Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia - <AUTHOR> https://miguelgfierro.com/blog/2018/top-mistakes-and-learnings-from-my-startup-postmortem-samsamia/ <comment><USER2> _If you are trying to start a startup with a friend, think about this, do you really know this person? are you confident that under high levels of pressure this person is going to help you or is he going to break apart?_

I started a startup with my best friend whom I knew for several years. The startup succeeded (kind of, we got acqui-hired by BigTech) but the friendship turned into a deep alienation in the process.

Startup pressure can bring out the true character of a person. The problem though is that you may not know the true character of someone until startup pressure is applied -- even if that someone is your best friend.

I'd actually argue for _not_ starting your startup with a good friend. Friendship bias works against you when your cofounder turns against you under pressure. Instead choose a co-founder that you know professionally and that you have a good gut feeling about.

The problem of the story presented is not that he didn't start the company with someone he knew better, it's that apparently no agreements existed that prevented $ANTISOCIAL_COFOUNDER_BEHAVIOR from happening. I'm certainly guilty of that as well. The resources spent on setting up those agreements are _always_ worth it. Also not a shame at all to bring in lawyers at this stage.

 _It is super common to divide shares generously the first day of the startup, it 's like marrying a girl the first day you know her. Isn't it creepy?_

It's common to divide 50/50, but with a vesting schedule. If co-founder shows $ANTISOCIAL_COFOUNDER_BEHAVIOR despite agreements made you may kick him/her out and will only lose shares that vested.

<comment><USER3> > Startup pressure can bring out the true character of a person

Not necessarily. It can bring out the worse.

Let's say you are stressing a machine beyond its limit. The risks are specified in the manual but you still do it. The resulting mechanical damage can't be blamed on the manufacturer.

<comment><USER4> So well put. People you could have roomed with, drink with, hung out with, even been trapepd on a desert island with, all successfully, can turn into monsters under the pressure of running out of money and associated startup events. And you can find yourself echoing that behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading the abstract reminded me that so many people don't understand effective communication. The academic essay style is a travesty of global proportions. Effective communication would start with the conclusion section, then the body, and leave the intro out. Make your statement quickly, and then expand upon it for whoever wants to keep reading. Saying, "in this essay I will tell you what I learned" is not going to keep me reading. Give me the high level points, then expand upon them!

<comment><USER6> Give him a break, it's obvious that English is not his first language. The article is about mistake and learning about his startup, but you have moved the topic to his style of writing. Seriously, you do realize HN is worldwide right and many of us don't speak English as first languages?

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's a first/second language issue, but rather a "how to present ideas in written form" issue. The GP is not criticizing typos, but rather the way in which the article is structured. If the post were written in Spanish it would have the same issues - just in Spanish rather than English.

I actually think the (quite nice) blog formatting might be partially at fault: whenever I read a paper, I expect a certain style of writing and ideas presented in a certain way. By presenting it visually as a paper and then using a casual blog style, my first thought is not "this blog post is okay" but rather "this paper is bad".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing to consider is that your co-founder might not actually be your friend. It's easy to think you have a relationship with someone that you spend a lot of time coordinating with that might not truly exist. I believe most problems in any kind of relationships are based on expectations. It can be devastating to realize that someone else doesn't actually care what you think unless it serves their agenda and result in feeling used or exploited.

My advice, which I have failed at many times, is keep business compartmentalized and separate.

<comment><USER9> This is so important, it's concerning to think about how many good years of smart people have been wasted. It should be taught in school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started my 21 yo company with 2 friends. One we fired after about a year (he was literaly doing nothing). Then the other one and I continued for 6-7 years before he started working on other projects with an other company. Still, we still holded 50/50 of the shares (which was not a problem due to the way small companies works here).

For all this time we stayed friends.

And then, 3 years ago he offered me to join him on his new company. And at the end he screwed me. Deeply. Leaving me and our first company in big troubles.

So long our 25 years of friendship.

The funny part (if any) is that a couple of months ago, he sold me his shares of our company.

Not because he felt guilty of any kind. But because, as the company had made a really bad year in 2016, with important loss compared to the size of it, he had to sell the shares to not being a part of a loosing money company to obtain a loan from banks for buying his new house...

<comment><USER11> how much did he sell you his shares for, if you don't mind me asking? because it sounded like it's for the first company, not the new one

<comment><USER10> I didn't had shares in the new one. The deal was to come and help as a contractor first, and then make a holding for the companies (other were involved).

But cash wasn't flowing and I soon worked for "free" as I wanted it to rise (my other company still paying me), and the cash promise at the end was very interesting. And at the end they kicked me out.

I know I made mistakes continuing doing this, but we were friends for decades so I didn't see it coming.

Note that it was not in the startup world, but I told this story because of the friendship side.

And about the shares of our first company, he basically give them to me, as he wanted to get rid of them very fast. In fact all the paperwork was done (and dated a month before).

The reason I signed them is that I too wanted to buy them back, but was a bit scared of the amount he would ask for it.

So in the end there is a positive thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most startups fail cos the founders broke up or cant keep going on anymore, we keep pointing to lack of demand or lack of money as why a startup failed but to be honest most startups start from a situation where there is either a lack of money or a lack of demand so technically speaking most startups start from a failed situation.

Theres no pass fail on a piece of paper as we're used to in school for startups, its more where you've given up and dont want to continue.

<comment><USER13> Or when you run out of cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everybody starting a company for the first time should read this article and the associated book [https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders- dilemma](https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma)

</comment><comment><USER15> What was he doing from end of 2015 to middle of 2016? If I lost access to my bank accounts I'd be contacting the bank, calling emergency board meetings and filing legal motions the next day.

