Silicon Valley geeks have their own 'Fight Club'. I kid you not. [video] - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/02/10/a-look-at-a-geek-fight-club-in-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> Right, because geeks should be fighting other geeks, for some mystery reason, rather than going somewhere where there is grown-up supervision, safety precautions and people who Know What They Are Doing.

Lousy technique - check. Out of shape guys - check. Amazing size mismatches - check. Hard floor so that the first time someone manages a decent throw or slam, someone can break something - check.

All of these 'Fight Clubs' I've ever seen usually revolve around a couple larger guys using this whole thing as a venue for somewhat sexually charged sadomasochism with their smaller buddies. There's a reason that they're not walking in the door of their local boxing/Muay Thai/MMA/BJJ club instead...

<comment><USER3> Technique? Adult supervision? Fitness? Safety? Proper size matching? You've misunderstood the point.

Sure, they sound melodramatic, cheesy and sentimental talking about their fight club. But at least they're out there doing it, venting, and participating in some mostly rules-free shenanigans.

And "sexually charged" is the condescending weenie's way of simultaneously saying the participants are closeted homosexuals, and that being gay is a bad thing.

Naysayers manage to anger me and tire me out, all at the same time.

<comment><USER4> > But at least they're out there doing it, venting, and participating in some > mostly rules-free shenanigans.

This is unnecessarily dangerous. You can go to a Muay Thai class, train up for a few months and kick three shades of shit out of each other if you want to. The difference is that with experienced teachers who will show you how to avoid injuries, the likelihood of serious accidents goes down.

Exposing yourself to unnecessary risk when you have safe alternatives isn't manly, it's stupid.

> ...participants are closeted homosexuals, and that being gay is a bad thing.

No one said being gay was a bad thing. Repressing gay feelings and letting them out through violence on the other hand isn't so great IMO.

<comment><USER3> > Exposing yourself to unnecessary risk when you have safe alternatives isn't > manly, it's stupid.

Sometimes it's OK to just be stupid, and uneducatedly kick the shit out of each other, as long as cries of "Uncle" are respected. The lack of framework and authority is important for some types of catharsis.

> Repressing gay feelings and letting them out through violence on the other > hand isn't so great IMO.

My point is that whenever guys roughhouse, some chronic non-participant will always call it homoeroticism, and since that sounds like a good, intellectual reason to justify their nonparticipation, other bystanders will smugly agree. It's a cheap jab.

<comment><USER4> > Sometimes it's OK to just be stupid, and uneducatedly kick the shit out of > each other, as long as cries of "Uncle" are respected. The lack of framework > and authority is important for some types of catharsis.

To each his own I suppose. Actually I felt this when going from Kendo to BJJ. Kendo being a bit more traditional Japanese and regimented. It was incredibly refreshing being thrown into the deep end with seemingly little structure and to train to Cypress Hill and Slipknot.

Still, I'm of the opinion that a bunch of dudes kicking the crap out of each other in a garage is a step too far.

> My point is that whenever guys roughhouse, some chronic non-participant will > always call it homoeroticism, and since that sounds like a good, > intellectual reason to justify their nonparticipation, other bystanders will > smugly agree. It's a cheap jab.

Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why don't they go to their local Muay Thai/Boxing/etc. club and learn proper technique? And if you want to fight: Get into the ring. It's fun. Even if you get beaten up.

I've been doing Muay Thai for many years now and beside the workout, I got much closer to my cultural Thai roots. Martial arts is more than fighting. It's about personality building, respect and culture.

'Fight Clubs' like this are dangerous for the participants. They don't know how to hit and could get injured seriously. I just hope no trained fighter is ever going to participate in such a fight and gets serious.

<comment><USER6> There are many such 'fight clubs', not just for geeks, although those are most likely to videotape and post it to Youtube, I guess. It happens in garages across Europe (I have no reason to believe it is different elsewhere). It's just tough guy talking, to have a story to tell in the bar or club. I've been to many and in most places people just stand around to look tough, but avoid any actual workout or training. Any halfway skilled muay thai or bjj fighter (as in, 1/2 year of serious training) can take on 90% of the people in those sort of gatherings. I mean I'm 5ft9 and less than 170 pounds and I've relatively easily dominated people 1 foot taller and 50 pounds heaver, and I'm not even a good fighter.

I've seen people get knocked out by accidental swings and hits, and people throwing up because the intense activity of a 1m30s fight was too much for them. Some nose bleeds here and there, but I've never seen 'serious' injuries, mostly because people have no kicking technique, no grappling skills (no joint locks or arm/leg bars) and telegraph punches from miles away. One dude broke his hand punching someone else on a a hard part of the jaw. I don't think it's dangerous, just stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who practiced Kendo for just a while, the little scene where the guy swings a shinai around pretending to be what he thinks a samurai looks like was cringe-worthy and pathetic. If he ever does take up Kendo/Iaido, he will look back and regret it with the fire of a thousand burning suns.

<comment><USER7> Never regret anything, because at some point it was exactly what you wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I think hockey is a great outlet for developers (being one that plays of course). It is physically and mentally taxing, but most of all it requires teamwork; I can't think of anything that matches better. Sometimes you square off with someone on the ice and that's where it stays. When it does happen, it's far more raw than any staged combat -- I'll take that rush any day. Plus, you get a solid workout in the meantime!

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I'm a hockey player too. But hockey requires lots of years of practice and skill to get fun/good at. It's easier to just wack someone with a chair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Army's Best Ranger competition is a Eco-Challenge event. If you want to get in touch with the _"essential nature of man"_ pit yourself against nature herself (like a week hike of the Sierra Ridge), preferably with a buddy, and you'll walk away with a whole new perspective.

<comment><USER11> _"... The Army's Best Ranger competition is a Eco-Challenge event ..."_

The Foreign Legion's has it's own version, MDS, _"Marathon des Sables"_ ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_des_Sables>

<comment><USER12> That Wiki link is rather devoid of information about the Marathon des Sables... I would know, as I ran it in 2009. I'm not sure how the Foreign Legion factors into the race, as it was started by Patrick Bauer in 1986(who still oversees it).

People of all ages and from all walks of life participate in it. It's a life changing event in which you learn so much about yourself and develop deep friendships with people you've only known for perhaps a few days at most. The participants also suffer.. a LOT-between heat, physical exertion / exhaustion, and being fully self-sufficient for a week. It's a damn grueling event that definitely earns it's spot among the world's toughest foot races.

More info here at <http://www.saharamarathon.co.uk/> and <http://darbaroud.com/index_uk.php>

<comment><USER11> _"... That Wiki link is rather devoid of information about the Marathon des Sables ..."_

It's always a balance here to go to the original technical source or a general one. I read [http://www.darbaroud.com/uk/html/mds/general/uk_26mds_regula...](http://www.darbaroud.com/uk/html/mds/general/uk_26mds_regulation.php) but most might want a quick overview.

 _"... I'm not sure how the Foreign Legion factors into the race ..."_

A fair portion of the participants are military - I know of ex Legion who have completed this.

 _"... would know, as I ran it in 2009. ..."_

What time did you complete in? You gave the UK url where did you train to acclimatise to the heat?

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, given the amount of detail :)

I understand, regarding the legion. I'm sure there are a lot of military folk who ran it. I know of at least one US Marine who ran it. There were a number of Rugby players and French firemen who were the talk of the town that year, too!

Ugh, 54 hours. I got hurt at the end of the first day and had to walk... and got really sick during the long stage which forced me to take frequent rests during the remainder of that and the marathon stage. As for me, I'm from the United States and trained in New Jersey. Hardly the conditions of the Sahara, but you make it work :)

Here's the Flickr link if you're interested. Runner 786 is me: [https://picasaweb.google.com/arthur.baczyk/ArthurSMarathonDe...](https://picasaweb.google.com/arthur.baczyk/ArthurSMarathonDesSablesPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCP3a8J-Zx- PCKQ&feat=directlink)

<comment><USER10> would you do it again?

