U.S. government once wanted to plan false flag attacks with Soviet aircraft - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/us-soviet-aircraft-jfk-docs-cover-operations-717460?utm_campaign=NewsweekTwitter&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social <comment><USER2> The title here on HN is somewhat better than the original on Newsweek, which replaces "wanted to plan" with "planned". But I object to both.

The linked memo [1] consists of a table estimating the cost for the US to secretly acquire MIGs. Stop and go read it, it's only a cover form, a table estimating the cost to get some MIGs, and a failed attempt at redacting the 3rd page, which describes the effort. The final paragraph reads:

> _There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception > operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise > attack against enemy installations_ or in a prevocation operation in which a > Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly installations in > order to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention. _If the planes were to be > used in such covert operations, it would seem preferable to manufacture them > in the United States._

Emphasis added. But note that the documents do not describe the mental status of the authors, they're just listing facts. Any guesses by journalists as to what the actors behind the documents were thinking or what they desired to do are only guesses.

The US government is a very, very large organization, that asks a lot of questions and produces a lot of documents. You can also expect that someone, somewhere was also tasked to answer the question "how hard would it be for the Soviet Union to procure US aircraft and launch a false flag attack against themselves, and what can/should we do to mitigate this risk." Within the Soviet government, someone else investigated what it would cost to procure some F-86 and F-4 aircraft, and what it would cost the US to get MIGs, and what they could/should do to mitigate this risk.

I would argue that it would be irresponsible of both governments to not ask these questions. I would also agree that false flag operations and indeed war itself are reprehensible, and would hope that the decision-makers, armed with this information, would still make the right choice. But given the lives, dollars, and issues at stake, and the comparably tiny cost of answering the question, it would be irresponsible not to check.

[1]: [https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-3...](https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32977055.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I agree with the general direction of your argument, but wholeheartedly disagree that this doesn't constitute "planning", and find your de-emphasis of 'using the aircraft in a covert operation to attack the US', disconcerting.

<comment><USER4> The Defense Department has war plans for a thousand and one eventualities. That is their job.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Even SOPs for a zombie apocalypse. Now, before you downvote, I'm being totally serious, even if the SOPs aren't.

<comment><USER6> A potential Zombie Apocalypse is not a bad thing to plan for. Sure, a disease outbreak might not turn people into the exact kind of zombie planned (there are as many zombie "rulesets" in movies as there are time travel "rulesets"), but it's an exercise which probably doesn't veer far from an actual worst-case scenario of disease outbreak. Remember that the Spanish Flu outbreak killed 3%-5% of the world population in 3 years[1].

It's not even a bad thing for the CDC to plan for[2]. I have a conservative cousin who is in the Marine reserves and is an FBI special agent. He complained to no end that the CDC was "wasting" our taxpayer dollars on the zombie outbreak preparedness marketing campaign. But he also failed to see that as a marketing campaign, it went viral because of unassuming hosts like him (very meta) and, ironically, it was an extremely efficient use of taxpayer dollars.

A false flag attack which attacks US or allied property is just a justification to lie to the American voter and to co-opt American tax dollars. If anything, the author who suggested it for such a purpose is part of the Pentagon "swamp" (in Trump terminology) and is part of the reason the US is currently waning in power (soft, hard, economic, etc).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic)

[2] [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/why- did...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/why-did-the-cdc- develop-a-plan-for-a-zombie-apocalypse/239246/)

<comment><USER7> The CDC may use zombie apocalypse as a lighthearted framework for training (and, even more, public preparedness) for a generic disease outbreak, but with the military, if they actually use it at all, I expect it is more as an emotionally convenient framework for preparing for the potentiality of widespread domestic counterinsurgency.

> A false flag attack which attacks US or allied property is just a > justification to lie to the American voter and to co-opt American tax > dollars. If anything, the author who suggested it for such a purpose

The false flag use wasn't a prominent suggestion, and the highlighted false flag uses started with a false flag attack on a Soviet-allied threat. Elevating a secondary variation of what is itself one of many possible uses for acquired MiGs as if it was a standalone or primary justification for the exercise is dishonest.

<comment><USER5> You have no idea what you are talking about. I think you are talking about the "zombie riot" civic emergency drills conducted in recent years, but I'm talking about specifically something my army unit did (develop SOPs for a zombie apocalypse) as coordination training. Additionally, you should know that you are a conspiracy theorist and completely out of touch with reality if you think that regular US army units will fire on American citizens in some kind of "widespread domestic counterinsurgency". You truly have no idea what you're talking about.

<comment><USER7> > but I'm talking about specifically something my army unit did (develop SOPs > for a zombie apocalypse) as coordination training

Developing SOPs as a training exercise (SOPs developed in such contexts are, IME, throwaways) and _having_ standing SOPs are a different thing.

That certainly makes sense.

> Additionally, you should know that you are a conspiracy theorist and > completely out of touch with reality if you think that regular US army units > will fire on American citizens in some kind of "widespread domestic > counterinsurgency".

Actually, I think that that's one of the major problems command authorities would face in such a situation even if there was legitimate reason to bring the Army into such a situation, and even overt preparation for the distant possibility would be problematic and disruptive, which is why any such preparation would not be overt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I instantly thought of this when reading the headline:

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

I remember reading about this around 20 years ago in James Bamford's excellent NSA book Body of Secrets.

</comment><comment><USER9> I woke up at 4 am this morning. I had this terrible dream where I was in a war and was going to be evacuated and my children had to choose which toys they were going to take (because we couldn't carry them all). They could only take a few toy cars. It broke my heart and I couldn't get back to sleep. And this is nothing compared to what really happens in war.

I can't imagine how a human being could start a war and even provoke one like this. It is just terrible to know that people like this exist.

<comment><USER10> > It is just terrible to know that people like this exist.

Which ones, the capitalist dogs or the commie bastards? If you dislike those people enough, you'll want to go to war with them if you're in a position of power.

<comment><USER11> Neither of those stereotypes are truly responsible for the atrocities for which they are capable.

Wars only happen because peaceful citizens do not take responsibility for the war-mongers in their societies. We wouldn't have the wars we have, if we didn't elevate the war-making classes above the folds. We need to always be diligent and vigilant about keeping the war-machine in check - alas, none of us in the West really has a clean slate on this issue. Citizens are responsible for the actions of their governments; this means our militaries, too. The fact that we fail to take that responsibility, means atrocities continue to happen.

<comment><USER12> This is idealistic and completely incorrect. You should read a history book.

Wars will end when we have limitless energy or evolve beyond greed and the lust for power.

Here's a situation I'd like you to analyse briefly: The US pulls out of every military installation they have outside of US territory. What happens in global geopolitics over the next year? Hint: the answer is 5 letters long with one space.

<comment><USER11> What happens: whatever the people, who are now in control of 'whatever superpowers the US left behind', decide.

Look, I know its hard for you to not feel right without insulting anyone, but I've actually read a metric fuck-ton of history, know a few words in a few languages, and am generally not an ignorant 'incorrect-oid'. There _is_ no truly correct/incorrect point of view, when it comes to killing humans. Fact: we don't need to do it. We do it _because we want to_.

Here's a thought experiment for you, American. What would happen if, instead of putting your citizens in debt to the tune of $TRILLIONS of dollars, every year, while funding active warfare on multiple fronts around the globe, for the last 80 years, the good ol' folks of the USA had instead built massive super-weaponry that _delivered schools, water-filtration, and medical facilities_ , with awesome overwhelming power, to the _people who needed it_.

Instead of, you know, dropping one bomb every twenty minutes for the last .. umm, lets just say, at least .. decade?

Hmm?

You think its so easy? Lets see that B1 bomber re-purposed to drop the write kind of supplies that _makes war unnecessary_ , not "invetible", as your formidable culture seems to want the rest of us to think it is ..

<comment><USER12> It would be nice if things worked that way, but a tremendous amount of food aid and cash is diverted by the corrupt leaders of the places that need it the most. I would bet without bothering to look that the US also spends the most on foreign aid, in addition to military spending. A large part of the past decade in Iraq has been helping rebuild. Going into Iraq was a mistake. Probably Afghanistan too.

After WWII, the USA was the least affected nation and was tasked with the protection of West Germany and western europe by proxy, and also Japan. The US policy of containment may have been a mistake, and it caused an immense amount of damage and suffering. Hindsight is 20/20 and in the 60s and 70s, no one foresaw the collapse of the USSR in 1989. The US has overstepped its bounds many times since the end of WWII, but the game between the US and the Soviets was serious business. The US has tons of blood on its hands, I'm not blind to that.

Interactions between nation-states will always be messy because there isn't a higher authority that can impose its will unless the nation-states are both small enough.

Idealism is necessary for coming up with potential outcomes for the future, but realism is necessary to understand the problem.

btw: The answer to the above question I posed is either multiple serious regional conflicts (Europe and SEA, probably India v Pakistan) or WW III.

<comment><USER11> World War Three already started, 15 years ago, by the Coalition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> U.S. Government planned to invade Canada

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

U.S. Government planned to invade Azores

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

U.S government does a lot of contingency planning

[https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/war-plan- rainbow...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/war-plan-rainbow.htm)

<comment><USER14> This is dismissive. I don't foresee any valid contingency scenario that validates a "false flag," the fact that individuals in the government would think this way only gives credence to the most cynical out there.

