Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone! I'm Max from BaseDash (https://www.basedash.io). BaseDash is an internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet. It's like being able to use Airtable to manage your company's internal operations.
I was working on a side project a few years ago that required a lot of manual data management. I was using Django Admin which was fine, but wished I could just set up a two-way sync between my SQL database and Airtable (without any crazy Zapier workflows).
After building a quick prototype as an internal tool, I realized that there was a space missing for a product somewhere between an admin panel and a database client. Something with an amazing interface that's usable by both engineers and non-technical users who need to access data within their company (e.g. customer support, operations).
From there, I built BaseDash with a strong focus on expanding upon existing tools I love, with extra care and polish. The resulting product is a polished, opinionated internal tool, with all the functionality most companies need out-of-the-box.
Being a web app, there are some great features that BaseDash enables for cross-functional teams. BaseDash keeps a full edit history of all changes made, makes it super easy to share access to teammates, and enables Google Sheets-like real-time collaboration for editing data.
We currently support most SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, SQL Server, MariaDB), with support for MongoDB and Firestore on the roadmap. We offer a hosted version, or you can host it yourself on-prem.
We're still in early access but happy to invite the Hacker News community to try the product out. We're currently focused on small-to-medium sized software companies, with a combination of engineers and non-technical users. Try it here: https://www.basedash.io and let me know what you think! <comment><USER2> The main question I have with tools like this is around safety.

The reason we typically _don 't_ directly edit production data like this is because of application level concerns or validation.

I think it's important that any tool like this allows a way to replicate that safety in some way, otherwise it's as risky as using a GUI client directly. Access control (which this does) addresses security and starts addressing safety, but there's a lot more necessary to get to the safety that is often enforced at the application level.

There's an argument that the validation should be in the database, and that's nice when it's possible, but it's often not. For any application using Rails/Django, anything else along those lines, anyone interacting with the database mostly via an ORM, will typically not be putting this sort of validation in the database in _all_ cases – thinking about enums, fixed slugs, relative dates, timezone support, etc.

<comment><USER3> > The main question I have with tools like this is around safety.

" _Your app 's data is never stored on our servers with the exception of edit history which lets you audit all changes to your data_" from: [https://www.basedash.io/pricing](https://www.basedash.io/pricing)

Not the most convincing sell but not that they did not address this concern at all.

<comment><USER4> He's talking about operational safety - your application applies validation to inputs to the database. This ensures that only valid data is stored.

What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9, but it's an int field and someone types in 22 on accident? Sure it might be valid for the database, but it's not valid for the application.

There's certainly different ways to take the problem, but it needs to be considered.

<comment><USER5> > What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9, but it's an int > field and someone types in 22 on accident? Sure it might be valid for the > database, but it's not valid for the application.

This is why database constraints exist.

Any sufficiently long lived database ends up with more than one code base connected to it. Enforcing rules in the database ensures a baseline level of data sanity.

<comment><USER6> You are right.

But ....

In the wild, database constraints are rare. I even often see databases without any foreign key constraint.

We have a new client like that. application developed in the past 3 years on postgres, uses all the buzzwords (microservices, Kubernetes, terraform, ...). The only constraints in database is on primary keys. The site moves up to 500k EUR per day.

This is far from rare.

<comment><USER7> Both your and the parent's sentiments are _so_ on-point. And they're one of the reasons I don't like ORMs or the use of in-app constraint checking. The mid-Aughties rise of CRUD-focused frameworks that treat the database as a sidecar to the web app ignored as inconvenient the full power of an RDBMS, in part because MySQL was the not-full-RDBMS that they were often paired with.

<comment><USER5> I think a big part of it is a general fear of database migrations. Once you embrace schema evolution as a normal part of development, it becomes natural to have your schemas reflect your true data constraints and relationships. Rather than just unlabeled sacks of text fields.

<comment><USER7> Django's migration tool is awesome; I can see how people could get seduced by it. It's happened to me.

<comment><USER4> Django's migration tool is one of the main reasons I can't leave django.

What comparative ORMs do you use for non-django, or non-python languages?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gotta hand it to you, this looks really slick. Also, the call to action at the bottom was well made;

> Skip the waitlist, this week only

> We're opening access to BaseDash for the next week during our Hacker News > launch.

Usually when someone is like "act now" I'm like "yeah right". But in this case, whether it really matters or not that I sign up exactly this week, the fact that you put some effort into connecting the text to the HN post made it feel more genuine and was sufficient to instead make me go "alright I'll do it".

I don't immediately have time to use it but I can tell that this product is useful so I'm making a mental note to log back in in the future and check it out more. For now I was happy to see that in addition to the UX niceties that were mentioned on the landing page, you guys make it possible to configure a connection with SSH between your servers and the db servers of the user. That is very encouraging to see :)

I think on top of that it would be neat if you also offered users to configure connections that go through Wireguard, as I run Wireguard on my personal server and I know other people do too. I guess one guy asking for Wireguard is probably not going to convince you to add it. But who knows, maybe others will request it too ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We thought it would be best for HN to have direct access (we didn't do this for Product Hunt).

I'll keep Wireguard in mind :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I started on a similar thing a couple of months back but didn't make it to YC. I talked to a bunch of folks and demoed then an MVP, but couldn't get any paying users. Covid-19 hit and I had to find a paying job to make ends meet after many months on it.

I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as polished as BaseDash or popsql. It's MIT licensed.

[https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin](https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin)

Congrats BaseDash on making it to YC and getting this far. I wish you best of luck. Even though I'm a bit jealous.

<comment><USER10> Don't feel bad. I was in your situation in the past. Don't give up. I have finally been able to launch a quite successful product (being used by a significant people daily). I plan to apply to YC this September. I don't want to put my product here because I don't want to steal thunders from BaseDash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just asked my CISO, about this product.

He said, "For small, and really small companies they already have the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of their problems because they don't have a "console" interface. So this would be just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database.

For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter productive.

However, it's a cool idea and looks like it was well implemented."

Oh, I forgot to add that he said "Allowing a 3rd party web site to connect directly to a production database for the purpose allowing direct database manipulation will only happen with companies that don't have a security department, or their "security person" is just in name only. There are so many things that can go wrong that is just not worth doing. Even if this could run on site, is runs against basically all Information Security and IT operations best practices."

<comment><USER12> I see this as a substitute for spreadsheets. I work in Business Intelligence and we spend a fair amount of time importing data from user spreadsheets that need to be incorporated into data warehouse and reports. It is a nightmare of a process because so many things can go wrong. I would jump at opportunity to substitute the spreadsheets for database tables.

<comment><USER13> Yes, this tool seems ideal for the people who unintentionally create databases in excel. I realize this sounds insulting, but providing tools to the people who know their business is useful. Perhaps you could brand it as MaxS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $50/user/month seems a bit steep to me, you can easily get something like [https://retool.com/pricing/](https://retool.com/pricing/) for $10/user/month. Granted it's a bit of a different market, but it does a lot more in addition to having editable/searchable/filterable DB tables.

<comment><USER15> For me the pain point is that, like many others, they want to charge the same price for editors and read-only users.

Do the math with me to feel the pain:

-I use the product $50/month great

-My team use the product $300/month (6x50€) bearable if product really fit our need

-My team want to share access in read-only mode with the whole department 2500$/month (50x50) acceptable only if it's a core unavoidable product

Almost everytime there is no real technical difference between hosting service for use case 2 and 3. So I get that the business model intend to milk as much money from large organisations that shit gold and can't do basic math. But in the process you are cutting yourself from all small/medium company that just seek to pay a fair price.

To keep it simple I believe the basis should be that read only are always free or linked to paying (like get 50 read-only license for each paying editor licence). This better reflect real world situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point, I'll look into reducing the pricing for read-only users. We haven't had many companies with read-only users so it hasn't come up, but I think it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> shreyas-satish Product looks great, congrats on the launch. I would reconsider the positioning of the product if I were in your shoes.

As danpalmer said, I suspect it might be tricky to ensure data integrity if non-technical people are bypassing app-level validations.

That said, while I may not use this for my mission-critical data, I do think there's a lot of potential in using this as a headless CMS. I'm currently using Airtable, and its API limits make it unusable for anything apart from light workloads. Also, doesn't have webhooks.

But, if I can use BaseDash instead as my CMS and have my marketing team handle the data through a familiar interface, while design + dev source the data into Figma & a static site through an API respectively, I see myself paying for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, we have a couple customers using BaseDash as a headless CMS. Edit history is especially nice here because you can always look through past iterations of content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really bullish on this concept. I learned how to code coming from a finance background, and the mental shift from Excel to relational database felt natural enough, but the lack of Excel-like ways to interact with those databases has always felt like white space to me. Well done!

