Sprint to offer unlimited data on iPhone 5? - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-09/sprint-is-said-to-plan-unlimited-data-with-iphone-5-to-stand-out-from-pack.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Love this comment: The plans may draw other customers because "people don't like bill shock," he said. "Consumers will pay a premium for unlimited."

So true. People will pay a premium to know that that is all they will ever pay.</comment>


Microkernels in a Bit More Depth (2007) [pdf] - vezzy-fnord https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9242/07/lectures/04-uk.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> My experience with a microkernel (the Apple Newton, which took a lot of inspiration from Mach) was that

\- IPC was pretty slow. We could have improved it, but probably not halved the cycle count. Even with a custom MMU that reduced the amount of MMU frobbing we had to do on a task switch, things weren't totally wonderful.

\- Some devices just couldn't go to a process. Well, most of them, really: Inking, modem character traffic and storage needed optimizations to avoid process switches. (The "device driver is just a user process that interrupts defer to" model was used in Windows CE, and the resulting performance was _horrible_ , by the way).

I'm sure that better people have designed better microkernel-based systems (Microsoft has done some interesting stuff here in the last 10 years or so), but it's still kind of crazy to do several context switches just to handle a device interrupt.

<comment><USER2> As far as I know, the state of the art in efficient microkernels is the L4 family: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family) and you can find some real meat about how they've been so successful in this paper: [http://www.nicta.com.au/publications/research- publications/?...](http://www.nicta.com.au/publications/research- publications/?term=l4&term_field=title&pageno=3&pid=6930)

One big thing: seL4 has been formally proven, down to the binary gcc emits for it.

Ah, I see these slides, as I'd expect from an Australian source, start taking about L4 on slide #44.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The line of research that led to L4-based security like this:

[http://genode-labs.com/publications/mikro-sina-2005.pdf](http://genode- labs.com/publications/mikro-sina-2005.pdf)

And capability-based security w/ persistence like this:

[http://www.eros-os.org/papers/IEEE-Software-Jan-2002.pdf](http://www.eros- os.org/papers/IEEE-Software-Jan-2002.pdf)

State-of-the-art are projects such as CHERI and SAFE processors that use tags to enforce fine-grained, efficient protection at hardware level. CHERI's path included legacy compatibility with FreeBSD software (CheriBSD) building on capability model like EROS did. SAFE essentially types memory with functional programming and verification. Personally, I thought they should've just ported Oberon to it for something immediately usable. One thing about SAFE, along with predecessor TIARA, is they go for "zero-kernel" OS where everything is deprivileged where possible with hardware enforcement and elimination of context switches.

However, I think their program transformation or microkernels with capabilities are best we can do for traditional architectures (esp x86) with kernel/user mode protections. Hypervisor layer adds additional possibilities but it's still simple, powerful things looking after complicated, weak things. Same stuff with new abstraction and efficiency opportunities. Clean-slate is best investment, though, so we should keep putting money into and building on architectures such as CHERI and SAFE.</comment>


Finland Has Second Thoughts About Giving Free Money to Jobless People - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/business/finland-universal-basic-income.html# <comment><USER2> According to at least one researcher involved with the project, this is basically what was expected all along. It was planned to be a one year trial, and now the year is up and they'll analyze the results before deciding what to do next.

Source: [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/finland-universal-basic- incom...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/finland-universal-basic-income- results-trial-cancelled)

<comment><USER3> I believe it was supposed to run for two years. They ended it a year early. (First source that pops up: [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/03/finland- experiments-universa...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/03/finland-experiments- universal-basic-income.html))

<comment><USER2> You're right that it was originally a two year plan, but they aren't terminating it a year early. It will still run for the full two years. As your link mentions, it launched at the beginning of 2017, and the Wired article mentions, it will run until the end of 2018.

What's happened recently is that they declined to extend it _past_ two years.

<comment><USER3> No, they explicitly made this a conditional handout this year, which is very much a termination of the original plan. UBI researchers have generally considered this a failure already (not to mention that many economists think UBI cannot work, anyway).

"Finland has actually reversed course on that front this year, adopting rules that threaten to cut benefits for jobless people unless they actively look for work or engage in job training."

<comment><USER2> The best I can tell, the part of the article you've quoted is a reference to Finland's welfare policy in general, not this experiment. Note that it follows "a reflection of public discomfort with the idea of dispensing government largess free of requirements that its recipients seek work". Just bad writing, I think. But I can't find any other sources that back up the idea that they're changing this project mid flight, which would be a really bizarre thing to do, since it would completely invalidate any possible results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another poorly researched article about this experiment. This has been a very limited experiment for only 2000 randomly selected participants (unemployed with certain restrictions). It has beem time-limited from the beginning. More critical observers have always said it is too small and too limited to produce useful data. Some claim it was designed to fail by the governmennt. But the international press has overhyped it with Finland giving away free money.

Now nothing has really changed and no decisions were taken. No reports have been published and this had not been intended before the end of the trial.

The so-called news is that the trial is not extended. But that's really a lack of news, an extension had never been planned.

(I live in Finland)

</comment><comment><USER5> Past discussions on the topic on HN within the past week or so:

\- 7 days ago, 169 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874921)

\- 2 days ago, 36 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16910856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16910856)

\- 2 days ago, 45 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16909881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16909881)

\- 2 days ago, 27 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912072)

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought the point of universal income was that everyone gets it regardless of their employment.

Finland just gave the money to unemployed people, so it just became an unemployment benefit.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's partly true (although recipients don't appear to lose the benefit if they become employed), but what they're studying is a specific question, which is how giving unemployed people an unconditional stipend affects their future employment. They're not trying to study broader aspects of UBI, and I'd argue that if they wanted to do so, making the experiment much longer term would be more important than applying it to more people.

<comment><USER7> They should also measure their health and happiness. Employment isn't the full Picture.

<comment><USER2> Sure, a study should measure that. But not every study has to measure every variable.

<comment><USER8> This study should have, since those are key metrics for UBI in a projected robotics-era of job scarcity.

Since it didn't measure them it is pointless classifying it as a test of UBI.

<comment><USER2> No, it's not pointless. It just studies one aspect of the problem. Yes, this is insufficient on its own, but more studies can be done, which can be designed particularly to examine the other questions that need to be answered.

A test for lead is usefully classified as a water quality test, even though you need to test for other compounds as well before you know if the water is safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quoted from: [http://www.kela.fi/web/en/news- archive/-/asset_publisher/lN0...](http://www.kela.fi/web/en/news- archive/-/asset_publisher/lN08GY2nIrZo/content/contrary-to-reports-the-basic- income-experiment-in-finland-will-continue-until-the-end-of-2018)

Many international media-outlets have published stories alleging that Finland is going to discontinue its basic income experiment. This information is incorrect.

"The experiment is proceeding according to plan and will continue until the end of 2018", says Professor Olli Kangas, the leader of the research team at Kela (Social Insurance Institution of Finland).

</comment><comment><USER10> If the goal was to head off job losses from automation, then the work requirement should have been in place, but it should have somehow scaled up and down proportionally with the number of unfilled jobs in the country.

</comment><comment><USER11> The idea that everybody must work and people that don't are a kind of evil, that everybody must sacrifice something (even when nobody actually needs it) to justify their fundamental needs being fulfilled (even if it doesn't actually cost anything) is itself a fundamental evil. The real virtue of economic development is setting everybody free.

<comment><USER12> I probably have an unpopular view on this, but this isn't the point for me. I don't think people are evil for not working. In fact, if I could manage it, I'd skip it myself. Working is hard work, and I'd prefer to do less of it. The problem I have is that, in order to have productive output to give away, _somebody_ has to work to produce it. If that somebody is me, and I'm producing enough for myself and another person+, then that means I have to work that much more to fund it. It chafes me to realize that I'm missing time with my family and friends in order to work for output that I don't even need.

I'm not an absolutist about it, and I'm happy to help people who need the help. However, I think it's reasonable to expect people who are able to pull their own weight.

\+ just for the sake of simplicity, hopefully in a real system the fraction I'm supporting is less than one

Edit: Formatting

<comment><USER11> I get your point but AFAIK there actually are many people annoyed by the mere idea that some people wouldn't work and would just enjoy their free time while they work, but as for me if I were producing (voluntarily and without working too hard preferably) a lot more productive output than I need myself I would absolutely not mind if the rest was distributed among other people and I would not care whether they work or not. I would actually be more happy to know that the people my work feeds just attend a university, do art or just have fun rather tan that they spend their lives on a chair in a government-funded office doing some useless paperwork to justify getting what they get.

As far as I understand modern production technologies may need rather humble number of humans to produce amounts of goods enough for much much much more people so the situation when one man work yields enough to feed a thousand is not a fantasy. I actually doubt many people that actually do useful productive work do just the amount to feed themselves even if they are paid just the amount.

And there also is a huge number of obstacles that can prevent people from doing what they are good at or anything useful at all. In many countries and in many areas people still have to compete to get a job even if they are willing to work. A coder can be denied a job for not smiling enough, being bad at solving puzzles or having a degree less fancy than another applicant has. Will to do a job and will (and capability) to compete are very different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this about landlords getting state money for no work?

