PG.

Your goal on the call is to get that person using your product. Offer to do it for them. Write code for them. Help them implement your solution. Treat it like a consulting gig. Whatever they are looking for, you can do it.

A LinkedIn add compliments a direct email. But, a LinkedIn message is often ignored.

If you don't have the customer's email use Rapportive -- [http://rapportive.com/](http://rapportive.com/)

Rapportive is amazing! You add Rapportive to gmail. It is a free add-on for Firefox, Safari, Mailplane, and Chrome. You can guess at the email you are looking for...firstname.lastname@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com, etc. When you get a hit the right hand side of gmail lights up with the person's picture and links to their publicly available social networks, all of which gets displayed alongside the message. The sidebar replaces Google's contextual ads, so that's a double win.

Even if you don't like my advice you should checkout Rapportive, it helps.

</comment><comment><USER5> What worked for us in the beginning was asking people for their advice. Something like "I'm really interested in your work and would really appreciate a chance to ask you some questions and get your advice." Then you can have a phone call, or even better, an in person meeting over coffee. This gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about them and what they need, and potentially tell them about your product in a very customized way.

PS: Try doing this at scale rather than relying on those 20. For example, twitter follow a few hundred people in the target market and then DM the ones that follow you back, asking for their advice.

</comment><comment><USER6> Phone call. You always miss exceptions in surveys, even if you allow open answers for each question, you sometimes want more elaboration to an answer. 20 people is also very doable to call. Sending a survey will also result in people forgetting/less willing to answer your questions. Calling is also more personal.

</comment><comment><USER7> Unless you're used to doing cold phone calls, and fairly adept at reversing a prospects objections - I would first start with Linkedin.

Emails and phone calls are easy to ignore. I would first use LinkedIn to approach them asking for advice (keep the intro short, sweet, but intriguing). Then email a few times via LinkedIn - and THEN ask for a phone call.

If you do decide on phone calls, I would first find another group of 20 people you don't care as much about their answers- and use them first to "refine your approach" and reduce nerves.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you only have 20 people to reach out to, you don't need much structure in how you go about doing it. Your goal should be to make those meetings happen at all.

Ask them for advice around the thing you are working on. Your goal at this stage should be to find 10 users who love your product.

</comment><comment><USER9> Personalized email or phone call.

A survey, in particular, seems awful for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> certainly. I guess by survey I meant putting some structure around the questions I will be asking them. The initial contact has to be personal (email/phone/in person).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A product you would like to see built? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have been doing a consumer Internet startup for last 3 years and have reached a point where I wanna try out something else. The startup is Ramen profitable so I can work on another idea without worrying about money.
My strengths are coding, usability and interaction design (for consumer facing sites). I don't know much about enterprise software etc. I wanted to ask the community what product they wish existed. Since I am a bootstrapper, monetizability is important. Ideally I should be able to charge people a subscription fees (monthly/yearly). <comment><USER2> I want to know what is going on in the world, but don't want editorial spin on my news. I want to have a better perspective about what is important.

Perhaps it's that I want to make up my own mind about what's important rather than trusting it to the current news organisations.

How about some kind of fact based news service where stories bubble to the top based on the "severity" or impact on the world or my community.

So for example, on the front page of the international section, global events of the last 7 days are sorted in order of "severity".

We may have to make some assumptions about what severity means, perhaps lives lost, financial loss, environmental impact. Perhaps a user can sort by a preference. Users could also filter by Global, County, State, City ect.

Clicking on one of these news events could present a nice collection of links to standard editorial content on the net, or relevant Wikipedia pages.

I guess the content would be community driven, and you would add some game mechanics to encourage adoption. (Karma ect)

I'd like to do this myself for fun, perhaps as a side project one day.

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife would like an iPad/iPhone app for tracking baby milestones. When is the first time she rolls over, smiles, holds her head up, makes eye contact, etc. Keep a centralized (anonymous) database so we can compare to the average stats of the other users.

She's downloaded several apps so far, paid $4 for one, $6 for another. They were all unusably bad. I wish there was a return policy for apps.

<comment><USER4> What were the apps she already downloaded? Is there a market for baby-related iphone apps? This could be interesting, in that i've recently started dabbling in making iApps, and i've recently started being a dad.

<comment><USER5> I would love to hear more too. I'm not in the target market, but I think there's a large market for baby-related apps (and, equally good, apps for young kids). I had some thoughts about how a "baby milestone" app might work, but the lack of a camera on the iPad is a big obstacle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Build a Sin Bin for articles with bad or mis-titled headlines. I've posted something along these lines already: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283954>

</comment><comment><USER7> High bandwidth proxy service. I can't watch Hulu in Australia and free proxies are too slow. I'd pay to use a proxy service along the backbone somewhere.

<comment><USER8> You could run a proxy on a VPS. A basic Linode has 200GB bandwidth (which is the same as the monthly cap on my home connection). Tinyproxy is easy to set up.

But this is an interesting idea for a service.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't it be illegal to serve hulu content to the outside of US?

<comment><USER8> This is probably why most businesses offering proxies, newsgroup access, etc. have very shady looking websites :)

That's the problem with such a business. You can't advertise "get Hulu from outside the US". You can only advertise "fast proxy servers", which only the technically inclined people will now what to do with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> OS forum software (simple, think vanilla forums, not phpbb) that I can easily run on google appengine so it's basically free to host.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://sudarshan.posterous.com/proxypc>

</comment><comment><USER12> $5000 a year for a virtual personal assistant that only helps you deal with email overload.