<comment><USER12> If you asked me right after the race, I would've said no. I was in so much pain.. but about a month later I felt like I had to again. If you can pay the high entry cost(~$4,000 USD), it's worth it. I'm going to try to go back in 2013.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To each his own.

But this is idiotic.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd rather see a reality tv Fight Club.

Dancing With the Stars chicks tearing out the hair of American Idol wannabes? Sign me up!

...holy shit, re-reading that I think I just became a mainstream American tv watcher.

</comment><comment><USER15> Though I was facepalmed through the entire video... it does lend itself to one question:

If you could geek fight anyone in history who would it be? :)

I'm torn between 1960s Gordon Moore or RMS (any decade).

<comment><USER16> ESR, definitely.

<comment><USER17> He'd hand you your ass. I'm a serious martial artist and I wouldn't want to fight him (outside of training). <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=318>

<comment><USER16> You're assuming I wouldn't park a bus on him as an opening move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does this differ significantly from self-mutilation (cutting)? Sure, if you feel your life is hum-drum it's easy enough to hurt yourself and to hurt others. To indulge in your violent instincts. It'll pump endorphins into your system and make you feel alive. So will cutting, and bulimia.

But these are very unhealthy outlets.

I see the fight club mentality as an indication of the dysfunctional nature of modern polite (or "politically correct") society which tends to write off violence and risk as aberrations and taboos. We see this in the ongoing trend of dis-empowering individuals (often in the guise of protecting them) and shifting responsibilities (and power) to organizations and corporations. The perfect example of this is the commonplace fear and hatred of firearms amongst most urban professionals.

This subject is too large to be addressed completely in a mere post or two. Suffice it to say that I think these "fight clubs" are a trend of men attempting to ape some perverted ideal of masculinity. A twisted masculinity of violence, domination, and disrespect.

<comment><USER19> _How does this differ significantly from self-mutilation (cutting)?_

How does American football (or ruby) differ significantly form this?

<comment><USER20> _> (or ruby)_

I assume you mean rugby, but if not then this is the weakest contribution to the programming language wars ever.

Rugby is brutal though.

<comment><USER19> Ugh, worst typo ever. I did not mean to compare ruby to self-mutilation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Real geeks do <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing>

</comment><comment><USER21> I've considered joining a Martial Arts gym, because I thoroughly enjoy the competition -- I wrestled all the way through High School.

However, I've convinced myself that it may be detrimental to my long term cognitive abilities. Do any HN martial arts participants have any insight into this? Can one really expect to repeatedly get hit in the head and not pay for it, long term?

<comment><USER22> Boxers lose IQ. I believe so do football players.

<comment><USER23> Professional Boxers and Professional rugby players. There's a big difference between trying out social / club style sports and going into amateur / pro boxing competitions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hitting each other with a keyboard? Now days, that's just funny (the keyboard probably took the worst of it). Back in the 80's, that would have been assault with a deadly weapon. Back then, keyboards had massive steel frames, "suitable for cracking a managers skull", as it says in the jargon file :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> It looks like some miss guided people, that wrongly interpreted Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.

</comment><comment><USER26> These guys got some press several years ago: [http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2006/05/fi...](http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2006/05/fightclub)

I was amused hearing of fights where they beat each other only with rolled up newspapers. It beats watching tv and eating pork rinds, I guess.

<comment><USER17> A tightly rolled newspaper or magazine can be an effective weapon; some schools of escrima or arnis demonstrate how to roll one and use it as a substitute for the short stick.

<comment><USER27> Soccer hooligans use it as well.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "In Silicon Valley we have the highest concentration of aggressive people in the United States."

Really? More than Fort Hood, Camp Lejeune, or the Louisiana State Penitentiary? What about New York City? I suspect that SV, in fact, has one of the highest concentrations of beta males in the US, and this club is an over- compensation mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER29> And I was thinking that geeks were sticking to Search Engine Battle Raps... ;-)

<http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=search> engine battle rap

</comment><comment><USER30> lol, I think this is a parody. Just something a bunch of nerds got together and threw together and is being taken too seriously. Meh just my opinion though, it very well might be for real.

<comment><USER31> This is real. There was an hour long documentary that followed one of these clubs around for a few months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> yeah, that is retarded. getting exercise is good. exerting yourself is good. even learning some kind of self defense is good. but that is just completely retarded.

speaking as someone who DID get in a lot of fights growing up, the "it lets me know I'm still alive" thing is ridiculous; there are so many ways to enjoy life without beating the shit out of someone or having someone beat the shit out of you.

take up martial arts, or rock climbing, or an actual sport.

</comment><comment><USER33> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R90QyIBJqrg>

</comment><comment><USER34> Chuck Palahniuk would be proud.

I want a go with Sergey. Or Larry.

</comment><comment><USER35> Loved the "I do it for the hugs afterwards" line.

<comment><USER36> I thought that line was incredibly sad. Why isn't anybody hugging him at other times?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "I do it for the hugs"

Awesome

</comment><comment><USER38> OP doesn't remember the first two rules.

</comment><comment><USER39> This reminds me _very_ strongly of Will Farrel and John Reilly in Step Brothers: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g0mUyH6dI8></comment>


How to Fix the Country's Ailing Schools. And How Not To. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/how-to-fix-the-countrys-failing-schools-and-how-not-to.html <comment><USER2> The piece ends with the following quote:

> _" People are... asking: 'What do we need to do to save traditional public > schools?'"_

And for the life of me, I cannot understand why people should be interested in saving 'traditional public schools'(TPS). I know that TPSs are a stand-in for a number of political values, but I have to say that emphasizing political values and the status quo is quite disappointing when it comes to the development of childrens' potential. In an age of rapidly improving communications, with responsive websites and machine learning, as well as the massive budgets devoted to 'education', we should be able to do better than small incremental improvements to a model of schooling developed hundreds of years ago.

Perhaps this article is a symptom of Thiel's diagnosis in "Zero to One", that people do not believe that things can be drastically improved, so they rely on incrementalism and a refusal to believe in anything specific. Another possibility is that the author is simply trying to defend the status quo against change, and appealing to cynicism and doubt to achieve this ends. I am not sure which possibility I find more distressing.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. Provide a space with facilitators to keep kids out of trouble and point them in the right direction(s), then just let them have at it.

The whole grade and classroom system is horribly antiquated. Children with ability will follow their more successful peers without any external impetus. Those who lag "behind" (based on whatever metric you choose to use) can get one-on-one assistance from instructors to determine where they're running into trouble.

Personally, I think the "traditional" classroom has always been "broken" and I'll be happy to see the back of it.

<comment><USER4> Without experiment there won't be progress. New technologies should be adopted to aid learning. Not talking about giving ipads, but about using internet to help with accelerated learning. An analogue to this would be that we can't learn basics of programming or become experts in them just by reading it. You have to practice. Using internet materials to help explain things would do great for both teacher and student. There are many wrong articles about stuff out there, so things will have to be curated though.

Also currently there is a situation where not everyone is able to follow what they truly like. That situation will change when there is a "place" where anyone can learn about anything authoritatively(learning by oneself with internet is very tedious and you never know if you are in right path).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always felt the system of using property taxes to fund public schools (in the US. I dont know how other countries work) is completely unfair. Affluent, lower population (and predominately white) school districts are well funded while urban (predominately minority) school districts struggle. Also, when the school board has the power to raise your property taxes, the can make it impossible for lower income families to afford to live in places with good schools.