<comment><USER14> If they are making money and paying taxes, then, net, they aren't getting state money for no work.

<comment><USER13> they are getting wealth creator's money and they are doing nothing for it as they are rentiers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What a loaded headline. Get it together, NYT.

</comment><comment><USER16> "In much of the world, the concept of basic income retains appeal as a potential way to more justly spread the bounty of global capitalism while cushioning workers against the threat of robots and artificial intelligence taking their jobs." So, this is a funny way to acknowledge that global capitalism is really that good. Not only can it provide "bounty," but other, non-capitalist systems may be propped up by its success. It seems ironic that "justly spread" and "global capitalism" are in the same sentence, and not being contrasted.</comment>


First Self-Propelled Endoscopy Device 'Swims' Digestive Tract in Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-06/worlds-first-self-propelled-endoscopy-device-swims-entire-digestive-tract-mere-hours

<comment><USER2> "Probing colons has never been so much fun." -- science writing line of the week.</comment>


Probably the best Film with real Hacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.sebastian.korotkiewicz.eu/2014/10/12/probably-the-best-film-with-real-hacks/

<comment><USER2> IPv4 addresses that could go way higher than 255 per segment. Yeah, real hacks.</comment>


Gameloft says it, others reining in Android plans - <AUTHOR> http://us.mobile.reuters.com/m/FullArticle/p.rdt/CTECH/ntechnologyNews_uUSTRE5AJ1EU20091120

<comment><USER2> Gameloft never really had any Android plans to start with - all their 'Android' games are direct ports of existing J2ME games, sometimes even with soft buttons.

In the Market, Gameloft games rate between 3.5 to 4 stars constantly, which is nowhere near the ratings that native professionally developed games get - compare these scores with with Glu Mobile or Hexage who are constantly 4.5 or 5 stars.

</comment><comment><USER3> Extremely similar story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=953404></comment>


Water Type by Mr.doob - <AUTHOR> http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/water/02/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a description how it was done:

<http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/695></comment>


San Diego Web Designer - <AUTHOR> http://osrc.dfm.io/netconstructor Christian Hochfilzer is the Co-Founder and Director of UX Design & Strategy at NetConstructor.com, a San Diego based company composed of a tightly-knit group of talented and experienced professionals in the realm of online web development and marketing.<p>At the heart of NetConstructor is the simple belief that results speak for themselves. We understand that regardless of how aesthetically pleasing an advertisement or website may be, or how much theoretical sense the technique makes, unless the campaign produces the desired results, it has failed. <comment><AUTHOR> Portfolio URL: [http://talent.adweek.com/netconstructor](http://talent.adweek.com/netconstructor)</comment>


Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146752-we-seem-to-be-getting-stupider-and-population-ageing-may-be-why/ <comment><USER2> Some of the decrease may be due to increased obesity and reduced cardiovascular fitness. Those factors are known to reduce cognitive ability. They're also correlated with age, although lately even young people have been getting worse on average.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it. Why is population ageing affecting Flynn effect? Don't they test each new generation at same time? Or is this longitudinal study of a single generation (which is weird, since we can't measure IQ correctly at later ages).

Alternative hypothesis. Presence of computers/phones reduces need for working memory, so it doesn't get exercised and leads to decline of it.

<comment><USER4> Each generation is not a 1:1 descendant of the previous generation. Which individuals of the current generation that have children determines the attributes of the next generation. Now for 100 points guess which people (and what attributes they share) have been biggest contributors to the next generation.

<comment><USER5> I suppose I'll be the one to post the canonical recap of this concept:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E)

<comment><USER4> There is a reason Idiocracy has been described as a documentary :)

<comment><USER6> ...because the people describing it that way are ironically ignorant of world statistics?

[https://www.gapminder.org/](https://www.gapminder.org/)

<comment><USER3> I'm very wary of statistics. As the saying goes, there is lies, dirty lies and then there is statistic.

A typical example is GDP is going in country X, which means X is doing better!!!

Except mean salary is going down, which is a typical for a rich get richer, poor get poorer scenario.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's true, data is sometimes misleading, mis-reported, or manipulated. It really is much better to just stick to what we believe in our guts to be true.

Belief in the face of evidence to the contrary has been accomplishing great things all over the world lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like with just a bit more effort the authors could have made a stronger case for their theory that aging is significantly impacting IQ scores by comparing IQ scores among people of the same age (e.g. 20-30 year olds) from decade to decade. They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan; there must be some within-subject data available where the same people took an IQ test when they were <30 then again when >60.

<comment><USER8> > They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan

It doesn't because it's a bell curve. You literally can't figure out your score until you already know the distribution.

<comment><USER7> Nonsense. If I administer an IQ test to 1000 people in their 20s, and then retested them in their 60s, I'd be performing a classic within-subject test, where I could easily assess whether test performance increases, decreases, or doesn't significantly change.

<comment><USER8> My point was that let's say all 1,000 people in their 20s got every question correct, and then you retested them in their 60s and they all got every question wrong. Assuming the sample was representative of the overall population, the group's average IQ would have remained constant at 100.

<comment><USER9> That's not quite accurate. The score adjustments are periodic, not constant. The 100 average is from some years ago, and will be adjusted some time in the future. It is not constantly changing to reflect current scores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> OECD 2016

"Young people in England are the most illiterate in the developed world with many students graduating with only a basic grasp of English and maths, an in- depth analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has found. The OECD report rated English teenagers aged 16 to 19 the worst of 23 developed nations in literacy and 22nd of 23 in numeracy.

In contrast, pensioners or those close to retirement were among the highest- ranked of their age group."

<comment><USER11> But most people back then didn't go to university. And the OECD compares across 23 developed nations.

Though, in my _opinion_ , education quality _has_ gone down.

In France, 2010ish?, in my last year of high school (in one of the best parisian high school) there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without stumbling. I don't know if this would have happened in the past. But back then only 20k students reached that stage and now it's 200k.

edit: stumbling/stuttering

<comment><USER12> >Though, in my opinion, education quality has gone down.

What would you think if I told you I graduated in the 1990s and I felt the same way? Where would that put you?

>there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without stumbling.

There could be other reasons for that, like fear of public speaking.

<comment><USER11> Maybe you were in a pessimistic period in your life and I am the same way now.

He didn't fear much. He was a bully.

<comment><USER12> Honestly I never bought into the stories that the current generation is full of dummies. It's mostly news hype made to make you feel superior about yourself. Those stories are amping up here in the US about Millenials. It's all BS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't access the original study (sci-hub too slow), which countries are affected by the effect and which aren't?

It would be interesting if China, Japan, Korea aren't affected while Western countries are.

<comment><USER14> Maybe I'm being really naive here but (other than all being Asian countries) what attributes do China, Japan, and Korea all share that Western countries don't?

<comment><USER15> Let me take a guess. Comparatively low immigration rate. Hardly accept any refugees (28 individuals accepted by Japan in 2016). Be able to support yourself or be (quite literally) kicked out. High barriers to citizenship.

<comment><USER16> Are you serious?

Let me ask you how many of immigrants are grad students or prople with high tech jobs?

Is it one of the stupidest thing to say drop in IQ is connected to immigrants!

It is greatly disappointing to see this kind of nonsense in HN which is kind of home for many hackers and programmers. Hearing these kind of stupid ideas in C-Span? Who cares? But HN, that shows how low our societies has become.

<comment><USER17> What percentage of immigrants are grad students or people with high tech jobs. I don't know, and I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER15> There are statistics on education level. For example "Share of the population aged 25-64, by educational attainment level, by place of birth and by sex, EU-28, 2016". [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/File:Share_of_the_population_aged_25-64,_by_educational_attainment_level,_by_place_of_birth_and_by_sex,_EU-28,_2016_\(%25\)_MI17.png).

Now let's say that you make it difficult (either deliberately or due to language barriers) for individuals in the left-most part of that graph to stay. What happens long term? I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The premise of this article is flawed (to put it kindly). Surely no rigorous statistical study would fail to take age into account. So why is it even an issue (beyond a measuring technicality) being raised in a 'science' journal? I think it is clear that as a society we don't want science to be undertaken in this area and so consequently we end up with obscurantism (willingly or unwillingly). Or maybe we have already become to stupid to engage in science?

</comment><comment><USER19> Well... So what? As long as people are happy, literate and nice to one another I think fluctuations in IQ are not a huge problem in themselves. It's only a problem if you think democracy the system can't be improved upon, because you have to improve people to improve the output of democracies.

I've seen some things mentioned here that utterly baffle me, and confirm my bias that IQ is good for understanding but has little relation to wisdom or 'overstanding'.

I am very worried about what will happen if we start doing rash things like mass removal of autistic embryos from the gene pool. I've seen it suggested too often, compared to the amount of people I imagine are actually deeply informed enough about both to speak on such things. It's strange to me that such an idea is not automatically considered risky, or obviously married with unintended consequences.

