Ask HN: Has anyone ever gotten funding from this website? - <AUTHOR> http://angelsoft.net/ <comment><USER2> Angelsoft has two business models. One is where they charge entreprenuers to essentially pitch their angel members. The second is they provide a platform for angels and even some VCs to automate their application process. With this model the process is free to the entreprenuer and the angel or VC covers the cost.

While I believe the first model is useless money spent, I do believe the second model is much better and entreprenuers should not avoid filling out an angel groups investment application based solely on the fact they use Angelsoft to process the application. I have utilized the process myself and while I did not get funding from (I did get face-to-face meetings though) the angel groups I submitted to I found the application process easy and organized. I am familiar with several groups that utilize the Angelsoft platform and all are very reputable.

Long story short, blindly sending your business plan to just about ANY investment group (excluding YC and similar models) is not going to get you anywhere. Introductions and networking are the only true way of having a chance at any investment. I can think of other things to spend the $250 on than a membership with Angelsoft. On the other hand, if you have interest in a specific angel group or VC and they point you to Angelsoft to submit your business plan, etc... know that (a) it is free for you; and (b) that Angelsoft is a legitimate platform for submitting your application.

Note that I have no affiliation with Angelsoft other than I have utilized their platform to submit to several VCs.

<comment><USER3> As the COO of Angelsoft and the creator of the Open Deals/The Investor Community, I can shed some statistical light on this question.

First let me clarify that since 2004 Angelsoft has been building tools that help Startups and Investors communicate more effectively. That's what we talk about every day. That's what keeps me up at night. Open Deals is one of those tools.

We originally released Open Deals as a way for Angel Groups to post deals that they wanted to do, but didn't have enough cash to do alone (This is a surprisingly common problem for these groups).

As Open Deals gained traction with our groups, we thought we could use it to solve another problem: Unknown entrepreneurs applying to groups and getting rejected because they were unknown. Most guys who are unknown are unknown for a reason, but obviously if you can never get an investment unless you've been successful before, we've got a problem.

We figured we'd encourage these new entrepreneurs to apply to Open Deals, let the investors crowd source them, and if a guy was legit, he'd get voted up and referred into some groups. Since he was referred, we figured the group might pay attention to him.

So has it been successful?

1\. First, our marketing around it has sucked (and still does). We're more of software company and marketing hasn't come naturally to us. We're working on a complete site redesign coming out early in March we think will fix this.

2\. Since we began we've had 243 companies referred from Open Deals to groups. That's about 25% who applied.

3\. Companies that are referred from Open Deals are 225% more likely to get a meeting with a group than a direct submission to that group.

In short, Open Deals is doing okay. You guys are smart enough to figure out if it's worth $250 for you, but I can say, that for most entrepreneurs its more than worth the money. And I'm not talking about those that get meetings. A lot of entrepreneurs get dinged or ignored when they apply. We take some heat for that, but the truth is, these guys paid $250 to find out they're not ready for prime-time. And speaking as an entrepreneur who has spent thousands of dollars and years of his life pursuing ideas that were not ready, I can say that $250 is a bargain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think a cheaper way to figure out how ready you are for primetime is to submit your site to Hacker News. It doesn't cost a penny.

I appreciate and agree with most of your comments, but saying that $250 is a cheap price to learn the ropes seems wrong and somewhat predatory to me. I think you should spend time polishing your value prop if you have to fall back on this sort of rhetoric.

I think I'll follow pg's advice.

<comment><USER4> Submitting your site to Hacker News can yield insightful comments, new users, and potentially result in an investor taking some notice. That isn't the same as deliberately pitching investors, though. I don't see how charging a specific fee for a specific service in an up-front fashion like this is predatory. A barrier to entry such as the fee charged probably makes the quality of applications and applicants better. That being said, at this point, I can't imagine myself paying for such a service. I prefer to network the old- fashioned way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This site charges $250 to put you in front of a bunch of angels. They claim 5% get funded. Has anyone ever gotten funding through this outfit?

I'm considering applying for my company - www.trailbehind.com, after we launch our new version next week.

<comment><USER5> There are several angel groups that charge money to present to them. I would not recommend doing this.

Angel groups generally are worthless (out of 102 YC-funded startups prior to this cycle, zero got money from angel groups), and the ones that charge you to present seem particularly dubious. If they had good deal flow, they wouldn't have to charge you to pay their operating expenses; angels would pay _them_ for access to it. Plus the best angels tend not to be members of these groups; they don't need to. Which means this is a world where lame startups present to lame investors.

<comment><USER6> Paul, with all due respect, I have to disagree. As both the Chairman of New York Angels, and the CEO of Angelsoft (which grew out of our perceived need for a comprehensive deal management platform), I think it's both inaccurate and unfair to state that angel groups are "generally worthless" and "the best angels are not members".

Taking our own group as an example, we have directly funded over $35 million into 54 companies during the past five years, have had successful exits in sales to companies like CBS and Kodak, and have a membership that includes 75 active, participating angels such as Esther Dyson, Scott Kurnit, Chris Anderson, Roger Ehrenberg, Brian Cohen, Charlie Federman, Lewis Gersh, David Hirsch and many others, all of whom commit to investing at least $100,000 annually. This year we funded about $4 million into 22 companies. How far off are those stats from yours at yC? For my own part, I have personally invested in over 70 startups and serve on half a dozen early stage boards. If that means I'm a "lame investor", I'm a little confused.

Angelsoft was founded to bring to the world of angel investing the type of infrastructure, tools and communications that venture funds and commercial organizations like yCombinator already have. Since angels are, by definition, part-time investors for whom this is not a primary occupation, it has always been a pretty chaotic and haphazard way to put to work the $25 billion annually that angels in the US invest (which is just about the same amount as all VCs put together.) Now that something like 90% of the angel groups in the world, with 15,000+ accredited investors in 43 countries, have all standardized on a single platform, we're finally beginning to bring some order to the chaos.

The Investor Community on Angelsoft was designed, as Ryan Janssen pointed out, to enable groups to syndicate deals with each other. At New York Angels, we have worked together with groups from Boston, California, Washington, Florida, Texas, Nevada, Missouri and Connecticut to fund cool startups...something that would have been logistically impractical prior to the advent of a single, standardized platform.

Now that we've opened it up to direct submissions by entrepreneurs, we seem to be on our way to solving the biggest challenge of angel investing: "I want to increase my deal flow, but I don't want to be spammed by having to respond to every company asking for funding". Instead of having entrepreneurs apply directly to one group for which they may well not be appropriate, the Investor Community allows angels to browse a much wider array of deals, and then affirmatively bring to their group only deals in which they have an interest. As Ryan noted in an early response here, companies that posted to the Investor Community and then were referred into groups by the angels themselves were over 200% more likely to get funded.

Paul, we both know how tough the funding environment is for startups, and we both know that your small investments and support into 102 companies, and our larger investments and support into 54 companies, are only drops in the bucket when one considers that there are over 600,000 companies started each year in the US. But angels and angel groups really ARE a legitimate part of the ecosystem, and I don't think you're doing a service to your readers by disputing that.

yCombinator was a brilliant idea with which you are doing a superb job of execution, and your results speak for themselves. You don't need to promote yC by slinging mud at others who are equally active and supportive of entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER7> Dude, you've got every right to stand up for your reputation and your business model, but your post is completely inappropriate in this setting.

It sounds like the script a telemarketer reads you after interrupting your dinner. Like PR and Legal tweaked the language to make it optimally appealing, synergistic, and defensible.

Boilerplate gets no respect in this community. How can you not know this after being a member yourself for the last two years?

<comment><USER6> ROFL! mnemonicscloth, you've made my day! It took me an hour and a half to write that post in direct response to Paul's, and it's certainly not boilerplate (feel free to Google any chunk of it you'd like, and I'd be surprised if you'd find even a single sentence written anywhere previously). But if the result was "optimally appealing, synergistic and defensible", the 90 minutes was absolutely worth it [grin].