<comment><USER17> Hey Taylor, You should check out actiondesk (disclaimer: I'm the founder)! We're complementary from basedash (not doing the writing to the database, but focusing on viewing and analyzing your db data in a spreadsheet)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actiondesk is awesome. We share a couple customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We use dbeaver internally (and we hate it). But it is free and our engineers get by with most of what's required from tool like it.

And dashbase looks like a well done product for a new project - what does you stack looks like frontend and backend ?

And have to agree with others that dashbase is pricey though!

It will be nearly impossible to convince management to pay $600 per year.

Can you tell about usecases of your early users who are paying for this ?

<comment><USER19> I'm CTO of a very early stage startup and $50/mo to allow my CEO to read and edit the database is an easy decision.

<comment><USER20> This is a half-joke of a comment, but I would pay $50/month to a product that could explicitly prohibit the CEO from editing the production database.

<comment><USER21> I saw this immediately after submitting my comment above and I was like why would you want to give such access to someone who is more than likely non- technical. I can't see any pros from this unless it's locked to read only mode but then at $50 you're just paying for an excel view into your app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and companies trying to compete in this space.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.

<comment><USER3> > _We 're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished > Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI > themselves._

Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All the best.

[0] database _is_ the app?

<comment><USER23> I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You can track changes and see comments as to why each change was made, that's really cool.

<comment><USER25> They should use this as their main selling point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A few folks mentioned repositioning so I thought I'd suggest a possibility.

Medium/large companies do want to restrict access to production databases. Especially sysadmin level access.

Maybe your tool could help companies with this. A coder/dba/support person can author an SQL "workbook" against their favorite dev db (thinking something like Jupyter Lab). They then submit the workbook for execution against a test or production db (with specific set of permissions like readonly, update X,Y,Z tables, etc).

Make sure everything run against production is audit logged (who did what, what data was viewed, what changes were made).

Also a bit of a front end workflow around getting access to production (dev submits request for access, some sort of production supervisor grants access, limited access (workbook requires review), or declined.

Anyways just some random thoughts.

(very slick website and feature walk throughs. impressive stuff)

</comment><comment><USER27> How does this differ from something like DBeaver? Our QA Analysts (semi-manual testers) use that for making tweaks to our databases, both production and otherwise. Developers also use it because it is frequently easier than the command line when we do not know all the table and column names.

Is it basically a less intimidating version of that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's meant to be much easier for non-technical teammates, plus has more collaborative functionality built for teams (easy to share access, team-wide edit history, real-time collaboration).

I tend to think of tools like DBeaver as being built for individual, technical users, while BaseDash is built for cross-functional teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The product looks cool but i seriously doubt if something like this can fly in any of our production services where changes can be made directly to a production database without an audit trail. Even the example on the website where the account credit is being increased is something that I've yet to see in a production system. To safely use it on a production system internally it would have to be deployed on premise.

In addition to that, the TOS clearly wash their hands if something goes wrong. I use airtable extensively in my personal projects and at work which seems to work fine.

One more thing i observed about the company structure is that they're based in Delaware in a virtual office. Now, i know that as startups go, this isn't unheard of but trying to get this past legal would be nightmare.

Congratulations on the launch though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have edit history which acts as an audit trail for changes; view logs are coming soon too.

We offer on-prem, and expect a good portion of SMBs to use it over our cloud version.

Good catch on the virtual office! We're actually based in Canada, that's our US company's legal address.

<comment><USER28> I have several clients that are startups and i usually recommend them JetBrains Datagrip which has yet to disappoint. It also makes it easier to access the databases directly behind a VPN. Is there a limit to the number of databases a single user can access on a startup license?

The reason i am asking this is that even a small startup can have multiple databases in production. A single license of DataGrip might sound more beneficial in that case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been ruminating on this exact problem for months. I'm consulting at a company where we have a lot of non-engineers who own several major processes w/r/t data sources of truth. Engineers need up-to-date programmatic access to that data, and the non-engineers need a way to keep that information accurate.

This is awesome. I was considering building it myself, but it's always a pleasure to see someone else deliver a working product on an idea you've been bouncing around. Good luck, this is a relatively 'simple' product with a huge market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear you like the product! Would love to hear your thoughts after trying it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> TLDR: Giving non-IT users direct edit access to the production DB will most likely break stuff.

I wrote something similar to BaseDash ages ago, I called it dAgent (for database agent). I had it running for many different clients from all sorts of trades (I do custom development). The GUI built itself from reading the DB schema.

My initial motivation was to cut dev time since dAgent would automate the coding of CRUD interfaces. However, the use of dAgent in production ended up being quite limited: maybe only used to edit catalog data (i.e. add a city to the cities table). The reason for this limited usage is no mystery: one can easily break things. In particular non-IT users can break things.

Allow me to use an example. You have a CRM with a customers table. On that table there is a field called status. For that field, dAgent would load a select input using the related table statuses, there was no risk to break integrity. However, in the business logic of this CRM, changing the status of a customer is the result of running a process. That process not only sets the status of a customer to a new value, but also writes a history log, sends email notifications and perhaps triggers an invoicing process.

Now, imagine a non-IT user changing the status field of a customer using a tool such as BaseDash. Now you have a customer in status active who is able to login to your paid SAAS but has never being invoiced.

Many such nightmares can happen when users can directly edit a DB.

For this reason, in production, dAgent features where limited to CRUDing simple catalog tables. It did help, but was not the silver bullet I had hoped for. On the other hand, IT users would never adopt dAgent since the DB engine provided a much more robust and feature-rich admin GUI. I was not in the business of competing with PHPMyAdmin, so I eventually dropped the project.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey there!

Fellow founder in the same space here. I deeply understand what you are trying to solve cause I am doing the same. I am sure you are trying to differentiate from Jet Admin which is also in YC. ReTool is more mature (also YC). Then there is Forest Admin and Macro is coming out soon.

On top of this, in my early customer validation talks, people ask me if my product is like Metabase or Chartio etc. So yeah it is a crowded space, but I feel this space is huge. Like every business wishes not to invest money in internal tools but they have to. I am still trying to figure out my MVP. I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any SQL knowledge. That is what I am going to launch as MVP soon. 2 levels of tables and people really struggle to get out what they want.

An example query I am throwing around is "Show me Orders from Red Shoes". This already means Order, Product and Product Category table. This is a real pain for non-technical people and I believe solving this is becoming critical to encourage and enable every business to be able to ask questions about their Business without needing Engineering.

I am going to go the UI/UX approach to solve this in my MVP and then go for an NLP based approach if things go well. Like if you could type that in a search box and get data, without knowing anything about databases or without needing any Engineering help, that would be real solution to Businesses.

Cheers, and best of luck!

Sumit from dwata.com

<comment><USER31> > _I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any > SQL knowledge_

One way to process data without joins and groupy in multiple tables is to use Prosto toolkit: [https://github.com/prostodata/prosto](https://github.com/prostodata/prosto) It is an alternative to SQL, MapReduce and other classical approaches by radically changing how data is processed

<comment><USER23> Thanks, I will take a look, although I prefer to stay with relational algebra, Python and R but make them all available through an easier UX. That might be a core selling point for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The real power of such kind of tools is determined by its ability to derive (infer) new data from _multiple_ tables, particularly, by linking tables and aggregating data (using these links). Airtable had an interesting approach to this problem (yet, not perfect imho). Here I do not see how can I derive new tables or columns from already existing ones except for using SQL. If BaseDash relies on SQL then the question is what are its USPs which are directly related to data?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have the ability to join tables along foreign keys in a couple clicks through the UI. Definitely looking into adding aggregated data & computed columns soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is a well known concept sometimes called a SQL editor. There's definitely a need for a great implementation of the concept though. There was a really good one called Wagon years ago that of course got bricked after the team was acquired and I still haven't liked any that I have tried since.

The emphasis on editing production here is a bit odd since there is a lot of value that can be delivered read-only to analysts or to editing development for developers. I have a war story about editing production with one of these tools. Someone used such an editor to edit a MongoDB database value. The ORM schema said it was a float, but it was entered as an int. This somehow broke production for a lot of users.

SQL editors

      * PopSQL
      * TeamSQL
      * DataGrip
      * https://www.beekeeperstudio.io

CLI tools

      * [usql](https://github.com/xo/usql/releases)
      * [dbcli](http://www.dbcli.com/)

<comment><USER34> We use Postico and are pretty happy with it. It's better for our use cases than e.g. PopSQL.