On the surface of it, you might increase the median IQ by a few points. But you'd also miss out on the next Newton, Turing, Einstein, Kant, Cavendish, etc etc (I've plenty of other speculatives). There's no free lunch. Shaking the Tree of Life and hoping something tasty falls out sounds very unwise to me. As far as I'm concerned the major problem for humans is not their absolute IQ levels - it's arrogance relative to engineering capabilities.

Lastly: if we ever make it through climate change and out the other side with powerful AGI, I guess high IQ won't be as central compared to EQ or creativity, except as something that roughly correlates with both.

Edited for clarity.

</comment><comment><USER20> Pedantic, but average IQ scores have stayed the same over the years, exactly 100.

<comment><USER21> This is always the case after they adjust the test. But the averages of generations can differ over time if they use the same test/sans adjustment.

But there is a much stronger way to believe IQ is not the same over time : intelligence is not normally distributed, _at all_. It really is meaningless to try to measure intelligence samples and call them independent and identically distributed random variables, whether the 'population' is an individual at one snapshot or over time, or an individual in a group (whether over time or not).

Intelligence is probably better measured by a power-law distribution than the normal distribution, whose key property is that it is the probability distribution that maximizes entropy/minimizes information. So maybe there would be a larger discrepancy (relative entropy aka Kullback-Leibler divergence) in measuring IQ as a normal distribution over time than expected (maybe that's the whole reason for the Flynn effect and the author writing this article..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about the Flynn effect?

Could it be this:

[http://www.advancedsciencenews.com/co2-on-the-brain-and- the-...](http://www.advancedsciencenews.com/co2-on-the-brain-and-the-brain-on- co2/)

[https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels- dire...](https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly- affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941/amp/)

<comment><USER23> Stopped somewhere around 2000.

</comment></comment><comment> iam-TJ Being a long-suffering thoughtful inquisitive type that can turn their hand to anything I have spent many hours pondering why it seems that most people around me show traits of 'stupidity'.

I've come to the conclusion 'stupidity' is not the issue; 'unthinking' is, and the specific sub-type is 'unable to apply logical analytical thinking'.

I have a relation who, when challenged that the way they're doing some task is the opposite of optimal, responds along the lines "I thought ...". In this case it is a sure sign that no logical analytical thinking took place.

Maybe the crux of the issue is that in general our societies have become so complex and fast-moving that technology, standard procedures (best practice), and fundamental measures of performance are changing so rapidly that very few individuals have the mental energy to keep up throughout their lifetime.

Some I'm sure have become tired of it and given up thinking altogether.

I would suspect many HN readers may have experienced this in their own highly technical fields alone.

For the general population who aren't - or don't want to be - interested in the world in general it's easy to deliberately avoid learning simple tasks and instead 'leave it to an expert' and continue in ignorance, or to expect someone else to have done it for 'convenience', or not want to attempt it because of the dangers due to 'health and safety'.

Here in the UK at least there's a very simple example of the culture behind this: the electric plugs on AC mains-powered equipment.

In the 1970s when a new item of white-goods for the kitchen arrived it was unlikely to have a plug fitted to the cable although some equipment came with a plug - you fitted it yourself and were expected to have the basic knowledge required to unscrew, strip the insulation from the cores, attach wires to poles, screw-down, insert fuse of specified rating, and screw back together. It often had a piece of card slid over the prongs with a diagram to help.

In the 1980s the cable almost always arrived with the cores cut to length and stripped and if you were buying a premium item the plug fitted by the supplier.

By the 2000s the plug was always fitted and more often than not it was molded onto the cable; and yet some of these still have the wiring diagram card attached. The plugs mostly no longer required the 'lid' removing to get to and replace the fuse - there is a captive sliding carrier that pops out when pried with a flat-blade screwdriver.

By the late 2000s the three metal prongs (earth longest, live and neutral slightly shorter) were encased in a plastic sheath which you have to remember to remove or else it won't fit into the wall socket.

Now, all of these incremental creeping changes can be seen as product improvements to provide greater convenience.

But the result is we now have several generations that have no idea about even the basics of the second most important technology in their lives: electricity (after water and food). They need an 'expert' to do it for them.

Ditto for basic plumbing skills, routine car maintenance, and more and more I notice even preparing basic meals, cooking and baking from raw unprocessed ingredients.

Oh, and a humorous anecdote on the subject of food: about 15 years ago a 17 year-old friend of mine was visiting for a week and I asked if she would like fish and chips (fried potatoes to the North Americans!). I grew up on a farm and so fetched the 25kg bag and selected some potatoes ready for peeling and chipping.

This 17 year old (who ate chips from chip-shops frequently) had no idea that to make chips required peeling and slicing raw potatoes and was incredulous at the process; she 'thought' chips just grew as long square pieces of potato - see: "unthinking".

I was left speechless that something that I considered so obvious and fundamental had escaped her for 17 years!

Multiply these examples up for every major and minor aspect of coping in a modern technology-based society and the result is the appearance of 'stupidity'.

<comment><USER24> I shudder to think what happens in 20 more years, when the last potato peelers are gone :-/ The movie "Idiocracy" inevitably comes to mind [1] :(

However I do think it's something more than just the burden or unburden of our new technology. Logical thinking should be an universal trait, no matter what the environment is like.

However one thing which is eating into that equation, is logical thinking is almost never promoted in modern education. Even in a declining IQ environment, promoting and teaching logical thinking would reverse a lot of the seeming "stupidity" in our society.

But I still do think there is something more going on. It's not just (lack of) education.

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

<comment> iam-TJ Agreed; there are many facets colluding.

I believe others of significance may be the exhaustion and stress many feel at the pace of life and coping with it.

On the educational side I think it very much depends on what culture, which country, which region, which politics, which teacher and even who your contemporaries are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is _highly_ hereditary, as research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming, and people with lower IQs tend to have more children.

<comment><USER20> And connecting the two dots too loudly makes you into a monster.

<comment><USER26> Well drawing strict conclusions in a field that's still highly debated by researchers does, yes.

<comment><USER27> psychometricians largely aren't debating the existence of intelligence, its variability, or the fact that it is heritable.

<comment><USER28> Actually...

[http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence- testing.aspx](http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-testing.aspx)

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are- funda...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are- fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a- fallacy-study-8425911.html)

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq- test...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-test- controversies-persist/)

If intelligence were simple we'd know how to test for it. It isn't, and we don't. Not reliably, and certainly not in ways that are absolutely independent of culture and background.

The UK used to have a concept called "mental agility", which seems to be closer to the abilities measured by IQ than the much more complex quality psychologists call general intelligence.

You can have exceptional mental agility - the ability to remember and manipulate symbols and parse symbolic relationships quickly - and still be an utter idiot when it comes to dealing with some or all of reality.

A high IQ will not protect you from ideological beliefs, especially if you grow up with no exposure to other viewpoints, from a lack of mental openness (not to be confused with a lack of curiosity), from "moral" perspectives that are self-reinforcing prejudices, from poor socialisation, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ageing? How about tech dumbing us down?

<comment><USER30> Is "Is Google Making Us Stupid" making us stupid?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It doesn't take much to bring eugenics supporters out of the woodworks these days does it.

<comment><USER32> Yep. Whole lotta people not knowing just how many shoulders they are standing on.

A while back someone asked Warren Buffet what he would be under more primitive circumstances. Buffet's reply was... "lion food".

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like to play a little game I call "HN matter anti-matter" where I notice contradicting articles posted on HN and imagine them colliding and erasing each other...

In this case: Yes, We Get Wiser with Age (nautil.us) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346635)

<comment><USER34> I think being wise and being intelligent are different qualities. You might solve a puzzle in shorter time if you're intelligent, or remember more things. But if you're wise you will spend your energy to solve the right puzzle and remember the right things.

<comment><USER35> How do we measure wisdom? Is there a "WQ test"?

<comment><USER36> There's already the WC test. Which as one gets older one is less likely to pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How on earth can they not figure this out?

I mean testing different age cohorts, should it be that hard?

</comment><comment><USER38> An aging population is the obvious explanation--unless you can think of some other major demographic shifts that have occurred in these countries in recent decades.

</comment><comment><USER39> If IQ = 100 * mental age / real age, how is it measured in old age? If you are 80 and have an IQ of 50, would that mean you have the mind of a 40-year-old?

</comment><comment><USER40> I attribute it to the incredible stupidity of our mass media. And 'TV' of what sort ever. It has been a good thing to be forced to watch dull content. At least it was informative at times.</comment>


Is this the greatest shot in TV journalism? - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/is-this-the-greatest-shot-in-t.html <comment><USER2> PBS is currently running a series called "Breakthrough" which is derivative of Burke's style.