Seriously, I'm a big fan of Paul's, and he knows it (and we know each other). I was simply responding to an overly broad-brush, inaccurate indictment (that he likely tossed off quickly) with a calm, factual response clarifying what the real story is. I believe it is _completely_ appropriate for this forum, and I'm happy to continue the discussion either here, on my own blog (rose.vc/angelnotes) or by email (david AT angelsoft.net).

For those who would like to delve further into the role of Angels-Other-Than- Paul, there's a good book that has recently been published titled "Fool's Gold?: The Truth Behind Angel Investing in America" by Scott Shane. While I happen to personally disagree with the tone (and some of the conclusions) of the author, there's no question but that he is a serious researcher in the field, and that his underlying facts are essentially correct.

Thanks again for your comments, and feel free to email directly if you'd like to continue taking me to task :-).

-David

Disclaimer: "No Boilerplate, PR, or Legal Personnel were harmed (or used) the making of this post or the previous one."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As much as I like the creator of AngelSoft, I think the $250 offer is wrong. AngelSoft provides good value by unifying the application process to many legitimate groups out there (angel forum for instance). One thing I hate is when each web site has a slightly different format to ask me about my business. TechCrunch has a template. YC has one. It goes on and on.

So AngelSoft is successful in that regard, with the hundreds of groups using them. The fact that they tried to monetize it by charging rookie entrepreneurs, well... it depreciates their brand.

<comment><USER6> Alain, as much as I appreciate your kind words [grin], I disagree with your premise. If the alternative is to NOT open the platform to entrepreneurs, how does that help anyone? Even in a world of Web 2.0 and fast-track development, creating, maintaining and operating a site like Angelsoft is very non-trivial. Since the company is not a charity, there needs to be a business model somewhere through which we provide enough value (both real and perceived) that someone(s) is willing to pay for it.

After spending five years of time, effort and a 20 person team developing a single platform that now powers a large majority of the world's organized angel investing, we've finally got something which entrepreneurs [correctly, in my view] believe is worth paying $250 for: powerful tools for managing their fundraising process, combined with access to over 15,000 legitimate investors who use the other side of the platform as their own deal processing tool.

In contrast, there are probably two dozen sites on the web which purport to be 'matching services' for entrepreneurs and investors, but the unfortunate dark secret is that while those sites often charge much, much more (in some cases, thousands of dollars), they have NO investors at all. With Angelsoft, we have created (for the first time anywhere) and provide (completely for free) a single, searchable directory of just about every angel group around. Together with a free "common app" for funding (as you noted), and the ability to apply to multiple groups at no charge through the site with a single click, I think it is fair to say that Angelsoft has done more to help entrepreneurs navigate the often-confusing world of angel investing than anyone else, ever. That's why we're the official software platform of the non-profit national and international associations of angels and angel groups in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and elsewhere.

I think the best way to look at Angelsoft is in the context of something like LinkedIn, for both investors and entrepreneurs. As with LinkedIn, basic use of the system is free to all, which enabled them (and enables us) to establish a meaningful universe of participants who gain real value from the basic services. With the platform then in place, they (and we) can now layer on additional, value-added services which may (or may not) be worth the cost to any given participant.

Do you think less of LinkedIn because they charge for job postings? How about receiving InMail, for which privilege the sender pays? If you don't want to receive InMail, you simply uncheck a box. If the sender doesn't feel that the ability to send messages is worth $25-$400/month, he or she doesn't pay it. But without the existence of the underlying site, value-added features like InMail and job postings wouldn't be possible in the first place.

With Angelsoft, we are always trying to navigate carefully among the needs of our three constituencies: angel investors, entrepreneurs...and ourselves as a for-profit company. Investors would love it if they only got one deal a month, and it was a guaranteed 30x return that was available only to them, for free. Entrepreneurs would love it if they could have free and unfettered access to the personal emails of 15,000 check-writing investors. I would love it if both of the forgoing paid Angelsoft hundreds of millions of dollars annually :-). Unfortunately, all of the above desires are mutually exclusive.

We think that we've done a pretty good job at creating a compromise platform that supports all three constituencies (well, at least the first two; we're not quite breakeven at Angelsoft yet :-), but we welcome any constructive comments or suggestions as to how we can improve our value proposition to everyone.

-David S. Rose, CEO, Angelsoft

<comment><USER8> David,

Thanks again for the detailed counterpoint. I'll reiterate that I'm a big fan.

My only objection is the upfront payment by entrepreneurs. How do you reconcile this with advice found on thefunded and other places, that tells entrepreneurs to never pay to pitch?

If you charged $1,000 on contingency, or a percentage of funds raised, then I'd be your best supporter.

Maybe I'm showing my bias, since I believe in helping entrepreneurs get started with no upfront cash. You probably think that anything contingent may be hard to enforce. That's certainly true. But think of it this way: if my startup has an agreement with AngelSoft that says I owe you something, when big VCs come in for due diligence, they'll flag the issue and force me to resolve it. So you have some protection!

If you don't like contingent payment because you are worried that the sucess rate is too low, then you have a major problem. You'd better be selling a service that works. By accepting contingencies, you signal to me, the entrepreneur, that you believe in the quality of your product. I'll have no problem paying fees way higher than $250.

There is a minor issue of filtering the quality of the deal flow, but $250 is probably not the right filter.

\- Alain, CEO, FairSoftware.net :-)

<comment><USER6> Alain,

That's a good question, which I'd answer as follows: (a) just because someone says something on TheFunded doesn't make it gospel [grin], but (b) IN GENERAL, and taken as a rule of thumb, the advice is pretty good.

Where it breaks down is in the details, which is why the Angel Capital Association convened a panel to consider this very question, and ultimately came out with a specific, detailed statement on it, which is available online at [http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/dir_resources/entrepr...](http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/dir_resources/entrepreneur_fees.aspx).

Angelsoft's corporate (and my personal) philosophy is as follows: the primary determinant as to whether it is appropriate to charge a fee of any kind to an entrepreneur to pitch, is the answer to the following question: "If you represent yourself to be an investor (or group of investors), is your business model based in any way on the fees you charge entrepreneurs?"

There are a number of 'venture summits', and 'angel groups' and others who represent themselves as investors and charge large fees (often several thousand dollars, for application, appearance, 'training', presentation, diligence, etc.) to companies, because that's how they make their money, regardless of whether or not the company receives an investment (which it rarely does.) In those cases, the whole point of the business is to make money from the entrepreneur fees.

On the other hand, take as an example New York Angels, my own local angel group. We charge a $150 application fee to submit a plan. Is that any part of our business model, and do our members make any money from that fee? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Quite the opposite: while we charge entrepreneurs the $150, we charge OURSELVES $3500 per person per year to allow us to maintain a non- profit organization that enables us to coordinate investments in the first place! So in the case of the 37% of legitimate angel groups that have a similar policy, I/we (obviously) have no problem with the practice.

That said, there are two significant problems with your suggestion for contingency-only fees, one legal and one practical:

Legally, anyone who charges any type of contingent fee relating to equity financing MUST be a registered broker/dealer with the SEC. There are no exceptions to this, and no wiggle room. Since by definition no legitimate angel group is a Broker/Dealer, adopting this policy would immediately end organized angel investing in the US, and you'd be back to having to find angels at your local country club, or by paying an investment banker (who IS a B/D) to introduce you.

The practical problem is the perhaps-unfortunate-but-nonetheless-true fact of the Golden Rule of financing: "S/he with the gold makes the rules." If YOU believe that anyone should be able to send you their business plan and expect you to read it, and then invest in them, then by all means YOU should go forth and do it! But if the only people who are willing to make these risky investments are only willing to do so if you follow the procedures they have set up (for reasons which seem sensible to them), then either (a) it's worth it to you to do so, and you will, or (b) it's not worth it and you won't. But there's no percentage in telling such an investor that he or she should do it your way because YOU think it makes sense for THEM.