Sure they didn't do it, but that they felt they had the authority to consider it (in a democracy, where they answer to us) speaks volumes.

<comment><USER15> It's a contingency scenario for the situation where the president (or senior officials) want to start a war. Yes it's a stretch but they might see it that way, "if the president wants to invade Canada then we need a plan to make it happen".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Along with the US's best ally targeting British and American civilians: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair)

One wonders what the actual rate of successful false flags are. Was the USS Liberty a failed false flag of opportunity?

</comment><comment><USER17> To my understanding, the US Military has "plans" for things it never intends to do. The plan is basically an outline for how such a thing might be done; it may be used for training or to recognize when another country is doing that thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great. More fuel for the conspiracy theorists to claim that every single tragedy from 9/11 to Sandy Hook was a false flag operation. Not that they couldn't _possibly_ be, but a 60 year old document that the government once considered a false flag operation doesn't indicate in any way that the Vegas shooting was a secret CIA operation, but it'll be used by nutters as "proof" of such.

<comment><USER19> "Nutters" will find "proof" regardless of what they've been given.

What this _does_ prove is what the US is willing to even _consider_ doing to justify various things it wants to accomplish. So at some point you must at least consider that an event _could_ have been a false flag, don't you? Even if you come to the conclusion it wasn't, to write it off entirely without consideration is almost as irresponsible as claiming every major event is a false flag.

<comment><USER20> > What this _does_ prove is what the US is willing to even _consider_ doing to > justify various things it wants to accomplish.

It doesn't even begin to prove that. It proves that the US military, which has plans and contingencies for nearly every imaginable scenario, has plans and contingencies for nearly every imaginable scenario.

<comment><USER19> Uhh, yeah, that's actually exactly what it proves. If they have "plans and contingencies" for it then -- by that very fact -- it's been considered!

And if you want to get pedantic, they most definitely don't have them for "nearly every imaginable scenario". The military would be overrun with simply coming up with plans and contingencies. They'd literally have to have infinite plans and contingencies to cover every imaginable scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TL;DR the plan was deemed impossible to pull off for a bunch of obvious reasons and nothing came of it.

This is basically meeting minutes of BSing at the water cooler.

The military/intelligence part of government cooks up all sorts of hair brained schemes for stuff that will never happen and even though it never goes beyond the brainstorming phase it still goes on record because the on the off chance that aliens invade Argintina it's really nice to just take an off the shelf plan that's close and adapt it and get sign offs rather than waste time trying to schedule a meeting with all the subject matter experts and make the plan from scratch with all the poor high speed decision making that comes with the fog of war.

<comment><USER22> So you should appreciate all the plans they consider? If they have a plan on how to stop a protest by killing the citizens with drones, or how to start a new war vs country X by killing children in a school and blaming it on X, this plan is fine, let's congratulate them for considering all possibilities including killing the citizens you are paied to protect. There are some things that you should not do, even war has rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone who is remotely surprised by this should read "The Secret Team" by L. Fletcher Prouty.

Great book that gives some insight into the crazy stuff the CIA/NSC was doing 50 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER24> What was the purpose of that, though? I can't imagine it. By 1962 Russians already tested Tsar Bomba - so their nuclear capabilities were significant. What positive outcome could the US government have possibly hoped to achieve?

<comment><USER11> It could start a war with anyone without repercussion from the one true power that can stop all war-making: its people.

It seems to have refined its ability to convince us of the need for war since then, however.

<comment><USER25> Fortunately, I'm not so sure on your second statement. There was an extremely concerted push from both the media and government to turn Syria into Iraq 2.0 around 2013. And ultimately it was a complete failure with public opinion never really turning towards the support necessary for that sort of operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Normally, this is the sort of Alex Jones stuff that I would roll my eyes at dismissively, but given the language is plain in the declassified documents, it seems very clear to me that the US at least considered the possibility of a false flag attack. Even just considering it is bad enough. I suspect the reason it was allowed to be declassified was because it was never acted upon. Which then makes me wonder how many other events may actually be false flags which are still classified. I really don't like getting all tin foil-y, but this kind of thing makes me even less trusting of government.

<comment><USER27> > _Even just considering it is bad enough_

The U.S. government is, as it should be, a paranoid bureaucracy. Everything is, and should be, considered.

<comment><USER16> Under what circumstances is false flagging your own citizens warranted?

This isn't a contingency like a plan to nuke Canada if they are on the edge of becoming communists.

<comment><USER27> > _Under what circumstances is false flagging your own citizens warranted?_

None, in my opinion. That said, I have not considered the question deeply enough to conclude that it is _never_ appropriate.

In any case, that isn't what the document [1] is about. Paragraph 5 mentions the "possibility" of various things. Our government should know how others within itself, perhaps with nefarious purposes, might conduct a "deception operation" against it. More specifically, ¶ 5 mentions operations in which "Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly installations". Providing the appearance of something is not necessarily doing it. I also do not think false flag operations conducted against foreign countries are as ethically off the table as those against one's self.

TL; DR There are legitimate reasons for studying how false flag operations may be done.

[1] [https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-3...](https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32977055.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One Way to Fix Uber: Think Twice Before Using It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/technology/one-way-to-fix-uber-think-twice-before-using-it.html <comment><USER2> Don't use wal-mart. Don't use facebook. Don't use windows. Don't eat at Chick Filet.

How often are these boycotts successful today, honestly? (I'm now there are some historical examples...last I can think of was the campaign against DRM in iTunes mp3s.) I think a much better solution than boycotting/complaining is for someone to develop a better alternative that people will significantly prefer. (Lyft apparently doesn't meet this threshold.)

<comment><USER3> Yup, supposedly Lyft is actually worse. NerdWallet recently did a survey that showed Uber drivers making $15/hour versus $11/hour for Lyft. They did concede that tips gave Lyft driver's the possibility of making more than Uber drivers, but now that Uber has tipping that's a moot point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also: stop calling it "ride sharing". It's a taxi (because it drives you where you want for money). Just make sure to deregulate your local taxi market and the problem sorts itself out. Uber will be a good taxi company among dozens of others.</comment>


Chris Anderson (Wired Editor) explains plagiarism charges - <AUTHOR> http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/06/corrections-in-the-digital-editions-of-free.html

<comment><USER2> It's easy to admit guilt when caught red-handed, so I don't give him any credit for that.

He copy-pasted from wikipedia, utterly indefensible. He didn't copy a quote from wikipedia, but entire paragraphs. Even WITH attribution that's totally unacceptable. What he calls "rewriting" is exactly the same thing kids do in highschool when cheating during exams, and when copying each other's papers. The teacher isn't fooled by this transparent cheating. And neither am I.

<comment><USER3> You didn't find his explanation at all plausible, that the sections that were copied were attributed and fomatted to indicate as much, before a last-minute reformat? Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good response, accepting his fault and explaining the reason. Transparency is a good thing, and after making a mistake apologizing too. Chapeau Chris.

</comment><comment><USER5> 5 exculpatory grafs. 3 grafs that contain actual apologies, each of which is buried in a mitigating construction (of the "I did this in good faith, but that's no excuse" variety).

What would Timothy Noah think?

<http://www.slate.com/?id=2061056>

</comment><comment><USER6> I really like his response. He took complete responsibility for the error and gave a very reasonable explanation for how they got there in the first place. In doing this, he came across as a very honest and straightforward kind of guy.

I wasn't interested in this book before but I'm going to buy it now after reading so much about it. Its almost like a brilliant PR move. Perhaps there is some truth to "There's no such thing as bad publicity"

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, but I'd like to know how common this 'write-through' technique is. That's basically taking text directly from some source and rewriting it to make it your own words. That doesn't feel like the same thing as writing.

If I'd known that was acceptable it would have made writing The Geek Atlas a lot quicker!

<comment><USER8> I'm not much of a writer, so I'm curious:

All of the copied passages were concise descriptions of historical events. Obviously, quoting verbatim (like was done here) is plagiarism, but given that he wasn't there to witness the events, isn't the only option to take other accounts and rewrite them in his own words?

<comment><USER9> Rewriting would be something closer to:

 _The passages he copied were short descriptions of events in history. Repeating them word-for-word, like he did, would be considered plagiarism, but since they are a source for events he wasn't there to see, shouldn't he just reword them?_

There's no point in doing that. It's better to quote verbatim with citations, and to write when there's something new to say. Historians can compile primary sources into a new document that adds something to the existing information; they don't curate documents, they narrate events.

<comment><USER8> There's no allowance for style? If my source is dry and pedantic, and quoting would disrupt the flow of what I'm trying to say, it's really that grievous a sin to rewrite?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Standup response.</comment>


Github down - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/#

<comment><USER2> Please link to github status: [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/) which I assume is run on separate servers and actually provides useful information on the current status.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

       The sites appear to have recovered from an upstream network outage.
       We will keep this status event open while we continue to investigate.