</comment><comment><USER16> The author opens by nobly asserting "I take all responsibility for the failure" yet then, everything that follows is how his co-founder screwed him who he is now suing. Feels kind of inauthentic overall.

<comment><USER17> How is that incompatible? If you partner with a crook, can't you take a responsibility for making that mistake (of not seeing the signs) but still call the other person out for being a crook?

Taking responsibility is different from saying other did no wrong.

<comment><USER18> I have to play devil's advocate here, because we know one side of the story. Perhaps the partner is not a crook, perhaps he was just not rich enough, hence why he was the recipient of a small salary in the first year and was unable to come up with further money to put into the company since his family didn't have any to risk, and why when the company generated actual revenue gave his family members opportunities to work with him. It sounds like the company's revenue consisted of one big customer and it folded when that customer was lost, but there's very little details of why that happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Haven't read the article yet but my first question is: what the heck did they use to make that?! It's beautiful like LaTeX but appears to be plain ol' HTML!

<comment><USER20> [https://github.com/miguelgfierro/sciblog](https://github.com/miguelgfierro/sciblog) \- Looks pretty sweet!

<comment><USER21> Off-topic, but I find it rather baffling that with uMatrix blocking scripts from ajax.cloudflare.com, the page renders with the article content missing, despite it being included in the page source (just with style="dispay: none").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sometimes I wonder about what's more profitable in B2B space - product or consulting/contracting. Doing the latter I manage to pull in more in 3 months what this guy generated it sounds like in 3 years.

That gives me a pause everytime I want to sink 3 months of my time into some startup idea.

<comment><USER23> As someone that has done both, you might be right. Consulting is way more profitable, but the thing is that you basically are working for someone else, and you can scale it as far as you can fit it on your calendar or hiring.

But with a product you can sell 1,000% of what you had yesterday, the schedules might be a little tight since B2B expects at least a few sales meetings.

So it has its pros and cons. And from my experience (and other's, both friends and clients who want to create something), it's unlikely to have something sellable in 3 months.

<comment><USER24> > As someone that has done both, you might be right.

I don't think he has done both. He wouldn't have asked in such a case.

<comment><USER25> It seems from the sentence that he himself has done both, he is not claiming that the original comment's author has done both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would never start any business with friends or families.

Anything with lots of money involve can hurt relationship.

With that said there were other points in there too and pitfalls that OP did early on that are good lessons. I think another thing to consider is that he didn't have a lawyer or accountant from the inception to go over the legality of 50%-50% and administration role.

It's a sad article but the ending was bright and I'm glad he's taking it as lessons learned. It'll help other people too.

edit:

The pivot from B2C to B2B is interesting. I never actually consider this but reading this now it's more of a "No duh" moment.

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems that this startup was successful in finding product market fit but was killed because of co-founders mismatch.

I am planning to start a business with my fiancée, we have been together for 10 years, and we complement each other nicely in terms of skills. What are your experiences with that?

<comment><USER28> I guess you should ask yourself is business success worth the risk of your relationship failing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Anyone visiting this discussion who may have suggestions about co-founder relationships etc., I would encourage you to visit Ben's site [0] to share your stories to others may learn.

I think co-founder relationships are one of the least explored aspects of a startup, despite its importance.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated with this site apart from the fact that I voluntarily submitted some content about my own co-founder experiences after being asked.

[0] - [https://healthybusinesspartnerships.com](https://healthybusinesspartnerships.com)

</comment><comment><USER30> I started with friends and end up with hurted relationship. (Advice given to me by my father years before that never start company with friends even when you both feel to be technically compatible.) Lesson learned, learn lesson when given from experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bad partnership will kill any business. Don't partner/cofound with strangers and be ready to lose friends if you do.

</comment><comment><USER31> I, for one, am sending big hugs to Miguel Angel Maldonado. I can totally see how this played out. Wow this rant is obnoxious. keep strong if you ever happen on this thread.

<comment><USER32> What, why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's funny how he claims full responsibility in the beginning before immediately ranting about how he got screwed by others.</comment>


The Worst Argument in the World - <AUTHOR> http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/worst.html <comment><USER2> The whole denial of the possibility of empirical knowledge strand in modern philosophy has long rubbed me up the wrong way, but possibly only in a way that is clear to programmers.

The denial usually derives from a distinction between the mind and the world outside it; things-in-themselves from the outside world can never be perceived by the mind, because all perceptions are mediated by sensory organs, they are all filtered one way or another.

But this seems suspect when one considers a simple physical computer as as an example of a simple mind. We model the "knowledge" of the machine as the state of its "memory", however we choose to represent that memory - flip-flop circuits or magnetized rust.

That "knowledge" changes as the machine's I/O manipulates the state through long chains of physical, mechanical operations, and looking in from the outside with our more sophisticated eyes we may see that the knowledge imparted by the "sensory I/O" may be more or less true. If it's less true (as a digitization, it'll almost always be an approximation), then the I/O or programming may have bugs; but if the I/O and programming are functioning well, is it true to say that the machine has not acquired true knowledge from its "sensory organs"? That it cannot acquire such knowledge?

Empirical (or a posteriori) knowledge is usually contrasted with a priori knowledge, stuff whose truth is independent of the outside world, but is usually a function of the meaning of words (such as "All batchelors are unmarried" - these are analytic truths). Things that are supposed to be true independent of the outside world but not embedded in the meaning of the words are supposed to be "synthetic a priori" truths. But it seems to me that a priori truths come from the brain examining itself, that the only way such "knowledge" can be obtained, i.e. a state change occur, is by examining the physical process of reasoning itself, whether directly, or indirectly as a result of the "programming", i.e. the construction of the machine / brain's mechanism for reasoning.