Burke's series (Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and Connections2) are all fantastic.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your mostly frueqented sites? - <AUTHOR>

What are your favorite and most visited sites/forums? This should be an interesting discussion. <comment><USER2> [http://www.typingstudy.com/](http://www.typingstudy.com/)

Sorry, easy to do, I just couldn't resist :-)

Seriously, I now have 'motherboard' in my dailies; [http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk](http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk) thats a fairly recent addition, curious to see what anyone else come up with.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm asking because I wanted to expand the sites that I visit daily. More specifically, I want more sites that have good articles about software dev/current tech.</comment>


Show HN: When and where to travel for free by hosting on Airbnb – A new arbitrage - <AUTHOR> https://www.eliotandme.com/travel-for-free <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

Thought I would provide a few examples :

If you live in SF [https://www.eliotandme.com/77_Colton_St_San_Francisco_CA/786...](https://www.eliotandme.com/77_Colton_St_San_Francisco_CA/78669338/travel)

If you live in NYC [https://www.eliotandme.com/19_Park_Pl_New_York_NY/172269611/...](https://www.eliotandme.com/19_Park_Pl_New_York_NY/172269611/travel)

If you live in London [https://www.eliotandme.com/Golden_Cross_House_Strand_London_...](https://www.eliotandme.com/Golden_Cross_House_Strand_London_WC2N_4JF_UK/148833501/travel)

You can enter your home address for more precise estimates. It should work for most cities in the world.</comment>


TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks Round 15 - <AUTHOR> https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15 <comment><AUTHOR> Now with more Rust benchmarks and Ruby properly configured!</comment>


Flutter and Dart, or how to quickly build a mobile app without losing your hair - <AUTHOR> https://altkomsoftware.pl/blog/flutter-dart-quickly-build-mobile-app-without-losing-much-hair/ <comment><USER2> I think Flutter now can survive without google. It has enough developer momentum behind it and it's unlike react native a bolt on solution to somehow make it work. It might fit Facebook's case (although they abandoned it themselves in favour of native speaks volumes about it).

But I think keeping in sync changes in API, hardware device drivers and new interactions across different platforms and device will still be nightmare and in general it will play catch up with native. It can be seen in the number of issues opened on flutter project on GitHub [1]. Hopefully there is some support from different platforms so it remains reasonable choice and perform well compared to native.

Also it's declarative UI paradigm is good and even SwiftUI is doing the same.

I had concern about this project earlier although personally I looked at Dart just because it's developed by Lara Bak the person who transformed google by giving them V8 engine in chrome. Earlier dart could not take off because no one wants dartvm in browsers except chrome.

It might not have succeeded in replacing JS from browser but Flutter is dart's killer platform and it is very much focused now on becoming a language focused on user interface programming. So I think dart will survive beyond google.

[1] [https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues)

<comment><USER3> Everyone from original Dart team left, Lars is now one of co-founders of a startup trying to sell a Dart like language for IoT.

Dart and Flutter futures are are now married, and I still don't buy into Flutter.

Languages married with UI frameworks seldom last, specially when the competition outside of the UI framework is so much better in tooling and available set of libraries.

Plus hot reloading were a novelty when Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Oberon System, Eiffel got introduced into the market.

And the competition isn't sleeping either, Flutter touched the Android team nerves hard enough that now we are getting Jetpack Composer, Xamarin already has its prototype available, Qt always kind of had it, so in the next twos (give or take it), all the cross-platform mobile frameworks will have dynamic code reload, with more market relevant languages, couple with 20 - 30 years of libraries.

Until Google releases Fuchsia and makes everyone write Dart code, I will pass. Qt, Xamarin, PWAs do the job just fine, with more mature languages.

<comment><USER2> It's good to have multiple choices, but given the momentum and quality of apps developed using Flutter, I think it's ahead and will have enough developers to keep it relevant and stay.

Also UI programming is very complex given the proliferation of device form factors, interaction and implicit inputs using sensors. It needs language especially designed to handle all of it and provide a smooth user experience. For end user UI is the whole system. Dart is especially designed for it.

It provides superior developer experience compared to other cross platform UI toolkit. I think a language designed for user interface programming providing clean, smooth and performant developer experience is a need which dart fill.

Obviously not everyone likes declarative UI programming and they will lean towards what they know. I am from the camp who prefer declarative UI's and that's the reason like SwiftUI and Flutter.

<comment><USER4> What are some examples of quality apps made with Flutter on iOS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My personal experience with it was as someone who had never developed for mobile or the web before, and I have to say I really appreciated it.

Dart itself is very simple to pick up basically as you write. It feels like the most generic 'algol family' language imaginable, in a good way.

The widgets itself that the framework provides are very complete and make inuitive sense. This was a big differentiator for me compared to my modest experiences with react a while ago.

As someone who doesn't live in the world of UI and end-user software at all react was not easy for me because I had to learn javascript and css and html and so on. When the last thing you've built UI wise is Java desktop apps ten years ago that's not easy. Flutter felt much more like a traditional desktop framework in how high-level and complete it is.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've worked on Dart and Flutter last year on a startupish project. I can say flutter is amazing. It got good ideas from react architecture (eg: managing state and declarative UI) and add many good things like very rich and well designed API. writing UI in language and without other markup language like XML is amazing. You also save a lot of cost to developing in parallel for multiple platform's. Dart is also a pleasant language, here are some pros and cons about language.

pros:

1- Everything is object. (no more inconsistencies like Java primitives, null and generics)

2- It has very well designed generics and you can access generic type in run time.

3- Good Type inference.

4- Has powerful facilities for asynchronous programming.(eg: async await, coroutines ,...)

5- Not overall bad or complex type system. Compare to Golang or java dart's type system is vastly superior.

some cons:

1- Everything can be null (null is also object).

2- Lack of Union and algebraic data types.

3- Lack of python's like tuple.(eg: (1,'string'))

4- I personally dislike C-style type definition and mandatory semicolon (eg: int foo=23; rather than foo : int=23 )

<comment><USER7> As for nulls, non-nullability is currently in the works: [https://github.com/dart- lang/language/blob/master/accepted/f...](https://github.com/dart- lang/language/blob/master/accepted/future-releases/nnbd/feature- specification.md)

<comment><USER8> serious question: how effectively can things like non-nullability be bolted onto a language after it and a large part of its ecosystem has been created?

I see the plan to allow libraries to opt-in and migrate that way.. but I wonder how long that migration will take and if it will ever actually be completed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Secondly (and this can be seen as both a flaw and an advantage), both > Flutter and Dart come from Google. The good part of it is that Google is a > tech giant, and if they want to maintain something, they have the resources > and manpower to do it. The bad part is that while Google is known to > introduce useful tech and services, it's also known to kill off or retire > them when they're deemed obsolete.

I think over time the crippling of Google's developer initiatives because of this perception will cost a lot more than all the money saved from all the retired services.

<comment><USER10> I think the risk of Flutter getting cancelled is very remote. Google knows they have a winner on their hands.

Flutter is the UI framework for Fuschia. It is picking up huge momentum [1]. The support for native apps and web[2] is still immature, but promising.

Flutter brings the joy back into UI development. No messing with CSS, tables, etc. - "everything is a widget" makes for a very composable framework that is super fun to use.

[1] [https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language- rankings-1-2...](https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language- rankings-1-20/) [2] [https://flutter.dev/web](https://flutter.dev/web)

<comment><USER11> I don't see any reason Google wouldn't cancel Fuchsia at a moment's notice. It's been consuming their resources for years and is far from launching in a product, and Google happily cancels even established well-used products.

<comment><USER12> I don't know why people tried to hide your post. Yes, it's entirely plausible that Fuchsia is killed in favor of Android evolution not revolution.

Plausible, but i wouldn't put odds on anything.

LUCKILY, for me because i really like Flutter, I think it hits critical mass soon and wouldn't matter if Google killed Fuchsia.

<comment><USER13> You both say this but the interesting thing is that Fuchsia support is creeping up in more essential low level software like LLVM, Rust, WebKit and the devs actually have Chrome already running on the platform for years. Dart/Flutter is used throughout the OS and used in many apps today.

From day 0 on launch, you can expect Fuchsia to run your Dart apps and to run existing Android apps via a tool called Machina (Zircon hypervisor running Linux kernel). If Fuchsia benefits from the Flutter apps being made and gives Google more complete control over the OS unlike Android, then it looks highly unlikely that it will be killed.

In reality as Fuchsia is being 'dog-fooded' on Google devices it is increasingly likely that Android will be killed.

<comment><USER3> The fact that ChromeOS had to gain Android support speaks loudly about what might win in the end.

If Fuchsia ever gets released, I bet ART will replace Flutter.

It is already being ported to run on Fuchsia anyway.

<comment><USER14> ART isn't a UI framework, it can't "replace" Flutter. You can run Flutter apps in ART, the article even talks about doing so.

<comment><USER3> Indeed it the basis of the Android stack, so it plugs naturally with everything written in Java and Kotlin for Android.

Flutter has zero relationship with ART, it just plugs into Android via the NDK, like anyone else using C++ code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tried out flutter in the past few weeks and it seems really great, especially compared to the android framework. Dart also seems to fit in really well.

But I do have some criticism for dart. While it's nice that they moved to a static types, they still made _every single type_ nullable. So e.g. if you get a boolean in your function, be aware that it can be true, false and also null. I have my problems with java having nullable objects, but having the primitives also be nullable?

Well, I'm pretty much a beginner, so maybe there are better ways and I still don't know them. But afaik, they weren't mentioned in the brief Dart intro on the flutter page.