</comment><comment><USER13> im drawing a blank (its late), but don't worry about us. What would you like to see built?

<comment><AUTHOR> I always find it hard to organize my reading (for most part technical reading). Do you think a service can help there? Like I can keep a track of books and papers I want to read and also get ideas from other people based on what I am currently reading/learning.

<comment><USER14> amazon.com, shelfari.com, anobii.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am thinking more like a site that can help you stay focused and also provide motivation (by hooking you up with real people who are learning/learned what you are learning right now).

So yes .. its like shelfari but more focused on learning than casual reading

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If not relate to the internet then it's a time machine...

</comment><comment><USER16> Do you have a resume / credentials? I'd like to make sure my idea reaches a capable person.</comment>


Intel's Profit Falls 27% as PC Sales Drop - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/technology/intel-earnings-are-sharply-lower.html?src=recg

<comment><USER2> PC sales dropping? Dell talking about going private? HP losing money? Tough. Let them try harder to win business. Here are a few suggestions.

1\. Eliminate the Windows tax. From now on, vendors should offer bare systems that can run Windows and/or some flavor of Linux, Chrome OS and maybe even Android. Give me a radio button for each, so that I can watch the price change as I toggle. Enough with the "comes with Windows 8, but we won't tell you how much that costs."

2\. Offer multiple years warranty. A car typically is 3 years or 36,000 miles. So why can't a PC be guaranteed for 3 years or 10,000 operational hours? I've seen so many components fail after 91 days, and then we're into a painful customer assistance process with some guy in Bangalore reading scripts in some dialect that sounds like English.

3\. By the way, offer real customer service, not some guy in Bangalore reading scripts in some dialect that sounds like English.

4\. Work harder to shield the user from malware: build more security into the hardware, e.g. trusted certificates and low level trusted, signed checking of application binaries.

5\. Touch screens.

6\. Get more creative with the form factor. Mac Mini is a good example of an elegant, efficient unit that doesn't look and sound like an air conditioner sitting under your desk, yet is packed with useful ports and computing power.

7\. Tout your products as the mother ship for mobile devices. Provide tablet connectivity and drivers out of the box, and include bluetooth rather than making me order a $10 dongle online just to have this basic feature.

Just some ideas; anyone got anything else?

<comment><USER3> None of that will help.

1\. People don't want barebones systems - they want a fully working computer they turn on and use. People who want a barebones system do it themself, and are not a large market.

2\. That just increases costs, and will not increase sales. You want it, obviously. But it won't help the seller.

3\. Same as #2 - that doesn't increase sales, and does increase costs.

4\. Good luck with that. Microsoft is trying that with secure boot (with hardware support), and people are screaming about it.

5\. Gorilla Arm. Assuming you are talking about a PC, it's not practical to use a vertical touch screen.

6\. A good suggestion. Market computers the way kitchen appliances are marketed: By how they look, with some discussion of functionality, but looks are paramount.

7\. It's nice I guess, but I'm not sure it'll help all that much.

<comment><USER2> Ars - re #1, I am not saying make Grandma install Win/Lin/*os, but rather make it an option during the buying process.

I'm pricing new cars right now and the makers are doing these interactive build-your-car websites where you select every single accessory and option and watch the price go up or down accordingly. Admittedly, Dell has had such a service for years, but preinstalled Windows is usually non-negotiable. Just automate the OS install process (if it isn't already) and let the user shave the $80 off the price if he prefers a free OS rather than a paid OS.

<comment><USER3> It actually is an option from most sellers, it's just not really promoted, but if you look you can find it.

If it was easier to find people would remove windows thinking "why do I need this" - and then call tech support when the computer doesn't work.

A _single_ tech support call eats all the profits of the sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I refuse to believe the PC is dying, evolving perhaps but not dying. People have been saying PC's are dying for the last 10 or so years and yet here we are, commenting on HN using our PC's and Mac's (which are PC's at the end of the day). Tablets in my mind will never work for programming or designing. I will always need a large screen and peripherals like a keyboard at the very least to do my job. Could anyone else here imagine developing on a tablet screen? I couldn't.

<comment><USER5> I would like to see the rise of the home server. Cloud services have latency and privacy issues. Imagine a small, powerful and energy efficient server that you could tuck away in a closet and connect to your gigabit or faster network.

This server would provide all the horsepower, centralized storage, and session management (think IRC chat etc) that you need -- and you can access it on any device in your house.

Imagine a keyboard running a tiny OS that could detect the nearest registered display. You could write code on the TV for a few hours, walk over to a desk and pick up where you left off. That's what I would eventually like to turn my home into (by setting up a Plan 9 network and writing terminal clients for android set-top boxes), but it's hard to find the perfect home server.

<comment><USER4> I've been dreaming of a home server revolution for years myself, but sadly due to the fact in Australia the Internet is slow and we're only just now rolling out a national 100mb fibre network which won't be finished for quite a few years and will be expensive with little guarantee of a decent data allowance doesn't give me much hope. Cloud storage is definitely not ready for the prime-time yet, I don't trust it and as Amazon has proven even they haven't even quite worked out how to reliably provide cloud services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is something I've argued before, too. Even if Intel gets every bit as good as the ARM competition in mobile devices, that may be pretty irrelevant to them, as they will have a very hard time competing as "just another mobile chip maker with tiny profits per chip". It will be hard for Intel to adapt to that as a company. And that's besides having to defeat established incumbents in the mobile chip market. The end of the "normal" PC market is not good at all for Intel.