Just to put things in perspective, and show you how things look from the angels' side, Angelsoft currently processes over three thousand (3,000!!) funding applications every month. By investing unholy amounts of time, energy and money, we have now made the process so easy that the temptation is overwhelming for virtually every entrepreneur in the world to want to hit virtually every potential investor in the world with his/her plan. While this is understandable from the entrepreneurial side, it should be apparent that it is completely unworkable from the angel side, particularly considering that angel investing is a part-time activity which (given the risk, effort, et al) is a tenuous practice in the first place.

On top of that, another fact that needs to be considered is that the quality of funding applications varies widely (to put it mildly). YOUR plan for FairSoftware.net may be brilliant, incisive, carefully reasoned, and a logical investment for any rational investor...but that would be the exception rather than the rule [grin]. Looked at another way, if angels invest in somewhere between 1% and 5% of deals seeking funding, that means they are in effect (and in aggregate) making a series of value judgments, and rank ordering all 100% of the deals so they can choose those which, in their opinions, are the top 1-5 deals. A fair argument could be made that they make mistakes, aren't perceptive, have poor vision, etc. etc., and that in reality (as with college admissions), EVERY one of the top 10% should be funded.

You could further say that the NEXT 10% down should, in an ideal world, be fundable if we could only match the specific deal to the specific investor under certain specific circumstances. And then, since we are entrepreneurs ourselves with faith in our ilk, let us say that the NEXT 5% we should fund because, even though the plan doesn't make sense and the financials are unrealistic, this might be a really good potential entrepreneur who could break the mold and defy all of our investing experience to date.

OK.

But...that still leaves a full 75%(!) of aspiring entrepreneurs seeking funding for ideas which are clearly and unequivocally inappropriate for an outside angel investment. In my experience, #26 might be the kind of deal for which I'd conceivably take a meeting, but know within the first minute or two that it simply wasn't fundable; #50 might be a deal which might make sense in theory, but not in practice ("I want to start a new, generic online social network"); #75 is a deal that should never have even been put to paper ("I've got a website that will obviously put Google, Yahoo and Microsoft out of business in six months!"); and #100 is from someone who is not necessarily playing with a full deck ("Send me $100 million to publish my book which will instantly result in world peace.")

So, Alain, if you would like to volunteer to read through 3,000 business plans a month and give me a quick write-up on each of them (at your own expense, of course), I would be delighted (and I'm stating this here in public) to give you (subject to appropriate legal structure, etc, etc. etc.) a 1% contingent interest in any investment I end up making in any such deal you send me.

You see the problem. :-)

So therefore, how can we establish a system, given our free-market, capitalist economy, to try to get smart money into good deals? Having been doing this for nearly a decade, I can attest to the fact that it's not easy. Angelsoft is (I believe) the best approach to date, and we are constantly iterating it to maximize the aggregate return to the entire system, which will in turn help entrepreneurs and investors, and make money for Angelsoft as a commercial entity.

But, as with everything else in a free market economy, each player has to make a decision for him or herself as to whether doing something is economically (or otherwise) justifiable. At Angelsoft (unlike ANY other site, service, company or institution) we freely publish our full, live statistics online (at www.angelsoft.net/industry) so that we can be as transparent as possible. We also make our Group Finder (without close second the most comprehensive on the planet) available for free, and we make it trivially easy to apply for free to as many groups as you want. And if, after reviewing our Investor Community posting opportunity, an entrepreneur determines that it makes sense to post his or her plan there for 30 days for $250, then we welcome them. If not, we completely understand, and invite them to continue to use the rest of our tools for free.

I apologize for the length of this post, but you were kind enough to ask, so I figured you deserved a full [perhaps too full?] reply.

-David S. Rose, CEO, Angelsoft

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The live activity monitor is pretty nifty.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thank you. I had the same question.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're dumb enough to pay money for this, you're dumb enough that your site will never make any money. The only ones who will get rich from this are the owners of the site - they are selling you a dream, and you are paying for it.

Spend the money on some proper SEO services instead, it will do you more good.

And let me give it to you square - your site will NEVER get funding. It's not hot, it has little potential of becoming huge. It's the type of site that can make solid money, but only by targeting the users directly. When you are making good money, the angels will come to you.

If you are trying to raise funding for your site, you are in the business of dreams, not reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our site already got funding, thanks. And an fbFund grant.

Of course, we'll need more in 2010, hence my constant quest for more money.

<comment><USER11> So you have no plan to make money for the entire year of 2009? Are you running a business or a charity?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a plan to make money this year. But then again, so did the last start- up I worked at, and it took us a while longer than a year to post revenues of any kind.

For TrailBehind, we think we can start bringing in revenues this summer (or a large enough audience for institutional funding), but our fallback is to seek additional angel funding. And Plan C is to accept some consulting gigs. We're also going to apply to YC, but that's more for the intangibles than the money.

This month, I brought on our first employee (besides the two founders, who are hackers), to execute our sales and marketing plan. We have multiple paths to revenue that he is charged with exploring, along with seeking out additional funding.

Because our website is devoted to the outdoors, the market is cyclical, and I have determined what that cycle is using Google Analytics. So, we have been developing for a few months, and we'll have a major go-to-market push in the late spring as the hiking season revs up. We're also using the next few months to begin laying seeds with potential partners and additional investors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drawing simple generative organics with L-systems - <AUTHOR> https://vexlio.com/blog/drawing-simple-organics-with-l-systems/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

Author here --- happy to answer any questions you may have.

<comment><USER2> Just here to say that I love Vexlio, it is an impressive piece of software, thanks for all your work :)

I hadn't taken the Lua API seriously till now though, seems fun, will try it soon :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind words, I appreciate it! And I'm glad you've been enjoying Vexlio so far :-).</comment></comment></comment>


Vegan and Plant-Based Diets Worsen Brain Health - <AUTHOR> https://neurosciencenews.com/vegan-diet-brain-health-14845 <comment><USER2> As might be expected, the source quoted in the article is someone who has worked as a lobbyist for meat and eggs. They seem to be especially active lately.

While true that organ meat is especially high in choline, even many meat eaters avoid it. For vegetarians, eggs have over double the amount of choline you'll get from steak. Two a day is all you need.

If you ate nothing else all day, you could achieve the recommended daily intake of choline with about a pound of tofu, but chocolate, cauliflower, broccoli, bok choy, spinach, nuts, and seeds are also high in it. Anyone who eats a variety of fresh foods will likely be fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I eat meat but jeez, the study's author is incredibly motivated to be biased:

"She has, however, consulted for and advised: The Meat Advisory Panel, Marlow Foods (Quorn), the Health Supplement Information Service and the British Egg Information Service, amongst others."

</comment><comment> dawg- I was just looking at this yesterday: there was a study where 75% of plant- based protein powders tested positive for lead, whereas animal-based protein powders performed much better. I think a lot of vegans drink soy and pea protein powders to get enough protein in their diet. And powders labeled "organic" did even worse on top of that. I think it would be interesting to do a study looking at vegans and exposure to heavy metals like lead/cadmium.

Here it is: [https://www.cleanlabelproject.org/protein- powder/](https://www.cleanlabelproject.org/protein-powder/)

<comment><USER4> > I think a lot of vegans drink soy and pea protein powders to get enough > protein in their diet.

Actually a common misconception, most vegans get more than enough protein in their diet eating a relatively healthy/varietal diet. The exceptions would be people particularly concerned with their protein intake, namely athletes, bodybuilders/weight lifters specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 'But bro, where do you get your choline?'

These anti-vegan and anti-vegetarian pieces always have clear ties to the meat and dairy industries.

Anyway, this rebuttal is spot on: [https://medium.com/@Kahn642/the-choline- vegan-crisis-a-pseud...](https://medium.com/@Kahn642/the-choline-vegan-crisis- a-pseudo-event-ignited-by-the-media-and-an-author-with-meat-and- dairy-94e483d0d009)

</comment><comment><USER6> I seem to recall an article many years ago about with the advent of fire, humans were able to cook meat which allowed their brains to develop better which made us more intelligent. I can see that correlation with decreased use of meat causing something like that to happen.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human)

By the way, the documentary I cited above, goes into this assertion a bit, in a reevaluation of the fossil record (which motivated that 10 year old book), using more accurate current analyses, and finds an entirely different, and surprising, result.