These "a priori truths" are mediated by the "I/O of self-reflection", and are not actually a priori at all, in practice. The _knowledge_ of the truths, i.e. the experiential sense of "dawning on oneself", i.e. what it feels like to experience a state change in one's knowledge representation, came about because of a physical process which may or may not have bugs; i.e. it is mediated.

So, a counterpart to "we have eyes, therefore we cannot see" - a lovely caricature - is "we have brains, therefore we cannot think". It seems to me no true Idealist can deny that he cannot have ideas.

<comment><USER3> I actually think that you're confusing a little bit of modern philosophy with a lot of "postmodernism." You have to be very careful there. Stove and Russell and Wittgenstein are "modern" philosophers. They also share a commonality in being founders of the school of analytic philosophy - the school most philosophy departments around the world are now centered on.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, has a comparatively small following. I'd make the exception for some of Stove's most criticized colleagues, including Feyerabend. There's no denying that he and his followers were influential, but I would not argue that they hold the "dominant" idea in modern philosophy. Their view is complex, but they certainly don't deny empirical knowledge, but instead aim to criticize certain points of empiricism which scientists generally regard as "solid." However, as you just read, Stove was one of many who sharply criticized him for "abusing" logical expressions.

I don't want this to turn into a really long argument, but I think you did make an interesting point. Many who believe that _a posteriori_ knowledge is impossible are in opposition to many of the early philosopher/mathematicians of the early-mid 20th century. Some of the most notable are Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein (and I also want to briefly mention Gödel, who was not very active in philosophy, but whose mathematics help the field immeasurably.

As opposed to Feyerabend and especially the skeptics, I would state that they have it all wrong. It is not _a posteriori_ knowledge which is impossible, it is _a priori_ knowledge which is impossible (or tautological, to be more accurate). Many of the early modern philosophers (especially the empiricists, like my heroes John Locke and David Hume) supposed that much of our knowledge comes from the outside - that is from our experience. As we now know today, they were largely correct. We gather a huge amount of our personality and view from our experiences, with very little "innate" knowledge. One of the main hold-outs from that time was in mathematics. Many believed that mathematics was something a priori solid. If you read Descartes's Meditations or Hume's Enquiry, you will see a lot of mention of Euclid, specifically his theories of geometry. Time and time again the philosophers used the example of basic addition or the laws of geometry as arguments for _a priori_ knowledge. That is, even if I don't know that that tree exists, I can at least know that 2+2=4. This would seem to be an argument for the skeptics and idealists (like Berkeley), but instead it is an indictment. For, even mathematics is not safe from _a posteriori_ reasoning. Why does 2+2=4? Because we have defined it to be so. We have come up with an algebra, the countable numbers, and defined addition using it. However, does this hold some innate truth, an _a priori_ truth about the Universe? I would argue that no, it doesn't. This _a priori_ knowledge is tautological -- math comes up with the "right" answer _because we defined what the right answer in our consistent system is._ Except, we really didn't. Gödel has helped here by proving that no moderately complex system can be both complete and consistent. This is one nail in the coffin of _a priori_ math, but it continues. Eventually we reach some of our most basic axioms -- Peano arithmetic. It would seem that these are truly untouchable. a != !a. Who can disagree with this? Well, if you look closely, you'll see an assumption here. Or, more importantly, a definition. We define !a. We define these expressions. These are _a priori,_ and many believe that you can build _a priori_ systems out of them. The problem is -- you _can't._ Russell and Whitehead soon saw this after Gödel's insight, but it's still a contentious issue.

Well, I tried to keep that as brief as possible, but as you can see, philosophy tends to drone on and on. This isn't really a detailed analysis, but think of it as a footnote of my views on the issue.

<comment><USER4> Godel did not show that "no moderately complex system can be both complete and consistent". What Godel showed was that a recursively enumerable set of axioms that is rich enough to contain the natural numbers could not be complete and consistent.

The second order Peano axioms for the natural numbers have only one model up to isomorphism. The second order axioms are not computable, that is not recursively enumerable. The first order Peano axioms are recursively enumerable but have infinitely non-isomorphic models to them.

What Russel and Whitehead tried to do was to remove humans from mathematical knowledge by finding a system of computable - that is, find a mechanical process for determining whether or not a proof was correct. Godel showed that this is not possible. This is the reason why Penrose and some others think that AI will never reach the level of human intelligence.

Not sure if this impacts your points. But it definitely is not the case that no moderately complex system can be both complete and consistent. In fact his completeness result demonstrates the incorrectness of your statement. Just take as your axiomatic system the collection of all true statements in whatever system you are working with. That's a complete axiomatic system. It's not helpful because there is no easy to use (think computable) criteria for finding out what statements are axioms and which ones aren't.

<comment><USER3> I am appropriately corrected. This actually doesn't change my view at all, because when I said "moderately complex," I assumed that the natural numbers where included in that. If you go back to read Descartes and Kant you'll see much of the same treatment - the addition operation as defined by our algebra of the set of the natural numbers is used many times as an example of a priori knowledge.

You are completely correct though - it was very late when I first commented on this and was tired and simply wrong. I'll try and be much more specific in my treatment of mathematics in the future, although I am not a mathematician. I just want to note that I never claimed that Gödel proved that Peano arithmetic was incomplete or inconsistent (although if I remember correctly, he could not prove that the whole of PA was consistent), but simply that the nature of Peano arithmetic does not imbue any a priori knowledge of the universe or our existence. This is supported by Gödel in the broad sense that we cannot generate a "universal theory" of mathematics. However, my main point is that mathematics is not truth, it is only a model of our definitions and observations -- a tool, if you will -- and an incomplete model at that.