<comment><USER6>
      when the school board has the power to
      raise your property taxes

I don't know of a jurisdiction that gives that power to school boards; generally parcel taxes and such must be voted in (but such measures generally win, since non-property-owners can vote as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not the fault of the schools or politicians or teachers. It's the parents.</comment>


Is the economy suffering from the crisis of attention? - <AUTHOR> https://bankunderground.co.uk/2017/11/24/is-the-economy-suffering-from-the-crisis-of-attention/ <comment><USER2> A.I. can be part of the solution as much as it is part of the problem.

If you train it to solve the problems in front of you and it serves you, it can filter out the crap and help you pay attention to what matters.

see

[http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/](http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/)</comment>


Atanasoff–Berry Computer (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/operation.php <comment><USER2> Anyone discussion of the (non-programmable, electronic) Atanasoff-Berry Computer will eventually segue into mentions of Zuse's (programmable, electromechanic) Z3, Babbage's (programmable, fully mechanic, only realized later on) Analytical Engine as well as Eckart and Mauchly's (programmable, electronic) ENIAC, which all were the first computer for some definition of computer.

The (electronic, programmable) chips that are in almost any device from the washing machine to the watch today are a product of a long series of inventions reaching from logic and arithmetic over the first automatons and calculation machines of the 1600s to more complex machines of the 1800s over to the development of electronics through tubes, transistors and integrated circuits of the 1900s.

And today they are a universal part of everyday life that nonetheless depends on large material flows across dozens of countries that would be in danger in any large-scale event like a World War (like the two world wars that have happened in the 20th century, and where anyone who has seen and survived that kind of large-scale war is rather old now).

</comment><comment><USER3> As an ISU alum and an Iowa resident I've always been dumbfounded that we don't highlight our state's place in the history of computing more.

I would totally be in favor of changing the state motto from "fields of opportunity" to "birthplace of the digital computer" and putting it on all the "welcome to iowa" signs on the highways, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd never heard of the ABC computer before. The Iowa State website seems to have reached the conclusion that Mauchly ripped off Atansoff and Berry.

Every invention, every discovery, emerges from a context, a culture, a society of thinkers. How can credit ever be properly assigned?

<comment><USER5> I forgot the name but there's a book on the history of this computer. It's a good read. This is apparently a historically controversial topic.

<comment><USER6> If you mean [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003F3FJKA/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003F3FJKA/), I agree it's interesting -- on an interesting topic by an excellent writer -- but you have to allow quite a lot for the author's poor understanding of computers.</comment></comment></comment>


Pgagroal: A high-performance connection pool for PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/agroal/pgagroal <comment><USER2> Why this and not PgBouncer?

<comment><USER3> Seems like it's faster: [https://github.com/agroal/pgagroal/blob/master/doc/PERFORMAN...](https://github.com/agroal/pgagroal/blob/master/doc/PERFORMANCE.md)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Generate pretty code screenshots with gradients - <AUTHOR> https://www.snippetshot.com <comment><AUTHOR> Snippet Shot is side project I build during my vacation. I wanted something like the obvious tool, but simpler and more in line with my workflow. I also really wanted a gradient background because I'm a bit tired of the solid color backgrounds! So basically just changing it up, challenging myself and seeing how such a tool is built.

The way it works: you either paste in a Github gist url or just the code, tweak the settings if needed (including choosing a gradient) and downloading a PNG or SVG of the code.

I'm pretty happy with it right now for my personal use cases, but I'm planning on adding a bunch of other features and improvements and I'm really curious to hear your opinion. I know it's nothing groundbreaking, but hopefully it's of use for some people.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice, from what I can see it looks like there isn't a way to embed gists with a nice font pack and coder style aesthetic. But I also think the gradient feature is detached from what this should be. It's rudimentary to add your own CSS border, so I'm not sure I like that particular feature. It's interesting to note that with [https://codepen.io](https://codepen.io) you can export to gist and with this you can get back some of the styling in an embed. And create an alt embed with your own branding. That's what I found most clever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out! So if I understand correctly, to you the feature to create an image from a gist is useful, but the gradients are too limiting or detracting from what you want it to be? I'm thinking about making that more flexible (turn it off).

Although it sounds like carbon.now.sh is more what you are looking for perhaps?

Again appreciate you checking it out and I will consider your remarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love this. Would legit use this as a quick tool even for non-code snippets - meaning screenshots - just because it makes them look that much better!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, appreciate it!

For sure, you can just set it to Markdown and use it for snippets of text. For now just in the monospace (Mono Lisa) font, but if that suits your style you can do that.

<comment><USER3> I was meaning actual screeenshots of i.e. let's say another product. I would 100% use it for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh cool, got it. Did not expect that but it's something else than a device mockup! If you're handy with HTML and CSS you could probably replace the code window with your own image (in the devtools inspector) and it should work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you think about creating a demo? I just want to see what this looks like, I'm on mobile and don't care to find some legit code to test.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, mobile is a bit difficult because of the way the screenshots are generated, but if you want to look at a generated screenshot with some JavaScript, check this picture: [https://twitter.com/MarcoSlooten/status/1291735166713565185/...](https://twitter.com/MarcoSlooten/status/1291735166713565185/photo/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Demo results look great. Two other options I'd like to see are color scheme and inner/outer padding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your kind words and feedback.

Especially color scheme is an option that has been requested multiple times. Here, it really shows I was not building it for an audience but just for myself. Now that it's public, I should consider making it more flexible without adding too much complexity. I think color schemes are relatively easy to add and might give a lot of value.

Inner/outer padding is something I haven't seen mentioned before, but totally get.

I need to figure out a way to keep it simple and cater to more use cases. I think both points are valid and I'm probably adding those short term.</comment></comment>


Lyft pops 21% on its first day of trading - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/29/lyft-nasdaq/ <comment><USER3> Notes about the IPO I've been collecting....

\- Opens at $87.24, IPO at $72.00

\- raised about $2.34 Billion in cash

\- unlike hte SNAP IPO, this one has some buy ratings

\- lock up date of Sept 2nd

\- company valued at $25Billion, though note the financial engineering of a relatively small float that helps push up the stock price.

\- upsized offer from 30.8M shares to 32.5M( around 11% of float, this is a relatively small float)

Groupon tried this kind of financial engineering to prop up a bad business, it didn't go well then

\- valued at 10x 2018 revenue, wow, given the losses, wow.

\- CEO won't talk about how they'll become profitable, now that they are out of the IPO window that's a bit of a worrying trend, though clearly Wall St doesn't seem to currently care

\- no international expansion plans outside of Canada > "We may choose to do that some day but we don't have current plans."

-now trading below its opening trade, not to be confused with its opening price.

Uber had better IPO this year.

By Year end Lyft will have reported 3 times so investors will start to look for losses to shrink and see a path to profitability. Lyft Share lock ups will also be off so Lyft will get some selling pressure.

If Lyft can't support the high valuation it currently has 9-12 months out then Uber had better have a better story than "we're Lyft but bigger".

I'd expect to see an S-1 from uber in April and an IPO by the end of the summer to avoid this scenario.

<comment><USER4> > valued at 10x 2018 revenue, wow, given the losses, wow.

Well it would have to be _some_ multiple of revenue as a multiple of profits wouldn't make any sense (as its negative).

Still though that's nuts!

<comment><USER5> For growth companies equity analysts look at forward ratios - <USER2> several years out. 10x in 2018 will probably be 5-6x in 2019 and 3-4x in 2020 and maybe 2-3x in 2021. Still very high but at least approaching sane levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can some kind soul please explain to me why _popping_ on the first day is considered to be a good thing? Isn't the company leaving the money on the table for investment banks and their rich clients if they do not sell their shares at an optimal price?