What's really true, I don't know...just find it all interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That title is entirely contrarian to seemingly endless current research.

One interesting documentary, which pretty scientifically goes into the pros and cons of plant-based nutrient sourcing, is the following.

[https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/#](https://gamechangersmovie.com/the- film/#)

It's also interesting to watch lobbyists for the beef industry stupefyingly try contradicting scientists, as if their propaganda is some sort of truth, rather than agenda.

Enlightening stuff, we thought.</comment>


Vim Keybindings for MS Word - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rcmdnk/vim_ahk <comment><USER2> Cool... i just wander that does AHK supports detect when clicking to a textbox of any Windows apps? My wish is I want to use terminal bindkey when typing in textbox. For example, Ctrl + E = End, Ctrl + A A = Home...</comment>


No Patents on Seeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/

<comment><USER2> It's quite obvious that the maintainers are often being economical with the truth, for example, from their article on Monsanto (actually Seminis) receiving a patent of a specific subsort of brocolli: ([http://www.no-patents- on-seeds.org/en/information/news/monsa...](http://www.no-patents-on- seeds.org/en/information/news/monsanto-granted-patent-severed-broccoli))

> "Today the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich granted a patent on > conventional breeding."

Really? The process of conventional breeding is patented? I thought it was about brocolli?

> "It additionally covers a "plurality of broccoli plants .. . grown in a > field of broccoli.""

Quote mining. The patent makes it clear that this sentence is about the brocolli subspecies that was patented, but the authors of the article rip this sentence out of context to make it appear that all of brocolli now belongs to Monsanto.

Also, note that in their article only 5 sentences, about half of the first paragraph, are relevant to the patent while the remainder of the article (4.5 paragraphs) are about on how terrible these patents are. They barely discuss what the patent is really about and the article only seems to be a kneejerk based on a quick scan of the patent. Why should I agree with the author and sign the petition if he needs to be intellectually dishonest?

I'm not sure what my position on patents on plants are. Almost all plants that we currently cultivate could never have existed without artificial selection (unintentional or otherwise). In this specific case, Seminis had to perform focused work so that these plants could exist. It's not as if these plants just fell out of the sky.

<comment><USER3> > economical with the truth

That could be said about pretty much any article about patents that gets posted to HN. Or heck, most of tech media. It's unfortunate that so-called geeks and hackers swallow it without the least bit of critical thought. Your post is a refreshing change.

Not saying the patent system is perfect, just that it's broken in completely different ways than what the tech media (cough submarine cough) likes to portray.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am increasingly of the opinion that patents simply aren't worth the trouble they cause.

I get that you need them for the lone inventor in their shed in the garden, but they never seem to be the ones who own all the patents.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. It's pretty obvious that most patents are owned by corporations who paid someone to do the work and not by the inventors themselves. My personal assessment is that in contemporary times, patents only slow down progress and fill the pockets of already-rich people.

That said, I am wary of anything environmentalist since those people often seem to not have done even the most minute amount of research on their topics and then continue to spread misinformation or plain lies (see the anti-GMO people for instance).

The mentioned site for example, seems to imply that plant/animal patents will diminish biodiversity ("The organisations behind No Patents On Seeds are especially concerned about […] biodiversity.").

I have no clue how granting patents on plants and animals is supposed to diminish biodiversity. Won't new plants and animals _increase_ biodiversity? I mean yes, without the patents you could crossbreed and remix GM and other plants more freely which would boost the increase even further, but even a small increase is still pretty much the opposite of a decrease and dismantles the argument.

And before someone gets into cross-pollination and other ways of patented species overtaking 'natural' species habitats: For that to happen you need the GM species to be vastly better at reproducing. The chances of this happening without it being a goal of the development (which it usually isn't, since they want you to buy shit again and again…) are pretty small. As far as I know most GM organisms are even made sterile.

And while the risk of GM organisms "taking over the world" is relatively slim, naturally occuring species do this kind of stuff right this moment. The so- called 'Killer bees', some species of fish and crustaceans, red fire ants. et cetera, et cetera.

Many people have this sense of nature being balanced and that if we don't touch it, it'll all be alright ("Man made everything bad!", the environmentalist version of original sin). This is complete and utter bullshit, just doesn't work that way. Ecosystems are not static, they are extremely dynamic and _never_ balanced.

<comment><USER4> _> Won't new plants and animals increase biodiversity?_

The issue here isn't that - new plants and animals may be good or bad, but that's an environmental argument. My concern is allowing people to patent biochemistry/DNA sequences, which is _clearly_ bad.

EU law doesn't allow software patents, perhaps it's time to define DNA as a computer program, thus making it illegal to patent it.

<comment><USER6> >My concern is allowing people to patent biochemistry/DNA sequences, which is clearly bad.

I was thinking about this earlier but I concluded that it was morally no different than any other form of patent - and modestly comparible to patents on new drugs (or software, indeed).

For example - the protection afforded by patents on new drugs is said to justify the amount spent by the pharmaceutical industry on R&D/drug discovery.

Why is the argument different for seeds/DNA sequences, _or any other invention that benefits humanity_ , if it is?

<comment><USER7> The problem seed manufactures get to enforce useless patents. Step 1, patent junk DNA. Step 2, prevent farmers from using seed banks due to useless patent. Step 3, profit.

Net value to society... Nothing.

<comment><USER6> This argument is against patenting 'junk' DNA: but European and American patent law both require a patent to have industrial application and to be novel.

So, I find it unlikely that this situation should apply in practice (although it is worrying that it _might_ apply). And, I don't find it an argument against patenting useful non-junk DNA.

Note: I'm probably on your side, at least in that I dislike implementation of patent law in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A much needed work, and I wish them all the luck in abolishing patents and any other kind of state enforced monopolies around plants, genetic material and other similar areas.

With some success in the EU, current food industries might feel inclined to stop trying exploiting state power for their businesses model, and just focus on creating superior products that are useful for the consumer. There will never be a lack of potential buyers for superior methods of farming, as the cost of biofuel are directly linked to the easy of farming. The army would love to throw money at more effective corn/soy/sugarcane production, if it would lower their cost in using biofuel. Animal fat is also used, so basically anything a farm produce could improve the biofuel industry.

</comment><comment><USER9> Patents on seeds are particularly worrying as a result of The Patent Box ([http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ct/forms-rates/claims/patent- box.htm](http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ct/forms-rates/claims/patent-box.htm)) in the UK. Basically means income from patented "inventions" is tax free, which means that Monsanto and chums will only get richer, and the market less competitive. Tweak a gene, repatent, ad infinitum.

Never mind that this is a complete perversion of the purpose of the patent system (innovation and the common good).

<comment><USER4> The sad thing is that will have been designed to incentivise innovation/R&D, when in fact it incentivises registering more patents. :/</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to get a good deal for a Ubuntu laptop? - <AUTHOR> I spilled beer on my Macbook. I have job interviews coming up for developer positions. I desperately need something I can afford. <comment><USER2> Chromebooks start below $200 and can install Ubuntu -

[http://www.howtogeek.com/185039/4-things-to-keep-in-mind- whe...](http://www.howtogeek.com/185039/4-things-to-keep-in-mind-when-buying- a-chromebook-for-linux/)

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Dap...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=chromebook)

Lots of cheap Windows laptops too -

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=amb_link_357131882_13?ie=UTF8&fi...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=amb_link_357131882_13?ie=UTF8&field- availability=-1&field-price-mp-owner- bin=00000-39999&node=565108&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search- leftnav&pf_rd_r=0AA4VWW8H7TAJPP13VVX&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=2170409942&pf_rd_i=565108)

There's also browser-based IDEs, maybe you can just connect a monitor + bluetooth keyboard with your phone or tablet -

[https://www.c9.io](https://www.c9.io)

</comment><comment><USER3> Get a used T- or X-series Lenovo Thinkpad with Intel graphics from Staples or Ebay or thinkpaddepot.com or outlet.lenovo.com. I have a T420s and an X220i that run Ubuntu, Slackware and OpenBSD. I'm unsure how well Nvidia chipsets are supported by Ubuntu, and I know they're not supported at all by OpenBSD.