As the situation becomes worse for them, you'll see them adopt more desperate moves such as mandating every "ultrabook" (a trademark they own) manufacturers buys their McAffee antivirus, and other such moves, to try to increase their profits and revenues, but I don't think it will help them much in the end.

The ultrabook market is a dead-end, anyway. So far their ultrabook sales have been several times lower than initially predicted, and most PC buyers want to buy "cheap" Windows machines, not $1000 Windows machines. The people who want that kind of PC, usually go for a Mac instead, and the latest sales data shows that. And Macs are still a niche market in the grand scheme of things. It's about the best Intel can hope for as far as "ultrabooks" go. And they better hope Apple is not moving to 64-bit ARM chips for Macs in 2014.

<comment><USER7> With full-power Intel Core chips rolling off the line today using <7W of power, we're almost at the point where you can have MacBook Pro computing power behind the glass of a tablet and still get 8+ hours of run time. Dock it to a hard keyboard with another battery to turn it into 12-16 hours. That's today, and it'll get better every year as the processors and batteries improve.

I think Microsoft is actually ahead of the curve here, and the tablets of the near-future will be more like the Surface Pro than the iPad. Your grandma can use hers to check e-mail and run pre-screened apps from an app store, while you can use yours to run Visual Studio or Photoshop. With full computing power in tablets, they could supplant not just Android/iOS but laptops, ultrabooks, netbooks and desktop towers.

<comment> j-g-faustus Why would grandma want to buy a powerful $1000 tablet when a $200 tablet can do everything she wants to do perfectly fine?

The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much computing power, it was the lack of alternatives to the PC form factor that kept CPU power, prices and Intel's profit margins inflated.

I don't doubt that there will be a market for powerful tablets. But it's a small market; the grandmas of this world won't be buying them any more than they used to buy powerful workstations.

<comment><USER8> > _a $200 tablet can do everything she wants to do perfectly fine?_

Show me one table at $200 that does everything a grandma would want.

> _The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much > computing power_

That's just wild speculation that needs a reference, especially since the history of PC proves otherwise.

<comment><USER9> Nexus 7? Or for a $100 more, an iPad Mini...

<comment><USER10> Yep, basically we've hit that point where computers are the appliances people always wanted them to be.

Intel is going to have a hard time keeping high profit margins on lower cost chips. If any company can handle it though they should be able to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think most OEMS would rather do without the very real technical advantages that Intel brings, than be stuck with Intel. If they could switch to ARM for PCs easily they would, and there's no way they're going to sign up for Intel chips on mobile devices, at least not unless it starts making ARM itself.

Say Intel is a process generation ahead of everyone and has fancy tri-gate transistors and what have you first. Is it really worth abandoning all that ARM gets you--the ability to design custom silicon, bid different foundries against each other, etc?

</comment><comment><USER12> In the consumer world, "Wintel" should be wary of the future.

Except for the one beefy laptop/workstation and my wifes gaming PC, (both which should be good for years), most of the devices we have bought or planning to buy don't require an expensive Intel CPU/chipset. And we don't need any new Windows software outside of the annual Quicken/TurboTax update. For portable use, there's smartphones and I'm thinking a good ARM based Linux laptop should be hitten the market soon enough.

<comment><USER13> Why are we still saying "Wintel" when Macs have been using Intel processors for years, and now non-Intel platforms are a much more significant part of Microsoft's strategy than ever?

<comment><USER10> I think the distinction is the windows/intel portion of the market. Of which macs aren't at all a member. Basically the 90's/2000's are over for the Windows/Intel "sure thing".

Given Microsoft is now also looking at arm, Intel is going to have a harder go at the Windows side of things. And if the rumored Apple arm laptops pan out, they've lost a very high end vendor as well. But I'm deviating from my reply, enough squirrel banter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know what % of Intel chips go to the datacenter/server market? It must be higher and higher all the time. Perhaps it'll eventually be the majority!

</comment><comment><USER15> And AMD's stock price got it worse than Intel's. [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5d&s=INTC&l=on&z...](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5d&s=INTC&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=AMD%2C+&ql=1)

</comment><comment><USER16> CPU's have reached the inevitable point where 90% of users simply do not need that kind of speed.

You can build a car that goes 200mph, but there are not going to be many buyers.

</comment><comment><USER17> The interesting question is whether Intel is going to sell fab capacity to third parties.

Given the umpteen billions they have invested in semiconductor fabrication plants, and the lack of sales of their own chips ...

<comment><USER18> And their lead in process technology. I would think that alone would drive some demand from third parties wanting to one-up their competition in a way that can't (easily) be countered.

<comment><USER19> They already started doing it: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/11/intel- shifts-strateg...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/11/intel-shifts- strategy-sells-22nm-fab-capacity/)

<comment><USER17> Good catch, I missed that. Probably still some way off from having PDKs (physical design kits) and a pricing sheet for Nvidia or other random fabless design shops to make their chips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Profit or earnings?