<comment><USER4> I didn't think that your view would be changed. Quite honestly I'm not sure I understand the philosophy behind this. But the fact that there is only one model to the second order axioms of arithmetic (Peano's axioms with induction included) is a bit surprising to me.

We can't come up with a computable system for finding all mathematical truth but there appears to be a hardwired number system in the universe. It's not computable but it is unique. The natural numbers lead naturally (no pun intended) to the integers in a unique way. The integers uniquely lead to the rationals and the completion of the rationals is a unique object called the real numbers. The unique algebraic closure of the reals is the complex numbers. There is uniqueness at each step. This coupled with the utility of using mathematics to describe natural processes is...strange to me and some others.

I don't know what this has to do with your points because I didn't understand them. Not because you didn't write clearly but because I don't know enough philosophy. I'm a mathematician and know very little about philosophy.

Thanks for your input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "He awarded the prize to himself"

So he also earns the award for the worst competition ever.

</comment><comment><USER6> if induction doesn't actually work we'll never know that for certain. what is the alternative to induction? stop trying? epistemic hand wringing over the fact that induction might fail us isn't useful.

<comment><USER7> Well, the "epistemic hand wringing" has a very serious point, which is that it spells big trouble for philosophy of science, which is (among other things) concerned with the "problem of demarcation". Put simply: how do you tell what is and isn't "science"?

Hume's formulation of the problem of induction actually pointed to two things: one, the "logical" problem of induction, was simply the standard critique of inductive generalization as an unsupportable method of inference. The other, the "psychological" problem of induction, claimed that inductive generalization was nonetheless how human beings actually think, and so we're screwed. But in the late nineteenth century, and then again in the mid- twentieth century, you get two thinkers who challenge this.

Charles Saunders Peirce took a view of science and of human thought which was not based on induction: in Peirce's view, the "average" person simply believes something until it causes some sort of conflict (at which point, Peirce claimed, other methods of justifying belief would be developed in response, leading to a chain which eventually ends up at the scientific method). Peirce also didn't view science as being able to give ultimately true answers to questions (thus sidestepping the need to justify inductive generalization, even if it does end up as part of scientific method); rather, science can get better and better approximations to the truth over time (as more observational data becomes available and new theories are proposed to explain the data), but will never actually arrive at "the truth" (and we wouldn't be able to tell even if it did). In other words, Peirce's view of human knowledge and of science is based around fallibility.

Karl Popper, immersed in the world of German-speaking philosophy, came to very similar conclusions much later on, and proposed a solution to the problem of induction in the following form. First, he accepted in its entirety the logical problem of induction, but declared that it need not cause problems for science, because science need not be inductive in nature. Second, he proposed that the psychological problem of induction was a fiction: he asserted that the way people actually reason is far closer to fallibilism (just like Peirce), and framed it in common-sense terms as a process of trial and error.

Popper built a theory of demarcation around flipping the problem of induction on its head: it is true, he happily conceded, that no number of observed instances is sufficient to establish a generalization to all instances (including those as-yet-unobserved, or unobservable). But this turns out not to be such a big deal, because all it takes is _one observed counterexample_ to demonstrate that a theory is false. Thus we can still proceed scientifically, but instead of speaking of theories which are "verified" by observation, we speak of theories which survive attempts at falsification.

Popper came to the same sort of conclusion as Peirce regarding the "truth" of scientific theories: he felt that there was no useful distinction between, say, a "hypothesis" or "conjecture", and a "theory", because none of them can be said to be true -- the best that can be said is that they have not yet been proven false. And so he developed a system in which "science" consists of those theories which can be subjected to falsification: a theory is scientific only if there is some test which, if it gives a negative result, will be taken as showing that the theory is false.

He talked occasionally of this system as applying a form of Darwinian selection to theories: there is never a final "best" or "true" theory, but there is a selection process at work which eliminates false theories through observation of counterexamples. The theories which stay with us and form the basis of everyday working science, then, are not those which are "true" but are merely those which, so far, have survived that selection process. And in judging between competing theories, Popper preferred the theory which was boldest in terms of possible falsification: theories which make assertions that are easy to test for falsity, he claimed, tend also to be those which -- if they survive such tests -- provide the broadest and most useful basis for further scientific work.

Of course, both Peirce and Popper are terribly unfashionable in philosophy of science these days. Peirce is reviled for having the gall to claim that science advances _toward_ truth over time even if it never _arrives_ at truth (a position which every good postmodern Kuhnian disciple will dogmatically reject). And Popper is often viewed as a sort of semantic charlatan whose attempt to shift from verification to falsification was merely a critique (albeit a devastating one) of communism, Freudian psychology and logical positivism.

<comment><USER6> I've never been able to grasp how falsificationism is incompatible with or different from induction.

<comment><USER7> They're sort of inverses of each other; a better way to put it is "verificationism" vs. "falsificationism".

The key difference is that a verification model seeks to establish that a theory is true, while a falsification model seeks to establish that it is not. Verification models cannot achieve their goal. Falsification models can.

This means throwing out the idea that you will ever have a theory "proven" to be "true", but thanks to the problem of induction you weren't (in the general scientific-method sense) ever going to get that anyway. Instead, you have theories which have been proven false (since falsification gives you counterexamples to universally-quantified conjectures, which allow the valid deductive conclusion of falsity of those conjectures), and theories which have not yet been proven false.

Importantly, you _never_ say that the latter group of theories are "true", "likely to be true", etc.; you only and always say either that they've not yet been shown false or, more commonly, that they have thus far survived attempts at falsification.

To a lot of people it does seem like meaningless semantics, but for people interested in the demarcation problem (which is anything but unimportant these days) it's quite significant because it offers a viable framework for a solution.