<comment><USER7> I think part of it is that the pop generates goodwill among the big players, making it easier for the company to tap the markets in the future. But it's fair to argue that a pop means that some money was left on the table.

<comment><USER8> Buying good will for 4 billion, that's a lot of waste cause no one is paying you that when you are in trouble and need it

What I'm trying to say is your hypothesis is not correct

<comment><USER7> They sold 32.5 million shares at $72 apiece, raising $2.3 billion. If you really believe that the 'true' price was the first transaction on the open market, then they left about $400m on the table, not four billion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> $SNAP "popped" 40% when it IPOed: [https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/02/technology/snapchat- ipo/ind...](https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/02/technology/snapchat- ipo/index.html)

It now trades at less than half of that.

<comment><USER10> Everyone with a little bit of objectivity knew they were way overvalued. However, I remember the inauthentic PR machine kept pushing them everywhere.

<comment><USER11> Nah, that's just hindsight bias because loads of people claiming objectivity thought that about FB too.

And they were crowing when FB hit 16. But they were wrong all throughout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The underwriters should have priced the deal higher so the company would have more money to invest. Pop is a handout to favored clients of the underwriters (or a subsidy to encourage them to subscribe).

It's like the VCs having the company pay its legal bill when doing a deal: less of the LP's money for the company to invest, while they get to pocket the money the LPs _did_ give the firm for this purpose (management fee -- the 2% of "2 and 20").

And the press describes the pop as a _good_ thing. It's underwriter malpractice.

</comment><comment><USER13> Might be a bit premature to write these headlines? The day isn't over.

At least that's a benefit of printed papers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was shocking since yesterday the rumored price was $72. That's a pretty big disparity.

<comment><USER14> The price that Lyft sold newly issued shares at yesterday was $72. They raised $2B at that price. Some of those investors put up their new shares into public markets this morning and got a handsome profit.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious how true this is, don't they have lock-up periods? Would love to get educated here if that's not the case or there are exceptions.

<comment><USER16> The lockup period is for existing shares that affect employees, founders, and prior investors. The new shares that are issued and then sold at the IPO offering price are able to be traded immediately and this is where the volume comes from.

In order to be a buyer of an IPO you need to have a tremendous amount of net worth, think 10's of billions of dollars, you need to have a relationship with a bank, and you need to subscribe to all of the IPOs on the calendars, not just cherry pick the ones that you want.

The entire IPO process is really a very limited market place to a very select few buyers and these are typically very large endowments, mutual funds, and so forth.

In order to assure the company that they have buyers, they promise a return to those buyers in the price popping immediately after the IPO, otherwise the IPO pricing loses it's allure.

In a Dutch auction, typically new shares aren't created, and instead existing investors sell shares. This means that the company doesn't get any of that cash on it's balance sheets. This is done when the company is profitable, or has enough cash reserves to become profitable in the near future and the investors then want to get all of that pop by offering those shares directly.

Now for investors in a regular IPO, it's also ok for investors, because while the company gets a bit less cash on its balance sheet, the investors shares are valued immediately on the public market and have the benefit of the pop. With the idea being that they will retain this higher value post the 6 month lock up.

However, you will already have two sets of quarterly results typically in that window in which case Wall Street will continue to evaluate the stock. If you can hit your projections you will be in good shape, however, if there are any misses, as was the case with Snap, all of that exuberance was tied to impossible numbers so the reset can be quite harsh.

And in public markets, that reset is instantaneous, because as soon as the news hits the market cap is immediately affected as shares are then traded on this news.

<comment><USER3> > In a Dutch auction, typically new shares aren't created, and instead > existing investors sell shares. This means that the company doesn't get any > of that cash on it's balance sheets. This is done when the company is > profitable, or has enough cash reserves to become profitable in the near > future and the investors then want to get all of that pop by offering those > shares directly.

This is wrong. Typically its still the company that sells shares. Infact Dutch auctions vs typical IPO's are orthogonal to who sells shares.

In both case the vast majority of the time its the company selling shares from its float.

<comment><USER14> I think GP was thinking of direct listing, like Spotify's, in which the company does not issue new shares and instead the stock is listed on a market and insiders put up their own sell orders to provide initial volume to the market. In this case, there is no lockup and founders, employees, and other insiders can get immediate liquidity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't know about anyone else, but I'm prepared to open up a huge short position when Lyft gets to about 90. No way this thing will keep going up.

<comment><USER18> Looks like you'll have to wait a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seeing that IPOs are designed to pop, I don't find it that surprising.

The naive way to look at an IPO that pops the first day of trading is that the investment bankers left a lot of money on the table and the company got screwed. But if an IPO was set at a fair price (the price after the first day of trading), the company might have a hard time generating the pre-IPO demand in the first place for their roadshow. After all, the only reason to subscribe to an IPO and get pre-allocated shares is to make some juicy risk-free returns.

So the company makes the explicit choice to trade off short-term profits for short-term (but hopefully longer) artificially induced demand.

The bankers win by allocating shares to investors they like hoping that the favor will be returned in the form of business in the future (on top of the fat fee they make). The subscribed investors win by the risk-free return. The company wins be inducing demand.

This has been the process and the incentives that have governed IPOs for a long long time. It's interesting that this process might be supplanted with direct listings or auctions ala Spotify or Google.

<comment><USER20> It's absolutely surprising considering the last private price is less than half of the publicly trading price.

<comment><USER19> Maybe the dotcom bubble is a bad example, but 50% or more pops were pretty common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And they are down 5% from that $87.24 pre-market price.

<comment><USER22> No profits. Check.

10x Revenue Valuation. Check.

Shares locked up for everyone except rich guys. Check.

Houston we are clear for LYFT OFF!

<comment><USER16> Technically the shares are locked up for the rich guys as well. The founders and VC investors won't be able to sell for 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't all the IPO usually pop on the first day? Just to get back to some lower level in the following days.

</comment><comment><USER24> Obligatory: underwriters usually price IPOs at a discount (called "underpricing") and preferred investors get the benefit of that in this early "pop."

<comment><USER25> Also the reason you pay underwriters is to engineer the pop, so underpricing might not be all there is to it.

<comment><USER26> Hm isn't it the listing firm who pays the underwriters?

Why would they want to "engineer" a pop? The bigger the pop between the listing price and what the price settles at, the less cash the listing firm raised relative to what they could have raised.

Even existing shareholders don't really benefit from a pop because they would be able to sell at the "true" market price that the listing firm _should have raised_ at, as well as the true marketing price that the price eventually reaches. The only people who benefit are those who got in between the listing price and the closing pop price - at the expense of the listing firm.

<comment><USER27> If you _really_ want to get the full market value out of your IPO, you should use something like a Dutch Auction [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchauction.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchauction.asp)

IIRC Google did that, and didn't experience a first-day pop.

The company sells its shares to the underwriter at the IPO price; so the company gets the money up front from the underwriter. It is in the company's interest to price it as high as it can; and in the underwriter's interest to price it _as low_ as it can. If the underwriter wins, you see a pop; if the company wins, you see flat or a decline.

This is why a Dutch Auction is the best option for IPOs, but underwriters hate that (insert "the underwriters hate him!" meme).

<comment><USER28> FB also did that. It closed only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering_of_Fac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering_of_Facebook#First_day)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How long until all the insiders can sell their stock?

<comment><USER30> Usually 6 months, occasionally 12, and the leadership may have a longer blackout window

<comment><USER31> That's for employees, what about insider investors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Too bad no retail investor got this pop.

</comment><comment><USER33> What's the volume? Let's not get fixated on the price when volatility is high. Mean vs variance yo.