<comment><USER21> Profit === Earnings (<http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnings.asp>)

From the article: "reported net income of $2.5 billion, or 48 cents a share, down 27 percent from $3.4 billion, or 64 cents a share, a year earlier"

Which is a 27% drop in total earnings or a 25% drop in EPS. The difference due to a share buy back improving the EPS by reducing the issued share capital.

<comment><USER20> thanks</comment></comment></comment>


The thermostat in your office may be sexist - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/08/thermostat-your-office-may-be-sexist

<comment><USER2> Let's not forget many businesses have a dress code that doesn't allow for shorts and sandals or any summer comfortable clothing for men. The dress code for women is normally conducive to hot weather. Sometimes I feel sorry for upper management in wool suits in 90 degree weather, and then I remember how much they're paid.

Why don't we talk about that? It should be a part of the discussion. If we're all allowed to wear lighter clothing in summer would that raise the temperature in offices??

</comment><comment><USER3> It's easier to get warm if you're cool than to cool off if you're warm.</comment>


Show HN: Send emoji-only postcards - <AUTHOR> https://www.emojimailer.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here, EmojiMailer is something I built for a bit of fun, it is an emoji- only postcard service. It was inspired by a friends want to send people violin emojis in the mail and emojli ([http://emoj.li/](http://emoj.li/)) an emoji only IM messenger. Currently sending to USA, Canada and Australia.

</comment><comment><USER2> Suggestion: background design templates, the postcards look pretty plain

<comment><USER3> Good suggestion - I agree. Would this cost more?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cost to print, no. I don't see much benefit in charging more for that either.</comment></comment></comment>


What's so great about CPAN anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamjctaylor.com/whats-so-great-about-cpan-anyway

<comment><USER2> I use Perl every day in product/home and have contributed numerous modules on CPAN. The "Ratings" argument is very very thin. Yes, CPAN does have a ratings system ; nobody uses it. Even very very popular and well-written modules, for example Data::Dumper, have below 10 ratings.

<comment><USER3> But Data::Dumper is a core module, so that's a bit of a special case as far as CPAN ratings goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a new release candidate for CPAN that sets up some very nice defaults for using CPAN:

[http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/1339/cpan-pm-release- candi...](http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/1339/cpan-pm-release-candidate/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know. For a Perl hacker this is rather boring, can it convince someone new to Perl?

<comment><USER6> I think new hackers could be easily drawn into using Perl simply because of the breadth of tools available in CPAN. Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it. Why roll your own when there's a stable module?

Of course the new user may quickly run into CPAN dependency hell, but that's a different issue.

<comment><USER7> Of which 50% are abandoned and 25% are alpha. And 12% are duplicates and you need to decide which to use. At least that was the state in the 90s when all I did was Perl. [Fixed some English]

<comment><USER3> The irony is that even in environments like Java and .NET, where, in theory, one person makes all the decisions with respect to what libraries to include, there are 50% deprecated classes, 25% that don't work, and 12% are duplicates and you need to decide what to use. I don't think I've ever written a Java app where 90% of the libraries I wanted to use have been deprecated in favor of AbstractSimpleTaskFactoryConfiguratorInterfaceThreePointOh.

This is a programmer problem, not a Perl problem. What's great about Perl is that you are forced to use very few of these modules, so you can ignore the bloat once you've made your own decisions. Worse comes to worst, and someone rewrites some module you use and you get new features for free. I don't get all the complaining.

<comment><USER8> >What's great about Perl is that you are forced to use very few of these modules

That sort of kills the claim that perl is great because of the size of CPAN, no?

<comment><USER9> Nope. Its darwinian, the more modules in the _gene pool_ means newer/better solutions need to fight harder to survive & win. So the outcome is often better for Perl/CPAN, for eg. Moose

<comment><USER10> > Its darwinian

I think you're correct, but that there are trade-offs. Take Python, for example. They have "batteries included", and when modules make it into the std lib, they pretty much stop evolving. _However_ , on the up-side, Python gains users who like having everything packaged up nice and neat so they don't need to go looking for modules quite as much.

Perl takes the popularity hit of not having too many batteries included, but benefits from the darwinian element that works to make the 3rd-party modules better. So, perlers need to spend more time asking around (or checking cpanratings), and also dealing with it when there's turnover (the module that they chose a few years ago is eclipsed by a competitor, or stops being maintained, and now they need to rewrite some of their code).

In the end, I think Perl has better modules.

<comment><USER9> Yes i've touched briefly on CPAN vs stdlib approach before (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088040>). They're just different approaches and neither is better or worse than the other.

BTW... I believe all language repos will have _darwinism_ acting upon it. I see it in Ruby & Python as well as on CPAN. Its Perl philosophy and CPAN size that just stirs the pot a bit more!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rumor: New Mac Mini Coming to Macworld 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/rumor-new-mac-m.html <comment> old-gregg Jesus motherfucking christ... How could I have missed this: <http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/11/apple-adds-copy.html> This makes me want to throw my MBP across the room.

<comment><USER2> Except that as of right now, it's only for HD content that has been purchased from the iTunes Store. But it's only for specific content from a specific location. A HDCP monitor isn't required for anything else.