<comment><USER6> thanks for the clarification. I guess the problem arose because I never thought of induction as a method for finding the "truth" per se, but rather as a method of finding consistent correlations (with direct cause and effect being a special case of correlation where the correlation coefficient is 1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The argument for why the article's author thinks "the worst argument in the world" is invalid comes from a book by Alan Sokal, a physicist with a real chip on his shoulder against Postmodern philosophy.

Sokal is perhaps best known for what has come to be known as the "Sokal Hoax": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_hoax>

I strongly recommend anyone interested in this article and in learning about the more recent incarnation of the analytic/continental feud in philosophy read the articles Sokal has collected on his hoax: <http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html>

Outside these articles, Sokal and his sympathizers rarely acknowledge that there could even be any reasonable response to their allegations of buffoonary and charlatanism. Unfortunately for Sokal and his sympathizers, this pose leads to the conclusion that they are either inadvertently or deliberately ignorant of much of philosophy.</comment>


Audio Reveals What John Kerry Told Syrians Behind Closed Doors - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/30/world/middleeast/john-kerry-syria-audio.html <comment><USER2> So while I understand the Syrian's frustration, let's assume the US does the most extreme thing to help them and goes to all-out war to remove Assad. They would probably be able to do that even against the will of the Russians, since those would hardly fight American forces, if we ignore the increased verbal threats that would surely come.

So let's assume the US is victorious and Assad gone. And now? A lot of Syrian fractions, deprived of their common enemy, and a lot of them are extremists. I'm sure very few of them would be okay with an international occupying force.

What I'm missing in all the news is even a hint that the journalists are willing and/or capable of looking at _motives_. We are always told about this or that attack, and how many children died - never mentioning that if the table were turned it would just be the children of the other group(s) that would die (but the media could just stop reporting about them, the news articles are way too inconsistent in whom they are reporting about and whom not, that alone is a significant selection bias).

I have yet to see any article that tells us (in believable terms and not just superficially) what "Assad" (meaning more than just the one guy) actually wants. I only read that he and Putin are bombing hospitals and children. The German leading magazine and news source "Der Spiegel", where I get most of my daily news, is especially bad. They've had 2-4 such Syria articles on the front page every single day for a while now, without giving any actual (deeper) information or a (thorough) look at the alternatives. And then they wonder about the apathy among the readers? They enable the forum only under every 10th or so of those articles, and each time they do the tone is highly skeptical, not of any one party in the conflict, but about how we are informed and the lack of actually clear and good alternatives.

<comment><USER3> Assad wants power and control over Syria, obviously. The guy has few appealing exile options. Most of the regime's members would face execution if they lost, so they don't want that.

<comment><USER4> > Assad wants power and control over Syria, obviously

This is a President's prerrogative. Why is US preventing this to happen?

<comment><USER5> Syria's Constitution makes the country a single party system. Assad is a dictator. There's nothing democratic about its government. It's a family dictatorship. The people wanted their ouster, Assad refused to go and lit the stables on fire in a huge fuck you to the whole country.

<comment><USER4> The people elected recently a parlament that supports Assad, which was also elected by vote. I don't see a good reason given for US to go there, fund ISIS and screw half a dozen of countries.

<comment><USER5> How do people have fair elections in the middle of a war zone with a single political party as the option? The entire opposition boycotted the election. What is your point in even bringing up such a obvious sham of an election?

And which half a dozen countries are you talking about exactly, that aren't already screwed?

I'm a non-interventionist myself, but it isn't an absolute position. Accepting years long conflict isn't good for anyone either.

<comment><USER4> US elections are also totally biased, all media is bashing Trump and supporting Hillary. How do people have fair election there? Should China and Rússia intervene?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a bunch of lies.

He talks as if the action against Syria is because Assad is a brutal military dictator. The reality is that the US wants Assad gone because he is an ally to Russia/Iran who can exert control over Lebanon, and he is blocking a gas pipeline from Qatar to EU that would weaken Russia.

The simple solution for there to be peace in Syria is for the US to get out. Stop sponsoring terrorists (yes, the "rebels" the US sponsors are terrorists) in Syria, just get out. Assad maintained peace from 2000 - 2011, and he can do it again.

The saddest part is this: when a Syrian kid learns of the destruction of his country and wants revenge on the US, it will be these same newspapers that will be crying about "Why do they hate us?"

</comment><comment><USER7> Propaganda. Assad and Russia are closer than ever to crushing the rebels ending this 5 year war. The sob stories (over 100 children!) have been at hysterical levels for the past week, but I can only hope most Americans will not fall for it. What happens in Syria is not our business.

</comment><comment><USER8> Which incidentally also goes to prove that most doors are not really closed these days...

</comment><comment><USER9> from the article <Kerry ask : "Who's that going to be?" he asked. "Who's going to do that?" "Three years ago, I would say: You. But right now, I don't know." >

So now oppositions all over the world go ballistic and use violence as the only solution to a problem, confident that USA will come and take out the head of the regime they oppose, ...Americans coming in, die for them. 3 years ago they were betting on Americans invading Syria and do the work for them ?

Silly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sad. Seeing Russia determine the outcome of this war is frustrating. Then again it's not the US's responsibility to fix everything.

<comment><USER10> Fix? They break everything they touch. Seriously, starting with Saddam they have created utter chaos in the ME and helped spread terrorism all over the world.