       We are currently investigating problems accessing a number of GitHub services.
       We will update with more information as soon as we have it.</comment>


Show HN: Boilerplate for Node.js packages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/diegohaz/nod <comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

This is an opinionated boilerplate that I use to create my own packages [1].

Feedback is appreciated.

[1] [https://github.com/diegohaz?tab=repositories](https://github.com/diegohaz?tab=repositories)</comment>


These Are Twitter's New Rules for Preventing Abuse and Harassment - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/pranavdixit/these-are-twitters-new-rules-for-preventing-abuse-and <comment><USER2> The "Donald Trump" caveat:

> _the behavior is newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest._

Basically, you can still harass and intimidate people, just make sure it generates enough ad impressions.

<comment><USER3> Ha, I wonder how they judge legitimate public interest. Say Trump.. hypothetically tweets about how North Korea "won't be around much longer!" and North Korea interpret that as a declaration of war, is that in the legitimate public interest?

Last time they said it was OK because it was newsworthy, but now they're adding it to the public policy it needs to be newsworthy and in the public interest? Should lead to more interesting debates.

<comment><USER4> That's not Twitter's fault, that's Trump's fault. If the president accidentally declares war, he should be impeached

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having a few centralized companies and a handful of decision-makers at those companies be responsible for policing what is effectively on track to become all of the worlds communication and public discourse is unsustainable and fundamentally impossible anyway. I don't have a solution but it has to change.

<comment><USER6> Mastodon seems to be growing quickly. It's a decentralised alternative to Twitter.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Vultr offers VPS hosting for $2.50 per month and the WordPress software is extremely simple to use and is 100% free. It even includes several high quality free themes which are perfect for blogging.

WordPress allows you to customize your blog to express yourself in any way that you can imagine, and it supports RSS feeds out of the box so your friends can easily and quickly follow your updates using any of numerous free RSS readers.

WordPress does not impose arbitrary limits on the size of your posts.

Twitter is garbage, it's a toy. If you have ideas you want to express, don't allow corporations to control how you can express them.

</comment><comment><USER8> #Notetoself:

Need to be less flippant about bitching about my life on twitter. While the world doesn't actually give a crap about my welfare, they will up their attempts to police my self expression concerning my dark moods that are at least partly a result of living in this often shithole of a world.

</comment><comment><USER9> _factors like whether the behavior is targeted at an individual or a group of people, and if a report has been filed and by whom_

Why should it matter who reports it? Either its in violation or it isn't. This is weaselly in the extreme.

<comment><USER10> Twitter's words are that one factor they may consider is "the report has been filed by the target of the abuse or a bystander."

That seems reasonable enough because the "target" may not consider it abuse at all, even if the same behavior against someone else in a different context would cross the line. Getting reported by the target is a stronger signal than being reported by a misguided (if well-meaning) bystander who files a dozen questionable reports every day.</comment></comment>


Dogecoin Users Outraged Over Trademark - <AUTHOR> http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/dogecoin-users-outraged-trademark/2014/06/23

<comment><USER2> The article is a bit confusing.

> Ultra Pro International, a case and sleeve company, announced plans to > trademark the word "Doge."

Why does a 'case and sleeve company' want to trademark the term?

> @UltraProIntl June 21, 2014 | 8:29 p.m.

> @DogeCarPR FWIW, we actually sought out the owner, signed a license & are > paying royalties & donating to her charities :)

1\. Who is this owner? (Don't assume that all readers know everything about Dogecoin or the Doge meme)

2\. If they are licensing / paying royalties, how can the get a trademark? Wouldn't the owner be the one with rights to the trademark?

[edit: Reading the Twitter conversation, this seems to be paying for the use of the image of Kabuso (copyright), which has little to do with 'Doge' as a trademark.]

> With Rage Comics, companies were able to use them on their products because > the original creator couldn't quite be proven. The famous picture of Kabuso, > the dog, can be found, and it seems as though they have been, but the word > "Doge" may have a different creator. That creator would have automatic > copyright under the Berne Convention.

This really needs an editor.

\- What is the reference to Rage Comics about? Either explain it, or provide a link to more information.

\- What does "they have been" refer to? The sentence reads as "The famous picture [...] can be found, and it seems as though they have been." Is this referring to the creator of the famous picture (meaning that some words are missing at the front of the sentence), or is it a typo for 'it' (referring to the picture itself)?

\- What does automatic copyright of the 'famous picture of Kabuso, the dog' have to do with the trademark on the 'Doge' term?

> Three years ago this was a much simpler process that would favor their > community over the company; however, President Barack Obama signed a law > into effect on September 16, 2011 that caused a shift to favor the first > company to file.

Is this true? I thought that it only applied to patents.

<comment><USER3> > 1\. Who is this owner? I wonder if this is the owner of the Shiba Inu used > in the meme. The dog's name is Kabosu, and the owner is a strong supporter > of animal rescue charities. "Doge" is another story.

I could certainly support paying Kabosu's owner for rights to use the image (most certainly it's never crossed the mind of the dogecoin folk, though they have donated to her). However, copyrighting "doge" in conjunction with Kabosu's image is another matter entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And the co-creator's response to the community: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/the-co-creator-of- dogecoin-...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/the-co-creator-of-dogecoin- talks-about-building-one-of-the-funniest-and-most-popular-cryptocurrencies-in- the-world/)

He has no interest in opposing the trademark. He called Moolah.io's oppositional filing "white knighting the situation." Zing!

 _In my eyes, it's a total waste of time and money being spent opposing a very generic trademark that can't and won't be enforced_

</comment><comment><USER5> > but the word "Doge" may have a different creator. That creator would have > automatic copyright under the Berne Convention.

They are also the creators of Homestar Runner [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge)

</comment><comment><USER6> > The tweet was in shorthand, but was transcribed as follows.

I like this and hope other news sites start to do this as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I could have sworn this was an onion article. How can this be real?

<comment><USER8> Right? The dogecoin community is afraid vendors won't want to use their currency now? It's... dogecoin. It's not meant to be taken seriously in the first place. And "doge" is not their invention.

<comment><USER9> It's not UltraPRO's invention either.

<comment><USER8> Right, I'm not saying they should get a trademark. I'm commenting on how ridiculous it is that the dogecoin community is worried no one will take them seriously after this. I guess I didn't realize a crypto currency based on an Internet meme was trying to get recognized as a legitimate money replacement.

<comment><USER10> The reaction is against someone taking it seriously becoming a threat to the people who just wanted to have fun with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Instantly Visualize Performance (and Risk) for All Crypto and S&P500 - <AUTHOR> http://coinquanta.com <comment><USER3> Interesting. Can you talk a bit about how you built this and what you hope to accomplish with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole backend is in Python + Pandas (which is bulk of the work - <USER2> data, quantitative analysis, aggregation, some performance engineering and so on). For the Webapp itself, I used a library called Dash. I recommend it for data heavy applications :)

I am working on a more ambitious (for me) venture to bring Quantitative Finance + Data Science to the DIY Investor community, for Stocks/ETFs/MFs and Crypto. That means being able to distill the market data towards good performance and risk without all the manual research, managing Risk/Reward and Correlations for your portfolio in a more informed way vs basing your investment purely on performance and subjective news/opinions. Things are done quite differently in hedge funds vs how the mainstream still invests. This is a step towards that. I explain more here: [https://www.benefits.coinquanta.com/](https://www.benefits.coinquanta.com/)</comment></comment>


Why do we need Flask, Celery, and Redis? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2019/11/08/flask-redis-celery-mcdo/ <comment><USER2> I see a lot of comments that are talking about how python does not have a go- like concurrency story.

Fyi - python ASGI frameworks like fastapi/Starlette are the same developer experience as go. They also compete on techempower benchmarks. Also used in production by Uber, Microsoft,etc.

A queue based system is used for a very different tradeoff of persistence vs concurrency. It's similar to saying that the usecase for Kafka doesn't exist because go can do concurrency.

Running "python -m asyncio" launches a natively async REPL. [https://www.integralist.co.uk/posts/python- asyncio/#running-...](https://www.integralist.co.uk/posts/python- asyncio/#running-async-code-in-the-repl)

Go play with it ;)

<comment><USER3> I think a hard part with lots of these "what do I use x for" examples is it starts with the tool and the discusses the problem that it solves. I find it more helpful to start with a problem, and discuss the various tools that address it, in different ways.

Forget email, say you have a app that scans links in comments for maliciousness. You rely on an internal api for checking against a known blacklist, which follows shortened links first, and an external api from a third party. You want the comment to appear to submit instantly to the poster but are comfortable waiting for it to appear for everyone else. What are your options?

You could certainly use message queues and workers. If you're cloud native maybe you leverage lambdas. Maybe you spin up an independent service that does the processing and inserting into the database in the background, and all you need to do is send a simple HTTP request on an internal network.

Your solution depends on your throughout requirements, the size of your team and their engineering capabilities, what existing solutions you have in place. Everything has its pros and cons. Pretending that celery/redis is useless and would be solved if everyone just used Java ignores the fact that celery and redis are widely popular and drive many successful applications and use cases.

<comment><USER4> While I agree with the rest of your comment, the sentence "if you're cloud native maybe you leverage lambdas" made me irrationally angry.