<comment><USER34> my broker is showing 57.9m shares traded as of 2:52pm Eastern</comment></comment>


"Siri, how much data do you gobble up in a month?" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars <comment><USER2> Linkbait. They're talking about 30MB pushing you over a 2,000MB limit. If you're within 1.5% of your monthly allocation, there are many things that might push you over.

<comment><USER3> Aren't you a bit too sensitive? It seems to me like they are pretty clearly suggesting that a few MB don't matter if you have a 2GB plan but also that things might be different if you have a different plan. All in all they seem to pretty clearly say that Siri doesn't use much data. I can't see what's linkbait about that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to recover after failure? - <AUTHOR>

I was a co-founder of a startup that never delivered and gained the reputation of not being able to do so. We decided not to launch after reevaluating the marketplace. We're in a city that doesn't embrace failure among startups so it's been especially difficult. I've learned to stay more stealth but in reality would love to talk to people about my ideas. Personally, I've grown from this "failure" and pivoted on to something great. How do I regain my reputation and should I even care? My focus is my customers and have already gained significant traction on my new startup. <comment><USER2> I have failed so many times that I called my plastic surgeon so he could sew in more fingers for me to count them. Know what? People are going to think that you are a failure either way. Why? Its their own reflection showing off their fears. You see, when you fail you admit you are human. That you dont know everything. That sometimes you make the wrong choices. One thing that this gives is the power to liberate yourself from those very own choices. Every bad choice itself is an opportunity to further down the road fix it. The biggest fear you should have in your life is not failure, but a lack of failure. Because it means that you stopped trying. That you gave up. And even though very few of us ever manage to make it, from my experience, I can say that its not the goal that matters but the journey. So far, I've managed to impact a lot of lives postiviely. Plan to impact a lot more.

When we fail we are forced to change. Change is good. It brings new things into our lives. There is a sayingt that goes something like this:

 _If you want to change the world, change your country. If you want to changeyour country, change your town. If you want to change your town, change your neighborhood. If you want to change your neighborhood, change your home. If you want to change your home, you gotta change yourself._

Failure is the mechanism through which we receive feedback to make sure the change we are doing is positive. Dont shy away from it. Run towards it and embrace. For it will set you free.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to under promise and over deliver with your new startup. Everyone loves a good comeback story, use this to your advantage. After you've started to over deliver for your clients, ask if they would write about their experience in exchange for xyz.

After a few have done that, write a post titled "How my failed startup helped me succeed" or similar. In this post be very transparent about why your first startup failed to deliver, but don't ever put blame on anyone but yourself. Take responsibility for the failure. Talk about what you learned and how those lessons are helping you deliver for your current clients. In your post link to the articles your current clients wrote and briefly mention why they're happy.

Afterwards, promote the shit out of your post.

What this accomplishes:

1\. It takes away any power a person would have in bringing up your past failure because you've spun it in a positive way. This will give you the confidence to talk about ideas moving forward. You will always be able to take negative criticism of your past failure and spin it to talk about how it lead to your current success.

2\. You've given people a good story. People like good stories, and they love good story tellers.

3\. Using your current clients endorsement you prove that you can deliver.

Just some rough thoughts. Sorry for the bad grammer. I just don't care enough to correct them. Hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is beautiful, thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Learn from your failure; turning your failure into learning. Then there is no need to recover, only a need to move on to your next lesson.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very powerful, thanks.</comment></comment>


Ask Ruby Developers: Would you purchase rails SaaS template? - <AUTHOR>

update: The template shall have the following features. 1. User management.
2. Invoicing 3. Integration with billing applications (stripe, paypal, et.c) <comment><USER2> I've seen: [https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-recurly-subscription- saas](https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-recurly-subscription-saas)

Which seems similar. I never looked too deep into the source code though or used it personally.

It might have value but template solutions almost always have the same draw back and that most use cases differ from the template's path by a lot and now the template user has to learn a 5,000+ line code base to understand the system.

It is good trade off though if they plan to stick closely to the template.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there might be a market for this , I have seen similar but for PHP based platforms the only one I remember now is [http://www.appthemes.com/themes/](http://www.appthemes.com/themes/)

I am not interested right this moment, but might be in the future. What is your email ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its not a theme template but more of a SaaS template that has User , Billing and Invoicing management.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the biggest problem of this world that we need to solve? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Where do socks go?!?

There's not just one big problem - there's millions (perhaps billions) of one big problems, depending on who's doing the asking and who's doing the answering. Sure, there are a few common problems that could be solved, but you have to figure out a way to ask the questions about the problems in such a way that the solution will be mutually agreeable to the largest number of people.

Energy, food, war, socks. All of these are big problems (OK, not so much with the socks) that won't be solved with one big solution. By the time you're done breaking them down into solvable units, some wierdo will come along and ask "So, what's the biggest problem?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Cheap, clean energy.

Solve that, and virtually everything in almost every industry changes.

</comment><comment><USER4> * Incurable diseases

* Mass killings of human beings by other human beings (whatever be the reason, whatever they are called)

* Mismanagement of global food inventory, as mentioned by others

* Inequality between women and men (and others). Existing solutions are not customized for cultures/communities.

</comment><comment><USER5> Inequality and lack of social mobility.

It's mind boggling how uneven wealth distribution is in some countries.

</comment><comment><USER6> Paraphrasing Jared Diamond, the biggest problem we face is thinking that we can fix just one problem and be OK.

</comment><comment><USER7> Greed.

It's the only thing that destroys everything it touches. And it often has massive reach and repercussions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Its equal access to opportunity. Population would not be a problem, given level of education has a direct correlation to number of children. And there is more than enough food to sustain the planet

</comment><comment><USER9> population growth. It drives hunger, unemployment, pollution, resource exhaustion, political instability,.... In systems terminology it is a control variable with many output variables.

</comment><comment><USER10> Food production. Even today there are people without enough food. The planet isn't getting any bigger while the population grows each day.

<comment><USER11> I would make a slight correction to this. There is enough food. It is just in the wrong places. It is a cost / distribution problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Food, cheap but nutritious engineered food which can be produced/grown in diverse geographic areas in large quantities/density.

</comment><comment><USER13> unethical businesses - Why? Because they do anything for money. They don't care about effects to the environment, they don't value human life and they treat employees as slaves (might not be same everywhere).

</comment><comment><USER14> War & hunger.

</comment><comment><USER15> Aging.

</comment><comment><USER16> climate change</comment>


Barometer question - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question <comment><USER2> This is a great article, thanks for posting.

I think my favorite response has to be "trading the barometer to the building's superintendent in return for the information wanted".</comment>


Grum takedown: '50% of worldwide spam is gone' - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/19/technology/grum-spam-botnet/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Other sources are reporting that the botnet was responsible for only 18% of worldwide spam, rather than 50%. ([http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/grum-botnet-gasps- dy...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/grum-botnet-gasps-dying- breath/))</comment>


Diamonds Are Bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit/

<comment><USER2> OK buddy - you be the first one to not give your fiancee a diamond...wait till she goes to work or talks to her friends who expect to see it...then come back and let the rest of us know how it went... not to be snarky, because I remember coming to the exact same conclusion you did before I got engaged...but not getting the rock is easier said than done...wasting a bunch of money on something you have no logical need for...let's just call that "training"...if you ever get married, you'll know what I mean.

<comment><USER3> > wait till she goes to work or talks to her friends who expect to see it

You can always game the system. My wife purchased a lab-made champagne diamond (colouring is from nitrogen IIRC). It was a pretty damn big rock, had only VVS inclusions and was cheap. Slap that thing in a gold band and your wife-to-be has a real diamond - your average jeweler won't have the tools to spot that it's artificial unless it's tagged. Thing was, my wife was a chem student at the time and thought it was cool. I was a young bloke with something to prove so I purchased the real-deal and spent the next three years paying it off.