Dart does also have some cool things, though: Extensions (for adding interfaces to existing types), explicit getters, async/await and lots of syntactic sugar. Building your widget-tree in dart sometimes looks like a declarative style similar to xml, but far more concise, except that it's really imperative, which is really cool. No long

Component a = new Component();

a.setOnClickHandler(xyz);

a.setColor("green");

b.add(a);

chains anymore!

<comment><USER10> > they still made every single type nullable

NNBD is almost here: [https://github.com/dart- lang/language/blob/master/accepted/f...](https://github.com/dart- lang/language/blob/master/accepted/future-releases/nnbd/feature- specification.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I tried Flutter a year or two ago after coding Android and iOS apps (to a lesser extent) for years and years.

The dev experience was lightyears ahead of Android. Dart was nice fit. I came upon some edge-cases where Flutter's API seemed immature. But as far as quickly getting apps/prototypes out there, there was no competition.

My main roadblock: the UI was centered around Material design. To use the iOS widgets, which looked good, it seemed you need to put a load of if statements to use the iOS widgets instead - and this felt hugely cludgey.

I'll reiterate what another poster said: if your business depends on apps, go native. Flutter will get you to 90 or 95% really quickly but it's probably that 5% that gives you an edge.

I'd use Flutter when apps are of secondary importance to the business, and when we need an iOS and Android app, and I want it done without spending huge amounts of effort.

</comment><comment><USER17> So this article [1] matches my own recollection. Like many projects that originate from Google, it always struck me as a solution looking for a problem.

The first "problem" was Javscript.

At one presentation about this I recall that Lars Bak (IIRC) took quite a beating about DArt, just in terms of the questions asked, to the point that someone had to point out just how much he'd accomplished (ie V8). This was, in essence, an appeal to authority.

I recall the Ads PA basically stepping in to save the project. I can only speculate why but my best guess is the AdWords TL woke up one day and decided to rewrite AdWords in Dart (as he allegedly had with GWT some years before). But all that's pure speculation.

The second "problem" that Dart solved was using the same code on client and server, something Google is inexplicably obsessed with (eg GWT). I don't know what caveats came with Dart but GWT had plenty (eg for many years it wasn't possible to use the same protobuf classes on client and server).

I believe the intent with Dart was, at one point, to run natively within Chrome (the article mentions Dartium). This worked out really well for vbscript. No one wants to write different languages for different browsers. Again, I speculate here, but my strong suspicion is the Chrome team killed the idea of shipping a Dart VM in Chrome and that was the end of that.

Maybe it's just me but TypeScript just seemed far more sane.

So... Flutter. I don't know why a UI library needs to be language-specific but it strikes me as a bad idea. Now, the counterpoint is that Flutter is an SDK And more akin to, say, React Native (albeit with significant architectural differences) but I don't think it started that way.

:UI frameworks, libraries and SDKs just don't seem to be in Google's wheelhouse (as opposed to, say, infra, which very much does). I can only speculate as to why but my best guess is Google engineers (disclaimer: Xoogler) can't see passed something as an engineering problem, so much so that they take on philosophies no one asked for or needed (eg same code on client and server), which come with a huge cost and no tangible benefits.

[1]: [https://insights.dice.com/2019/03/27/fall-rise-dart- google-j...](https://insights.dice.com/2019/03/27/fall-rise-dart-google- javascript-killer/)

<comment><USER18> Can't similar things be said for node.js and other tech? Electron apps perhaps? What problems did these technologies solve?

Mostly I agree with you, but coming from desktop development, I also sometimes feel like javascript and the web in general is a mess, and prefer things in a familiar format. As so I don't find things like "DArt" or "Flutter" as surprising...

<comment><USER17> > node.js

I don't have a strong opinion on Node.

> Electron apps perhaps?

Hate them with a passion.

> What problems did these technologies solve?

Node.js to is primarily a platform for high-concurrency event-driven request handling where each request itself is a single thread. In my day job I primarily write Hack (PHP) nowadays. PHP embraced this model years ago and I, personally, think it's pretty much ideal for something most often used to service HTTP requests. You almost never want to be in the business of starting and coordinating threads. It gains you a lot of complexity and a lot more failure modes for very little benefit over the single thread per request model (combined with async/await programming, in particular).

Electron is, in my opinion, trash. It's a cheap and crappy way for people to create desktop apps that have a much larger attack surface than any native desktop app (being the entire Chrome runtime) and a huge memory footprint all for the privilege of being able to use HTML/CSS to layout your app.

> and prefer things in a familiar format

So this explains a lot of the things you see from Google. Google engineers, in general, look down on Javascript. There's actually a hierarchy. The C++ engineers look down on anything that isn't C++. Java engineers look down on anything that isn't C++/Java (and sometimes even C++ is looked down on) and so on.

A lot of Google JS is written for the Closure compiler. This was an early effort to add type hints to JS code. If you look at the code you can tell it's written by Java engineers. I like to quip that "Closure puts the Java into Javascript". The JsDoc comment format is basically Javadoc. The type system is familiar to those coming from Java.

So you have GWT, which seemed to appeal to people who though tit would allow them to not need to know anything about JS [insert standard reference to the Joel Spolsky's "leaky abstraction" essay].

Closure tries to remake JS into Java.

What these things tell you is the people coming up with these ideas don't really understand Javascript and more to the point, they don't think they have to nor do they want to.

> I also sometimes feel like javascript and the web in general is a mess

Everything is a mess if you look closely enough.

<comment><USER19> Does Hack somehow add async to php (like swoole?). It seems to me that PHP and Node are pretty different. PHP is thread per connection and no async, node is just one single thread and you write as much async as you can. Pretty different modes of thinking apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Using Dart in flutter feels like Google was trying to avoid tossing away a bunch of pre-existing work by finding a purpose for it somewhere. It's Lars' sorta Java, sorta Javascript personal project and it just doesn't have any sort of design to it. Dart's failure in the web space showed that there wasn't any real demand for it - it just wasn't better enough.

I realize they can't use Java, but this is a weird horse to tie themselves to.

<comment><USER21> They certainly did find a new purpose for Dart outside of it being used in parts of their Ads platform, but Flutter, when is was the chrome experiment called sky, first started out using Javascript.

The chrome guys decided to move on and look at several language before going with Dart, Swift may have been an option, if it was opensource at the time.

Seems a reason for Dart's failure in the web space was mobile.

Lar gave a talk last year about his and Kasper iot startup [https://www.toitware.com/](https://www.toitware.com/) he mentions why dart didn't make it into chrome, saying "then the whole mobile shift happen and there was no room for extra stuff in chrome" [https://youtu.be/mPna6D21Eqg](https://youtu.be/mPna6D21Eqg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a good example of a great, native feeling Flutter UI? I just downloaded a couple of random "Flutter gallery" type Apps from the iOS App Store and both of them have animations and text rendering that feel "wrong" (and somewhat janky in the case of the animations).

This may reflect more on the development of those particular apps than the framework though, hence my asking - in my experience, React Native does a pretty good job of feeling "native" by default in most cases.

Not saying users would necessarily care so much, but I'm interested regardless - I wonder if there have been any studies/anecdotes into how sensitive users are to "details" like animation etc. in terms of engagement.

<comment><USER23> that's the question i keep asking everytime there's a thread about flutter being great, and so far i haven't received any answer.

my intuition is that flutter is used mostly for business apps made of forms and lists, where expectation in terms of graphical performances are very low.

<comment><USER24> That's Xamarin. Flutter is better at implementing custom UI, like stuff that can be seen on dribbble.

<comment><USER23> and yet the UI performance of simple things like scrolling are a total disaster.. how can you get anything fancy with those performance ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Flutter is the best thing that happened to the UI development in the last decade or even two.

Before Flutter, if I needed to build a simple app (couple of screens and network requests), there were no real option except of outsource it to the mobile app development studio. After discovering Flutter I've built and published my first app in 3 days while watching initial Flutter tutorials.

Since then, making mobile apps for my projects has become such a pleasant experience, that I'm now trying Flutter Web as a substitute to the madness of JS/HTML/CSS ecosystem, and I'm quite impressed with a result. It's still in Beta, but the development experience is so much smoother.

At the same time, a lot people still don't know what Flutter even is, so having it in your arsenal is a huge competitive advantage at the moment.

<comment><USER26> > there were no real option

React Native, Xamarin, Ionic, and a ton more?

<comment><USER25> All those solve the "two codebases" problem by piling levels of complexity one on top of another. It's fire-sure way to make developers unhappy and code unmaintainable in the long run.

React Native was the best shot in this market, but adding the worst UI framework in the history of software – typesetting markup language (HTML), set of global classes for styling with magic words like "!important" (CSS) and hackish scripting language designed under pressure from Sun in 2 weeks (Mocha, renamed to Javascript) - on top of the already complicated stacks yielded all sorts of problems: from dependency management hell to unforgivably slow UI. Even AirBnB – the largest React Native shop over there – abandoned it altogether and returned to native iOS/Android development. My own experience working with React Native project for 1.5 years (with ClojureScript added on top for coolness) just reassured me that 5 layers of complexity is worse than 1 layer :)

Flutter design is so sick, that unless I'm writing own native plugins, I don't even touch iOS/Android layers. So it's basically single layer of complexity from the perspective of the developer and it's a game changer in this field.