That being said, we'd drop Postico any day for a smooth editor with 100% Postgres typing support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This looks really useful! Not sure how it would handle business rules and callbacks, but these days I'm doing much of that directly in the database anyways after years of fighting inconsistencies at the application level (Rails, cough cough).

For admin type dashboards that need customization I've been using Hasura + React Admin (nice replacement for Rails ActiveAdmin). Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours.

This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: [https://github.com/Steams/ra- data-hasura-graphql](https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql)

</comment><comment><USER36> Congrats on the launch. Have wanted something like this for years - most admin tools aren't easy to use like Airtable, and Airtable itself isn't designed to be a backend for your apps. Would love to see a lower-priced tier for just a single user (no collaborators).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We'll probably add a cheaper plan for individuals soon. If you're interested, we can set something custom up now. Shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Great product, solving exact pain point we have right now: non-technical team members glued to Django Admin all day long and waiting days to get much-needed data from engineers, who cannot find the time to write simple views with relevant SQL queries.

I have signed up and started testing your product. Looks great so far. If things check out, there is a good chance we will sign up for real and pay.

Congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER38> How does this compare with Prisma Studio? (Prisma framework specifically Prisma 2). Our company is graphql based and uses Prisma Studio as our visual gui for our db

</comment><comment><USER39> > _internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of > a spreadsheet_

I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that allowed people to edit prod. It was a catastrophe.

As others have said, non-tech people shouldn't have access to prod data, where they may not understand the schema well enough to edit it. Tech people already have GUIs.

Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a thin layer of code is much more viable.

</comment><comment><USER40> The pricing model is a little strange to me. I would like to see a minimal free tier and then a micro pay-as-you-go query cost than a large set monthly cost.

</comment><comment><USER41> Congrats and looks great, I like the tracking history/change. If everything is tracked is there a feature to rollback to a previous state? If so, why not also advertise it as a innovative backup + edit solution? That would be be a bigger deal than just the spreadsheet part since people already use DataGrip or TablePlus.

<comment><AUTHOR> We only track changes made through BaseDash, so we don't have full snapshots of your database to revert to. We'll definitely add a feature to rollback individual edits though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Max - congrats on the launch! Looks very slick, I'd love to replace AirTable with something more performant. Can I edit the schema yet? Would be great to have a sample database when I login for the first time so I can see the UI in action.

<comment><USER34> Yes, a sample DB would be amazing! I'd love to try this out, but wouldn't give access to one of our DBs w/o setting up a specific role for BaseDash etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Look Good from the description.However i know this is not a very necessary feature but consider adding google login, its easier and quick especially for people who want to test the product before committing.

</comment><comment><USER43> I under stand this is for internal use, but will there be an on site deployment option?

</comment><comment><USER44> I would like to give this a test drive against an Oracle cloud database? Possible?

</comment><comment><USER45> Any plans to support NoSQL?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! MongoDB and Firestore are first on the roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Do I understand correctly that I am supposed to give you write access to my PROD database just so i can _edit my production database with the ease of a spreadsheet_ in a web browser ?

What happens when BaseDash is down ? Do I have to go back to using code again ?

</comment><comment><USER47> Cool tool, how are you guys different from forestadmin?

</comment><comment><USER48> could we self host this for DIY/home use?

</comment><comment><USER49> Nice product, nice UI, nice onboarding experience.

Good job!

</comment><comment><USER50> Any plans for an API?</comment>


New Math Constant on the Block Gets Kick-Ass Theme Song - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3174T-3-59Q

<comment><USER2> Already submitted by New Scientist hosting: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705080></comment>


Building a backend for our £20M crowdfunding round - grey-area https://monzo.com/blog/2019/01/14/crowdfunding-technology-backend-architecture/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for posting! I was part of the team that worked on this.

Monzo is a bank in the UK and last month we crowdfunded £20 million from 36,000 users through our own platform. We run the bank on our own software stack using Kubernetes & AWS, which we used for crowdfunding too.

Trying to integrate a high-traffic crowdfunding backend with our banking platform without disrupting our users' day to day banking experience was tricky. Our bank is a distributed system that runs on hundreds of microservices. Building a high-traffic, reliable investment system using our architecture while requiring strong consistency on the amount invested was surprisingly challenging.</comment>


Self-driving cars may be more likely to hit you if you have dark skin - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613064/self-driving-cars-are-coming-but-accidents-may-not-be-evenly-distributed <comment><USER2> The article is very thin on details. It serves mostly to point to an abstract for a research paper : [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11097](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11097)

The abstract is unfortunately also very light on detail.

It appears as though the researchers trained a number of classification systems using static images of pedestrians noting skin color and observed that darker skin tones resulted in mis-classification more often than for lighter skin tones. The original article then sensationalizes this suggesting that means self driving cars are more likely to kill darker skinned people.

I believe there are a number of problems here.

Fist, the skin tone bias in image training data sets is well documented. The abstract it self says such bias motivated their research. The conclusion that pedestrians with darker skin tones were mis-classified more often should not really come as a surprise given that these training sets have historically resulted in this type of mis-classification.

Second, pedestrian detection is not done (typically) using cameras but with LIDAR. LIDAR has no notion of skin tone. Cameras are more traditionally used for lane departure and blind spot checking. See : [https://www.quora.com/How- do-self-driving-cars-see-in-the-da...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-self- driving-cars-see-in-the-dark)

In my opinion there there is quite a large gap between noting the impact of biases in training data applied to static images of pedestrians and a sensationalized conclusion that "Self-driving cars may be more likely to hit you if you have dark skin"

</comment><comment><USER3> To the degree that this is actually so, it's likely that human-driven cars have the same problem. The main difference is that it will be reasonably easy to permanently fix the issue with the former.</comment>


Unions - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/unions/

<comment><USER2> Blaming America's dismal education system on teachers unions is a tired and hollow argument. Mr. Adams would do well to consider the chronic underfunding, push toward standardization at all costs, and political interference that directly challenges science education.

Are unions good for a small, agile company? No. Are they necessary for monolithic employers? Probably. The U.S. government employs 2 million civilians. (ref:<http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs041.htm>) Withouts CBAs, etc, this likely would not work particularly well. Having a organizational structure that completely changes its goals, direction, and attitude towards employees every four years probably doesn't help much.

<comment><USER3> Instead of calling an argument tired and hollow, why don't you explain why the argument is tired and hollow?

I'm not trying to score some cheap political points off you - I'd love a response that makes me think a bit, because when I hear someone say 'teachers unions are bad for education', my gut reaction is 'well, that's obvious', since any system where pay is based on seniority and poor-performers are difficult to fire has got to create perverse incentives. What am I missing?

<comment><USER2> I'll preface this by saying that I am no fan of unions, although I recognize their utility in some sectors and will go so far as to say that they have done an incredible amount of historic good for the middle class.

Blaming teachers for failing educational standards has long been a tactic of those who wish to see public education marginalized. What they fail to point out, however, is that those countries with the best education systems also have strong teachers unions. I'm not implying causality between the two, merely correlation. It's certainly true that the structure of a union is not one that tends to reward or punish based upon performance, but those who hold unions to be the downfall of any organization place far too much weight on the idea of monetary incentives.

Take Microsoft, for instance. Here's a company that has tried to implement performance-based monetary incentives, and, by most accounts, failed widely. It's not that people aren't incentivized by money, but rather that those who are really good at what they do care much more about their impact than their paycheque. They care more about doing something great and earning the respect of peers they respect than a 5%/year raise.

The education system in America is shameful, something that it seems almost everyone can agree on. The fact is, however, teacher unions are by no means the major culprit. As I said earlier, chronic severe underfunding and a drive toward standardization that values passing meaningless tests over education is the true culprit.

As a member of HN, I think I can go out on a limb and say you're either fairly technical, entrepreneurial, or both. Let me ask you: would you want to work for a failing organization that had a terrible product, didn't invest enough in development, and had ridiculous rules governing what qualified as success? The trouble with finding great teachers who take charge of their students' education is not the union, it's the system itself. The union may play a role in that, but it's simply not a primary one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unions for armies aren't a problem because they might make the army less efficient. They're a problem because they introduce a parallel and competing chain of command and undermine the control of the civilian state over the men with guns.

</comment><comment><USER5> While unions make it easier for workers to defend their rights, they make it _much harder_ to create a meritocracy in the organization, and so much harder to reward people based on their performance - just ask anybody who have ever tried to transform an organization with a strong union. (Notoriously ineffective PG&E comes to mind first).