One caveat: some OpenBSD firmware isn't included in the standard installation media, so one needs either to do the install while connected to the net via Ethernet, or download the firmware from firmware.openbsd.org onto media and run fw_update after installation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Decent Ubuntu laptop for ~$1k

[http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd)

<comment><AUTHOR> Theyre out of stock :(</comment></comment>


What's going on Reddit these days has media manipulation written all over it - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2013/02/hail-corporate-the-increasingly-insufferable-fakery-of-brands-on-reddit/ <comment><USER2> Is that like the multiple media companies spamming the shit out of HN, with at least these accounts shilling for BetaBeat?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=met3>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ssalevan>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=benjaminkabin>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nitashatiku>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=lovekandinsky>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gnarls_manson>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookish08>

Other big media houses spamming HN include Future (techradar.com and maximumpc.com), and of course Ziff Davis (extremetech.com, pcmag.com, geek.com).

<comment><USER3> I'm sure PG is aware of this, but is he going to do anything about it?

<comment><USER4> yeah PG and all HN admins need to fine a way of keeping media manipulation out of this website.

<comment><USER5> Maybe he can start with the techcrunch spam of announced yc companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Articles like this are toxic for a community.

First, it's largely unsubstantiated, predicating most of its arguments on insinuations without much substance if any in the entire article. Without the usual navel-gazing about Journalism, it's still worth pointing out I wouldn't associate trustworthiness with any brand willing to publish an article as poorly-sourced as this.

Second, it ascribes to single-minded malice what is much more likely a vast and complex series of behaviors, some of which probably involves spammers but much of which does not. This kind of reductionism is rarely constructive IMO.

Most problematically, it lays the foundation for the delegitimization of dialogue in a community. This kind of paranoid accusation soon empowers folks to stifle dissenting voices as part of this outside group trying to bring down reddit. This kind of paranoia has already infected dialogue on the middle east in reddit, for example.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Subreddits like /r/hailcorporate exist to try to make light of these practices (and started out credible enough), but now it is overrun with conspiracy theorists who think that any and all references to a major brand in a post that hits the front page - especially if it doesn't have very many comments - is clearly advertising, and you are all sheeple.

They even mass-downvoted someone for saying "something smells fishy and it isn't the Fish Filet" in a thread about the baby eating the used condom off the floor because just mentioning a product means they must be a paid marketer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not simply limited to media manipulation. Loby and special interest groups are also using reddit to sway political discourse.

This is no better seen than when Israel/Palestine articles hit the front page. You can nearly watch in real time where a critical mass is reached and suddenly pro israeli comments start flooding in. It's a thing of beauty to watch.

If you look at the /r/videos subreddit you can see videos uploaded showing clips from the official ellen page which arn't particularly interested but have been boosted to the top and are full of comments talking about how great ellen is.

Even subreddits that have failed to reach the large member volumes other subreddits have are not immune to this manipulation.

It's unfortunate because it stiffles original dialogue.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if reddit got rid of the upvote button and only allowed posts to be down votted. Articles and comments which survived the war of attrition might be a little more inciteful.

<comment><USER9> >Sometimes I wonder what would happen if reddit got rid of the upvote button and only allowed posts to be down votted.

That might actually make things worse. Astroturfers would systematically downvote everyone else, while legitimate users would usually only downvote a small handful of things.

<comment><USER10> If that happens, it could make it easier to identify them. Reddit already has quite sophisticated spam detection algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This garbage is what's wrong with blog news sites, a complete lack of journalistic integrity. While I didn't check them all, every supposed example I looked at was a legitimate user and not a corporate shill. Ryan Holiday could have easily confirmed this as well (and may have) but instead chose to post them and insinuate less than honest intentions by the post authors.

While corporate shilling does happen on Reddit (and other news sites such as HN) it's not as common as the article implies. If it was he could have at least found some real examples. Holiday should stick to what he's good at, marketing, and leave journalism to actual journalists.

<comment><USER12> "This garbage is what's wrong with blog news sites, a complete lack of journalistic integrity."

Newspapers really aren't much better, they're mainly better at appearing to have integrity. The only real benefit of most newspapers is that the lack of integrity is somewhat consistent according to a particular slant of the paper. So you can expect The New Yorker to lack their integrity in a fairly consistent way, whereas Washington Post lacks integrity in a different but consistent way.

Reddit's curation is biased toward lowest common denominator dopamine shots that are provided in as little as time as is possible after clicking the "hit me" link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are lots of places where corporate manipulation of the media bother me, but the front page of Reddit just isn't that high on my list.

What's there now? Among other things, there's a cartoon image of a man saying "It's locked." A picture of Keira Knightley, with an atheism/theism quote. A dog catching a piece of cheese. A picture of two shirtless guys jumping around in a hotel room. The top link points to an article with content that does actually seem to be corrupted by corporate manipulation (it could be read as an advert for Lockheed-Martin). However, the article itself is on Reuters, so Reddit is just acting as a low-quality aggregator site at that point.

In short, it's hard for me to take the front page of Reddit seriously as a "media" outlet. While I do find some subreddits interesting and informative, it's not clear how the quality of the front page would somehow get dragged down by a few professionally-produced marketing messages.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know how much of it is directly corporate-driven, but Reddit _loves_ viral marketing. Can't get enough. Mildly funny Facebook post from a beer brand? Screenshot it, thousands of upvotes. Repeat over and over and over again.

I suspect it's mainly down to a total lack of concern or thought for the effects of what you choose to consume and share.

<comment><USER15> In your example, what is the effect? A beer company gets a little bit of free exposure for a clever pic? Whoop-de-freaking-doo!

The cleverness is probably what's getting upvoted, FYI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reddit has really gone through a transformation in the past few years. It's painful to see interesting discussions turn to memes and viral marketing. Just seems to be inevitable. I had an idea for how to limit the influence of the masses and bots by giving trust to known high quality "trusted" users. When a high quality user votes on something, he spreads his trust trust around. Effectively it means that people who post cat pictures have no trust and therefore no influence with their votes, and the admins have a simple way of steering the content by picking and choosing the trusted and non-trusted users. Trust could be computed similarly to how you calculate pagerank.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure why they haven't used karma in a similar way. Why not make up or down votes cost one karma point? In order to shape the content stream you would need to spend your social capital.

<comment><USER16> I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions. What I'm essentially saying is that the Reddit staff should pick a few thousand people by hand that they think embodies what they want the perfect redditor to be like. Everybody else starts out with minuscule influence. Now those ambassadors will go out and up-vote other good users and down-vote bad ones and will in that way spread their influence to other people. Some users might even have negative influence. Can you imagine a user who keeps up-voting cat pictures that is in effect down-voting those submissions without realizing it? It would be beautiful. Obviously it would be important to keep users' influence a secret.

In essence, it would give the Reddit staff much needed control of the content and discourse. If they one day wanted to steer the site towards only cat pictures, they can easily do that by selecting those users to be the ambassadors.

Right now it seems that Reddit is suffering from Eternal September x 1000, and they're at the mercy of the masses. But the geeky, thoughtful content that brought people to the site to begin with is nowhere to be found anymore. It's being drowned in memes and cat pictures.

<comment><USER18> _I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions._

I disagree. IMHO it can be accomplished with the correct structure. The problem you identify is that subreddits are shared spaces, and the primary signal that they rely on is the sum of all users. As subreddits grow, the signal becomes worse. Weighting the votes of users could help, but then you are implementing a moderator bias, and not being honest with people about their input would almost certainly lead to blowback.