Moral: marry nerds. And perhaps swallow your pride.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988)

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh please, we get it already. We know about diamonds, their scarcity and price. I'm still getting my wife a nice diamond ring, and hell I might get one too, and no we did not marry the "wrong people" because we gave in a little to culture.

Any other breaking news? NSA Spying? What about that facebook!</comment>


CopperEgg Cloud Service Monitoring - Hybrid Visibility, Fine-Grained Forensics - <AUTHOR> http://copperegg.com/copperegg-cloud-service-monitoring-enables-unmatched-hybrid-visibility-and-fine-grained-forensics/ New heatmaps, custom cloud monitoring dashboards, and iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps announced.  Designed for hybrid monitoring across clouds, enterprise+cloud, and inside the enterprise as well.  Custom dashboards aggregate application performance metrics with server monitoring and website performance for service-level views. <comment><USER2> The heat map is awesome!

<comment><USER3> yeah, pretty cool.</comment></comment>


Why do men find blonde women so very attractive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jun/04/men-blonde-women-attractive

<comment><USER2> Ah, but when there are more bottle blondes than real blondes, brunettes look more honest. It's similar to the curse of having an extraordinary bust: some men will assume it's fake and conclude that you were tacky and superficial enough to get a boob job.

<comment><USER3> Not all men evaluate women like prize-cattle in an auction. If you're tacky, I can probably figure that out from your speech, writing, or actions .. not your bust.

<comment><USER2> Getting a boob job is not only an action, it's expensive, physically invasive, and is usually done to achieve or fulfill an image of oneself that one believes can't be fulfilled in any other way than by having bigger boobs. I'd say it says a heck of a lot about someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I prefer brunettes and Plan9.</comment>


Ask YC: What is a reasonable equity stake for a summer internship? - <AUTHOR>

Here's a hypothetical situation: Let's say I'm an MBA-type and a few of my business school friends and I are starting a web startup. We have a technical guy who has been doing all of the coding so far, but we'd like to get a bit more cheap manpower so we can put out a beta by the end of the summer, so we're trying to hire one or two summer interns. We can't offer the same kind of pay the interns could get at an established company, but since they're only going to be working for us for a few months (unless we still exist when they graduate), that kind of complicates the equity calculation. What kind of equity stake do you think is reasonable for a summer intern if we pay them ~80% market value? <comment><USER2> "Market value" for an intern isn't very high. Pay the extra three bucks an hour so it is market value and forget this whole giving equity to interns idea.

The ones who are willing to take internships are folks who don't have a lot of real world experience yet, and won't produce fantastic code (and that's OK-- you're paying them pennies on the dollar and experience is part of the equation). You'll want to recognize that there are wide-ranging levels of coders at all ages.

I've never hired "interns", but I've hired college kids who kicked ass, but I paid them whatever they wanted me to pay them--regular consulting rates, if on the low end of the scale $25-50/hour usually. But I could tell they kicked ass because I'd seen their code in Open Source projects--I'd be hesitant to hire someone who has no projects I can look at. But those generally aren't the folks you're going to get through internship programs (usually, though one of the smartest developers I've ever met interned at both Google and Microsoft while in school...I doubt either of those companies really took advantage of the opportunity they had in this kid and he went to work for neither after school).

Anyway, interns and contractors don't get equity. If you want another partner, bring on another partner. Maybe even a cheap one (e.g. 1-5% stake), if it's a kid that is working part time while going to school (if we knew where to find just the right person, we'd be willing to do this, even though we can afford to pay market rates for the work we need done--the right person is always worth equity). And maybe you even pay him something. But "intern" means "here and gone before he/she becomes really valuable to the organization". Scaling the learning curve in a codebase of reasonable size will take an inexperienced developer a month or more.

</comment><comment><USER3> 0, or something really small. If you are paying 80% market value, the difference should be made up in the excitement of working on your exciting startup. Say you end up selling for $20M and they end up with 1% at acquisition. You would be rewarding them with $200K for a few months work when you already paid them salary.

</comment><comment><USER4> 0% for interns. You wouldn't give ownership to some offshore worker or a contractor. Treat them as such.

I've done a couple coding internships (gosh, it was 10 years ago this year!) and they paid me $10/hr. I shudder to think about the crap I wrote too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Free sandwiches should do the trick.

</comment><comment><USER6> So we did not offer equity stakes when we had interns working for us. We offered them a chance to be a significant part of a small team, trying to pull off the impossible.

As a student--especially from the top schools--I think you are more interested in a good summer experience where you learn alot. Not lots of pay or potential for options.

If you can convince them that they will learn alot more in a life-or-death struggle w/ you guys and create software used by thousands of ppl the next day rather than sitting bored in a windowless cubicle writing some code no one will ever use....you are all set.

If they need cash, they should do other stuff. If they want to test their limits, they should throw their lot in with you. :)

Be careful tho. Unless you get stellar interns, they are usually more work than they are worth. By the time they ramp up, they are about to quit and go back to school. Just think about what you did during your summer internship and you'll see what I mean. Most ppl do jack, so don't expect them to increase velocity too quickly. (unless you've carefully chosen some superstars)

</comment><comment><USER7> we are two technical co-founders who have just hired an intern to help us for the summer. We've decided to pay him going hourly rate based on the market. But we have also told him that based on his "impact" on the product he is eligible for equity.

If you are going to get great contribution from them then it doesn't matter if they are an intern. And just like any other contributors to your product they deserve equity.

IMO, they are going to be helping your "technical guy" bring YOUR idea to life, which it seems you are not capable of doing yourself. Doesn't that deserve equity?

If they are smart and contribute then the possibility of equity makes them take ownership of your product which is something an offshore team or "hacker for hire" might not do.

</comment><comment><USER8> If they were normal early stage employees I expect they'd get about a 3% stake vesting over four years.

3 / 48 * .03 = 0.001875.

So, a 0.1875% stake in the company would be reasonable over three months. If you make a ten million dollar exit, that's a respectable $18,750.

<comment><USER8> That said, I'd hire one good intern and pay him 120% of market value. One person who feels valuable and respected will do twice the work of a team who think they should be paid more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 0% equity as 80% salary is good enough considering for summer jobs other places may pay 100%~120% salary (assuming market rates do not fluctuate) but many will also pay ~<80% as it is established that interns will also gain experience, CV value, and some mentoring too.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is market value of interns in your area? I always have wondered this because this seems to vary widely. Where I've lived it's been between $9 - $15.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are you offering equity in lieu of cash?

</comment><comment><USER12> FREE BEER</comment>


Yes this is a [pic] but it is also a Picture of the Year:  Soyuz TMA-11 on a train - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_986.html

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TMA-11>

I think it will be a while before any greater spacecraft is engineered.</comment>


Major mode for editing SEML (S-Expression Markup Language) files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/conao3/seml-mode.el <comment><USER2> I've been using SXML [0] for all my sgml needs in Racket and the quality of life improvement from having a sane and regular syntax for everything is hard to overstate. seml looks like it might have the same kind of quality of life improvements for some of my elisp-only code. I'm not sold on the way that missing attributes are handled using nil, that seems like a design decision that was made to simplify parsing at the expense of making the representation more cluttered.

[https://docs.racket-lang.org/sxml/](https://docs.racket-lang.org/sxml/)

<comment><USER3> It's funny how the lisp/fp often remove irregularity, at the cost of abstraction [0], which makes people pulling their hair off to the point of going back to simpler but irregular separate logical tools. Even if they complain about it very .. regularly.