Here is an example of how "easy" it is to fire a low-performing teacher: [http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of- the...](http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the-lemons/)

<comment><USER5> Here is a though experiment. How fast do you think Salman Khan, of khanacademy.org fame, would advance in a US public school system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Duplicate of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1950695> that already has 63 comments.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe instead of comparing military and education in terms of why unions are allowed in one and not in the other, he should just make a comparison between education and any private sector with functioning competition. I'd say the benchmark for education should not be the military but rather retail. Imagine schools as efficient as Walmart or Starbucks.

<comment><USER8> if school was a Walmart, would teachers be shipped from China in Panamax container ships?

<comment><USER7> If they did a better job, they would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Imagine how things would be different if education were treated as a national defense issue_

Good grief, Scott. The problem with unions and/or education is that we keep trying to make one-size-fits-all solutions, eventually treating our children (and teachers) like widgets in a factory. So the teachers and children have started acting like we've been treating them. Further nationalizing it isn't going to help any -- it'll just make matters worse.

Each student is a complicated problem on his or her own. That makes each class an even more complicated problem. We need to be able to give people the freedom and accountability to leverage local minima and maxima, not come up with imaginations of how various global solutions might work. School boards alone have too much concentrated power and make too many global rules. It just gets worse the higher up the chain you go. The way we got here was through a long string of really smart folks imagining what magic bullet might fix things for everybody -- it will not be the way we get out.

EDIT: Interesting trivia point: one of the big pushes for centralized education "reform" originally in the states was that in WWI the soldiers had a hard time working the artillery. It was thought that we had better start having national standards of education so that we could be assured future soldiers would be able to fight effectively. Seems like we will never escape well-meaning people using bad military analogies. La plus ca change...

</comment><comment><USER10> I've heard an interesting argument that states education has become the number one reason for one's under-achievements in today's society (like sinning in the middle ages). The point is that education will always be bad and a LOT of people have and idea (usually wrong) about how to improve it.

</comment><comment><USER11> By the way, civil servants (that includes teachers) have no right to strike in Germany.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a strong dislike for unions, especially when people are forced to deal with unionized companies for contractors.

I also feel sympathetic to those who are trapped in a union, who have been making the same wage as everyone else for 30 years and are still forced to walk out of their job for 8 months when talks break down so a union rep can feel important and still relevant.</comment>


How we store 400M phone numbers with fast lookup - <AUTHOR> http://sparktg.com/engineering/ <comment><USER2> Their solution seems over-engineered for the scale of data they're concerned with.

A 10 digit phone number can be encoded in 34 bits. Supposing they used 64 bit wide fields to store the key and target data, that leaves 30 bits (more than their 2 bytes) to play with for flags or whatever target data. To store the whole dataset in a trie or tree-like structure on disk in this model they would need 8 bytes * 400 million phone numbers < 3 terabytes of data. So, a single 3TB or 4TB HDD ($130USD/ea) would suffice, this would give them (in the trie- or tree-like on-disk format) an access/read time in single digit or low double digit milliseconds with an HDD, or below 1 millisecond for 3 striped 1TB SSDs ($300USD/ea), for example. The disk controller's cache and the host's file buffers/cache would work in their favor as well since there are probably plenty of hotspots in the data. mmap could make the job of reading the file/disk even easier (and faster).

The data just isn't that big by today's standards.

Since false negatives are not possible for a properly implemented Bloom filter, using a Bloom filter in front of this on-disk approach would make it even faster for the negative case, since the disk would only be hit for positive or false positive cases, the latter of which should be relatively rare.

EDIT: It might be even simpler/better/faster than a trie/tree to just store the data indexed by some hash function (even just prefix bucketing) and then sequentially scan the collision list for that prefix hash for matches to the target number, which would take advantage of the much better sequential read throughput for most commodity HDDs/SSDs so that only one random read is necessary.

<comment><USER3> > 8 bytes * 400 million phone numbers < 3 terabytes of data

I get 3.2GB, which fits in RAM.

So yes, I guess, but why hit the disk at all? I'd probably just sort the data and do a binary search.

<comment><USER2> I must be sleep deprived. 1024^3 = gigabytes, not terabytes. Wow, then they've _definitely_ over-engineered it, and disk isn't even necessary in the event of a 10-fold increase in the database size. Tries, search trees, or properly sized hash tables on phone number prefixes should be plenty fast and the whole thing can fit in RAM on a modern laptop...

<comment><AUTHOR> Our solution maintains the data in a simpler scheme because keeping the data in a maintainable format is important aspect when the data is ever changing - every couple of days millions of people update their preferences and we need to be able to apply these changes. When choosing a single data structure for all the numbers, we need to optimize for space or for faster inserts/updates. Our solution is a trade-off between these options.

<comment><USER3> A hash table is more than compact enough. It should work fine even at high load factors (80%/90%) given a decent hash scheme (eg. Robin Hood hashing) which means you need only 4GB memory. It's random access and on average should have one cache miss per lookup. Updating is rather trivial.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds promising. Little bit concerned on the computational cost of hashing function. Gotta explore this option!

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be worried about hashing, either, given you effectively want to hash a 34 bit integer to a ⌈log 4e8⌉ = 29 bit integer.

An easy way is to take a 32 to 32 bit hash (eg. [http://stackoverflow.com/a/12996028/1763356](http://stackoverflow.com/a/12996028/1763356)), calculate

        hash(top 32 bits) ^ hash(bottom 32 bits)

and take the bottom 29 bits of that. I wouldn't be surprised if you can do this in less time than an integer division.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Similar issue in doing LNP lookups in the US. There's about 500M entries, each mapping to a different LRN. Naively, that's 16 bytes per entry (8 for the number, 8 for the LRN), so 8GB.

First optimization is changing the LRNs to a lookup, as there's only ~30K uniques. So that cuts the data to 5GB. That's OK but it'd be better if it was smaller and quicker to load.

I implemented a delta-encoding system with multi-level indexing, ISAM style. Data's compressed on a "page" basis, like 4KB or so of data at a time. That way all data is compressed while in memory and lookups can be done on the compressed data directly. A header on each page provides the range it covers, so you can quickly skip to the next page if the index wasn't precise enough.

Delta encoding is neat here, because on average, there'll only be gap of 18 numbers from one entry to the next (~9B possible numbers / 500M). I used base128 encoding but simple16 or another way (there's SIMD-optimized formats) would have been even better.

Using this method, the entire dataset only requires about 600-800MB of RAM.

</comment><comment><USER5> Their basic premise is all wrong. The list of people that actually want spam phone calls would be very short and is a faster search target.

<comment><USER6> If it is opt-out, then won't they have just the list of people who don't want phone calls?

<comment><USER7> assuming a saturated numberspace, 400M numbers is just 5% of all possible #s . I doubt that the exceptions (911-xxx-xxxx) reduce the number enough to make a whitelist a better choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing that strikes me is that while the data being searched for has been optimized down to 2 bytes of bitfields, the same hasn't been done with the phone numbers - area codes in India appear to be variable-length (2, 3, ? digits) with that length being part of the 10 digits, and presumably mobile numbers are handled similarly either with their own area codes or overlapping. Breaking the data by area code would allow the elimination of significant chunks of the total possible address space, and further separating (as they do) into dense and sparse would further reduce the requirements (since tries, skip-lists, etc. have their own overhead).

It comes down to this: while the Indian phone system could in theory allow 10 billion phone numbers, there are not in fact 10 billion legally-allocatable phone numbers and the rules in place likely effectively reduce the legally- allocatable number to somewhere between 1-3 billion numbers. Dividing based on those rules may both reduce the problem to something requiring less engineering time and simiplify possible marketing-related factors (e.g. selling access/systems targeted only to specific area codes).

<comment><USER8> And after a bit more thinking while doing something mindless, it seems that other interesting areas would be the distribution of digits within each of the first 4-5 positions and perhaps looking at the bit patterns of either run- length or Huffman encoding of the first 4-5 digits.

And separately, depending on the hit rate and particularly in the sparse sections, there might be situations where it would make sense to have a preliminary lookup that simply indicated whether there were _any_ possible matches within a prefix range - before searching, get an overview of whether there's anything to search.

Overall this strikes me as something that could demonstrate the importance of having developers aware of the environment in which something will be used. If there are going to be 2 of something, throw hardware at it. If there are going to be 2,000 of "something" instead, an extra $1000 each in "throw hardware at it" could become a real issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Relevant: [http://yourdatafitsinram.com](http://yourdatafitsinram.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> We are using a constant database for a similar use-case (MNP database), albeit much smaller, around 15 million phone numbers. It requires almost no RAM and you update the database as a whole with no downtime.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdb_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdb_\(software\))

<comment><USER11> I'm sure that works great for 15m. (EDIT: To be clear, I love CDB, and I'm not being sarcastic - for 15m it's probably perfectly fine; it's just space inefficient for large datasets where the combined key+value lengths are very low)

But even if we ignore the hash table pointer tables which can be made arbitrarily small at the cost of probing a higher number of entries on average before finding the right key (but in reality you'd want them to be fairly large), the minimum space used per entry is [1]:

8 bytes for the length of the key and length of the value + 5 bytes for the key + 2 bytes for the value, so 15 bytes per number, or 6GB (EDIT: fixed numbers to account for BCD encoding of number). Which means you'd need to switch to one of the (non-standard) 64-bit CDB-inspired formats, as CDB itself can only handle 4GB data files.