<comment><USER5> Can you explain why? I use lambdas often and they seem to solve the problems they're meant for well.

<comment><USER4> It wasn't the lambdas, it was the combination of "cloud-native", which is a very salesmany term, and "leverage", which is my pet hate word. It's exactly as useful as "use", only much more pretentious. I'm just easily triggered with language :P

More off-topic (or, rather, on-topic), I find lambdas great for things like a static website that needs a few functions. I especially like how Netlify uses them, they seem to fit that purpose exactly.

<comment><USER6> > I'm just easily triggered with language :P

Me too! It makes me irrationally angry when people regurgitate linguistic clichés. I was already mad with:

"python does not have a go-like concurrency story"

when it would be enough (and 1000x less cringe) to say:

"python does not have go-like concurrency"

I think these mindless clichés make language really ugly and dysfunctional, and even worse they are thought-stoppers, because they make the reader/listener feel like something smart is being said, because they recognize the "in-group" lingo. In my experience, people get really offended when you point this out. It's kind of an HN taboo to discuss this. Which is also interesting in itself.

Going forward we should pay more attention to our communication use cases. Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: "leverage" \+ "use case" = "leverage case".

<comment><USER4> I agree, I think Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is spot on here. I try to use simpler language whenever possible, I agree that people think that using longer words makes them sound smart but is just worse for communication.

I've found it's a taboo to discuss anything even slightly personal. People are averse to feeling bad, so criticism needs to be extremely subtle in order to not offend.

> Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: > "leverage" \+ "use case" = "leverage case".

I hate you for even thinking of this.

<comment><USER7> > I've found it's a taboo to discuss anything even slightly personal. People > are averse to feeling bad, so criticism needs to be extremely subtle in > order to not offend.

The personal association you made between "discussing anything even slightly personal" and "criticism needs to be extremely subtled" makes it sound that your problem isn't language or Orwellian discourse but the way you subconsciously link discussing personal matters with harshly criticising those you speak with for no good reason.

If your personal conversations boil down to appease your own personal need to criticise others then I'm sorry to break it to you but your problem isn't language.

<comment><USER4> You just misconstrued my saying "personal" and clearly meaning "personal criticism" as meaning personal things in general and then criticized me on that straw man. I don't hold that opinion at all.

You also went to "Orwellian discourse", which has a specific meaning, from a text by Orwell I mentioned. It seems to me like you got personally offended, interpreted my comment in the most uncharitable way, and chose to lash out at me instead, and I'm not sure why. I wasn't even talking about anyone specifically.

<comment><USER7> You were the one associating discussing remotely personal stuff with criticising others, and if that was not bad enough your personal take was that you felt the need to keep criticising others but resorting to subtlety just to keep shoveling criticism without sparking the reactions you're getting for doing the thing you want to do to others.

I repeat, your problem is not language. Your problem is that you manifest a need to criticize others. That problem is all on you.

<comment><USER8> That is such quite a stretch of the imagination and I sure didn't read it that way. I may be wrong but here's one fun example from this comment section that I wanted to "respond" to and demand some clarification on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22911497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22911497)

PS: I work with like 65-70% of that stack daily

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting is that McDonald's wait times have actually gone up since they moved to kiosk ordering, mobile app ordering, Uber eats etc. They've increased their ability to take orders, but haven't been able to keep up on the supply side. The old way was almost better in that it introduced a natural bottleneck so while it took longer to place your order, once you did, the queue in front of you was shorter.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-spending- millions-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-spending-millions-on- drive-thru-2019-10)

<comment><USER10> This is intentional. In fact, I've seen many McDonald'ses that were redecorated such that you can't see the screen with the queued/ready orders from where the kiosks are. This way, you're not discouraged from ordering if you feel like the wait will be too long.

This is also why McDonald's introduced table service, which is only in restaurants that have a layout where it's impossible to hide how many people are waiting. It costs manpower to deliver food to tables, but the additional orders are worth it.

McD's don't mind if you have to wait, they mind if you leave before you order. "Busy-looking queue" is a much more frequent problem than "totally-packed- restaurant".

Source: I like hamburgers + I geek out over stuff like this. I.e., Just Guessing.

<comment><USER11> Yet we are willing to wait for chipotle, five guys, shake shack for 20 min m

<comment><USER12> ?

Chipotle is about as fast as it gets

<comment><USER13> Not when the person in front of you is getting 6 different orders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actually with uWSGI, be in on Flask, Django or else: I don't need neither Celery nor Redis. uWSGI has a built-in celery-ish spooler, cron-ish task scheduler, memcache-ish key-value store, along with _plenty_ of other toys that I love from the deepest of my heart ... And I've been in this (great) situation for years, not planning to move out to more complicated stacks. I would highly recommend uWSGI over of Celery and Redis, which I used in the past, prior to doing it all in uWSGI, unless you have a really good reason which I'm eager to read about. And now that uWSGI supports a lot of languages, even if I have some PHP or whatever to deploy I'll go for uWSGI, one of the most beautiful piece of software I have the chance to use.

<comment><USER15> Could you elaborate, e.g. link to documentation, subprojects or example code? I'd love to get rid of Celery because of how difficult it is for me to tweak it for good performance.

<comment><USER12> Would love to see more detail as well because I'm a bit skeptical. From uWSGI documentation, it looks like to coordinate cron across anything more than a single server setup, you'd need to configure a Legion, which means you're then integrating uWSGI's orchestration framework with whatever you're already using (k8, ECS, etc).

I like minimalism, but sometimes batteries are included for a reason.

<comment><USER16> I suspect they are using a single server. I found uwsgi's mules and cache2 very useful in that situation.

If someone finds that Redis and Celery are more complication than they need for a given task, then I think they're probably not using an orchestration framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hi, author here! Pleasantly surprised I saw this on HN, thanks for posting feross! Sorry for the Mcdonalds analogy, it's just that it's really near our office and I got that insight while ordering McNuggets! Didn't expect it will cause some divide

Agree, Mcdonalds has definitely upped their ordering game recently. Thank you and I appreciate all the helpful comments!

<comment><USER18> Hey, Nice article format for actual humans with easy to digest flow. Will share with devs. Great work! Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish there was a paragraph up the top that made two points:

1\. Quite often you don't (I've built dozens of websites without needing Celery)

2\. Even if you think you do there's often a much simpler solution that is enough for most needs (Use cron, spawn a process etc)

Celery is a big, heavy lump of code to add to most websites and it increased the deployment complexity.

<comment><USER20> It's worth scoping out what your site will need to do up front to some extent. Spending a couple of days setting up a basic background processing system (whether that's celery, rq, or a home grown system) makes it easy to make great engineering decisions later down the line.

Questions like: should I send this email in-line in the web request? Get a very easy answer: no, just stick do it later. Sure, sending an email is probably fine to do in-line for now, but months in you may realise that things are slow, that you're sending emails and rolling back transactions later, or committing the transaction but losing the email that needed to be sent, or all manner of other annoying edge cases. Queues don't solve everything, but they can be an ok answer to a lot of stuff for a long time.

For basic sites, yeah maybe not necessary, but a reliable background processing system has always been a significant accelerator in my projects.

<comment><USER14> Same in my experience: emails should always be sent in a background process. Luckily for me, using uWSGI to deploy anything in any languages: it builds in a nice little spooler that's going to let me spool emails without adding a single new software to my stack: not even having to start another process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One aspect of this set up I've never been able to understand is how the application then gets the result from the worker? If it's polling for status from the backend doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a worker to begin with? Or does this set up only work for tasks that don't need to have the backend notified about the result so the front end can just poll for the result via the application?

<comment><USER22> You're spot on really. Having the front end wait for a background task to complete broadly defeats the purpose. There are some caveats though: if you're using an async/threaded web server then it may not matter that you have a pending request hanging around as your web server is free to continue serving other requests. It also may be that you need to run the task on specialist hardware for some reason.

Really though, I think a lot of people use celery for offloading things like email sending and API calls which, IMHO, isn't really worth the complexity (especially as SMTP is basically a queue anyway). Of course, YMMV depending on your use case.

However, I find it is often more worthwhile for:

1\. Tasks which take a long time to run

2\. Tasks which need to happen on a schedule, rather than in response to a user request.

There is an option 3 too, which is for inter-software communication. Eg events or RPCs, but I found Celery to be very much a square-peg-round-hole for this, which is why I developed Lightbus ([http://lightbus.org](http://lightbus.org)). Lightbus also supports background tasks and scheduled tasks. /plug

<comment><USER23> It's not just about the time the operation takes, it's about reliability. Even if sending an email synchronously doesn't usually take more than a few milliseconds, you still need to handle cases like servers failing in the middle of the request, temporary upstream unavailability, some expired API, account limits reached, etc...

Honestly, I think that mostly anything that doesn't depend directly in the current state of your infrastructure should be done asynchronously. I've had a lot of issues with systems that start up doing everything synchronously: you'll probably need to refactor it to be asynchronous in emergency mode during a crisis.

<comment><USER24> For email, that's why you set a relay within your control, that will accept messages without a fuss and send them around following SMTP conventions.