(I know it's a 'not my problem' issue, but if you want something to happen start blaming Big Content since this is their idea. Do you really think the all the low-level engineers at Apple really want to go through all this effort to benefit the consumer?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I currently use a Mac Mini as a media center with a Panasonic projector. Its a little slow playing HD movies, so I am looking forward to better graphics support. I am concerned though that I might not be able to play iTunes movies via it if they have DRM crippled the display port.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Mac Mini is long overdue for something, but I'd be less surprised to see something in the same ballpark, but new. They've left the mini alone too long for just a simple update.

</comment><comment><USER5> Kind of interesting, but really it would have been a safe prediction even without the supposed leak.

Now if there is a leak concerning the mythical OS X Netbook, I'm all ears...

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe with this update they'll kindly address the following:

* When I run front row, and one of my kids accidentally presses a key it doesn't understand, don't exit frontrow!!! How is that a sane decision? I'd expect that sort of idiocy from MS Media center. Not from Apple.

* For the love of god please fix the idiotically bad Dolby 5.1 support (Or lack of it). Trying to get 5.1 output is ridiculously hard unless you stuff an actual DVD in the thing.

Apart from those 2 issues, I'm pretty pleased with my mac mini, higher resolution output wouldn't hurt, and the wireless keyboard could do with a little trackpad, but can't think of much else.

</comment><comment><USER7> A better graphics chip and easier user-upgradeability would be nice. Even if they had to make the unit a little taller, it would be a good tradeoff.

</comment><comment><USER8> Could be Apple's way of addressing the recession. Give people a viable, lower cost option to continue moving from Windows to Mac. People who were willing to pay for a MacBook to move from Windows to Mac last year might be more price sensitive next year.

</comment><comment><USER9> And let me guess - comes with Mini DisplayPort. And no new Displays yet (or adaptors).

<comment><USER10> The new Mini DisplayPort adapters are insanely expensive. Since I need one for my external monitor as well as presenting on a projector, I dropped a total of $60 on the DVI and VGA adapters. Even worse for those who have to power their 30" screens with $100 adapters. :/

<comment><USER11> At the office we have some new MBPs and old ADC Cinema Displays, so you need a $30 DisplayPort to DVI cable _and_ a $100 DVI to ADC converter. What a pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> $400 would be a better price point to really get their sales going.

</comment><comment><USER13> Please wake me up when MacBooks start shipping with a matte 4:3 UXGA display.

<comment><USER14> Widescreen is here to stay, I'm pretty sure.

<comment><USER6> Until "Tallscreen" is released in 2015 or so.

Now get taller screens! Yes throw away all your existing screens, tall is in, wide is out! buy buy buy!

<comment><USER11> I know you're joking, but I've heard that two 24" monitors rotated is a pretty nice setup. Any monitor with a VESA mount (ahem Apple) can be pretty easily rotated. A 1920-pixel-tall screen gives you room for huge editor windows.

<comment><USER15> You can buy VESA mounts from Apple for the pre-LED Cinema Displays. Don't know about the LED-based 24" display, but I'd imagine so.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: European founders in YC? - <AUTHOR>

I know I've read about some founders from outside US and what they had to do to get working permissions, but I can't find the link. Anybody got  that link or some other advice? <comment><USER3> YC has a lot of founders from outside of the US. There were four teams from outside of the US in our YC class, two from Canada, one from the UK and one team from Austria. I can think of at least four other teams from abroad from previous classes.

In fact there is a kind of UK YC inside YC. The UK guys really stick together and help each other out. If you can get a hold of any of them I'm sure they'll point you in the right direction.

Papers and immigration are always a difficult issue. In most cases you can get a work visa or whatever visa lets you attend conferences in the US and it will be enough for the 3 month YC session.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's Germany in my case. Can you point out the Austrian guys?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should probably add that in my case all founders would be from outside US! So the problem is not only in getting visas for some of the founders but also incorporating in the US as I figure PG has no interest in 6% of a germany based company. The link I remember contained descriptions of both (visas and incorporating at the same time).

<comment><USER4> If you incorporate in the US you'll also need an EU based organization for legal purposes (since you'll have a "Betriebsstätte" in Germany) that can be a subsidiary of a Deleware C-Corp. That's why we decided to incorporate in UK since a Ltd. is a valid legal form EU-wide and leaves all of the incorporation documents in English, which is easier for investors to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The two that come to mind of the top of my head are Songkick and Clickpass, both from the UK.

Here was a previous discussion on the topic: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158969>

searchyc.com is your friend.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is. Thanks for the quick reply and the hint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just to clarify you are asking about founders from outside the US moving to the US and getting work permits. Not the otherway round, right?

If it's the other way (in Holland at least) it will be easiest if one of the founders/employees can be recognized as an knowledge migrant.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am sure there are a few UK YC startups. Below is what I can recall off the top of my head.

The blogs in particular may hold useful info for you regarding getting visas and working in the U.S. plus the journey in startup as a whole - <USER2> particularly like <http://www.kulveer.co.uk> and <http://blog.harjtaggar.com> who are the <http://www.auctomatic.com> guys as they give a good level of detail throughout their journey.

However, [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/coming-to-america- getti...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/coming-to-america-getting- visas-to-do-business-in-silicon-valley/#more-17036) (or <http://is.gd/1Vrf> in short) by Peter from ClickPass could be what you were referring to and probably holds most of the answers you want in the most succinct form.

Anyway, I'm sure if you contact them they may be answer specific visa questions from their experience. Hope this helps.