<comment><USER26> There is no HTML or CSS in react native. Are you sure you didn't work with plain React in a webview instead? I can't even imagine trying to add another compiler (ClojureScript) to its build process.

AirBnB abandoned it for other reasons - mostly difficulty integrating it with _existing_ native codebases and developer pushback, without fully commuting to it. MS Office, Shopify and a host of other products are fully invested now.

Flutter doesn't have native UI, so I don't think it compares well (or will catch up for non-gaming/casual apps).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> HN: I won't use anything Google makes, they always shut stuff down. Also HN: I'm all in on Go.

HN: Learn a new language every year, it's easy and worth it even the language isn't useful for anything. Also HN: I won't learn a new language that would allow me to double my mobile dev productivity because someone told me it was bad 8 years ago.

<comment><USER28> It's almost as if HN is a community made of different people with different opinions and not a singular entity.

<comment><USER29> This isn't about who likes what, it's about inconsistent reasoning.

If Google creating a language is reason to believe it will die, why does that apply to Dart and not Go?

This assumes you've observed the much higher popularity for Go and lack of it for Dart here on HN (and most elsewhere).

<comment><USER30> Go is used at a bunch of major companies outside Google. Dart is _only_ used in Flutter (and apparently Fuchsia).

Dart overlaps in goals almost completely with Typescript which is heavily used multiple teams within Google.

Switching Flutter to Typescript is something I could easily see happening if Google wanted Flutter to be truly popular.

<comment><USER31> > Dart overlaps in goals almost completely with Typescript

As I see it, that's not all that true.

Now, it's true, that it's non-native use competes with TypeScript in domain and shares some implementation method details in that domain (e.g., both are languages that rely on compilation to JS in the web domain), but the goals clearly aren't the same. TypeScript's goals are basically limited to static typing and source compatibility with modern JavaScript (that is, it is an goal to be a typed superset of JS.)

Dart has a wide array of different goals, including being a typed replacement for JS that is not limited in its other goals by being source-compatible with JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If mobile is at all _critical_ to your business, then you build in native - period.

I think we've all learned at least that much in the past few years.

A lot of businesses either overestimate or underestimate their mobile product needs because they don't understand the market or the platform. Expectations for an interactive consumer mobile app (Ride-sharing, Social media, Photo editing, etc) are extremely high and it would be foolish to under-invest or try to take shortcuts. At the same time there are ton of businesses (Home listings, Saas tools, Informational apps, etc) that would be well served by a simple React Native app. Know which type of business you are.

<comment><USER33> The plethora of companies building mission critical apps on platforms like Ionic and React Native would stand to disprove this

<comment><USER34> There are two new app only banks here in Switzerland and they both use a cross platform framework. One for sure ionic. On Android these apps are absolute garbage. They are slow to start, slow interaction and slow animation. One of these apps has a main.js in it that has over 200k lines of crap with hundreds of lines of if (ios) and if (android). All the iOS styles are packed in the Android apk which is just stupid.

If these banks want to compete with revolut or transferwise they need to provide an app that's isn't garbage.

<comment><USER35> My local bank has a native app as far as I can tell and it regularly takes over 10 seconds to get past the login page. My credit card (Discover) app somehow won an award for best UX in the industry and _still_ takes over 5 seconds to log in (both of these are with Face ID by the way).

Contrast this to Robinhood, which jumps from cold boot to main screen in about a second.

The problem is not the frameworks, it is poor development practices. Until the big guys learn that outsourcing critical software is a stupid idea, the next generation cool kid apps will continue to eat at their customer base (until they become relevant enough to be bought out by the big guys, and the cycle repeats).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not super related to the article, but I had to get this off my chest. Suppose you use VSCode on Windows to write a Flutter app targeting the Surface Duo. In that case, you would be using a Microsoft editor running a Google SDK on a Microsoft operating system, targeting a Microsoft distribution of a Google operating system. We've not only come full circle, we've gone in loops.

</comment><comment><USER37> Over the past two weeks I have seen Shopify, Flipkart, Microsoft Office, Coinbase and others officially throw their weight behind React Native.

I'm also seeing the Expo.io project (ready made starters for React Native) mature to production quality extent.

At this point, I'm seeing a massive production scale behind React Native which doesn't exist in the Flutter world.

Plus the elephant in the room - React. How do you compete against that ? Incidentally, Flutter was inspired by React.

At this point, if I had to take a bet - React Native would win against Flutter definitely. There will still be a massive Java/Kotlin userbase...but I don't see why Flutter will exist in a even-Microsoft-Office-is-using-React-Native world.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft is not only using React Native, they are the main contributors to React Native on Windows and macOS.

React Native is also one of the reasons why WinUI core components are all going to be C++, instead of a mix of C# and C++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Without losing your hair"

Future common data boilerplate. Qt/gtk-style app init boilerplate. Routing boilerplate. Future builder boilerplate. Homepage title state boilerplate. Setmapsfordicts boilerplate. DTOs. Widget scaffold. Step builder boilerplate. New policy subject(?). Complex handwritten setters and validators.

How on earth is that not losing your hair? Can't we just drop a list view, few controls on a form, attach field formatters, and then write a simple controller that implements a part of a table view delegate and a save method? What's wrong with modern ui?

<comment><USER39> You don't have to do that. you can write everything in one file if you want. But when you introduce some architecture you always have some verbosity

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > The bad part is that while Google is known to introduce useful tech and > services, it's also known to kill off or retire them when they're deemed > obsolete.

Do you know any company that doesn't retire a product once it's deemed obsolete?

<comment><USER41> Most enterprise IT vendor. IBM in particular will support obsolete products for decades (e.g. OS/2). It's part of the reason managers feel comfortable writing them big checks b/c they know that if they make a bet on the technology they will still be able to get support many years later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > You'll find the complete app code here [1]

Leads to an empty repository.

[1] [https://github.com/asc-lab/personal-insurance-flutter- poc](https://github.com/asc-lab/personal-insurance-flutter-poc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, our mistake. Tomorrow we added full code to this repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why Flutter over React Native can anyone answer this question?

<comment><USER44> This is a complicated answer that would probably take experience developing real-world applications in both to fully appreciate, but I`ll bite.

A few years ago, I was CTO of a small startup and spent a significant portion of a year building out our mobile app in React Native.

I have experience building cross-platform mobile apps going all the way back from when Ionic was called Apache PhoneGap and was an entirely different product.

In my opinion, React Native is a classic case of follow-the-herd syndrome. This is not to say that React Native is not a viable technology, but simply that it just isn't very _good_. Let me dive into a few of the things that were really grating when developing on RN:

\- The hot-reload times were painstakingly slow. I am talking about 15-20 seconds after save. This really takes a toll on development velocity.

\- You have a major decision to make when building an RN app: To use Expo or not. Expo is an SDK which allows you to circumvent needing to drop down into the native build processes for each platform and provides wrapper APIs for accessing native hardware functionality on the phone, with the tradeoff being that a wide number of RN libraries were not compatible since they required being installed as Cocoa Pods or Gradle/Maven packages natively. So you are trading convenience and development speed for flexibility. We chose to go with Expo, and did not regret it.

\- Performance is an issue in RN that you need to aggressively optimize against. I remember being aghast that rendering a scrollable list of 300 text items caused so much lag and stuttering it required a full day of manual optimization to calculate viewport area and which cells would be in view to prevent that work from being done by the element on-thread in order to be semi-usable. You have to be really cautious about your render cycles and everything else when building views.

\- Doing heavy custom styling requires some hacky workarounds since RN wraps the native UI elements and does not expose all of the style API that they provide.

Later on, at another company, we ended up building an app with NativeScript + Vue which was a much better experience. NativeScript is essentially React Native, but allows you to use any JS/TS framework (or none at all) and has much better APIs for interacting with the device, and allows you to fully style the underlying device-specific UI element if you really need to. And the performance ran circles around RN. The entire experience was overall miles better. Very few people use NativeScript though, just due to the fact you never hear about it.

Ultimately, if I had to give advice, it would be this:

Either write a regular PWA web app, so that you can leverage existing web technologies and all the component libraries, and then add native functionalities and publish to the app store using the Capacitor framework that powers Ionic apps. Or just use Flutter.

Flutter has the only cross-platform mobile experience that does not feel really hacky to me. It does not try to compile to platform-specific view elements, instead compiling to native ARM code, and tries to maintain 120FPS. You can use the same Flutter codebase to generate mobile, web, and desktop apps. And the whole developer experience is really incredible. Instant stateful hot-reloading, screaming performance. Google put a lot of effort and thought into it, and Flutter is not going anywhere given that it powers all of Fuschias UI.

<comment><USER45> When React Native started there was Appcelerator Titanium, Xamarin, and others such as Qt and Rubymotion (Ionic was popular too but it's considered webview).

We may be in Peak React right now as adoption is at an all time high vs Angular and Vue. But tools such as Svelte and Flutter are the next thing that has a chance to be competitive.