One of our goals with <http://hubski.com> was to avoid this problem. Our approach was to avoid shared pages, and instead allow users to build a feed by following other users or tags. That way we don't have the problem of 'keeping bad content out' to begin with. Instead of voting a story up a page, users share the post with those users that follow them. Posts propagate from user to user. Therefore content cannot be 'buried' by competing with other posts in a shared space. Of course, we are not anywhere near the size of Reddit, but it has been working well so far for us. Each user is their own moderator.

<comment><USER16> I like it. Have been looking for an alternative to Reddit for general discussions, so far HN has been my inadequate replacement.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. Feel free to send feedback along after you kick the tires. It's always useful to get a fresh perspective. We always consider Hubski to be a work in progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The American military astroturfing on reddit is off the charts. Desert-puppy- holding and worship-baiting-poignant-reunion photos are pumped out like clockwork.

<comment><USER20> You're not the only one noticing that. Every time I mention it (in a non- confrontational way) I get spammed with downvotes.

I honestly don't care about Reddit any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> People like their favorite brands and will post and upvote them. Costco for example. People love Costco as the anti-Walmart. That's not to say manipulation doesn't happen, but the author should at least mention this.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is something that is difficult to prove either way, especially with the amount of group think that gets posted to the top of popular subreddits.

Reddit is basically the perfect breeding ground for this sort of thing. In fact if I was an internet marketing type I can't think of why I wouldn't target reddit.

We have a lot of younger unemployed people out there today who are probably thinking "damn, if only somebody would pay me to browse reddit all day".

Facebook etc are doing similar things with "sponsored likes", the main difference being that this is at least less surreptitious but it certainly shows that astroturfing is very very big business.

Hell for all I know, I'm the only "real" person on HN and all of the rest of you are hired by various interest groups to try and persuade me of various things..

</comment><comment><USER23> _"So whether Redditors know it or not, there is a now a big 'deceive me' sign on their back. And marketers are going to try to take advantage of it."_

And what's new about this? As a consumer, I've had this sign on me since birth, haven't I?

</comment><comment><USER24> I find myself in the surreal position of wanting to endorse the author's book while bound by the awareness that any such endorsement by definition ought to be viewed with extreme skepticism.

</comment><comment><USER25> Some of his examples are just... awful. Apparently the genius minds at Domino's Pizza's marketing department came up with "in a one-off test our Pizza arrived one minute faster than one of our competitors", Costo came up with "look at the financial record our company set" (something shoppers always think about when deciding where to shop), and Mountain Dew wanted potential customers to know their drink was created to hide the taste of Moonshine.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's been like that for a while on the bigger subs. But it's the same thing that happens on TV, radio, etc. You can't avoid it.

</comment><comment><USER27> So it's impossible for people to find that little factoid about Mountain Dew genuinely interesting and therefore it must be a corporate conspiracy that it reached the front page of /r/TIL?

Absolute pure insanity. And why then is reddit's obsession with Neil DeGrasse Tyson not an orchestrated conspiracy by NDT's publicist or book publisher to sell more books? Oh, because _you_ like NDT and therefore support for him is organic and genuine?

Supreme narcissism.

</comment><comment><USER28> Reddit has minimal barriers to churning accounts to sybil attack the community. It's all too common to hear founders trying to maximize users and accelerate growth before the long-term externalities have been considered or the stack is ready.

Some times taking your time is the best decision for the long-game.

Crawl->Stand->Walk->Run->Jump

<comment><USER28> Let's not forget Conde Nast--Advanced Publications--owns Reddit...

<comment><USER29> Not anymore. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit- thri...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-thrives- after-advance-publications-let-it-sink-or-swim.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER28> Can't even call it a Chinese wall...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Crowdsourced list of travel scams people are likely to encounter - <AUTHOR> https://www.scamstravel.com <comment><USER2> Interesting! Can you write a bit about how you built it?</comment>


India gets a new phone, and it's free - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/reliance-jio-phone-priced-zero <comment><USER2> Nowadays, it seems to me that every time I hear the word 'disruptive', the word 'free' seems to be close by.</comment>


A strange museum at the 'centre of the world' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190101-a-strange-museum-at-the-centre-of-the-world <comment><USER2> First time I saw this thing was on a drive from Southern Arizona to San Diego. (There really aren't that many reasons to be out there.) The pyramid is clearly visible from the Interstate. I remember thinking: "WTF is this doing here?" It was a little surreal.

<comment><USER3> I knew exactly what this this article would link to the minute I read the title. I must have driven past that pyramid and the weird little church on the hill dozens of times before I finally bothered to stop and go take a look. Weird place in deed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First thought was that this is unnecessary because enough people will always keep a local cache of Wikipedia or whatever handy.

Second thought was a conversation between an electrical engineering professor I had in college and one of my classmates. We were learning about flip-flop circuits, which led to a discussion of computer memory in general. The conversation went:

Prof: Flip-flops and latches will lose their memory when powered off, so not necessarily the best solution for storing something important.

Classmate: Then how does my USB memory stick store data when it's unpowered?

P: [explanation of floating-gate MOSFETs, which can hold data intact practically forever, although actually forever is a different story]

C: What's the best way we know of of storing data for the longest possible time?

P: Carve it into the side of a mountain.

<comment><USER5> 5D optical data storage is all the rage these days. Wouldn't want your data to disappear with a tectonic plate shift.

</comment></comment><comment> munk-a I grew up in Boston and there are headstones from the 19th century carved in granite that are already entirely illegible. How is this data going to stand a chance against erosion?

<comment><USER6> There is very little erosion in the desert, unlike in cities, where acid rain and humidity will break down even the hardiest rocks.

<comment><USER7> What about sand + wind?

<comment><USER8> That's what I was wondering. The entire monument doesn't need to be eroded, only the fine etching.

Would the best way to preserve it actually be to allow it to be buried in sand?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I clicked the BBC link and after reading a few paragraphs with many teaser words still no picture is shown? I reach the end of the article and yes there is a picture, if you click all the links to find it.

[http://www.parafame.org/DPP07DA0C0D152627%20cropped.jpg](http://www.parafame.org/DPP07DA0C0D152627%20cropped.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wanted to make something like this myself, it's been on my mind for a while now. I have been thinking of using laser-engraved aluminum panels instead of granite, and mount them on a cave somewhere. Anyone have any idea of how long the aluminum can last? Is it at least 1000 years?

<comment><USER10> You might be interested in looking at [http://rosettaproject.org/](http://rosettaproject.org/) or talking to some of the people who worked on that. I assume they did a lot of research on materials and engraving processes (although they finished their prototypes a decade ago, so it might not be as state-of-the-art as it could be).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really going to confuse the archeologists who rediscover it in the year 6000.</comment>


Why can't I watch web-based video in Canada? - <AUTHOR> http://brandonbt.posterous.com/why-cant-i-watch-videos-from-us-sites

<comment><USER2> It has nothing to do with an advantage to a company of not having Canadians watch US programming, it is completely based on Copyright owners, which is MUCH more complicated than I could have imagined.

For instance, you'd think that because Comedy Central broadcasts the Daily Show, they would have the rights to distribute that show online in all countries, but The production company of The Daily Show, provides only the rights to broadcast the show in the US.

This way, the producers get to sell the same show again in a different region. If Comedy Central were permitted to broadcast beyond US borders, it would limit the amount the producers could make on the show.

I believe it has has less to do with advertising to the consumer, which is revenue to the broadcast company, and more about the revenue to the production company, which is paid by the broadcaster.

If we end up in an environment where you pay directly for content, this would probably change, as you'd possibly be paying directly to the production company and cut out the middle man. But I suspect that is all a long way off.</comment>


Beaglejs - track page clicks using regex filter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dnprock/beaglejs

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to make this into a javascript library. Would love to get some pointers from others.</comment>


Snap CEO on FB 'Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn't mean they're Google' - tuna-piano http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-ceo-evan-spiegel-compares-facebook-copying-to-yahoo-copying-google-search-2017-5 <comment><AUTHOR> Lol the standford bro can talk a big game but Facebook is quickly making snap inc irrelevant</comment>


High school journalists investigated a new principal's credentials - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/05/these-high-school-journalists-investigated-a-new-principals-credentials-days-later-she-resigned/ <comment><USER3> I don't know how common falsified credentials are in school administration, but I'll mention a parallel experience that was a formative part of my upbringing.