\---

      http://www.auctomatic.com
      http://auctomatic.com/about
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kul
      http://www.kulveer.co.uk
      http://twitter.com/kul
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=harj
      http://blog.harjtaggar.com
      http://twitter.com/harjeet
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pc
      http://www.collison.ie/
      http://twitter.com/patrickc
      [John Collison]
      http://twitter.com/collision

      http://snaptalent.com
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sharpshoot
      http://sharpshoot.blogspot.com/
      http://twitter.com/sharpshoot

      http://www.songkick.com/
      http://www.songkick.com/team
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ian
      http://twitter.com/soundboy
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petesmithy
      http://twitter.com/petesmithy

      http://www.clickpass.com/
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=immad
      http://www.immadsnewworld.com/
      http://twitter.com/immad
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petenixey
      http://www.webkitchen.co.uk/
      http://twitter.com/petenixey

      http://webmynd.com/
      http://webmynd.wordpress.com
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=amirnathoo
      http://twitter.com/amirnathoo

      http://www.scoopler.com
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ajmalasver
      http://blog.projectbluespark.com/
      http://twitter.com/_aj
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dilanj
      http://meonearth.blogspot.com/
      http://twitter.com/_dilan

<comment><USER7> nice work Babul. Peter (Nixey) and Harj are the masters of US Visa stuff. Let us (Songkick) know if you've got any questions about applying to YC from the UK. Happy to chat on Skype. You can also grab me at one of our Hacker Meetups if in London at any point.

<comment><USER6> Thanks Ian. (bit busy next week so may not see you).

In case anyone wants to attend and does not know where/when it is, hope this helps...

      Hacker Meetups London
      04 September 2008
      Flat 1,
      103 Commercial Street,
      London
      E1 6BG
      (Five minutes walk from Liverpool St tube)
      (Google map: http://is.gd/4zZ)</comment></comment></comment>


Level Up Your Shell Game - <AUTHOR> http://viget.com/extend/level-up-your-shell-game

<comment><USER2> I didn't see Ctrl-r, but I've found that to be the most insanely useful shortcut.

Ctrl-r = reverse history search. Type a partial command after Ctrl-r and it'll find the most recent executed command with that substring in it.

Press Ctrl-r again, jump to the next oldest command containing your substring. Did you accidentally press too many Ctrl-r? Press backspace to move forward in history.

<comment><USER3> A complementary tip for Ctr+R is to tag long reusable commands with a comment in the end, e.g.,

find . -name "*.png" -print0 | xargs -0 -P8 pngquant --ext .png --force 256 #optimizepng

(if you're using zsh, you have to enable INTERACTIVE_COMMENTS option first; just run set -k)

<comment><USER4> Cool tip, did not know that, though I prefer to put long reusable commands in script files, in part so I can comment them to better remember what everything is doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMO the aliases for git should be in ~/.gitconfig instead. I have a bunch of these, like:

        [alias]
        br = branch
        co = checkout
        ci = commit -v
        sci = svn dcommit --interactive
        cp = cherry-pick
        l = log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
        l3 = log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit -n3
        lm = log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit master..
        rc = rebase --continue
        st = status -sb
        squash = !git rebase -i --autosquash $(git merge-base master HEAD)

Also, I prefer to set aliases in my ~/.functions instead of in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc. I find that this makes it easier to move the .functions file from one machine to another, especially on a lab/test machine with a shared account where I shouldn't be modifying things in the shared ~/.bashrc. To make this work, you can add this to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile:

        if [ -f ~/.functions ]; then . ~/.functions; fi

This will source your .functions file if it exists when your .bashrc is run.

A tweak to the "editbash" suggested alias will make it so that you don't have to reopen your terminal. My equivalent alias is "vif", for "vi .functions":

        alias vif='vi ~/.functions; . ~/.functions'

Note that the second command (after the semicolon) sources the modified .functions file.

Lastly: brevity is king. I love 'alias psgrep="ps aux | grep"', since I use it several times a day, but to "level up your shell game", keep it short. My alias for this command is "psg". The other alias that I use all the time is "d" \-- "alias d='ls -lFh --color --group-directories -v'".

<comment><USER6> Did you know you can make your own git commands, and I don't mean just aliases?

Write a script called git-mycommand, and you can invoke it with 'git mycommand'. Tab completion works too, at least for bash + bash_completion.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I have written some of those too. Just make sure the script is in your PATH. I drop them in ~/bin/ \-- which reminds me of another thing you should have in your ~/.bash_profile, if it isn't already in the template provided by your system:

        if [ -d $HOME/bin ]
        then
            PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
        fi

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite shell trick (not in the link) is this: ~-

Tilde-hyphen expands to the previous directory you were in, and of course "cd -" returns you to your previous directory, so I put them together all the time.

Here's an example workflow (with a fake PS1):

      mac:/Users/me/Projects/my_new_app$ cd ~/.pow

      mac:/Users/me/.pow$ ln -s ~- .

      mac:/Users/me/.pow$ cd -

      mac:/Users/me/Projects/my_new_app$

Now I can continue working on my app.

<disclaimer>

That's bit of a contrived example above. Here's a more realistic way to do a symlink for pow:

      mac:/Users/me/Projects/my_new_app$ ln -s `pwd` ~/.pow/

</disclaimer>

<comment><USER8> Save the earth, fork less:

        ln -s $PWD ~/.pow

(Interesting tip about ~-, didn't know that one)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The command line navigation commands are just what any Emacs user would expect. vi users can set their $EDITOR to 'vi' to get those commands.