[1] CDB format: [http://cr.yp.to/cdb/cdb.txt](http://cr.yp.to/cdb/cdb.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This scale is pretty small and can be done on my laptop. If you need to do such operations at a truly large scale, this is an interesting article: [http://alexbowe.com/rrr/](http://alexbowe.com/rrr/) C++ implementation: [https://github.com/simongog/sdsl- lite/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/simongog/sdsl- lite/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't some manageable amount of RAM and a hash table be the simplest and fastest solution?

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for posting this article. Would this be a good use case for a bloom filter?

<comment><USER15> Maybe, probably not thought as a completely naive solution to this problem an array of 400M elements which is sorted, only takes 2.4 GB of RAM, or about $50 worth of RAM.

Basically you'd waste more time (and money) than it could possibly be worth.

<comment><USER16> I mean, a bloom filter isn't super difficult, but it's also probabilistic instead of deterministic.

<comment><USER15> Exactly, so you'd need the array anyway...

Also, typically bloom filters don't come out of the box with the language you're using, so it's just more potential for bugs.

A lookup on a sorted array should take 8.6 comparisons anyway, I bet the hashing takes longer...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had interned in a similar company, they had this sorted out way back then, using bloom filters. This is the github link if anyone is interested: [https://github.com/mobmewireless/fast- filter](https://github.com/mobmewireless/fast-filter)

</comment><comment><USER18> Article seems down. Here is a google cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://sparktg.com/engineering/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Earlier submission tanked on HN and the link didn't work, resubmitting with lookup timings added. Hopefully, readers will find it interesting this time.

<comment><USER19> > Unfortunately, 10 digits won't fit in 32 bits and 5 * 400 MB for storing > number is not a very happy situation and it is NOT readily searchable.

Why is 7 bytes (2b prefs + 5b number) x 400M = ~2.4GB of RAM not good enough?

<comment><USER20> Exactly. My response to the headline was "Um... using ten lines of C and $44 worth of RAM?"

<comment><USER21> Because the interesting part of the effort is doing it fast in anticipation of translating the optimization tricks to cases where you can't just go buy more RAM anymore. A lot of problems can be "solved" with current hardware because accesses or comparisons or whatnot become ridiculously cheap but that's not what computer science is about.

<comment><USER15> This is one of the biggest problems I run into in 'software engineering', people building way to complex systems because they are 'interesting' rather than buying $50 of RAM and being done with it, and then poo-poo'ing systems that cost $50 and work.

Querying a DNC list is not a problem in which you will ever not be able to buy more RAM, it's trivially parallel, if for some reason DNC lists ever outpace Moore's law, just buy another system.

To be fair to the authors at least they didn't do something ridiculous like build a 100 note cassandra cluster.

<comment><USER22> And realistically, there's nothing you can do with phone numbers that even needs the full speed of RAM. A fast SSD can do enough random reads to load the entire database in under 20 minutes, and nobody actually needs to know the status of all 400M numbers in the same 20 minutes because they can't all be dialed that quickly.

<comment><USER15> Exactly: [https://github.com/twitter/fatcache](https://github.com/twitter/fatcache)

      A single fatcache can do close to 100K set/sec for 100 bytes item sizes.
      A single fatcache can do close to 4.5K get/sec for 100 byte item sizes.
      All the 8 fatcache instances in aggregate do 32K get/sec to a single 600 GB SSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting article.

The idea of two-layer index actually reminds me of the very similar compression technique adapted by Roaring Bitmap.

</comment><comment><USER24> My intuition is that a Radix tree trie would make a lot more sense and is more maintainable than such a hack.

</comment><comment><USER25> Idea: use a hash table with perfect hashing ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function), e.g. library: [https://github.com/wahern/phf](https://github.com/wahern/phf))

</comment><comment><USER11> This is what tries [1] are for, as well as skip-lists [2]. Skip lists for a suitable sized prefix would likely be more space efficient than a trie, but some trie types such as radix-trees [3] with a sufficiently high radix value, could also be quite efficient.

The described approach doesn't seem _bad_ , though it's a bit amusing to see this described as if it's not a very well trodden area of computer science.

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

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

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

<comment><USER26> Depending on exactly how they're implemented, tries can give you unacceptable numbers of random disk seeks / uncached memory lookups per read.

<comment><USER11> They can, but they certainly don't have to, especially not for a dataset like this which is small enough to re-generate offline with data suitably clustered. And certainly no reason why it'd be worse than the describe approach, which isn't really all that conceptually different. What the article described isn't necessarily _bad_ , just unnecessarily ad-hoc when there's plenty of suitable algorithms with well understood tradeoffs and implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yeah, or you could just, like, use indexes?

Remind me not to hire these guys.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does it worth mentioning? Straightforward approach of storing numbers in a hash map in memory solves the problem. This may require say 40 Gb of ram w/o ANY optimizations.

<comment><USER29> Why would you do that when you can just keep a 10B-long bit vector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why not OpenLDAP with MDB? It's the fastest in terms of lookups -> [http://www.slideshare.net/ldapcon/whats-new-in- openldap](http://www.slideshare.net/ldapcon/whats-new-in-openldap)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with the down periods of running a startup - <AUTHOR> It is a rollercoaster running a startup - how do you deal with the down periods? <comment><USER2> I read The Struggle

[http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_struggle](http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_struggle)

Then I remember that it is normal/usual for a startup and move on as fast as I can - easier said than done :)

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean down periods? Emotionally down? Periods where the business is struggling?

</comment><comment><USER4> Focus on something else in your life that you're grateful for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lean hard on your co-founders. You're in an incredibly difficult journey together. I think they should be happy to pick you right back up. Is there anything specific I can help with?

</comment><comment><USER6> I talk to my mentor and to my business coach.</comment>


The Xbox Story, Part 1: The Birth of a Console - <AUTHOR> http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/02/the-xbox-story-part-1-the-birth-of-a-console/

<comment><USER2> The original Xbox was the best product Microsoft ever made. Hacked with modchip, XBMC, and emulators, the Xbox was basically my dream entertainment system come true. The authentic Xbox games were just a bonus. 8 years later my modchip still works, the machine has never given me any problems. And I still use it almost every day for watching movies and I still haven't found a more convenient way for me to get my MegaMan, F-Zero, and Gradius fix every now and then.

It may seem trivial, but what I also liked about it was the boot screen menu. It was quite radically advanced, it felt futuristic. Remember this was back when Microsoft was even more frighteningly good at what they do than Apple is today. And when I saw the 3D menu, with all the futuristic sounds and whatnot -- you knew this system was for real. But the Xbox360 seemed a bit like a step backward, it was more refined, but didn't have that badass feel to it. And then Microsoft kind of fizzled away in the years since.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part 2

[http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/03/the-xbox-story- part-2-gunnin...](http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/03/the-xbox-story- part-2-gunning-for-greenlight/)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2841521>

</comment><comment><USER3> > _PlayStation was the market. Sony owned consoles. Japan owned console games. > [...] Microsoft didn't understand the console world._

Oh, how times change.

<comment><USER4> The Japanese (actually, this applies to Asians in general) are very good at making standalone devices, which is why they owned the console industry prior to the 6th generation. Creating integrated platforms where software plays a significant role isn't something that the Japanese are very good at. That's why when Microsoft came in with Xbox Live they were able to steal a huge chunk of the market share.

This is also why none of the Korean or Taiwanese cell phone makers that had huge market shares were able to beat Apple to the iPhone (and even now, all they do is provide hardware for Android, which is American as well), or even beat RIM to making an email-friendly cell phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will be interesting to see the impact of MS's game studios/technology in 3-5 years. By then, TVs and/or sub-$100 set top boxes will be thoroughly integrated into the post-PC app ecosystems and will be powerful enough to run fairly sophisticated games. It's not hard to imagine Blizzard/EA/Ubisoft/etc. targeting the most ubiquitous platform before the "dedicated game consoles", at which point the console game will dramatically change.