[0] some people can't bear lisp uniformity for instance.

<comment><USER4> Keep in mind that Lisp (including SXML) can be written in many ways (parenthesised, indentation based, braces, infixed, prefixed, etc.), which can be mixed and matched within the same expression, and can be trivially converted between automatically.

I bring this up so often that I have a go-to blog post for it: [http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html](http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to spend a lot of time manually typing up examples of why S-expressions are cleaner and more readable than XML, HTML, JSON, YAML &c. They are, they really are. And yet for some reason there's a population of people who prefer:

        <!DOCTYPE html>

                <meta charset="utf-8"/>
                <title>sample page</title>
                <link rel="stylesheet" href="sample1.css"/>

sample

                    text sample

to:

        (html ((lang . "en"))
              (head nil
                    (meta ((charset . "utf-8")))
                    (title nil "sample page")
                    (link ((rel . "stylesheet") (href . "sample1.css"))))
              (body nil
                    (h1 nil "sample")
                    (p nil "text sample")))

I don't understand it, but it seems to be true. The egotistical part of me feels that they just haven't experience the enlightenment of understanding the benefits of have all data & code be manipulable, structured data rather than dead text which must be painstakingly parsed, combined with the benefits of a _single_ , general, universal, cheaply-parseable representation.

But the professional, open-minded part of me wonders if maybe _I_ am missing the point. Maybe all that painful-to-parse, irregular syntax is buying something. Maybe there's a reason every generation for the last 50 years has been approximating some but not all of the features of Lisp. Maybe those other languages and formats have worthwhile benefits. Maybe they're even superior.

Or maybe most folks really are stuck in a local maximum, like kids who like being read to and don't see the advantage of learning to read. I honestly don't know.

Regardless, SEML looks great.

<comment><USER6> Your example (and all the SEML documentation it seems) is missing marked-up text. For example, how would you represent:

This is a really cool sentence.

Your solution will probably have to splice the text segments around the embedded markup, something like:

        (p nil (text "This is a " (b nil "really cool") " sentence."))

In particular, notice the careful whitespace at the edges of the strings.

IMO this Sexpr is now more obtuse than the XML, and the more markup you have within text-spans (e.g. nested markup), the worse it gets. This is also a major difference between XML (markup language) vs JSON (data-structure notation).

Maybe you don't need the (text ...) thing, but either way you're changing the grammar. How do SEML and SXML handle this?

<comment><USER7> The issue is the spaces, so let's get rid of them!

        (p nil (text (string-join '("This" "is "a" '(b nil "really") '(b nil "cool") "sentence.") " ")))

No more wondering if the space between 'really' and 'cool' should be bold and no need to have awkward preceding and trailing padding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Makes me think of Edi Weitz's CL-WHO, which works very nicely if creating web pages from Common Lisp. [https://edicl.github.io/cl- who/](https://edicl.github.io/cl-who/)

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me very much of Hiccup[1]. Both nested s-expressions and HTML describe trees.

[1] [https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup](https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup)

<comment><USER10> I really like Hiccup, it is my favorite part of the Clojure web kit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting. It reminds me of the API behind JSX. But I'm not sure what problem this is seeking to solve exactly. Is it showing that HTML and s-expressions are technically interchangeable?

<comment><USER12> If you have time, this[0] is the canonical article usually shared around this concept. The thrust of it is that yes, XML (or x-expressions) and s-expressions are very similar, and that s-expressions are a less verbose and simpler way to represent data.

[0] [https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html](https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html)

<comment><USER13> Skimmed the article, left me a bit confused. Am I missing something big, or is this not particularly novel? The similarities between a-expressions and XML seem fairly obvious to me.

<comment><USER12> Well, it is and isn't novel. S-expressions have been around since McCarthy, XML since the mid-90's. The point of the article is that XML is a more verbose re-interpretation of s-expressions-- it's hard to find things that XML brings to the table that sexps don't have. What's more, inside editors, there are really clever things that manipulate sexprs, move them around, redefine their semantic meaning. XML usually doesn't work quite that way, not as a first intent.

<comment><USER14> SGML has been around since the 1960s, and XML is specified as a proper subset of it. SGML/XML isn't so much about (trivial) nesting than it is about content models, eg. the language defined by a regular expression admitted/recognized as the content of a particular element. Markup is also first and foremost a plain text format, _optionally_ tagged by start-/end-element tags, unlike sexprs which need quotes around individual spans of text. Try telling an author to use verbose quoting (and escaping for quotes) for what makes the majority of his text format, or try edititing a large text with verbose sexpr yourself, and you'll see why nobody uses sexprs for semistructured text.

<comment><USER12> I take your point, and I really don't want to be the spark of a syntactic flamewar. I suspected I was missing something, and that the $angle_bracketed_format was older, but I was searching the wrong things.

It seems to me, though, that escaping is just something that's going to be tricky everywhere, and a decent first line solution, wherever you are, is to have a really rare set of characters represent your begin/end string marks. In Python, """text""", Postgres has $$text$$, non-ASCII characters in other formats. XML and sexps are both susceptible to that issue-- both of their escapes are, themselves, escapable. To either one, if you have a subregion that's likely to be unintentionally escaped, then you create a boundary where you either explicitly escape every one, or you refuse to acknowledge previously accepted delimiters. As an example, lisps have (quote term) rather than 'term when you're writing macros and concerned with macro-expansion.

To your regex point, there are lisps that definitely did awful deeds with that, particularly emacs lisp, but the more recent ones have solutions just like other modern programming languages and markups do.

To me the unending escape just kind of seems like a universal bug. While lisp is just as susceptible, lisps have perfectly reasonable ways of treating these problems-- separate, make distinct, and as last resort, escape.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Richard Stallman safe after Peru earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Reports:_Richard_Stallman%2C_founder_of_GNU_Project_missing_in_Peru

<comment><USER2> False alarm. He's been active on the emacs-devel mailing list for the past three days.

</comment><comment><USER3> This also just in:

SwellJoe safe after Peru earthquake.

Paris Hilton safe after Peru earthquake.

About 6 billion people I don't know safe after Peru earthquake.

Anybody else think this is an utter waste of a headline/link? Everyone except the people injured or lost in the Peru earthquake is safe after the earthquake. We don't need a headline about every single one of them. The silly rumor about isn't news, and the fact that it was a rumor is certainly now news.

But maybe I'm just grouchy because I'm coming down with yet another summer cold (God must have smote me because of my atheism).

</comment><comment><USER4> "Wikinews has learned that Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project, ->is not<\- missing in Peru after a massive 8.0 earthquake struck the country on August 15."

<comment><USER5> It's been changed back and forth, including the title...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do natural disasters always strike highly religious areas? The bible belt is devastated by tornadoes and hurricanes every year. Don't they wonder why us liberal godless heathens on the coasts aren't feeling some divine wrath, too?

<comment> mark-t That's a very strange opinion.

<comment> mark-t Would somebody care to explain to me what's wrong with my comment? I'll admit it's short. Is there something more fundamentally wrong? Feeding trolls?

Frankly, a belief that natural disasters only strike highly religious areas is quite strange, and I see no evidence for it. As Goladus pointed out, San Francisco gets earthquakes; that was also the first thing I thought of. But is there any part of the planet that doesn't suffer from natural disasters? I don't think anybody could make the original assertion without realizing these problems, and my explanation shouldn't be needed. If I could, I would have downmodded it.