But hey, Eisenhower tried to wake up we (the people) when he talked about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

<comment><USER11> Its the USA who started all this chaos in the near east and europe is the one who suffers. Nicely explained by satire show "Die Anstalt" on youtube [https://youtu.be/57fMqUl-sng](https://youtu.be/57fMqUl-sng) (english subtitles)

<comment><USER12> I'd argue Europe's brilliant idea to carve up the Middle East into countries intentionally designed to be sectarian is a root cause of today's problems. America took the lid off the problems, but we didn't draw the lines of Syria, Iraq, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tech Workers Need to Keep Organizing - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/tech-worker-organizing-google-union-walkout <comment><AUTHOR> Archived link here: [https://archive.fo/3UUa0](https://archive.fo/3UUa0)</comment>


TechCrunch's RSS Figures Graphed (Is RSS Fading?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.feedcompare.com/?feed1=techcrunch&feed2=&feed3=&feed4=&months=48

<comment><USER2> Or is TechCrunch fading?

<comment><USER3> Sure looks that way:

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com/></comment></comment>


Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? – Prof. Dennis Whyte (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 <comment><USER2> This is _the_ future of energy - nothing else comes close.

I got excited about it this spring, and I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention and funding. This is all coming from MIT, not the ramblings of some random crank:

[http://web.mit.edu/nse/people/faculty/whyte.html](http://web.mit.edu/nse/people/faculty/whyte.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also an excellent presentation from one of the post docs

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk)

The approach and physics are well established. This seems like the quickest way to break the net power gain barrier with the lowest risk and lowest cost today and will allow individual labs and entrepreneurs to iterate on the implementation and engineering much more rapidly.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What ever happened with the Rap Genius/Heroku routing controversy? - <AUTHOR> Digging into a recent link for annotations on Google's SRE book led me to look back into the "Routergate"[1] issue in 2013.
For those who don't remember it, the short summary is that Heroku, a PAAS company of some repute, silently changed their routing for their customer's applications from least-used to random, without updating their documentation or their performance analysis tooling.
This had the following effects:
* Torpedoing the performance of any Rails applications with long-running threads
* Requiring many more workers (dynos in Heroku parlance) to achieve the same level of performance, at a cost of $35/month/dyno
* Inaccurate information was provided by the platform's integration with New Relic, an integration that adds another $40/month to the price of a dyno, making it hard for customers to see that their performance issues were the fault of the platform, not their app.
An info website was referenced, http://herokuclassaction.com, which is now suspended. The domain still resolves, but the old site was suspended by the webhost some time after February 2015 [2] and hasn't been usable since.
I've been unable to find much about the resolution of this controversy with a combination of google and HN searches.
Does anyone know what eventually happened?
Did Heroku ever pay Genius back the few hundred thousand they ripped them off with the silent change?
Did the lawsuit happen, or did it fizzle?
Did Heroku ever fix their routing to be less pathological?
[1]: http://www.wired.com/2013/03/hieroku/
[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20150127094114/http://herokuclassaction.com/ <comment><USER2> > Does anyone know what eventually happened?

Here's the rap genius blog post packed with links to replies and further comments.

[http://genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret- annotated](http://genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotated)

TLDR; They were upset that they had to discover the issue, eventually they changed web servers to use Unicorn and this fixed everything. Their final post on the matter was "It was all a dream".

</comment><comment><USER2> > Did Heroku ever fix their routing to be less pathological?

I may be remembering my history incorrectly but it had to do with rails handling of concurrency and that the default gem used in rails did not take advantage of heroku's handling of concurrency and that heroku did not tell everyone about this.

As far as I remember they fixed things on their end, the suggestion for rails apps was to switch which web server you were using over to Unicorn or Puma.

[https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/2/27/unicorn_rails](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/2/27/unicorn_rails)

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought about the same thing yesterday and went to rap genius blog to see if there were anything, but their blog was broken!</comment>


Gtkdial: dial from every gtk app - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/geocar/gtkdial

<comment><AUTHOR> I was playing with gtkparasite and I realized I could probably make a dial menu (like firedialer) for my evolution calendar using the gtkmodule method.

Despite there not being very much documentation on gtkmodules, the whole thing took only a couple hours of hacking and works pretty well.</comment>


Stop relying on your ORM and learn SQL - <AUTHOR> http://sirupsen.com/stop-relying-on-your-orm-and-learn-sql/

<comment><USER2> ActiveRecord (Rails) provides counter caches for this instance. There are also gems that will analyze the queries your ORM performs to tell you which ones you should optimize.

I tend to stick with "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

</comment><comment><USER3> Knowledge of SQL is definitely needed even when using ORMs, but I agree with both of the other commenters. Instead of starting out with bending the ORM to your will it is better to use the API of the ORM in the way it really is intended.

In my experience with Rails ActiveRecord the usual suspects are N+1 queries, repeated queries that hit the query cache (they are really quite slow in Rails 3), and missing indices.

But intricate knowledge of SQL is most certainly necessary when using ORMs in conjunction with anything else than a trivial data model.

</comment><comment><USER4> My typical approach is to just go with the ORM approach while keeping an eye on various query metrics. If I begin to see signs of a slowdown related to a specific query being generated by the ORM, then I will replace it with hand tailored SQL.

I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about it, but it works well for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> To use an ORM well you should know how it works internally anyway. Monitor what SQL it spits out, think how that should be done optimally and see how the ORM would generate that; a lot of ORMs you can nudge in the right direction if you know how it generates the actual SQL it executes from your (limited) input.</comment>


Star Wars: Russian bots and trolls behind Last Jedi abuse, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://news.sky.com/story/star-wars-russian-bots-and-trolls-behind-last-jedi-abuse-study-finds-11515403 <comment><USER2> It's funny how a study on a few hundreds of negative tweets on Star Wars TLJ, directed to M. Johnson, from which half were from bots/trolls/people "not interested in Star wars" give headlines like this, as if any critics of the movie could be dismissed as irrelevant, because of the origin of a few tweets.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! This comes up very intermittently, but asking again if anyone has side projects that they'd like to sell?
I run a weekly newsletter for interested buyers. I monitor marketplaces and forums every week. I strongly believe a lot of potential projects are never listed or die an unnecessary quiet death.
My community specifically wants to see more SaaS opportunities, which are somewhat under-represented in public marketplaces.
Super helpful info: - Name + link to site/product - Business model - Current monthly revenue - Tech stack <comment><USER2> Not really at the moment, but possibly one day. I could also be interested as a buyer at some point. How does one subscribe to your newsletter?