But anyway, how is your application supposed to respond after any of those failures? Is it just supposed to ignore the failure and thread on like if nothing happened, leaving your users on the dark? Is it supposed to reliably log every task so that it can retry anything that fails and in the worst case feed failures into some monitoring system/process? Or is it supposed to inform the user of any success or failure before the user can move on?

Queue software is only a good match for the first. For the second you will need to roll your own interface with the monitoring system anyway, so it's much easier to roll your own queues and get control of everything. The third one is best done synchronous, it doesn't matter the nature of the process or how long it takes. But funny thing is, I have never seen the first situation on the wild.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If anyone is looking for another Celery post that goes over common web development use cases for using Celery there's: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/4-use-cases-for-when-to- use-c...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/4-use-cases-for-when-to-use-celery- in-a-flask-application)

The above post walks through sending emails out with and without using Celery, making third party API calls, executing long running tasks and firing off periodic tasks on a schedule to replace cron jobs.

There's links to code examples too in an example Flask app which happens to use Docker as well.

</comment><comment><USER26> They mostly need Celery and Redis because in the Python world concurrency was an afterthought. In most other languages you can get away with just running tasks in the background for a really long time before you need spin up a distributed task queue. In Python I've seen Celery setups on a single machine.

<comment><USER27> You still should use some sort of work queue - your application process may need to restart (deploys), or for a period of time, work could overflow the amount of available resources (bursts), so having some place to put the task before it goes onto processing is useful regardless of the underlying concurrency primitives of the language.

<comment><USER28> It may not make sense to retain jobs across deployments. What if the contract of the job is changed by the code being deployed? Might be easier to keep it all in-process, letting queues drain in a graceful shutdown.

<comment><USER27> I haven't found that to be the case typically -- you could always serialize some information into the task to check for things like this.

Also consider if the machine running that process just disappears and that process dies. Putting work into a task queue allows you to do it durably until it can be processed so that it's not lost in some typical "that machine/instance died" scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Excellent craftmanship of a helpful blog. Very reminiscent of the style used by the Head Rush Ajax ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102258.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102258.do)) book O'Reilly published back in 2009 and the rest of the Head First series.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it's really important to understand task queues and workers but my experience working with these particular tools isn't exactly fun. I inherited a system built on celery, rabbitmq and nameko I'd be interested to hear how people setup their systems to debug and test new tasks. I'm currently using manually added psb.set_trace to telnet in to a debugging session, but I'd prefer to use an IDE so I can modify code while debugging. Anyone have any tips? One thing I would caution against is putting the business logic in the task logic. This is obviously up to whoever set up the tasks but it seems like most of the tutorials don't mention how painful this can make testing especially once you start making chains, chords and sub tasks.

<comment><USER31> For testing you can set "CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER" to "True" in your config.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone have enough experience with alternatives to Celery to give a good comparison of Celery vs. Dramatiq vs. RQ?

</comment><comment><USER33> Cool article! But why do you need a database _and_ a message queue? I would think a message queue is the main thing, and a database is only necessary if you want long term persistence. Or you could just use a database as a message queue.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the McDonald's order by touch screen also has the benefit of seeming to take less time when waiting because you are not standing in line behind someone, even if it takes the same amount of time psychologically it seems less.

</comment><comment><USER35> Very noice! I am not normally not a huge fan of stick figures (a la waitbutwhy), but this was very pleasant to read :D And noice work picking an example I can relate to

</comment><comment><USER36> Celery is good for distributed and persistent message queues which can be monitored. If you just need multiprocessing, use a multiprocessing pool, it comes with python.

</comment><comment><USER37> I only use celery for sending out emails. It's overkill.

I wonder how many other people have celery just for email.

</comment><comment><USER38> McDonald's is very often a love or hate divide as you can already see from some of the comments here. You could prevent that distraction by using a generic food takeout store and ask people to imagine their favorite. The article will resonate with a larger audience, and the comments will be higher quality.

<comment><USER17> Hi author here, definitely didn't intend and expected that! I'm mostly drawing from my own experience and that insight while ordering food inside Mcdo.

<comment><USER38> As someone who also does technical writing, I agree you should draw from your own experience.

It can be hard to find the right analogy. If the subject of the analogy is enough of a hot topic, it will get attention itself. As you can see, you've got comments in here even talking about how McDonald's isn't faster with their new system, or how they could have better optimized for customers, links to articles about McDonald's business model etc. Some of the earlier negative comments about McDonald's were deleted - probably due to downvotes. Since my advice to other writers was sincere and I believe useful, I'm keeping my comment.

For sure I'm not expecting you to change your article. Just hoping that my tip might help you with future technical writing. If not, no worries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> And, of course, you need multiple separate components because Python/Flask has no central "application" concept,there are multiple, stateless processes.

Had you got e.g. a Java app running with a multithread application server model, you could serve and process everything within a single process. No Celery, no Redis, no MQ.

This doesn't mean that the above stack has no use. But, whenever picking a tech, you should understand the use case. The "simpler" Python/Flask solution has an increased complexity when the task at hand is not simple anymore.

<comment><USER40> > Python/Flask has no central "application" concept,

They do, it's a WSGI application. Flask has been multithreaded for many years. Python also has multi-process queues that don't need an extra process.

<comment><USER39> WSGI is purely an interface between a webserver and python. What has WSGI to do with state?

The application server model makes it so there's a running application, with a state, and which exposes an HTTP endpoint.

> Flask has been multithreaded for many years

So? You run a blocking thread to performing a long-running task in Flask? With Python? Try, then report what you find.

Flask/Django are mostly designed to work with a stateless approach. Nothing wrong with that, but it's got drawbacks.

> multi-process queues that don't need an extra process.

More processes usually imply more complexity. And still, since you don't have a central application with a state, you NEED an extra piece to manage the result from the queue.

<comment><USER40> > So? You run a blocking thread to performing a long-running task in Flask? > With Python? Try, then report what you find.

I did it for years. It works just fine. The GIL is essentially like running an app on a single core, which works just fine for many use cases. CPU cores are quite powerful.

> More processes usually imply more complexity.

Right, but I'm only saying you _can_ have more processes without requiring Redis.

> And still, since you don't have a central application with a state, you NEED > an extra piece to manage the result from the queue.

A regular thread can do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> With all due respect, my recent experiences ordering at McDonald's have been nothing short of horrible! As nice as the kiosk is, it has taken the accountability factor for your order out of the picture. I vividly recall getting blank stares from employees when asked "how much longer until my order is complete?". My past few visits (11 to be specific from 11/19 thru 2/20) have yielded 8 minutes of wait time on average. This is ordering inside the facility and at 5 different locations. Last I recall, it used to be a lot faster...I think between 1-3mins tops! I can't say the same for drive-thru though...seems like any orders from the drive through are always tagged with a higher priority. I do remember this since I was in my teens in the late 90s. Though it looked like a mainframe system, McDonald's did have a countdown timer that would initiate on orders. I'm all for tech and automating queues...but humans are complex beings and until the gap is bridged, I think we have a lot more room for improvement!

<comment><USER42> Drive-through is higher priority at most restaurants, because the customer can drive away after ordering but before paying.</comment></comment>


Declaratively building a Snake clone in the terminal - <AUTHOR> https://samtay.github.io/articles/brick.html <comment><USER2> Brick is great. It's got some quirks, but it's the best TUI library I've used. I've made a little text editor, and am currently toying around with building an interactive environment—halfway between REPL and IDE—for a programming language I'm working on. If you're looking to make a TUI application and want an excuse to dive headfirst into Haskell, brick is a decent place to start.

</comment><comment><USER3> in a similar vein (though also completely different), here's the game of life in APL:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4)

This is one of my favorite screencasts. I would have a hard time reproducing this thought process, so it feels much more like watching a speed run than a tutorial.

Would be interested in seeing the APL version of this blog post</comment>


Is This Time Different? The Opportunities and Challenges of AI [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160707_cea_ai_furman.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Jason's talk at AI Now (July 2016): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuUMLXRGJaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuUMLXRGJaY)</comment>


How Women Came to Dominate Neuroendocrinology - yaseen-rob http://nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/how-women-came-to-dominate-neuroendocrinology <comment><AUTHOR> > _Women, of course, have clearly played a major role in their own successes > in the field. But that is only half the story: They were also helped by > early feminist men like Daniel Lehrman._

A few years ago, I started at company that had a tech department of 15, all male. I made the case to the department that it was in the interest of the company to have a diverse tech team, and my colleagues and management responded. Three years later, the department was 5 women and 11 men.

People who care can make a difference.

<comment><USER2> People who care about, what, exactly? People who care about diversity of their technical team along arbitrary immutable characteristics which have no bearing whatsoever on the technical work are...capable of increasing their technical team's diversity along arbitrary immutable characteristics which have no bearing whatsoever on the technical work. I think that is to be expected, it's not exactly surprising.

Unless you felt as though you were specifically choosing your initial 15 employees because they were men, however, I fail to see where you had a problem to begin with.

I'm sorry for even participating in the beating of this dead horse, but this might just be an argument destined to endure indefinitely.

<comment><USER3> Women bring different perspective on a vast variety of issues. It has obvious bearing on the technical work.