What do you mean you've never used Emacs? _mumble whippersnappers mumble_

<comment><USER10> Use `set -o vi` to get vi navigation commands on the command line.

EDIT: In bash, that is. It's `bindkey -v` in zsh.

<comment><USER11> Do it in .inputrc like this:

set editing-mode vi

Now any executable that uses readline will have vi editing commands on its command line. mysql, psql, etc.

Do as much of your command line editing configuration in .inputrc as possible, and you'll have it everywhere.

EDIT: man readline

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everything you ever wanted to know about SSH keys but were afraid to ask:

[http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/l-keyc/...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/l-keyc/index.html)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5M47jV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5M47jV8tSkJ:www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BzFiI_7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BzFiI_7zLoMJ:www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

(pt2/pt3 borked on IBMs site)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's probably worth mentioning that all the delete functions he points out(all of them for that matter, ctrl-k, etc) are actually cut's, so you can paste them back as well. I find Ctrl-u especially useful when I'm halfway through with a command, then I realize I wanted to do something else before executing said command, so I cut it- then paste it back when I need it. * Ctrl + y to paste anything back

<comment><USER14> readline also seems to have a "kill ring":

        $ aaa ^U
        # now "aaa" is the only thing in the kill ring
        $ bbb ^U
        # now kill ring is ["aaa", "bbb"]
        $ ccc ^U
        # now kill ring is ["aaa", "bbb", "ccc"]
        $ ^Y
        $ ccc
        # alt+y cycles through the kill ring
        $ bbb Alt+Y
        $ aaa Alt+Y
        $ ccc Alt+Y
        $ bbb

etc. This likely feels completely natural if you're an emacs user. I don't know what the equivalent vi thing is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Note: you'll need to open a new Terminal window for changes in > ~/.bash_profile to take place.

Alternatively, you can just do '. ~/.bash_profile' or 'source ~./bash_profile'.

<comment><USER16>
      alias refresh-bash="source ~/.bash_profile"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When you execute a command that takes a long time to run and you want to send it to the background you can do:

ctrl + z

then, to send it to the background:

bg

and, to get it back from the background:

fg

Also, I really like to use "for", like:

// get the size of each file or directory in the current directory

for i in `ls -1`; do du -hs $i; done;

<comment><USER18> I don't understand your last line. How is it different to "for i in *; blah"? Or even just "du -hs ."?

<comment><USER17> It was just an example...

instead of "ls -1" you could use any other command that returns a list

The "du -hs ." will only return the size of the current directory, but that was also an example. You could use any other command that you wanted to perform over each item in the list returned by the first command.

Not sure if this is clear enough, please let me know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interestingly, relatedly, a lot of the emacs style keybindings (ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k, etc) are system-wide in OSX. I prefer vim as my daily editor, but it is often useful. You can also make the bindings even more emacsy if you want.

[http://irreal.org/blog/?p=2063](http://irreal.org/blog/?p=2063)

<comment><USER20> There's a link to one of the related files from your link, but folks might also find the rest of my article about this from 2006 interesting:

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa- text.html](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html)

Also cf.:

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/system- bindings.html](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/system-bindings.html)

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/selectors.html](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/selectors.html)

[https://github.com/jrus/cocoa-text- system/tree/master/KeyBin...](https://github.com/jrus/cocoa-text- system/tree/master/KeyBindings)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> aliasing git shortcuts seems more appropriate for git config:

[https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Aliases](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Aliases)

...after aliasing git to 'g' in your shell config, of course :)

        alias g='git'

<comment><USER22> Then you need a space after the g.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I prefer to use inputrc instead of aliases. Put the following into your .inputrc

        "\C-gs": "git status -sb "

Then, for example, after pressing Ctrl-g, s "git status -sb " will appear in your prompt. Much more readable than lots of two or three letter aliases. You can see the complete list of my shortcuts on my GitHub - [https://github.com/grn/dotfiles/blob/master/inputrc](https://github.com/grn/dotfiles/blob/master/inputrc)

<comment><USER6> I don't like rebinding C-g, as that's the 'cancel' key for things like incremental search (in emacs bindings).

<comment><USER23> Good point! Interestingly I managed to work without it somehow. I just checked that C-g C-g works as cancel when those binding are present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should really mention which shell and terminal emulator they are using. Not everyone is using the same "Unix command line".

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. FWIW, we're all on OS X, running bash, zsh, or fish on either Terminal.app or iTerm2.

<comment><USER25> Control-Left and Right switch workspaces for me. A giant pain in the ass, because the normal word-jump shortcut, Option-Left/Right, just drops a [C/[D into the shell on iTerm. The stupid thing is, if I shell into an Ubuntu machine, it works fine.

<comment><USER26> You can probably set that up in .inputrc. Pressing Ctrl-V in a terminal before pressing your ctrl+left or ctrl+right arrow will type the initial escape character literally so you can see what the key sequence is (e.g. something like \e[1;5D).

Alternatively, you could change your workspace bindings to Control+[some other modifier].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here is a rule for how to level up your shell/editing game. If you ever touch your arrow keys, you are doing something wrong.