Flutter reminds me of Vue, loved by Developers but low adoption (compared to React or Angular). At least Flutter is backed by a giant. Hopefully the adoption rate keeps increasing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I work for a little web-development shop that does the occational app on the side, mostly if an existing customer are interested in having one developed, we don't employ any full time app developers. We have just decided to try out flutter for our next app project. We are close to being done with the actual app development, and it looks like we are going to be done way under budget, so we are very happy with the technology as it currently is.

Before my time, we initially started app development using Cordova. It lined up well with existing expertise in the office as that what we work with most of the time. The apps turned out rather well except for reliability and building. These are by contract applications, so we make them, release them and don't revisit them unless we need to perform support on them. Changes in the web browser, particularity on iOS has broken these apps on several occasions where we have to go back and fix them. Some of these issues have been expected, such as when iPhone X came to market, but sometimes an update has broken something else, seemingly out of the blue.

We decided to try out some new technologies as we we're not too impressed with Cordova and settled on Nativescript + Vue. Again due to expertise with vue as it is one of the technologies we utilize a lot in web projects. Pretty much all of the people who had been involved with the previous apps found it a better experience than Cordova. But in my opinion, it was also quite infuriating to work with. Hot module reloading never truly worked the way it should, we often had to quit and reload the app for changes to be correctly applied. It didn't end up as cross platform as initially thought. We had to make a lot of platform specific components for things we initially didn't think we had to, mostly because the shared options of components in their standard libraries we're not as good as we had hoped. We ended up spending way more time than initially thought wresling components into submission in order to get close to the design we initially envisioned, and we ended up compromising a lot on UI in order to make budget and deadlines. Performance was also something I we had to optimize a lot more for than initially planned. Animations and screen transitions would usually take a performance dive even though our views were very simple and did not really have much data in them at all. We struggled a lot to wrangle UI components into shape, hence why we felt we had to make so many components. And we encountered issues with very simple components such as images in list views not rendering if scrolled out then back in from views.

For this next project I suggested we try flutter before committing more to NativeScript, and we have seen immediate value from this technology over any of the others we have tried.

* We spend way less time on platform specific code, the reusable pieces look more consistent across platforms which means we spend less time tweaking them for either iOS or Android. I think that flutter using its own rendering technique is a serious boon to us who are just making cross platform apps as cheap as possible.

* Any non standard UI component is often way less time consuming to develop in flutter as you don't have to write platform specific version of it. This has also let us cut down on external dependencies which we felt were necessary on Nativescript in order to implement some features in the allotted time available. This is something I think we will appreciate a lot over time, as NativeScript does not have the most active community and the potential work we will have to do to maintain components that may be abandoned by their original developer down the line.

* Tooling works a lot better for flutter. Hot module reloading actually works(most of the time). Statefulness and these reload is not as smooth. Actual breakpoints and debugging is very nice. We could get that with Nativescript too, but only in the javascript code, not for the templates which were written in XML. And if something went wrong on the "native" side, it would be like a black box to us which we could not truly inspect our way into. Flutter allows us to follow the stack deep into any widget.

* When you have to write native code for Flutter, you at least get the help of the tooling built for native platform development, as opposed to NativeScript where you declare that in javascript. It is very seldom needed for the kind of projects we've been doing however so I have no great insights here.

I'm very apathetic towards Dart as a language. It is entirely inoffensive. I felt like I could work in it without even trying to learn it, and I think I have spent at most an hour or two hours to look into and learn the more dart specific language features. I am not that much of a fan of how to deal with JSON data and the dynamic type in there. Dynamic feels a bit accident prone but other than that, Dart as a language gets less on my nerves than some of the more common and frankly way more tedious web related programming languages I have to use daily for work.

As far as the kind of work we're doing, Flutter is great

</comment><comment><USER47> I wouldn't discount React Native. Microsoft and Shopify are now fully committed to it, and Facebook is committed to fixing the architecture issues that made Airbnb leave it in the first place.

[https://www.ideamotive.co/blog/what-to-expect-from-react- nat...](https://www.ideamotive.co/blog/what-to-expect-from-react-native- in-2020)

[https://reactnative.dev/blog/2019/06/12/react-native-open- so...](https://reactnative.dev/blog/2019/06/12/react-native-open-source- update)

</comment><comment><USER48> Do I need to use Dart in order to use Flutter?

<comment><USER3> Yes, Flutter is Skia + an UI framework written in Dart.

You can also get Skia + whatever you want and get your own "Flutter".

Currently they still have a better experience to sell regarding code reloading, but competing frameworks are upping their game by adding similar capabilities to their developer toolchains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cached article:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4HEVGP...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4HEVGPuxZ3kJ:https://altkomsoftware.pl/blog/flutter- dart-quickly-build-mobile-app-without-losing-much- hair/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER49> If most of my focus is on Apple platforms (iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and possibly soon the rumored arOS), I would rather pick SwiftUI over any other framework.

Though at its early stage, as with all new Apple tech, you will still be losing your hair. Hopefully there's only a few months to go until a substantial increase in its stability (and documentation.)

<comment><USER50> The issue with SwiftUI is that you can't just have "most" of your focus on Apple platforms. You need to have _all_ of the focus on Apple platforms because you can't run it anywhere else.

With Flutter you have all of your focus on most of of the smartphone market practically for free which makes a massive difference in your addressable market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> How does Flutter compare to React Native? I haven't used either but previously my go to framework was React Native since I have a ton of JS experience.

<comment><USER39> My React Native experience is very limited, but RN lacks of widgets. With Flutter you get complete package of material and apple widgets to create UI. Also RN is quite laggy on Android

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Outside of flutter, how it's darts performance compared to other languages?

</comment><comment><USER53> I find Flutter and Dart horrendous for apps. So many lines of code, so many things to check. I much preffer Swift approach or web approach is way more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER54> How's xamarin? Anybody with experience here?

<comment><USER55> Buggy and unstable. I spent quite some time investigating Xamarin vs Flutter for my app, and ended up choosing Flutter simply because Xamarin was so unreliable.

No regrets whatsoever. There's no two ways about it - Flutter has already won the battle.

In fact, it hasn't just won the battle, it's already sitting in a spa celebrating its victory with bottles of champagne.

<comment><USER56> I had an opposite experience with Xamarin.Forms - I loved my time with it. A deployed commercial app I made is in the stores for a year now.

No idea about Flutter though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is a garbage software. I wasted 2 hrs installing / reinstalling this trash and it was complaining about licenses.

Untested unstable software... Never going anywhere near this pile of shit.

<comment><USER57> I am unfairly getting downvoted. I downloaded and installed this software and spent hours to fix the errors.

Running flutter doctor is recommended in their "Getting Started" page to check the sanity of the install.

But I kept getting the same "license status unknown" error after multiple installs /uninstalls in various order.

Their GitHub issues page has this issue as closed.

If this is the state of a simple install I dread to venture any further into actual development.

This will be a complete waste of developer's time and resources.

I am merely sharing my experience. Do not waste your time trying the flutter / stutter / sputter.

<comment><USER21> If you're running windows, someone found this worked and allows them to run

flutter doctor --android-licenses

[https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/16025#issuecomment...](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/16025#issuecomment-468958533)

If you just want to try out flutter, I wonder if you can avoid the android stuff by just running on ios and when they are ready the desktop and the web.

<comment><USER57> Thanks for your response.

Unfortunately, that solution is a dud. It does not work.

flutter doctor is looking for the sdkmanager in an outdated directory.

The point is not "googling" for fixes, the point is this software is not a well maintained software if I have to spend hours to just "Get started..."

Developers, abandon this piece of crap.

Android sdkmanager tool not found (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Android\Sdk\tools\bin\sdkmanager). Try re-installing or updating your Android SDK, visit [https://flutter.dev/setup/#android- setup](https://flutter.dev/setup/#android-setup) for detailed instructions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Dart

\- Is dynamically typed at the core

\- Has no support for nullability

\- Has old school syntax for constructors, semi colons

In other words, Dart on the wrong side of history for pretty much every single important feature for programming languages in 2020.

Even C# looks more modern than Dart from a design perspective, and C# is fifteen years old.

<comment><USER58> \- Dart 2 has a sound type system and the compiler has been receiving lots of optimisations based on types since then (several years now). So this is no longer true.

\- that's currently true but in the next release (at least that's what the Dart team have been working on for the past several months) it will have nullable types just like Kotlin.

\- That's a strange criticism. Dart has excellent constructor syntax, I don't know a language that is more flexible with constructors.

e.g.

        class Person {
            String name;
            int age;
            Person(this.name, this.age);
            String toString() => "Person($name, $age)";
        }

        main() => print(Person("Joe", 40));

Looks pretty good compared to most other languages?!

<comment><USER59> Dart has some annoying traits that hurt productivity with it. For example, the lack of union types or some kind of sealed classes is fairly annoying when the language is actually statically typed.

There's some work being done to overcome this but so far no solution has seen the daylight in practice.