While I was in high school, my father taught at a small private college in Wisconsin, where he was on the hiring committee for the new college president. After being hired, the chosen candidate's behavior was surprisingly erratic, prompting my my father to continue researching his background.

After a bit of digging, he found that the new college president had falsified almost his entire resume. Thinking he had solid proof of this, and not being politically savvy, my father presented his evidence to the other faculty who had been on the hiring committee.

To his surprise, he (rather than the fraudster) was promptly fired from his supposedly tenured position for "gross insubordination". Shortly thereafter, the "fake" college president pocketed the proceeds from remortgaging the college dorms, drove his college provided little-red-sports-car out of town, and was never heard from again.

Embittered by the lack of backing from his purported colleagues, my father never returned to academia, and instead turned to odd jobs and house painting. Not long after, the college lost its accreditation, and went out of business: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College).

<comment><USER4> This is a story about a teacher near where I live who only got outted for a fake degree when he ran for a school board. And from stories I have heard from his students, he got the fake doctorate degree because he wanted to be called doctor. In fact if students in high school called him Mr. Kulas he would correct them (sometimes chew them out) that he is to be referred to as Dr. Kulas.

Use imcognito mode to open this link to avoid possible pay wall: [http://lacrossetribune.com/news/ex-candidate-cited- degrees-f...](http://lacrossetribune.com/news/ex-candidate-cited-degrees-from- nonexistent-school/article_0b208f22-d275-56fb-bf82-aba8760324c8.html)

<comment><USER5> We had a high school teacher who demanded that we address them as Dr. Whozits on the first day, and would correct us.

They learned that you can demand respect all you want, but if you actually want to _get_ respect, you have to _earn_ it from the people you're expecting it from.

<comment><USER6> He earned that title, and he was your teacher (a superior), so I don't understand why you were annoyed. Most importantly, it was the first day! Think of an interview for example: would it be polite to address your interviewer using his/her first name? No, unless the interviewer gives you permission to do so.

Edit: It seems like a lot of HN users have a severe aversion to authority, so I guess I've learned something new today :P

<comment><USER7> The respect goes both ways.

I call people with doctoral degrees "Dr." unless I'm invited otherwise or we're in a non-professional setting. Doctoral degrees usually aren't mere pieces of paper; going out of one's way to diminish the work and sacrifice involved is kind of rude.

But I also think it's kind of snooty and ill-mannered to explicitly _demand_ to be called Dr.

Like with table manners. It's rude to not be decent to other people at the table. But equally rude to snap at another guest for eating with his mouth open.

This example is kind of an in-between on the teacher's part, because socialization is part of education. Only parent knows whether the teacher was motivated by socializing skills or ego.

 _> Edit: It seems like a lot of HN users have a severe aversion to authority, so I guess I've learned something new today_

As always, the aversion is slightly more nuanced than just authority. You'll find lots of respect for certain other positions of authority (eg CEO). Also, aversion to the hierarchy of schools is nothing unique to HN.

<comment><USER6> Oh yes, I agree completely. But OP's scenario involved a school teacher on his/her first day teaching the class, and so I felt that OP was overreacting. Obviously, demanding that random people call you Dr. is absolutely rude.

Well, it's news to me! I never noticed this thinking before, probably because it's not a common topic of discussion on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

</comment><comment><USER9> I applaud the budding journalists persistence, and certainly having someone falsify their credentials is a really terrible start into such an important position.

However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background?

Also, let me clarify I was not one to get into trouble and had very good grades in HS. I can really remember 2 really good teachers, and the rest ... quite mediocre at best. I also dated a HS teacher (as an adult,much later on) so I've seen firsthand the inner workings of teaching 'system'.

<comment><USER10> In the US I feel like the primary education system is simply childcare for the working class. My experience with teacher quality was just like yours.

<comment><USER11> We don't pay them well so we get what we pay for. The exceptions are those that love to teach and love students. You can't run an organization via exceptions however. It's really a shame we don't value education more.

<comment><USER12> > _It 's really a shame we don't value education more._

This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for _others outside of our sphere_.

When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that everyone can think of one relatively close school that they can unequivocally call a good/great school system where they expect most student to exceed by some set of positive metrics

As long as the people who can fix it (no matter if its more staff, better pay, better resources or whatever change necessary) can place their children into C-Level Preparatory Academy, Dumpster Fire High School probably won't see much improvement.

<comment><USER13> >This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole.

That's a bunch of crap. If we (Americans) valued education as a whole, we wouldn't vote for leaders who continually cut education budgets. It's very simple: we as a society do not care about education. It's not a top political issue ever, unlike abortion, defense spending, guns, and who uses what bathroom. We keep school funding and administration at the local level because we don't want "our money" going to "those kids" (i.e. poor kids) in some other district, so we all end up with terrible schools and horribly inconsistent results school-to-school. Public education in this country is completely broken, and there's absolutely no political will to change it, and voters don't make it an issue because they're more worried about Planned Parenthood and terrorists.

<comment><USER14> Some context in case anyone is curious:

Education is the third-biggest item of (combined) US government spending, after healthcare and pensions. Defense is fourth. It accounts for roughly 15% of total spending and 5% of GDP. I found this history of education spending informative regarding "leaders who continually cut education budgets": [http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending)

Perhaps Politifact can be used as a barometer of "issues" during elections. They have rated 954 statements about education, 415 about guns, 390 about the military, 377 about terrorism, 316 about abortion, 64 about sexuality (including "bathroom bills"), and 20 or so about Planned Parenthood. Even statements about the federal budget in general (which include many of the previous issues) only totaled 938 items.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right?

My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happened a few times. Also he's had the old trick of the certificate with the the cigarette burn on the date attempted.

There's probably a lot of jobs outside of the more technical fields where simply being a nice person who can read and write makes you indistinguishable from someone with an education in that field.

Heck, I worked with someone with a mathematical PhD for years wondering how he'd never heard of Banach-Tarsky. Not that it's a specifically useful or necessary thing, just that you'd think a math-interested person would have come across it. Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance. In the end I decided there were too many things that surprised him, even if he did act interested when told about them. That's not to say he didn't actually have the degree; but he certainly didn't have the skills that are supposed to go with it.

<comment><USER16> MD here. Is your father-in-law suggesting that several doctors he works with aren't legitimate physicians?

It seems a bit hard to believe. I've had to apply for medical licenses in 3 states, and it was a colossal pain the ass for each. Took 4 months the first time; and I have a completely clean record. Getting hospital privileges takes forever, too.

If fact, I think it should be easier, especially for those of us who did medical school, residency, and exams in the US.

Best doctor that I know failed 2 of his USMLE exams.

<comment><USER17> Not the US, but ...

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-07/doctors-identity- alleg...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-07/doctors-identity-allegedly- stolen-and-used-in-nsw-hospitals/8332812)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.

<comment><USER19> IMHO, two reasons:

\- Adults are not super humans and can make mistakes

\- and 17 year olds are as capable as adults.

In engineering people frequently ask - why nobody thought about it - <USER2> because nobody did.

<comment><USER20> Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way"

Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

<comment><USER21> If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.

<comment><USER22> That's no way to witch hunt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is the issue of the newspaper the kids published: [https://issuu.com/emilysmith41/docs/march_17](https://issuu.com/emilysmith41/docs/march_17)

<comment><USER24> There's a "Full screen" button at bottom-right of the image that improves readability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This happen in my school in Ireland also - with false credentials.

This part of the story I really respect:

"Under Kansas law, high school journalists are protected from administrative censorship. "The kids are treated as professionals," Smith said. But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. It also meant overcoming a natural hesitancy many students have to question authority."

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately, not all U.S. states give students this right.

When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run.

<comment><USER27> > When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was > subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue > prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run.