<comment><USER4> For a great many products that technical teams make, women are on the order of _half of their users_.

I can not comprehend why you would not want them helping to build that thing.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that moving from 15 males to 11 males + 5 females is necessarily an improvement.

Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals?

I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female.

In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.

<comment><USER4> I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Please don't put words in my mouth.

The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it _made things better_. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user > base's.

Then why say this?

> women are on the order of half of their users.

<comment><USER4> Because if you're ignoring (by simply not hearing) the perspective of a meaningful representation of that ~half of your user-base, you do not, and probably _can not_ understand them.

You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do _at all_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of my startups, at one point had eight employees, all but me female. The company also had seven employees with PhDs. I don't have one.

(it was just for a period of a few months. This was a pharma company; there seem to be more women in biology, analytic chemistry, medical statistics etc)

</comment><comment><USER7> The article doesn't explain how they came to dominate it, actually. Did fewer men sign up than women? Did more women than men pass the coursework or exams? Did men in the middle of the pipeline end up making a different choice and going somewhere else?

</comment><comment><USER8> I want to hear the story of why all the sciences have been dominated by men consistently. I want to know why all cultures have anthropologically been dominated by men.

What we see today in modern society is more of a phenomenon then a norm from an anthropological and historical standpoint. I want to know why.

It seems however that the default explanation is that men have always oppressed women.

I believe that political correctness has colored the true reason that is more complex, nuanced and not as one sided.

You may get voted down.

<comment><USER9> Survivorship bias. Agrarian societies that were based on male dominance, hierarchical social strata, and conquest of competitors were the ones that developed into the early empires that today's societies are descended from. There are and have been matriarchal societies and also more egalitarian and less confrontational ones, but they did not expand at the same rates or compete as well with those that ultimately won out on geographic and resource control.

This does not mean male dominance and social hierarchy are preferable. It just explains why they are the norm. There are many good reasons to reject them as the norm now that we can.

<comment><USER8> >This does not mean male dominance and social hierarchy are preferable. It just explains why they are the norm. There are many good reasons to reject them as the norm now that we can.

I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 90% of the attendees were women. Given that correlation implies causation in the world of social justice, doesn't this demonstrate that there must be rampant systemic sexism in the field that keeps otherwise eager men from breaking in? Where's the uproar?

<comment><USER11> The gender flamewar comments you posted to this thread are just the kind of flamey things we don't want on HN. We eventually ban accounts that won't stop ranting about divisive topics. If you don't have something substantive and thoughtful to say, please don't post.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Clearly_ , the entire field is sexist and we should use gender quotas to correct this horrible behavior in the name of diversity.</comment>


Google will remove misleading election-related autocompletes - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/google-block-autocomplete-fake-news-elections-194145543.html <comment><USER2> They already removed "joe biden gaffe" for me. I'm more suspect that they are manipulating autocomplete for their political preferences... on an individual / geography level, because I pair auto completed with a friend a number of things and we had inconsistent results</comment>


Jonathan Franzen is confused about climate change, but then, lots of people are - <AUTHOR> http://grist.org/living/jonathan-franzen-is-confused-about-climate-change-but-then-lots-of-people-are/

<comment><USER2> When the ESA or NASA tells me that Titan has a methane atmosphere, how do I know it is not helium or ethane? I have no clue how to read spectrometer data and neither does the public. Hence we have to have faith because NASA has a track record.

When the population, who has their favorite science leaders ranging from the creationist museum guy to Neil deGrasse Tyson; (I am a Bill Nye guy), how can the subject not get messy?

David Roberts, the writer of the article did a solid job discrediting Jonathan Franzen but his solution does not seem workable. I think the public needs to see "Mythbuster" like experiments or least kids should. Experiments they can see, touch and recreate if they are ambitious DIY people.</comment>


Recommended by a friend - do any HNers use FreeAgent Online Accounting Software? - <AUTHOR> http://www.freeagent.com/?referrer=42fdjm42 <comment><USER2> FreeAgent is fantastic. I have been using it as my sole accounting software for 3 years. If you need to track time and send out invoices (for a multitude of clients), and do general accounting work (tracking income vs. expenses), it's hard to do better than FreeAgent IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER3> what's with submitting an affiliate link without clearly labeling it, doesn't that break the internet code of honor?

<comment><AUTHOR> You might find this hard to believe, but I don't actually know what an "affiliate link" is, and nor do I know the implications of having submitted one, assuming (as I infer from your comment) that this is one. All I did was use the bookmarklet to submit to HN the page I was looking at.

 _Added in edit: I've just gone to look up and read about affiliate links, but to be completely honest, I really don't have time now to try to decrypt all the crap returned to me by the Google search, and all the pages high on the marketing Ginger Factor. Suffice to say I'm clueless about web marketing/tracking crap, and I really do not have the time now to learn about stuff that's so foreign to me._

Should I delete this and resubmit it? It's possible to edit the title, but not the URL, and I can't add any text to the title because of length restrictions.

What would you propose?

 _Added in further edit: I've submitted a version without the tracking code - I just hope people see that one so I get the comments I was looking for. Thanks for the responses._

<comment><USER3> oh, I see. Well, whomever linked you to the page had a referral link attached. Reddit has the problem quite frequently, people will submit referral links under the guise of the content being "interesting" or having some value to users and then it becomes a game of "is this person genuine or are they looking to make money?". Ultimately it doesn't really matter that much and you're a long standing HN user (didn't notice it was you who submitted this...) so deleting it would probably be overkill, just might make a few people apprehensive about being gamed.

People share their blog entries and companies and products here all the time to make money and that's fine but I figure that's because it's transparent whereas referral links (where the person intentionally used it) are trying to make money without admitting it. "I made this product..." vs. "This product looks amazing, what do you think?" the latter is misleading when (intentional) referral links are involved, because I don't assume by default the person presenting it is in it for the money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI, the link has a referral tracking code.

Assuming this is a genuine inquiry: I used FreeAgent a couple of years ago when I was freelance. As a first-time business owner, I found it extremely valuable. Its design goal of "accountant-speak as the backend, layman's terms as the frontend" was very effective at simultaneously making bookkeeping easy and teaching me the fundamentals of accounting.

<comment><AUTHOR> See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828392></comment></comment>


I fixed my RTS's most hated level - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/gsq3jn/how_i_fixed_my_rtss_most_hated_level/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! I've seen game design posts on here from time to time and thought I'd contribute mine! If you have any questions feel free to ask!</comment>


China Moves to Let Xi Stay in Power by Abolishing Term Limit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/world/asia/china-xi-jinping.html <comment><USER2> This news is already on the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457998)

<comment><USER3> Thanks Greg. Moved comments thither.</comment></comment>


Things you will not learn in a business management school - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netguru.pl/post/6355557421/4-things-you-will-not-learn-in-a-business-management

<comment><USER2> This article should be called "4 things you WILL LEARN in a business school."

Communication, networking, adaptation, and follow-up/through have been central tenets of my business education. Having seen both sides of the coin (I have a CS degree and I'm halfway through an MBA), I have to say, this is a very typical and incorrect attitude towards to business education.

<comment><USER3> probably title is bit too much provocative, but I am glad we agree on importance of this things

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a big one: decision-making

There are a lot of skills required in business (sales, marketing, leadership, etc), but if you had to boil all of it down to one skillset, IMO it would be good judgment and sound decision-making.

Because of that, all else being equal, I'll take a strong poker or bridge player over an Ivy League MBA any day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great addition. Maybe even: quick decision-making based on a limited amount of information

<comment><USER5> For quick decision-making based on limited information when your opponents may be actively lying to you and colluding against you, see Diplomacy[1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)>

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.playdiplomacy.com/> :)

<comment><USER5> gamesbyemail.com also has a nice diplomacy interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "It is therefore better to communicate too much than too little."

I can't disagree strongly enough about this. When you're on a team greater than 2 or 3 people, using hyper-communication like this suggests would consume the majority of your time. Instead of, you know, getting shit done.

It's not the _quantity_ of communication that's important as much as the _quality_ of the information being communicated.

</comment><comment><USER7> We're building an IMAP-based tool focused on solving #4 - "the power of follow-up" - tracking which you're emails you're waiting on for replies:

<http://stacyplease.com>

There's other startups that do something similar, usually as a plugin for outlook, gmail, or a particular browser.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very good points, sounds obvious but I had to learn those based on my own mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER9> A list of the few things you do learn in biz school is an easier feat. I'll start.

\- Gantt charts \- Dataflow diagrams

Did I miss anything?