So the question, to me, is not the future of the XBox so much as whether MS can leverage their impressive game technology to get a foothold in these emerging ecosystems. I'm generally not a fan of WP7, but the games have some very impressive technology and I think their studios could make something of a completely different caliber than anything Gameloft/Chillingo are doing. If they can create a groundbreaking Halo or GTA-like game phenomenon on their phone platform it could be their best chance to stay relevant in the consumer space.

<comment><USER6> "By then, TVs and/or sub-$100 set top boxes will be thoroughly integrated into the post-PC app ecosystems and will be powerful enough to run fairly sophisticated games."

A solid prediction, as at least one such device already exists: <http://www.roku.com/roku-products> (This is amplification, not disagreement or a "gotcha".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great to be a 30+ year old gamer/entrepreneur who is living thru the console wars. The landscape today feels a lot like it did in late-90's. And this piece give you a great glimpse of the dynamics on building a ground breaking piece of software.</comment>


Show HN: I just released my first self-published book - <AUTHOR> http://magetdd.com/ <comment><USER3> Nice work. I passed it along to a couple of magento developers I know. A bit of feedback. I get that you want to be clear what the book isn't, but when you say

"This book only focuses on a handful of tools and few specific approaches that in my opinion work the best. Be Pragmatic and use what works best for you."

That makes me (with my 'Magento developer who doesn't test' hat on) think, wait, I don't know what works for me, that's why I'm buying the book.

Instead, I'd write something like:

"This book discusses one toolset I've used with success. There are other ways to test Magento extensions, but this book will walk you through setting up a method that I've tested and used for years."

If this is a book aimed at beginners (magento testing beginners, not necessarily magento beginners), which your copy implies, give them definitive statements, especially in the marketing copy. That's what beginners like. (You can, of course, offer more shades of gray in the book, but not too much.)

<comment><USER4> _give them definitive statements_

Concise, confident: "This book focuses on the best testing tools and frameworks."

<comment><USER3> Much better. Use this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi,

I really love it and I'm very impressed. I'm actually just a high schooler and I was working a book for Java that I was planning on self-publishing as well. I was wondering if you could lend some insight into how you formatted your book (especially with the code)? Did you use any software or get it done by someone else? Or did you use any template that you recommend?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Sure I'm using leanpub.com for generating the ebooks; they have great tools and manuals for the markdown style they use.

The book itself is saved into a private GitHub repo; so I can keep tabs on all the changes. Formatting the code becomes a walk in the park thanks to leanpub.com

If you need more help, advice or any help at all feel free to email me at amacgregor [at] allanmacgregor.com

<comment><USER6> Good luck for the book (I will buy your book your book very soon) and thanks for the leanpub.com link :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on publishing your book! I did one back a few years ago, and I know it's a ton of work but really fun / gratifying :)

May I make a suggestion? In the early bird access, I would also include part of the get hands dirty. Knowing why I should do something isn't that valuable on its own - it's the stuff showing me how that's more valuable. So give me a taste, get me started and then wanting the rest so I know how to finish it!

The only downside is that it'll create demand but that will also create pressure on you to make the rest available soon, otherwise people may try to find how to finish elsewhere so when you release the rest some of the demand will have dissipated.

<comment><USER3> Yes, congrats! I wrote one too and it's a ton of work but fun to see what doors open up.

My book ended up having a short shelf life--hope this one has a longer one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks awesome. I just wanted to mention a couple stylistic things I noticed in the sample copy: subsubsection under Part 1 named "It;s all about communication" (the it;s), and the capitalization style for section titles is pretty inconsistent.

I don't know if you'll have an editor go through everything later on, but just wanted to mention a couple of the things from the early access sample :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, Thanks for the feedback.

I have a couple of people helping me out with the proofreading. I will make sure to double check that kind of formatting issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats on finishing your book! I know exactly how much work that can be.

I hate to be picky but I know I'd want someone to point these out in my work, so I'll hope you feel the same way. You have a few grammatical errors on your page:

"Building proper tests for a Magento extension can be difficult for seasoned veterans let's not say the junior developer just getting started with Magento."

You at least need a comma before "let's not say", but even then it still feels like a strange construction to me. Maybe "...veterans, not to say..."

"After all, you have written code like this a thousand times before; You know what you are doing right?"

Turn that semicolon into a period. I have a simple rule on when to use a semicolon:

        Should I use a semicolon?
        1. Nope.
        2. There is no second answer.

"And yet, how much time of your day to day do you spend tracking and fixing bugs?"

If you really want to use "day to day", hyphenate it. But I would simplify it to "how much of your day do you spend...".

"What if you could do something that gave you confidence, not only on the quality of the code that is being promoted, confidence that if and when, someone has to make changes to the code there are tests that can confirm that nothing has been broken and the application still performs as expected."

There's some dead weight here and the clauses sort of run on. How about:

"What if you could do something that gave you confidence — not only on the quality of the code, but confidence that when someone changes the code, there are tests that confirm nothing has broken."

When I write, I do (at least) three drafts:

1\. Get all the words down. Put all the clay on the table.

2\. Rearrange and control structure and pacing. Push the clay into the right shape.

3\. Edit every single sentence to tweak or remove words that don't add value. Trim the sculpture down to its final shape and texture.

My goal on the third draft isn't to strip it down to Hemingway. There's still room for character and charm to shine through. But it's to make sure that every ounce of prose adds _some_ value, be it information, clarity, cadence, or humor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I love this kind of feedback. I'll sit tonight and play around with the landing page.

A lot of the fun with this book has been finding a writing style that feels natural but is still clear enough; a bit difficult since I try to ramble.

Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good for you! Magento isn't in my wheelhouse, but I'd be interested in hearing how you've gone about marketing your book before release — building a mailing list, sharing articles to social media, guest blog posts, etc. Do you have anything you'd do differently if you were to write another book in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

This book is actually my second one the first one was: 'The Magento PHP Developer's Guide' which was in collaboration with PacktPub. During the process of writing and publishing the first book, I learned a lot of hard lessons.

The Magento TDD book is actually my attempt at doing things differently:

\- Building an email list \- A lot of twitter marketing

As well I'm currently working on getting some reviewer copies distributed to a few well-known blogs in the Magento community.

I plan to do a couple follow up posts with all the things I'm learning about marketing the book and the experience overall.

Reference: [https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/magento-php- develop...](https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/magento-php- developer%E2%80%99s-guide)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats

Couple of points - I had to dig back to your blog to find anything about you personally. It was odd to read about the book but not the author - <USER2> for something like this where personal expertise counts. I suggest a small about me section on the landing page.

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Will add one over the weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have you written at all about the tools you used to work on the book? I'd be interested for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would be more than happy to a post about my writing process if that's what you are referring to.

<comment><USER12> That would be excellent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats and Good luck.</comment>


Windows 8 for software developers: the Longhorn dream reborn? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/windows-8-for-software-developers-the-longhorn-dream-reborn.ars <comment><USER2> Some very interesting insights into the development history of Windows at Microsoft and the future architecture of Windows 8, particularly the new WinRT runtime.</comment>


Uber launches a shift-work finder app, Uber Works, starting in Chicago - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/uber-launches-a-shift-work-finder-app-uber-works-starting-in-chicago/ <comment><USER2> Uber may have caught the _Uber-itis_ trend themselves.

It's not necessarily the concepts are bad (I like being able to order rides on my phone, get food delivered, and ride e-bikes around the city), it's more the case of trying to be a jack of all trades without mastering one.

Uber is trying to fight too many battles on too many fronts in an effort to conquer territory while also needing to convince people to believe in them as a public company.</comment>


The Sordid Ways Death Penalty States Obtain Execution Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/the-sordid-ways-death-penalty-states-obtain-execution-drugs <comment><USER2> Should make a darknet site for united and nation states to order their drugs then</comment>


Pseudonymity as a Trivial Concession to Genius - <AUTHOR> https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4870 <comment><USER2> _In my view, for SSC to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss on the scale of, let's say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their collected works. That might sound like hyperbole, but_

You can stop right there.

I don't want to get into a prolonged litigation of the Slate Star Codex oeuvre. You can like it or loathe it. But at some point people on these threads need to speak up and say that this blogger is not in fact the second coming of John Stuart Mill --- or at least, that's not the _universally held opinion_ of people in tech. I know, he goes on to hedge his claim the same way. But let's retain candor. You can employ hyperbole if you feel it helps a valid argument, but it remains hyperbole.

<comment><USER3> I know this will go down like a lead balloon on HN but I've never seen anything as cringeworthy and pseudo-intellectual as this entire rationalist subculture, where weird obsessions with Bayesianism or other highly technical lingo is applied to all sorts of topics in ways that just make anyone else roll their eyes.