<comment><USER3> Link is in submitter's profile [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dshanahan](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dshanahan)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Why did Google get rid of the centered design of YouTube? - <AUTHOR>

Google just changed YouTube. Everything is now aligned left. That might be good for a smaller resolution, but on mine it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/cB2ZB.png
So now I have to look at the upper-left corner to see the video. Which is bizarre at least (and I'm irritated by it, for now at least).
Aren't Google testing these on multiple resolutions, or am I the only one that feels the discomfort of this lack of symmetry? <comment><USER2> "now I have to look at the upper-left corner".

Surely this takes _first-world problems_ to a new level.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always fullscreen videos, so it doesn't matter to me.

I suspect you're just experiencing cognitive dissonance due to the fact it's a change from what you're used to.

Within a month it'll feel natural and you'll have trouble remembering why the change upset you.

Within a year you'll have half-forgotten it was ever any different.

Within two years you'll have totally forgotten the old layout, and you'll make a near-identical complaint if Google ever changes it back.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps they're making space for new ads aligned to the right. People naturally tend to look to the right, so right-aligned ads might get higher CTRs.</comment>


A Beautiful Race Condition - <AUTHOR> http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2009/06/beautiful-race-condition.html <comment><USER2> Nice analysis and demonstration that even relaxing concurrency requirements is not as easy as it looks.

Interestingly, when trying to reason about and verify correct synchronisation of data structures, I immediately start drawing boxes with lots of arrows for pointers (just like those in the article) even though I don't normally need any visual aids to design my code. Somehow, holding a complex data structure in my head is no problem, but as soon as I try to think about concurrent access to something as simple as a linked list, I need to draw each state. Anyone else got any good strategies for concurrency analysis?

<comment><USER3> I used to have do something similar (on a whiteboard, though) whenever I needed to write some slightly complicated concurrency code (I'm a systems developer). However, after years of writing multi-threaded and synchronization code, I've learned that the trick is to.... abstract (?) the representation in your head.

If you try to "flatten out" the concurrency, it'll be this HUGE representation that'll never fit in your skull. The trick is to think in multiple dimensions instead of flattening it out. Sort of queue the other threads in the back of your head, and pretend you're the OS. Whenever you reach a line of code for the current thread you're "imagining/debugging in your head", loop over the other consumers/producers in your model and ask yourself "what happens to this guy at this moment, or what happens if this guy was doing x, y, or z?"

Basically, don't hold the structure, hold the events. Expand the other objects as needed in your head, then stash them away. Don't try to hold them all in there, because they'll never fit.

Incidentally, since adapting to this I many times still get the urge to pick up a pen or marker and scribble down the concurrency model - except 2 seconds later I give up because it's so hard to efficiently represent multi-threaded environments/code in 2d. And that's the same difficulty you have trying to jam that representation in your head.

Remember the description of the components, not the components themselves, I guess. I hope this isn't as confusing as I fear I've made it out to be!

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I do that for simpler things (a bunch of mutexes, condition variables, etc.) but as soon as I look at anything lock-free, by brain just fails to take it all in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember reading this article for the first time and being overcome by the urge to erase it from my memory. Every time it comes up I worry that I may have committed this error in applications still in production. I know for sure that I've wondered on multiple occasions about whether you could use a regular HashMap as an imperfect cache and I'm not sure I've always (especially when I first started writing code) erred on the safe side of caution and opted for the ConcurrentHashMap.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you have a library class or function that is not explicitly marked as thread safe, do not assume it is, regardless of whether or not it "should" be under any system of logic or reason.

Why not?

Because you have no idea what it might be doing behind the scenes. Even "immutable" objects might have mutable state under the covers of encapsulation (e.g. caching).

And even if you somehow manage to prove that the current version IS safe, perhaps the next version won't be. After the code has been running perfectly for years and the library has been upgraded dozens of times, good luck every finding your subtle, intermittent threading disaster.

Thread safety is an implementation detail unless you are explicitly told otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice analysis. Points up the need for synchronization primitives around complex data structures.

Which brings up its own issues: scheduling blockages. Resizing a hash map; garbage collecting; flushing file buffers. It doesn't matter, putting synchronication primitives around usually-fast-but-occasionally-dog-slow operations is the sad result of most naieve multithreaded attempts.

It results in apparently-hung GUI threads, stuttering performance, deadlocks that usually don't happen and are terrible to diagnose.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't have anything to add regarding race conditions. But I do want to mention how awesome the mailinator service is. I've been using it for years and recommend it highly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool analysis. tl;dr:

If you're using a non-thread safe structure in a multi-threaded way and think you understand what kinds of data corruption you might get (and are ok with that), you still might get totally different and unexpected kinds of data corruption than you planned for (read the article for details).

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading javadoc helps as well sometimes. The HashMap's doc says "Note that this implementation is not synchronized", and that's enough for me for not using this class as global unsynchronized cache.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, the question is: does a hashmap implementation exist where accessing and normal writing is not serialized, but expanding the table has the appropriate locks?