<comment><USER8> UML, if you're lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> great compact list of basics everybody should know.</comment>


Climate Change: It's a Buzzkill for Bumblebees, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/06/climate/bumblebees-extreme-heat-weather.html <comment><AUTHOR> Researchers found that bumblebee populations had recently declined by 46 percent in North America and by 17 percent across Europe when compared to a base period of 1901 to 1974. The biggest declines were in areas where temperatures spiked well beyond the historical range, which raises concerns that climate change could increase the risk of extinction for bees, which are already threatened by pesticide use and habitat loss.</comment>


OS X Yosemite lets you video capture iOS 8 devices with a Lightning cable - <AUTHOR> http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/06/03/yosemite-ios-8-screenscasting/

<comment><USER2> Nice!</comment>


Show HN: Acronym Slack Bot - <AUTHOR> I created a Slack bot that crowdsources acronym and word definitions within Slack.
When I started working I realized how many acronyms and words were being thrown around with the expectation that everyone in the room knew what they meant. I hated having to search around internal docs or Google to figure out what words meant, and thought there had to be a better way to quickly look something up without interrupting the meeting.
So I created a super simple Slack bot that helps you define words within Slack and then crowdsources the definitions from the rest of the company by posting into a channel when the acronym or word is not yet defined.
Would love any feedback! https://acronym-chatbot.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> This is really well designed. Solves an issue I never knew I needed solved. Thanks! You're beautiful

</comment><comment><USER3> very smart, simple and elegant, i love it

</comment><comment><USER3> in fact, i love you</comment>


The Constitution Is Not a Sometimes Food - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jasongreenlowe/the-constitution-is-not-a-sometimes-food-879dd7adf2ca#.9sqgf6p8d <comment><USER2> > On the other hand, if you start making exceptions to the Constitution — even > for wonderful reasons, like because you want to ... end school segregation, > ... then pretty soon there are enough exceptions that the document doesn't > really mean what it says.

The justification for the civil right's laws, including school desegregation, come from the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Before it was added there was doubt that the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 was constitutional, for the reasons the author pointed out.

So Congress since 1868 has some say in the matter. The next part is to establish if segregated schooling is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Under Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decided that "separate- but-equal" was not unconstitutional.

The next step required a decision that "separate-but-equal" was never equal, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education.

I therefore see no exception in the Constitution as it a applies to the desegregation of state-run schools.

> Constitution says nothing about abortion, or banks, or contraception, or > desegregation, or e-mail, or farming, or gay marriage, or heroin, but all of > those topics are still heavily regulated by the federal government.

One cannot simply say that the Constitution doesn't explicitly consider topic X because the 9th amendment says "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." For example, the Constitution does not say that we have a right to privacy.

That, combined with the 14th amendment, is the basis for Roe v. Wade (access to abortion) and for Griswold v. Connecticut (access to contraception). Obergefell v. Hodges was decided based on the 14th amendment, after finally deciding there was no overriding legitimate interest of the state to prohibit same-sex marriages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughtful response!

Brown v. Board of Education is definitely the most well-supported case of the three, and you might be right; perhaps it's fully justified by the 14th Amendment. I have trouble seeing how the Court got from the reasoning in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (most professional schools need to be integrated so that minorities can learn their professions from people who are currently working in their field) to the sweeping declaration in Brown that all segregated schools in all circumstances are inherently illegal, but that's a relatively minor quibble, and I should have looked for a better example.

The problem with the 9th Amendment argument for rights like privacy is that just because the rights exist doesn't mean the federal government is entrusted with protecting those rights, much less affirmatively defining their scope in cases where the extent of the right is hotly contested.

It doesn't make much sense to file a federal lawsuit to stop a state government from implementing state abortion laws that were duly approved a majority of the state's voters, including women. It makes even less sense for the Supreme Court to then lay out (as it did in Roe v. Wade) a detailed regulatory scheme explaining exactly when a fetus should be treated as a person. Even if you approve of Roe v. Wade's trimester scheme, there's no common sense way to get from "Americans probably have some kind of right to privacy" to "According to the Constitution, here's which fetuses are viable."

Similarly, I support gay marriage, but I can't find a right to gay marriage in the constitution as it's currently written. The Obergefell court wasn't even pretending to interpret any particular part of the Constitution -- instead, the Court just asserted that "The identification and protection of fundamental rights is an enduring part of the judicial duty to interpret the Constitution" and that "it requires courts to exercise reasoned judgment in identifying interests of the person so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect." If you trust the nine members of the Supreme Court to "exercise reasoned judgment" on behalf of the whole country to figure out what's moral, then that's fine...but that's not a democratic way of doing things.</comment></comment>


Pokedex.org: a progressive webapp for Pokémon fans - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketjavascript.com/blog/2015/11/23/introducing-pokedex-org <comment><USER2> As someone who doesn't spend much time on the front end of things, this post renewed my interest. Great explanation of tech used and why. Actually using it on my Nexus 5 was unlike any site I've used before.

<comment><USER3> Author here - thanks a lot! :) I think many of the emerging performance bottlenecks in webdev are on the client rather than the server, so there's definitely a lot more research that needs to be done here. In particular, I feel like the whole "web worker" angle has been seriously overlooked, even though the tech is ~5 years old.

<comment><USER4> > In particular, I feel like the whole "web worker" angle has been seriously > overlooked, even though the tech is ~5 years old.

I wonder how much of that stems from the fact that IE didn't support them until 10 and Safari til 8. I'm not sure about dates/numbers, but mobile browsers were pretty late in support too, weren't they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really cool idea to try to show the way to make a responsive smooth 60fps app. But the animations on my PC(firefox on linux) and phone (firefox on android) were really choppy.

Is the chrome experience much better?

EDIT: also the back button on my phone sent me back to the tile screen :(

<comment><USER6> I had the back button problem too. The solution is for the app to add routing, which is tracked in this issue: [https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org/issues/2](https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org/issues/2).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just know that Nintendo already shutdown a lot of Pokédex apps just like yours (a friend of mine was the main dev for one of them).

I don't agree with them, but I guess it would be better for you (and the project) if you couldn't be traced back.

<comment><USER3> Author here. I'm no stranger to this situation; I wrote a native Android Pokédex app awhile ago that got DMCA'd: [http://nolanlawson.com/2011/05/26/on- pokedroids-removal/](http://nolanlawson.com/2011/05/26/on-pokedroids-removal/)

Last time I talked with the legal team of The Pokémon Company (subsidiary of Nintendo that owns the IP), I was informed that, while they allow web sites like Bulbapedia and Serebii, it gets hairier with native apps (e.g. because you implicitly assert ownership over the IP when you publish on the Play Store). This happened almost 5 years ago, though, and nowadays there are lots of Pokémon apps on the Play Store ([https://play.google.com/store/search?q=pokedex&c=apps](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=pokedex&c=apps)), so I can only assume that they've softened their views.

That said, it's their IP, and they're free to wield the DMCA hammer as they see fit. For me, though, the point of Pokedex.org is to show what you can do with 2015-era web tech, and that, on Android at least, the web has already (mostly) caught up with native. I mean, this app is arguably superior than my old Froyo-era native app, and it's all HTML/CSS/JS! So hopefully someone will be inspired by it to build a similar, offline-capable webapp. That was reason enough for me to build it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a conspicuous lack of actual info, though. As a competitive player who's played at Worlds before, anything short of Veekun's data is going to be missing something crucial. It's a nice site and your principles are solid, but the data just has to be there.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'm glad there are some true Pokémaniacs out there keeping me honest. ;) In my defense, though, I put this site together in my spare time over the course of the past few weeks, and the data source I used (PokéAPI) is missing some crucial data that I still need to patch (e.g. the Gen VI species, the catch rates). But the point of the site is mostly to demonstrate what you can do with web tech, not to be the end-all be-all best Pokémon resource ever.

I'd like it to be, though! :) Hence why I open-sourced it, and why I'm encouraging anyone with the inclination to help improve it: [https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org](https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org)

<comment><USER9> Any thoughts on what you would do differently and/or what you couldn't do right now?

Eg. of techstack, syncing databases, whatever. I think this project is awesome! Learned a lot of new things :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty cool! One suggestion: On phones, make the search accessible from your popout menu. That way I don't have to scroll waaaay up to get to it.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's pretty nice, though I have to be honest and ask:

1\. Why should I use this one specifically, given that Pokedex listings are dime a dozen on the internet nowadays? I mean, the technology is nice, but a static website is presumably even quicker, and you're still competing with the likes of Serebii, Bulbapedia, Smogon, the official site, etc.

2\. Why are no Pokemon from generation 6 included in this? Anyone wanting a Pokedex now is likely to want some information about the new species introduced in Pokemon X and Y, and your competition likely have this data.

It's a nice enough interface, and the technology seems interesting, just wondering about the use case.

P.S. As for it being shut down... I doubt it. The article doesn't say the app is being sold on the Apple store or Google Play, it's a web app that's accessible for free through the browser. It's just a fancy website, like the thousands of other Pokedex websites that have been going for years or even decades.

<comment><USER12> Disclaimer: I'm a coworker of the author.

1\. this is easy, accessible, broadly compatible. I think it's the fastest way to get to the data (especially on mobile: no going to store, no waiting to download, touch-friendly interface)

2\. "soft" technical limitation of the PokéApi. He says it can be worked around, time permitting. PRs encouraged!

As far as use cases go, I think it's common to want a Pokédex of some sort when playing the games. As the existence of this blog post illustrates, this particular one was a case study in web technology first with a fun theme rather than a grand attempt at market domination.

<comment><USER13> 2c of UX: You should bind the escape key to close the detail views as they appear like windows.