No different from any "real" newspaper.

<comment><USER28> I worked on school papers high school through college. Administrative review served a very useful purpose and kept the quality of the papers higher. I respected every administrator I dealt with.

They have a much harder job than it might appear at first blush -- even the slightest hint of repressing a valid story turns a very harsh spotlight on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Turns out, for U.S. institutions, and a little information on the subject, it's pretty easy to get educational verification on candidate's claims. Many companies with well run hiring operations just use this service as a matter of course.

[https://nscverifications.org/](https://nscverifications.org/)

[http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/](http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/)

</comment><comment><USER30> My experience with young people is they think nothing of googling someone.

Example. 25yr old always G Earth the presons address, searches other sites,FB, etc As ROUTINE. New male client comes in she openly tells coworkers about her results.

<comment><USER31> My experience with old people is they take a shocking amount of time to consider googling something or they have me google it for them.

<comment><USER30> I would never had thought a normal, well reared person would Google anybody just because they can. I think the net-natives think nothing of it and probably dont think it's wrong.

My comment demonstrated my discovery that I am not surprised it was from a young person.

<comment><USER32> You haven't explained why you think it's wrong to Google someone. Note: not everyone you encounter is a "normal, well-reared" person. Googling someone is a good way to weed out the less "well-reared".

<comment><USER30> Hmm. Googling a person is nosey. Nosey is not desireable. Nosey is not acceptable behavior I had passed on to me and I passed it on to all my children.

Google lets a nosey person be nosey in private and anonymously. It is still not desireable.

Young people ( and some older ones) Google everything and think it's all the same. That was my point. Nobody my age tells me or my peers "Hay, I just found out our new manager is divorced and has 3 kids,and used to work for botuniverse.com."

I would directly ask that person "why on earth did you want to find that out!?!?"

Perhaps this is a generational think....

<comment><USER31> Honestly I don't see how it's any different than a prospective employer running a background check on me, which has been a relatively common practice since before google achieved ubiquity.

Do you find that gauche as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is simply excellent. What a great story. I'm surprised no one has just stated that yet.

Excellent.

<comment><USER34> More comments like these are needed here!

<comment><USER34> Welp this got downvoted, I guess HN doesn't look kindly at promoting positivity here?!

<comment><USER35> First "hn rule" of the voting system... use it. (Its a good way of promoting positivity)

Second "hn rule" of the voting system... don't needlessly talk about it.

<comment><USER34> Are these rules posted somewhere? Overall, HN has some really interesting content and insight, mixed in with hateful negativity - seems like talking about the rules would be good, if we wanted to cut out the negative bits

<comment><USER35> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER34> > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and > it makes boring reading.

lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This just in, there have been a surprising number of resignations from Faculty members all across the nation. In unrelated news, student journalist have begun investigating administrators credentials as projects for their school papers.

Seriously, this is remarkable. That kids today have the power to effect this level of change is nothing short of incredible.

</comment><comment><USER37> > for one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university > where Robertson said she got her master's and doctorate degrees years ago, > the website didn't work.

what an amateur - this is how you do it [http://bigbusinessjournal.com/](http://bigbusinessjournal.com/)

<comment><USER38> I had no idea what to expect from that link but I'm happy I clicked it :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids"

</comment><comment><USER40> Great read though the title felt a little click baity.

Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? (especially for a public school) or was this a result of the board being lazy? Because if credentials are never verified, this might be hinting at a bigger problem.

<comment><USER41> My high school physics teacher got fired middle of the year. Turned out he wasn't at all licensed to teach and may or may not have actually finished college. He got all the way to tenure before anyone noticed. The guy was a wonderful teacher and knew his topic insanely well. Other students hated him cause he actually held students to a standard. Dude ran a convenience store out of his class room to fund our robotics team. He convinced me to re-enroll in the AP Physics B class under the promise that I wouldn't have to show up and instead would study AP Physics C (calculus) with him during his prep time. I was then bribed into this non-existent class with pirated software (thus getting me into programming). He did all of this so that there would be enough students enrolled in the AP Physics B class. For the record I got a perfect score on my exam. The man broke every rule in the book and our lives were better for it.

In conclusion, yes it happens. Yes you can be anti-rule anti-authority and still be successful and non-edgy. Fuck da police.

<comment><USER42> That's not at all where I thought you were going with that. Some rule breakers are good others are bad. Some only break certain rules. I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out? I've seen teachers be emergency certified in similar circumstances.

<comment><USER41> >Some rule breakers are good others are bad.

True. Maybe I just idolized this guy cause he was both smart and stuck it to the man.

>I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out?

I don't know what the rules are on that. Even if it were possible by this time he already tried to forge documents and otherwise lie his way through. Even before the fraud the man didn't really have to many allies in administration.

Also the district didn't even have the balls to tell us (the students) why our teacher disappeared one day. I had to learn it through another teacher in a private conversation outside the school.

Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a "congratulatory" piece of paper.

<comment><USER43> > Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of > time followed by a "congratulatory" piece of paper.

John Taylor Gatto (and John Holt, and many others) say "wasting time" is the whole point of compulsory education.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis)

"Against School: How Public Education Criples our Kids, and Why" \- [http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm](http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm)

Archive.org should have the complete text of "The Underground History of American Education", which was formerly posted in its entirety at [http://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com](http://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com)

Also search for "I quit, I think", and ... "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"... several copies of these essays are scattered around the internet.

Edit: favorite'd your earlier comment, as I like how your teacher was good at teaching physics in spite of not having a congratulatory paper from a "higher education" establishment.

<comment><USER41> Public schools serve one primary purpose. They free up women to work in the labour market. It turns out that having every kid attended to one-on-one by their mother was a terribly inefficient system compared to just shoving them all in a room and letting one person look after ~20. The fact that any sort of education happens is just a nice add-on after the fact. School also does a fantastic job of preparing you to submit to the arbitrary demands of authority figures. Today its the teacher, tomorrow its the cop.

Society is a well oiled machine from cradle to college to job to marriage to suburban home to grave. Sadly I'm too much of a fan of indoor plumbing to consider the alternative. We're all just cogs in the machine.

<comment><USER44> Nice narrative, and especially the "bend and break the kids to conform with mainstream" rings a bell.

Yet I don't believe the major driving force is to free up women as laborers - schools have been existing way before women had the right to work or vote.

In my opinion schools and universities rather serve to breed out worker drones and the curriculums are based on corporate needs, not society's. And this has, especially in the last two decades, been visible in the EU with the Bologna reform. Classes with no direct economical advantage (arts!) are falling way behind classes in the STEM field.

<comment><USER45> Schools were around before washing machines. So just because a woman didn't have a job at an office or other place of employment, she did have a lot of work to do around the home.

<comment><USER46> Robert Caro's first LBJ book has a great (harrowing) passage on how hard it was in rural Texas for mothers, who often didn't have electricity up until the 30's. It was backbreaking, constant labor to keep everything in working order and preserve enough food for winter.

<comment><USER45> Sounds like people don't realise how much leisure time we have in our current lives (Myself included). People used to work over 40 hours a week just making sure they could survive through the winter months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This isn't doing much to dispel my feeling that the entire field of Human Resources is a farce.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've had a conversation with a well credentialed school principal that had, uh, lost track of the concept of the multiplication table.

</comment><comment><USER49> Great journalism by the students. What I fear just as much as unaccredited "diploma mill" universities are the accredited ones that hand out education degrees just as easily. It seems like anyone can pay for an education masters (or PhD) these days.

</comment><comment><USER50> I love stories like this. Look into 'Gerd postel' if you like that stuff. He imposted as director of a medical clinic for years and is very outspoken about it. Narcissism at its best

</comment><comment><USER51> This is how journalism should work. Not like the Washpo, acting as Jeff Bezos Anti-Trump propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a Trump fan writing, but I can't stand the biased bs media publishes these days.

<comment><USER52> A story that comes to a conclusion you dislike is not necessarily propaganda. Nobody is immune from legitimate criticism.</comment></comment>


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