I think this also ties into this latest drama because apparently Scott seems himself like some medieval scholar being persecuted by the authorities if his name ever comes up, which is dramatic given that his pseudonym is his actual first and middle name which together with "psychiatrist ann arbor" gives you his actual name on a google search and a picture. Any of his patients who has ever googled his name knows who he is.

<comment><USER4> Also, it should go down. If you're going to call something vile, you should at least provide some argument to that effect.

Second, and not that it matters, but searching Scott's real name does not link him as the author of SSC, which is what Scott cares about.

Rationalists have written a lot about: \- making better arguments, and discursive standards \- holding truer beliefs no matter if it goes against your current beliefs or makes you appear "cringeworthy"or "pseudo- intellectual"

Maybe you really ought to check them out?

<comment><USER3> >but searching Scott's real name does not link him as the author of SSC, which is what Scott cares about.

tried it in an anonymous browsing session. Googling just his real name returns a link to the SSC twitter as the very first result, a rational wiki entry to scott alexander, and plenty of pictures at SSC meetups, so I have to assume any of his patients who ever Googled his name (which I guess is most people) probably know who he is

<comment><USER4> Good point, but only if you include the middle name (Alexander), and except for one of these links that is a bona fide doxing, most are matches for "Scott Alexander".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are enough comments in this thread discussing whether this guy has any real privacy (read: is pseudonymous) or not that I decided to see for myself.

After half an hour, I couldn't ferret out his last name no matter the search I tried, regardless of incognito mode, open session, etc. In fact, google kept trying to point me to some screenwriter, at least whenever I searched while logged in.

Admittedly, I don't remember ever reading his blog nor anything about him... But then again, that is probably true of most of his patients too, so my search results might be more representative of the results he cares about.

Now, something tells me that an NYT article would definitely bring his two personas closer together in anyone's search results. So, even assuming that my google-fu is weaker than I thought it was and it turns out that literally everyone (but me) can immediately know who he is, his fear still seems warranted to me.

<comment><USER2> I don't know what to tell you, since I had his real name on the simplest imaginable search, and other people have had his name autocomplete.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't surprise me, to be honest. From what I've seen in this thread, you seem to care more about this guy than I do, and google adapts results according to one's history and all the other data google collects.

As for our incognito results, mine aren't even in English, so that also factors in why they might be so different. Though I doubt this Scott Alexander person cares about someone who won't ever be his patient.

<comment><USER2> I think I care less than you do, since I spent less than 4 minutes, and you spent a whole half hour. I do care about bad arguments, though; very little Google skill is required to rebut them, though.

<comment><USER5> > I think I care less than you do, since I spent less than 4 minutes

You've been on this thread for hours and have been replying to almost everyone in it...

Anyhow, what was my bad argument? Wait, scratch that, what was my argument, period? I only mentioned what my results were and some stuff about google results that everyone already knows anyway. I certainly wasn't trying to share any particular view, idea or theory.

Wait, I also speculated on whether an article in one of the biggest news sites in the USA might impact the kind of results google shows about him, was that an incorrect assumption on my part?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Even though the article was going to be positive_

No. That's what the NYT _said_ it was going to be.

Despite Professor Aaronson's assurances of the writer's good character and pure intentions in this case, Scott Alexander - apart from his duty of care to his clients - is wise to not take that for granted considering his open-minded approach to various subjects which is liable by certain elements of the Ctrl- Left to warrant a cancel-attack.

<comment><USER7> _That 's what the NYT said it was going to be._

That's what Scott Alexander said the NYT writer said. Everything we know about this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it. You can give it as much credence as you like but it is, so far, one party's representation.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't make sense - the writer is hardly going to say its gonna be a hatchet job, and if he said it was going to be anything other than positive then Scott Alexander would have mentioned that as it would have made his caution all the more understandable.

There is no reason to disbelieve that the writer said it was going to be positive and that Professor Aaronson believed him from experience.

<comment><USER7> There is no reason to disbelieve the subjects of this potential story got the impression the story is going to be positive. This happens a lot and sometimes turns out to be inaccurate, it's at the center of lots of post-publication journalism kerfuffles. But we haven't seen the story. We haven't heard the journalist's description of any of these interactions. All we have are the impressions and recollections of one side.

<comment><USER8> It would be truly strange for the NYT to dox a pseudonymous blogger against their directly expressed wishes in a puff piece about that pseudonymous blogger. I believe that Scott Alexander believes that's what's was going to happen, but the motives just don't line up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe, the "Don't ever talk to the police" rule is also good for journalists. "Don't ever talk to journalists." Just like in real life, if you need to talk to the police, you hire a lawyer whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf, so if you need to talk to a journalist, you hire a publicist whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf.

This has to do with incentives. Police, no how nicely they talk to you, ultimately want to close the case. If they can do that by having you take the fall, they will do that. Journalists, no matter now nicely they talk to you, just want to create an article that will optimize for engagement from their readers. If they can do that by a misleading portrayal or something that otherwise harms your reputation or safety, they will do that. It is just business to them.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I think this is a good idea. If your blog/hobby/project is just a side- gig to your main employment, I'm not sure national media scrutiny is desirable. If you wanted to go full-time as a writer or pundit/speaker, perhaps like MMM or James Kunstler, and if you are media-savvy, then maybe it is worth playing the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> VERY highly voted and discussed topic earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416)

<comment><USER12> I wonder why it isn't anywhere to be found on the home page then.

<comment><USER13> Flamewar detector I think. IIRC HN posts are automatically down-ranked if the ratio of comments to upvotes gets above a certain threshold, because a large number of comments relative to upvotes frequently indicates that there's a flamewar going on in the comments section.

<comment><USER14> > Flamewar detector I think.

I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments than upvotes, which isn't true for this article. Judging by the drops ([http://hnrankings.info/23610416/](http://hnrankings.info/23610416/)) I wonder if the site might be penalized in some way, so that it decays faster than one would expect. Or perhaps an editorial penalty added specifically for this story, to kick it out of the top spot to make room for a more technical article.

<comment><USER15> > I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments > than upvotes

I guess that might explain why someone who really dislikes SSC might add a lot of short, repetitive comments in this thread :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm struck by this in TFA:

> In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona > and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire > world's goodwill not to breach that firewall.

And it obviously _did_ matter to him, because he took his blog down over the coming NYT article.

So what I wonder is why he didn't erect a far more effective firewall, one that didn't rely on goodwill. If he was writing pseudonymously, I don't get how his blog's credibility would rely on his true identity. But perhaps it did, in a subtle way.

<comment><USER2> I don't believe it's reasonable to claim that any "firewall" existed. There are very basic things you can do to protect your identity, especially if you blogged at length and with a fair amount of notoriety under your real name, that Scott Alexander didn't do. I'm genuinely confused as to how he could in good faith claim his identity to have been a secret.

You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how it works.

<comment><USER17> >You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how it works.

would you say the same of kendric lamar or mf doom? both fail the google test and yet the nytimes respected their pseudonyms.

<comment><USER18> Uhh, kinda off topic but you've got a great username and you mentioned two of my favorite artists to make a point. Feel free to email me if you wanna be friends. :3

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "In his takedown notice, Scott writes that it's considered vitally important in psychiatry for patients to know almost nothing about their doctors, beyond their names and their areas of expertise."

I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within _psychotherapy_ (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over.

Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore.

But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a _psychiatrist_ in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first- line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management".

None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now.

<comment><USER20> > I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", > because this reason is bunk

It's bunk to call Scott's concerns bunk. You may think that he ought to self- disclose, but that's simply not his call: he has a job as a psychiatrist and has to stick to what his employers require of him if he wants to keep working in the field, and support his patients.

<comment><USER19> I didn't say he ought to; I said that if he were to self-disclose, there'd be little damage that could occur to his effectiveness as a clinician, contrary to what he claimed.

Further, to cite that as his _first_ reason for wanting to remain pseudonymous is odd, because it's flimsy for the reasons I cited. His second reason (that he's gotten death threats) is much more compelling, and to me is all he needs to make a good argument here. Why sully it with things like this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe this is what MacArthur should give to geniuses instead of cash.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm sorry, but if I may be frank, I feel ascriptions like "genius" to be massively overblown in this context, masturbatory, and nothing more than the signal of how inflated egos may become once they gain modest degrees of influence.