<comment><USER39> Relax, it's being speced now, give them time to make non-nullables first.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What does depth look like in NBA? - <AUTHOR> http://dev.mkubilayk.com/nbadepth/

<comment><AUTHOR> After Knicks defeated the Cavaliers at The Q in the Cavs' season opener, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry wrote a piece about Cleveland's bench that was outscored by Knicks subs.

In the article, he used minutes vs. points scatter charts to show what a deep roster should look like.

It is no rocket science and not the best way to evaluate bench depth. But, still, I had plenty of time on a Sunday afternoon.</comment>


Ask HN: How does sharing trademark or copyright ownership work?  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> (IANAL; ignore me if you wish.)

First of all, trademark & copyright law are completely separate. Don't depend on any general principles to apply to both.

Second, it's probably better if you don't think in terms of "ownership". In Berne-convention signatory nations (i.e., just about all nations, including the U.S.), copyright exists in most works on their completion, with the legal author(s) holding the copyright until it expires. That would usually be the actual authors, unless it is a work for hire, in which case it is usually the employer.

So if the work is created by employees of a corporation as part of their work, and there is no contract stating to the contrary, then the issues you bring up do not arise; the corporation is the sole legal author.

In a work with multiple legal authors, all authors would have to agree to any licensing. One way to do this is for all authors to agree formally that some particular party may act as their agent in such matters. If this is not done, then, whenever any licensing or publishing issues come up, they need to be run by all authors for their approval.

As for trademarks: couldn't say.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is the paperwork involved laborious? I ask this because I think it would be interesting to streamline the process and create a marketplace where conceivably tens or hundreds or more people could 'own' a copyright and/or trademark, grant licenses and divvy the profits among themselves whenever the license is evoked

<comment><USER2> > Is the paperwork involved laborious?

Depends on what you mean.

As I said in the GP, under the Berne Convention, copyright exists in a work when it is created. There is no paperwork required. For example, thousands of people hold copyright to portions of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation makes the license, and the terms under which contributions are accepted, clear, and that's it.

But if you want to be dividing up money, then you'll need to carefully consider the issues of whether the licensing terms would hold up in courts in various jurisdictions, how to prove at a later date that authors did indeed agree to the license terms, and how the licensing terms might be changed, if necessary, without all authors needing to be contacted individually. For that, you need to talk to a real lawyer (which, once again, I am not).

And then there is the issue of just how you're going to collect money and get it to all those people ....

<comment><USER3> I am a lawyer, and what ggchappell said is correct.

The work required to license either isn't difficult. Arguing back and forth on terms is how the legal bills add up. It all boils down to how much money must be paid.

Your product is mostly the underlying asset, not the streamlined process.

Remember, every licensee of the copyright or trademark will be selling the same thing (mostly). How do they differentiate themselves in the market? Probably price, in a multitude of ways.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you validate a business idea? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I am not a business expert and I don't have any economics background so bear with me on this one. Let's say you have an idea for a new business or product and before start building it, you'd want to validate it. How would you do that? How would you know that the idea might fly? How would you research the market to see if it would fit?
I apologize if my questions are vague, I don't know what would the starting points for this topic be.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> This question has been asked a thousand times.

On reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/search?q=how+to+validate+i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/search?q=how+to+validate+idea&restrict_sr=on)

On IndieHackers:

* go to [https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/) * click the search icon in the upper right * type "how to validate idea"

Those 2 sources will give you hours of reading.

My short answer is that if you have to validate an idea then you're doing it wrong.

A good idea is a solution to a problem that you noticed. Maybe because you've had this problem yourself (e.g. "I was trying to share a screenshot with a friend but there was not tool to do it easily") or maybe because you noticed that other people have a problem that you can solve using your programming skills.

Lacing any additional context to your particular situation "validating an idea" conjures a situation where you came up with a solution first and then started thinking "is this a solution to a problem that someone actually has"? Which is backwards.

If you want to learn more about how to improve the skill of noticing problems, read "The Mom Test" ([https://blog.kowalczyk.info/dailynotes/note/b4u674cvj43jdajd...](https://blog.kowalczyk.info/dailynotes/note/b4u674cvj43jdajdsukg- summary-of-the-mom-test-book-about-validating-business-ideas)).

<comment><USER3> While I agree with you that starting with the idea and then trying to find a problem is backwards, starting with the problem is fraught with issues too. Unless you are working in the industry you want to target it is unlikely that your problems are either common or serious enough to make enough people fork out money to make a viable business.

Identifying good business problems to solve with technology is very, very hard. Almost all the ones you can identify are too small, too trivial, or illusory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of people will suggest building a landing page / MVP to gauge initial interest, but I would start even before that: Don't spend any more time than necessary on something that you don't even know is actually viable.

However, you need to find out if potential customers are excited about your idea. To find out whether your target audience is interested in your idea, I suggest the following validation process:

* Write down a) the problem you're trying to solve and b) your solution. A lot of ideas may sound awesome while they're in your head, but that might change once you transform it from an abstract concept into 2–3 sentences.

* Create a questionnaire based on your idea. Make sure to ask questions relevant to judging whether your idea might take off, such as "How often are you facing this problem" rather than "Have you ever faced this problem". Use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to put your survey online.

* Identify people in your target audience. This is hard. Don't simply email the survey link to your friends - because of something called "Interviewer bias", your friends will rate your ideas more favorably than the general public. Also, it's highly likely that your friends aren't actually in your target audience.

I run IdeaCheck.io[0], where we generate a questionnaire based on your idea and use a panel of respondents to gather direct feedback from your actual target audience. You can read more about IdeaCheck in my Indie Hackers interview[1].

[0] [https://ideacheck.io](https://ideacheck.io)

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ideacheck- io](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ideacheck-io)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing, I like IdeaCheck, I will shoot you guys an email for some ideas I have.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, aalhour, let me know if you have any questions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You do the dirty work of contacting people in that industry, asking questions about their problems, and listening (without pitching your product)

That might involve a lot of cold emails, Linkedin Inmails, Skype calls, coffee meetups, stalking in conferences, joining relevant meetups, listening in on online forums, tweeting people who tweeted about that problem, etc.

Then you might a friendly group of 3-4 people who might give you friendly feedback as you develop the product. Keep talking with them. Keep iterating.

Thats really all there is to it. There are no "hacks" and no shortcuts. Just work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Start with value.

Before thinking about validating your idea / researching your market etc ask yourself "What value am I providing to the world / to the market?". Value is fundamental to your business because you, as an entrepreneur, get paid for putting that value into the hands of your users / customers.

Your role as an entrepreneur is to shift resources from a lower area of productivity to a higher area of productivity (example: Instead of 100g selling coffee beans for $1, you buy a cup and a coffee machine and sell a cup of coffee for $5, you successfully created value). You get paid for creating value, and you get paid for identifying market needs and delivering that value to the customers.

When something goes wrong with your business, always think about value: "Am I delivering value to users"

Next step, about validating, I would also advocate for a MVP (or in the case of a product a MVO: Minimum Viable Offer). The role of a MVP is to seek the shortest path to deliver value to customers. In other words, it is to validate your assumptions so that you can justify the time / financial commitments to build an actual or better product. The MVP is not about your product, it's about validating your value proposition.

</comment><comment><USER7> Once I put product on sale before creating it and directed ad traffic to it.

I refunded first 4 orders with apology.

But I had detailed statistic of traffic and conversion rate.

Idea was validated.

</comment><comment><USER8> Set up a website for your proposed product. Describe what it does, post up some screenshots. Have a sign up page. When they get past a certain point put up a payment error message, or tell them that the product is limited to a selected group only.

If it's B2B, just do a PowerPoint presentation and try to sell it before you build it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have a look at the checklist I use for my own ideas [0] - it might be of some help.

0\. [https://www.tillett.info/2016/01/27/a-good-idea- checklist/](https://www.tillett.info/2016/01/27/a-good-idea-checklist/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Actually,the president of YC answered this question in the course of startup schools. I remembered he said several principles or questions, such as "why now?", "why you?",etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> by raising seed money

</comment><comment><USER11> Set up a landing page website and/or discord chat room, make a youtube video and some reddit posts showing off your product, and offer it for free to anyone who visits.

then, offer a paid version with some extra features and explain to those users exactly what their $5 a month or whatever will pay for (5% to fees, 13% to aws, 27% to your personal pocket, etc)</comment>


Hover: Possible Unauthorized Access - <AUTHOR>

I have just noticed the following mail from Hover in my inbox:
Dear Hover Customer,
We are writing to let you know that we reset your password today. If you are unable to log into your Hover account, you will need to use the "I forgot my password" option on the sign in page to change your password.
We did this as a precautionary measure because there appears to have been a brief period of time when unauthorized access to one of our systems could have occurred. We have no evidence at all that any Hover accounts have been accessed, but even the possibility that this could have happened moved us to err on the side of extreme caution.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Sincerely,
The Hover Team <comment><USER2> Super misleading title on this post, given what the email says. For the record, at the time of this comment, the title is "Hover hacked".

<comment><AUTHOR> I am open to suggestions, I did not intend to use a 'super misleading title'. For now, I have changed to title to 'possible unauthorized access'.</comment></comment>