<comment><USER7> heh, here in michigan we get um, snow, the occasional freezing rain. But we're pretty much eventless (somehow attributable to the water around us i think)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alan Turing's school reports - <AUTHOR> http://alexbellos.com/?p=1674

<comment><USER2> It took everything I had to not submit this as, "turing's test results"</comment>


Millions of Active WebSockets with Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexhultman/millions-of-active-websockets-with-node-js-7dc575746a01 <comment><USER2> Why is deno so much slower than node.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not going to fit in a single comment :)</comment></comment>


The Art of the Propagator (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44215/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-002.pdf <comment><USER2> It looks like the Scheme version of Flow-based Programming (aka dataflow programming) or hardware synthesis. Not sure how well that works for general software but Paul Morrison led a lot of work using it in industry (eg banking apps). It's also made a comeback in recent years for acceleration of software, optionally with hardware engines.

So, could an expert in these things tell me what this paper innovates or offers over mature Flow-based programming's way of doing things?

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone want to elucidate the significance of this?

<comment><USER4> "A conversation with Sussman on AI and asynchronous programming" linked to Gerald Sussman's mention of this work [http://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on- ai/](http://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It all ends with Skynet</comment>


Advanced Live HTTP Headers for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/httpview/bceinmfhkjabmdgbieoenfgpophpfmlm

<comment><USER2> Errrm

"This app comes with a free trial. Trials will roll into a payed subscription if not canceled."

Maybe read the Detail tab / section at the bottom.</comment>


Switching from Wordpress to Jekyll - <AUTHOR> http://www.philipithomas.com/wordpress-to-jekyll/

<comment><USER2> I plan on switching over as well. I love the speed when using static files, plus there's a couple of plugins that make this a full CMS like a CSS minifier and a thumbnail plugin.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats on switching. I switched about a year ago and get a lot more delight from my elegant Jekyll setup than a convoluted WP install with thousands of LOC I don't need.

</comment><comment><USER4> +1 on Jekyll. I've been running my primary site (<http://personalmba.com>) on Jekyll for six months now. No regrets.</comment>


VC and the marginal-dollar problem - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/toxic-vc-and-the-marginal-dollar-problem/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this an "all sides" problem? This article tends to use the term "toxic VC" but forgets one thing - VCs are generalist and not specialist every startup's problem and market. They rely a lot on data provided by the startups.

Many startups, if not all, oversell themselves. Maybe it is for the fear of not getting a funding. What follows is a fat check and pressure to grow.

There is one thing I wish people learn from this article but in a different way.

> After this fundraise, everyone at Fuego agrees to hit the gas, hard. Burn > rates jump from $200,000 a month to more than $1 million per month. > Experiments that previously were returning $1.50 over time for every dollar > invested start to return $1 as money is pumped into scale, but everyone > agrees that's okay. It just means that the customer pays back the cost of > acquisition more slowly.

The difference being...Not everything scales. Sometimes you feel you have a "huge" market but the novelty of things will never scale. It is not a VC problem rather market research problem.

<comment><USER3> This is the real problem stated in the article:

> The investors' goal over the next roughly 24 months is for the company to > become worth at least three times the post-money valuation

The investors have promised this goal to their customers (err, "LPs"), or at least need it to get their overall IRR up to what their customers need. So like a jockey they will crop and spur the horse to get it over the finish line faster.

This growth rate is not a problem for some business models (or if it is a problem means indeed the business is not viable). But for others, for example most hardware businesses, it makes little sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The VC money is a rocket fuel. It may take you to the moon, but you can also burn in flames.

Everybody wants to be or invest in next Uber, but a lot of business models got limited scalability. Maybe we should learn to appreciate also business that do few mln ARR and they do just fine.</comment>


Launching the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/05/launching-quantum-artificial.html <comment><USER2> at first I read this and immediately thought that google had jumped the shark, but then when I realized that they are proposing to use quantum computing to make ANNs tunnel through local minima in converging on solutions, I think that's a really interesting use case - _if_ quantum adiabatic annealing can be easily programmed to do this, (whether or not it has any sort of biomimetic relevance).

</comment><comment><USER3> Posted 16th May 2013

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone here able to recommend a primer on quantum computing? I have a high- level understanding of the physics involved, but I get lost as soon as people start discussing the algorithms.

<comment><USER5> Drop me an email and I can send you 20+ short PDFs worth of lecture notes from a quantum information course I took at Imperial College, if you wish.

They're probably as good a 'primer' as any, since they basically go from undergraduate quantum mechanics to quantum computing (& other topics). Should certainly make some of the basic quantum algorithms clear (e.g. Grover's).

Failing that, I think Nielsen & Chuang's textbook is really good:

[http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information- Annive...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Anniversary- Edition/dp/1107002176/)

It's thorough, naturally, but it does zoom out from time to time.

<comment><USER6> _Drop me an email and I can send you 20+ short PDFs worth of lecture notes from a quantum information course I took at Imperial College, if you wish._

Any chance you'd be willing to just put that stuff "out there" somewhere, link to them all in a blog post, and submit that here? I'm guessing there would be more than a few people who would find that interesting...

<comment><USER5> I'd love to. I'm just not quite sure where lecture notes stand, legally speaking.

If I send the files to just a few people I theoretically know, I guess it's like lending a book to a friend. But putting them all up for public download feels like quite a different matter.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER6> I'm not really sure. I've always tended to assume that if you wrote notes, paraphrasing content that you sat through a lecture on, then you own the copyright on those notes. But I do think I recall at least one case where a professor or a university tried to stop a student from distributing notes, but I don't remember the details...

Here's a couple of articles on the topic:

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/04/prof-sues- note/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/04/prof-sues-note/)

[http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/02/do-students-have- cop...](http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/02/do-students-have-copyright-to- their-own-notes/)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/04/aclass-of- copyrig...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/04/aclass-of-copyright- thieves-a-lawsuit-over-lecture-notes/)

Unfortunately, IANAL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A good book on the topic for non physicist is schrodinger's killer app published last year. I found entertaining and informative. D-wave computers are adiabetic not gate based and are generally thought not to have significant numbers of entangled particles, this does not allow for exponential speed up that is required for Shor's but should allow for quadratic speed up.

</comment><comment><USER8> The consensus seems to ever tipping against the idea that D-wave is a true quantum computer. I wonder if Google and others regret spending $10mil on the machine.

<comment><USER9> It's irrelevant if it's "true quantum"; as long as it can solve optimization problems quicker or cheaper than alternatives, it could be powered by pigeons for all they care.

<comment><USER10> But if it's not a QC, it won't solve them any faster. Our classical computers are pretty efficient these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A little bit off-topic: Aren't quantum computers similar to the 'proposed' PCMOS analog computers based on memristors and spin torque oscillators?

The programming model looks the same, and the machine code is 'complex', so it needs to be abstracted just like in proposed probabilistic computers like DARPA UPSIDE and Synapse?

</comment><comment><USER12> I think they ought to host a seminar with Hameroff and Penrose like really soon.

<comment><USER13> I haven't looked into this for a while, wasn't this quantum consciousness stuff widely considered a crackpot phase from an otherwise brilliant scientist (Penrose)?

<comment><USER14> Apparently it WAS until 5 days ago: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recollect this being posted earlier.

</comment><comment><USER16> so, what are the things that a d-wave system cannot do that a 'pure' quantum computer can?

<comment><USER10> Solving certain problems faster than a classical computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So how worried should I be about this? Are quantum computers really powerful enough to give us strong AI anytime soon?

</comment><comment><USER18> The problem with quantum computers is that you never know whether they are one or not.</comment>


Texas man wrongly sentenced to death screwed out of $1.4 million - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110216/ts_yblog_thelookout/texas-man-wrongly-put-away-for-decades-denied-compensation-after-legal-glitch

<comment><USER2> it really sucks for that guy, but this is not hacker news.

<comment><USER3> Then don't upvote it.</comment></comment>