<comment><USER6> Posted as a GitHub issue: [https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org/issues/10](https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org/issues/10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's nice, but you should have used Veekun's data: [https://github.com/veekun/pokedex/wiki/Getting- Data](https://github.com/veekun/pokedex/wiki/Getting-Data)

<comment><USER15> Looks like pokeapi does use Veekun's data: [http://pokeapi.co/about/](http://pokeapi.co/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I once made a Pokédex page for Pokémon Showdown, but I never really got around to promoting it:

[http://pokemonshowdown.com/dex/](http://pokemonshowdown.com/dex/)

It's a similar idea to yours, in terms of making it modern, although I never got around to making it work offline, but it might be interesting to compare how they're similar and how they differ.

Maybe if there's interest, I should put its source up on GitHub and maybe write up some details of how I wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is super cool and fast, I'm impressed. Thought I would note, it looks like the catch rates of all the pokemon all incorrectly display 0%.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I totally failed to notice that, but I've filed an issue now: [https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org/issues/9](https://github.com/nolanlawson/pokedex.org/issues/9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For some reason this blog post is using 100% of my CPU while it's sitting idle in the background. Really odd for something that's just static text. Any idea what's going on here?

(Ironically, the actual demo site (pokedex.org) seems to be well behaved in comparison, using ~0% of my CPU, even though it's much more complex.)

<comment><USER3> Hm, that might be due to the autoloop <video>s I have in there (which are great for illustrating the animations, but may be a bit indulgent). Which browser are you on?

<comment><USER18> Chrome 46 on MacOS.

And I think you're right. I just removed the loop attribute from all the <video> tags, and CPU usage quickly dropped back down to normal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone interested in PokeHub.com ? I've always wanted to do something cool with it! Mark @ TextHub.com

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure if it is intended or not. When I click a pokemon, new background spawns from an unrelated point and stretches to fit screen. pressing back button stretches background back to frame of pokemon in list correctly. It looks buggy and not uniform.

chrome 46.0.2490.86 m & windows 8

</comment><comment><USER21> Would be great if this used Material Design Lite ([http://getmdl.io](http://getmdl.io)), not sure if that would bloat things too much but it would get it super close to "native" feeling on Android.

</comment><comment><USER22> Technology wise this is really neat but it's very slow on my iPhone 6. I know it's targeted towards androids (at least, that's the impression I got) but it was definitely not the snappy 60 fps that was promised.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone able to open in on an iPhone 4s? I know I know... it's old, but it legit gave me a warning I've never seen before "This page had a problem so it's been automatically reloaded"

</comment><comment><USER24> From the anime, the Pokedex actually speaking the description was always immersive. Maybe some client side TTS library could be built into this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Scrolling is absolutely terrible on iPhone 4s with ios9.

No inertia or what it is you call it when it continues scrolling a little.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps this can add some hype to the augmented reality pokemon game that is coming. It's a cooperation with Niantic ( Originally from Google, they created Ingress ).

More information about it here: [http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-video- games/pokemon-go/](http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-video-games/pokemon-go/)

Love the techstack for sure! Super sweet

</comment><comment><USER26> Phenomenal write-up. I'm excited to spend the next few weeks really digging into some of these ideas.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does stuttering in Chrome for Android on a Nexus 5 count as a bug?</comment>


KeepTruckin Lays off 400 despite Apr 2019 $149M Investment - <AUTHOR> So this truck logistics company just raised $149M a year ago, yet today it laid off like 20% of its staff. https://news.crunchbase.com/news/keeptruckin-drives-in-149m-series-d-taking-valuation-to-1-4b/<p>Is this a housecleaning exercise, because they can't be short of cash from recent events.  Preparing for a sale? <comment><USER2> Assuming 2000 employees, $149m is only $75k per employee. That number is reduced depending on how much they spent on "...further invest in hardware and software, double down on safety and efficiency, and build partnerships. The company also wants to invest in AI capabilities and machine vision as well as asset management functionality." Unless they've paired that investment with substantial revenue, they'd run out of runway quickly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most likely their burn rate is too high and they need more of a runway to weather the storm.</comment>


Traditional Venture Model is "Broken" for Biotech, Says VC Alan Frazier - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/12/04/traditional-venture-model-is-broken-for-biotech-companies-need-to-adapt-says-vc-alan-frazier/

<comment><USER2> That was a great interview.

Biotech, unlike web apps, does require A LOT of capitol.

But in the last part of the interview Alan guesses that the future of biotech is smarter and more narrowly targeted products.

And imho, that's a great guess.

What's so interesting about that is, that smarter and more targeted in my mind goes right along with smaller.

And smaller walks hand in hand with cheaper i.e. less capitol.

And if you lower the barriers of entry for biotech that means we could see an _explosion_ in innovation from startups and small companies.</comment>


"Yakuza 3" videogame reviewed by actual yakuza - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/10/yakuza-3-review.html

<comment><USER2> "a former yakuza boss named Tadamasa Goto"

Goto considered harmful, indeed.

In seriousness, this is really cool</comment>


Double Opt-In is Crazy - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonleister.com/stop-following-the-herd-double-opt-in-is-crazy/

<comment><USER2> Some people maliciously or accidentally provide another's email address, and now that person is getting your unsolicited commercial email (i.e., spam). And now they must actively do something to try to get off the list.

Double opt-in means by doing nothing they will only receive your original confirmation email.

It's not a matter of being crazy. It's a matter of being considerate.

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting to know if Jason would feel the same way after being auto signed up to a few thousand mailing lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to have a newsletter project where I signed people up through a single optin - it was kind of a daily deals newsletter. I grew to 1000 subscribers in no time. Yet, whenever I sent a mailer, there used to be a 2-3% bounce and a 3% open rate - remember, this is from a newsletter that people voluntarily signed up for. I didn't get them from a spam list.

Recently, I started a newsletter for entrepreneurs - this time, I was careful to have double optin. The growth is definitely slower. But with nearly 50% open rate for each of my newsletter, I think I am talking to the right people.

It costs money to send a newsletter out. I use MailChimp and it's not free. What's the point in paying for people who are half hearted subscribers who have bouncing emails? I would rather pay double for people who are genuinely interested in reading from me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I know it's a sample size of one, but every time I click a Mailchimp button, I immediately receive the confirmation email, and immediately confirm.

I don't see the big deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was talking to a friend with a sample size not much larger, but he was monitoring traffic for a signup page through Google Analytics and watching his list on Mailchimp. Over a dozen clicks on the email signup button, but only one person in Mailchimp (who he personally knew).

As a follow up, there's this: [http://www.jasonleister.com/more-double-opt-in- nonsense/](http://www.jasonleister.com/more-double-opt-in-nonsense/)</comment></comment>


Is it worth moving to Scotland from Singapore for 40% less savings? - <AUTHOR> I am a senior developer working in Singapore for a decade. Now planning to explore opportunities to work in Europe. <comment><USER2> What does "worth it" mean in this context? It is rather subjective. Also, what does "40% less savings" mean? 40% less to invest after taxes and cost of living? Is it 40% of 100 dollars/pounds per month or 5000?

Without really knowing what you value and what you gain or loose, it is impossible for someone else to say if it is worth it for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment, I am looking for the places that has more nature, cold weather and opportunity for long drive. Being in Singapore, I don't have the former. But because of the low tax I have decent saving and safe living. Now I have a opportunity to move to Glasgow with the saving cut of 40%.</comment></comment>


Ted Nelson presents a working prototype version of Xanadu - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72M5kcnAL-4 <comment><USER2> Another interesting thing to view is the recently published video of his talk at Vintage Computer Festival East XI (1).

The idea of text being treated as _paper_ makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, it can be incredibly messy to explain the concept to others. My best current analogy is citations linking paper to paper all at once. Without more software, or a better analogy, it's difficult to preach the merits to others.

I think this is a step in the right direction.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcfwLhDDMz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcfwLhDDMz4)</comment>


Scientists discover organism that hasn't evolved in more than 2B years - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150203104131.htm

<comment><USER2> Counterpoint: "New paper claims that evolution has stopped in a bacterial species. Is it true?" (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com) (23 points, 9 hours ago, 9 comments) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003279](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003279)</comment>


Talented Designers Stream Into M.F.A. Video Game Programs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/arts/video-games/talented-designers-stream-into-mfa-video-game-programs.html

<comment><USER2> As someone who has spent his professional life developing games I have very mixed feelings about the growth of academic programs for games.

On one hand, teaching is a great late career transition for video game devlopers. I have a lot of friends who I have worked with over the years who teach.

On the other hand, it seems like a degree, like getting an MFA in film or television, where it is unlikely you are going to get a reasonable return on what you spend. People like to be in school, and they like to study what they are interested in, so that is fine. But if someone represents this as a good way to launch a career I am dubious.</comment>


Why on Earth Is Google Building a New Operating System from Scratch? - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3063006/why-on-earth-is-google-building-a-new-operating-system-from-scratch <comment><USER2> _The other problem is that Linux isn 't "real-time."_

I thought the Linux kernel was preemptive. Isn't this enough to configure the kernel to be real-time?

<comment><USER3> From memory (might have changed) , but linux doesn't offer any hard guaranty for hard-real time.</comment></comment>