Is it possible epoch defining ideas are lying around on a blog somewhere, sure, but it's highly unlikely. In order to become an intellectual legend, you need to have ideas with _reach_ stoking the ire of a few thousand redditors and having even a few million views on posts in 2020 is not a significant amount of reach to shape zeitgeists. Yes, sad but true, those who are going through the traditional channels and publishing institutions still have the most impact on the world (it's easy to feel like your contributions and small internet following is a more significant player in shaping the future than it really is). While it's quite possible/likely the ideas on this blog _will_ be immensely important and thoroughly studied _in a field of specialization_ , I will wager they will have no effect on the overall social field. I'd argue pseudonymity is actually harmful in a community of specialists, since it blocks the proper exchange and verification of results and creates opportunity for plagarization.

There is a distinction between internet/niche community "cancellation" and "cancellation" in the real world. In my personal estimation, everyone's fear of "cancel culture" is grossly exaggerated when it comes to the way it operates in the real world. Typically, most of the notable "cancel" incidents are not the result of some "leftists" ruining someone's career over indelicate statements, they stem rather from direct allegations of criminal behavior; sexual assault, abuse of power for personal gain, clear-cut hate crimes, etc. Sure, there may be small communities more susceptible to flimsy, purely speech-based "cancellations" but that is a failure of the community in question to uphold ideals of open discussion (assuming the speech isn't in fact harmful); if you think "cancel culture" is an unstoppable global phenomenon that can ruin anyone's life in a moment's notice you only need look at the current US president to assure yourself otherwise.

Finally, I'd like to say that the vast majority of people that continue to cling to some antiquated enlightenment ideal of reason, in which reason is some pure, untrammeled, untainted instrument that will unite us all and lead us to the promised land, only prove themselves ignorant of all of post-WWII philosophy. WWII blew gaping holes in the entire enlightenment enterprise and philosophers from all sides (even legendary logicians such as Quine, Russell, and Wittgenstein) all make some fundamental appeal to relativity in their work, and clearly state there are problems that logical reasoning (by extension strictly economic/utilitarian reasoning, by extension purely technological reasoning) cannot solve (or in the case of Wittgenstein, cannot even express).

Many people have switched to using so-called "reason" as a defense mechanism for promulgating ideas they know would bring them flak were it not for the guise of "objectivity" or the shield of (usually suspect) statistics (another thing philsopshers have throughly dismantled, by the way, as early as the 1800s with Neitzsche and more recently in the philosophy of science).

<comment><USER23> The tiny number of people who read The End of History seems unimportant compared to the founding of neoconservativism causing the US to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Though the impact of neoreaction is probably smaller (that is, it hasn't literally killed 500,000 people), I don't think you could get a good estimate of that impact by finding out how many people read the blog that founded the ideology.

Maybe the tech workers you read who are afraid of being cancelled are afraid of being cancelled because tech companies have shown they are totally willing to end people's careers over fairly mundane speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's confusing about all this is that Scott Alexander [redacted, see 0] doesn't seem to be in _any_ way "pseudonymous." A non-profiled Google search autocompletes this, and then links to numerous fan-driven Reddit threads including talk about podcasts and authors.[1]

Given that his name was already out there to the point where it's trivially discoverable, did he even _have_ pseudonymous status to begin with? I still have to work to recover Dril's name, and I confess I never heard Infosec Taylor Swift's name. But I actually had this name in the back of my head for years now. If an NYT reported had asked me to name him, I probably could have in a heartbeat.

A lot is being said about the transgression of the press here, but if you've got a fan-run reddit where they're using your full name publicly, maybe it's somewhat futile to delete your blog and blame the NYT no matter how much your purported genius entitles you.

I am definitely one of those spooky antifa types that folks here label with derision as the "ctrl-left". If anyone wanted to somehow threaten his safety, they're a google search away. That places him closer to discoverability for most folks than any NYT article which will squat behind a paywall.

Far more likely is that few have bothered Scott or substantially transgressed his safety because he's actually a very small niche blogger with a loyal but admittedly small fan community.

I admit I'm a famously uncharitable audience for bloggers, but I'm much more inclined to think that this entire series of events is either a fit of pique that blew up in Scott's face, or a deliberate attempt to create a controversy to gain publicity.

[0]: I've been informed that as there is a central controversy over if this man is in fact anonymous, the mods are going to err on the side of caution, and so I've re-presented this post with the item redacted even though it turns out all it took to find the name was to let google autocomplete the name, populated from content 7 years old.

[1]: I've screenshotted what _I_ see when I use an incog to search for him on this tweet: [redacted], it turns out even THIS is too much of a concession to reality. My twitter account has the screenshot if you'd like to see it. But it consists of typing "scott alexander"

<comment><USER25> Yeah, it's too cute by half to pretend you're working to respect his pseudonymity and then link a tweet you sent out with his real name attached.

That's also clearly not a clean incognito search, as it has your previous search with his name included.

<comment><USER24> Uh, I regret to inform you that I found the name from the autocomplete and then hit tab. It was not on the tip of my tongue and you can easily reproduce the experiment if you don't believe me.

<comment><USER25> My reproduced experiment:

[https://imgur.com/a/Ppj57cP](https://imgur.com/a/Ppj57cP)

Note that there's no reference to his real name.

The only reference to his real name in your screenshot is the first entry, which is purple and removable because it is coming from your browser's session identity history. If this was in fact in an incognito tab, it's likely you had one or more incognito windows simultaneously open somewhere else where you had searched for him, which carried over into your new tab.

<comment><USER26> [https://imgur.com/a/NwwBiIo](https://imgur.com/a/NwwBiIo)

I did this on a computer I don't usually use in an incognito tab.

<comment><USER25> Interesting. I suspect that the different results Google gives different people (even in incognito mode) are driving a lot of the divergence and even rancor between the two points of view.

<comment><USER24> I have no privileged information except one: my father dropped by and I could reproduce the last name appearing on his non-incognito account.

He is not "the target audience" for this sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >In a year of historic ironies, here's another one: that it was the decent, reasonable, and well-meaning Cade Metz, rather than any of the SneerClubbers

Okay so what's with the obsession with a niche subreddit whose sole purpose is to dunk on rationalists/SSCers who talk too often about the IQ of black people. I mean it's not like Aaronson is himself an HBD blogger. I kind of like Aaronson but his online anxiety is really getting the better of his judgement.

<comment><USER28> To treat this in good faith, I point to here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip- culture-war-thread/)

"A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers." That is SneerClub.

"Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.

Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.

One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.

... I had a nervous breakdown. It wasn't even that bad a nervous breakdown. I was able to keep working through it. I just sort of broke off all human contact for a couple of weeks and stayed in my room freaking out instead.

... The first few [subreddit mods] I approached were positive; some had similar experiences to mine; one admitted that even though he personally was not involved with the CW thread and only dealt with other parts of the subreddit, he taught at a college and felt like his job would not be safe so long as the subreddit and CW thread were affiliated. Apparently the problem was bigger than just me, and other people had been dealing with it in silence."

<comment><USER2> It is odd seeing someone who blogged under their real name, who released one of their best-known pieces of public writing under their real name, talk as if their real name was somehow discovered through sleuthing. I want to be careful how I respond to this but, let's just say, the amount of Google elaboration required to penetrate the veil of protective secrecy this person has created for themselves is not... uh... significant.

<comment><USER15> You're looking at the wrong side of the veil. Yes, it's trivial to find his real name if you know of his blog, but it's not easy to find his blog by searching his real name.

<comment><USER2> No, it's straightforwardly evident from a search of his real name. And, again: one of his best-known standalone pieces was originally published under that name.

<comment><USER29> What piece was that? Just curious as I have no idea.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure which one tptacek was thinking of, but [https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/efficient- charity...](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/efficient-charity-do- unto-others/) (a cross-post, which now says "Scott Alexander") comes to mind for me.

<comment><USER2> Not that one. I'm uncomfortable sharing, though honestly I would have a hard time articulating why, since my whole point is: this guy's identity is not a secret.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Man beats murder rap because DNA expert illegally testified via Skype - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/man-beats-murder-rap-because-dna-expert-illegally-testified-via-skype/ <comment><USER2> He didn't "beat the rap" (yet); he's being retried. It's just that the original conviction was vacated.</comment>


Show HN: Siftrss – Apply simple filters to your RSS feeds - <AUTHOR> https://siftrss.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, everybody!

I threw together siftrss over the last week to scratch my own itch. My girlfriend works in a specialized field for which there are seldom job opportunities. I monitor RSS feeds for her, but many don't let me restrict the results by location, so I would have to manually weed out the _vast_ majority of them, hoping for something in the area. Now I just have siftrss do it for me. I'd be delighted if someone else got some use out of it as well.

Someday I'd like to get around to implementing some more complex filters with logical operators, but for the time being it's covering 100% of my use cases. Let me know what you think!</comment>