> ctrl + left arrow Moves the cursor to the left by one word > ctrl + right > arrow Moves the cursor to the right by one word

Alt + b and Alt + f are also aliases for the same action.

<comment><USER28> uhh.... So what's wrong with doing the exact same thing with arrow keys? isn't that more natural and convenient?

<comment><USER27> Your hand has to move a few inches. It wastes time. You can optimize it out of your workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I like the commands, especially the ssh one, which I didn't know before and will certainly use in the future.

I also enjoyed the format of the article. A whole dev team each contributing their own piece to a blog post provides a lot of different voices and styles in a concise way.

</comment><comment><USER30> I knew about the sudo !! but the sudo !$ will come in handy! thanks!

</comment><comment><USER31> Ctrl-t will flip two words. Not very useful but pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER17> ctrl + l

to clear the screen, instead of typing "clear" is pretty useful too.</comment>


Ask HN: How old is the average reader of HN? - <AUTHOR> I posted a question about what advice you would give your younger self the other day on HN and it got me thinking about what the average age of HN readers is.  If you want to participate please post your age, I am 41. Thanks!<p>If you want to see the other post about advice for your younger self it's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12337537 <comment><USER2> 20</comment>


Python source code search engine - <AUTHOR> http://code.feicall.com/codes

<comment><USER3> Hmmm.... Either empty responses, or "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 537587808 bytes) in Unknown on line 0". What is it actually supposed to do? Is it for looking for projects? or code in the projects?

Edit: Ah - it searches the Python's source, not any Python source... not very clear when looking at the page. Not very multi-client safe either - <USER2> you get completion for something that you didn't write for some reason (just started writing 'push' and got completion with ' _to_ ken, _to_ kenize, ...')

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER3> FF 3.5.5 currently

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Erm... this has to be a mistake: <http://code.feicall.com/codes/search/import%20sys>

A search for import sys that doesn't return any results? That _has_ to be a bug. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> the "search" algorithm is pretty dumb now, it only looks for functions and classes. I'll make it smarter. Type sys and wait for auto complete, it should give you thousands of results.</comment></comment>


Magnificent City of Merv - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/12/lost-cities-merv-worlds-biggest-city-razed-turkmenistan <comment><AUTHOR> > Over the centuries, Merv's inhabitants built and maintained a series of dams > and dykes on the Murghab river and a network of canals and reservoirs to > ensure the supply of water to the city. The position of mir-ab, or water > bailiff, was an important post in Merv: according to contemporary medieval > accounts, he had a force of 10,000 workmen under his command, including a > team of 300 divers who routinely patched up the dykes with timber. Their > labour maintained the dam on the Murghab, preventing the accumulation of > silt and regulating the flow of water into Merv's canals in times of drought > and plenty.</comment>


Underground network of microbes that connects trees mapped for first time - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/wood-wide-web-underground-network-microbes-connects-trees-mapped-first-time <comment><USER2> There's a staggering lot we don't know about plants. It's partly due to their nightmarish genome complexity (often polyploid), their slow generation time (taking often decades to mature and reproduce) and the impossibility to reproduce the complex micro-organism communities found in the soil in which they thrive.

Much of the cool stuff we know (such as e.g. transmitting responses to stress to other individuals) we've only learned a couple years ago. This is truly an exciting time to make discoveries.

<comment><USER3> We also don't know much about humans, for roughly same reasons :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> from the paper's synposis, paraphrased -- consider two large groups of trees, one of which thrives in warm temperatures with moderate to high rainfall, another which thrives in strong seasonal changes including a cold and dry time of the year. Each of these two groups has co-evolved with respective microbes in the soil which do regulate the nutrition available from the roots. The physical areas in which these microbes appear, can change "relatively abruptly" over the land, and are sensitive to climate conditions.

The implication is, that if climate conditions like more rain or sustained hotter temperatures, change rapidly, then the microbes in the soil are increasingly out of synch with the weather conditions. I would guess that more stress and increased reproductive failures, to name two extinction drivers, become more pronounced with less available nutrition from the soils plus the new weather.

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested in this topic, Joe Rogan (I know, groan from some) has a great podcast episode with the mycology expert Paul Stammet where they discuss this topic. It's the thing that first got me into mycology and mushroom cultivation. He also has two fantastic Ted Talks if memory serves me correctly. Well worth a listen.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Wood Wide Web" _giggles_

</comment><comment><USER7> Where's the map?

<comment><USER8> Maybe in the paywalled paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1128-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1128-0)

<comment><USER9> No microbe map in the paper unfortunately, just global maps of where the samples were taken. Like many papers these days: wonderful titles, disappointing abstracts and empty conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As above, so below

</comment><comment><USER11> Now, we just need to implement TCP/IP on it...

<comment><USER12> Or whatever the "networking protocol" used by the indigenous species on Pandora (for those who've seen the movie Avatar)

<comment><USER13> I can't wait for people using brain-computer interfaces to connect to the treenet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Spoilers if you haven't seen the first season. of s.t.d.

It's not the same as the stupid intergalactic Mycelia network on Star Trek Discovery, but it's a little bit similar. [https://memory- alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Mycelial_network;](https://memory- alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Mycelial_network;) [https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/7sb2r1/what_is_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/7sb2r1/what_is_the_mycelial_network/).

Spoilers if you haven't seen the first season. of s.t.d.</comment>