<comment><USER11> Here you go:

Collections.synchronizedMap(new HashMap());

<comment><USER12> he wrote "accessing is not serialized"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's why I use Microsoft.FSharp.Collections.Map instead. No multi-threading issues with concurrent access and no performance killing locks.

</comment><comment><USER14> A very cool analysis. I will be filing this under "what part of 'undefined' don't you understand?"

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a complete aside from any contents from the article...

This is what I see....

23."You will be lynched" 24.A Beautiful Race Condition

That's Just Wrong. Completely by accident, but still Just Wrong.</comment>


Envoy Protect: Keep Employees Safe During Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://envoy.com/products/protect-employee-safety/ <comment><AUTHOR> more here: [https://envoy.com/blog/introducing-envoy-protect-reopen- your...](https://envoy.com/blog/introducing-envoy-protect-reopen-your- workplace-with-confidence/)

btw, envoy is hiring engineers and product managers as well: [https://envoy.com/jobs](https://envoy.com/jobs)</comment>


Intestinal δ-6-desaturase determines hosts for Toxoplasma sexual reproduction - <AUTHOR> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/688580v1?rss=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Toxoplasma is the somewhat infamous parasite that in the wild exclusively reproduces in cats (it infects prey, mice, as part of its lifecycle and then alters their behavior to make them easier for cats to catch, but then reproduces in cats). There isn't any cure or vaccine, and still a lot of research to do. But until now it hadn't been determined why reproduction was species specific, and so the only way to get more to try to study was to raise lab cats, infect them, incubate, and then kill them and harvest it. This team figured out that linoleic acid was the key differentiator and now have done preliminary work that shows they may be able to get them to go through a full cycle in mice with the right drug (and genetic modification to eliminate that requirement is the next step). It's pretty cool research and if they've got it right would be a big deal for further Toxo studies, dramatically reducing the research reqs and experimentation cycle time by allowing use of a standard lab model and not depending on going through actual cats.

Edit to add: It looks like The Atlantic also has a good more general article [1] of this research and overview of the surrounding context. I'm not sure if it's available to everyone though, I'm a subscriber and sometimes I think they paywall stuff.

1: [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/groundbr...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/groundbreaking- parasite-study-good-news-cats/593779/)</comment>


Ask HN: Place to find short term Python gigs? - <AUTHOR>

	I'm aware of the big ones like odesk, rentacoder, elance, &c... but I was wondering if anyone knew of lesser-known and specific sites for Python or Erlang programming? I'm building my own startup but I'm finding myself in a position where I need some extra cash and doing a short term gig is the only thing I can really think of. <comment><USER2> There's <http://djangogigs.com/> and of course the monthly HN freelance / work threads.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is <http://experts4solutions.com/e4s/default/index> for web2py/python developers.</comment>


Why Google won't fix a security bug that's in almost a billion Android phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/14/google-security-bug-billion-android-phones

<comment><USER2> Note: This is a bug on an outdated OS that is no longer supported by Google. This is no worse than Apple not patching iOS 4.</comment>


WebVR spec 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://mozvr.com/webvr-spec/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps an unfortuitous choice of release date.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearly they'll need a 1.1 just in time for Oct. 31.</comment></comment>


The new way to bank your business - <AUTHOR> http://www.hufsy.com/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=HackerNews <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

Hufsy here:) a FinTech start-up based in Copenhagen. We're trying to change how business approach/handle their finances.

What do we actual do and believe in ? Hufsy believes online bank systems for businesses are outdated. Therefore, we are reinventing how businesses handle money and do banking: get an instant overview of financial health, accept and make payments, analyze them and report taxes. All in one system.

We are still working on our BetaVersion and we'd love to hear as much input from you guys as possible.

If you're interested in changing the world as we do, take a look and let us know what you think: [http://www.hufsy.com/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=websi...](http://www.hufsy.com/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=HackerNews)

-Hufsy</comment>


Announcing Chess 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html

<comment><USER2> I get that the name is a cute joke, but adding hidden information is totally contradictory to the core beauty of chess.

I took a quick look at the rules and it seems like an interesting game, but from a game design perspective, it's a radical departure from vanilla chess.

<comment><USER3> And the need for memorization is pretty elegantly solved with Fischer Random Chess.

And draws are only very common at high-level play. It's not even clear this variant would solve that.

<comment><USER4> Not clear, but I am wondering what that "a king crossing the middle line is a win" rule will do.

I have suspicion that that can lead to very early wins. "Move pawn, then rush king to fifth row" might be beatable, but I guess there are quite a few "recklessly run for row 5, and just make it" paths in the search tree. An easy way to counteract that may be bringing the queen and rooks into play early, but I would exchange them and then start the race for row 5.

<comment><USER5> Remove most draws by adding a secondary objective.

<comment><USER4> Here's something that I think is in the spirit of the game and has a good chance of working:

Frame the game as two armies racing to occupy an oasis (four center squares of the board) in the desert. Consider that oasis occupied if either the enemy's king is captured, or if your king can camp there for X moves (if your king can camp there, the area can't be part of the front anymore, so it is truly yours)

I chose an oasis rather than a true stronghold such as a fort or castle because a fort or castle would have to mean the introduction of separate rules for attacks into and out of the stronghold (hm, that might be fun, too. Consider a case where captures into the four center squares require the capturer to have at least two means to make that capture.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A variant I really like is gothic chess. It basically adds two pieces to the board. While traditional chess only has a bishop-rook piece (the queen), gothic chess adds a bishop-knight and a rook-knight.

When I was younger I picked up a set at the USCF youth nationals chess tournament, it is a fun break from regular chess because it gets you back to thinking on your feet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_chess](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_chess)

</comment><comment><USER7> And here are chesses from 3 to infinity.

[http://www.chessvariants.org/alphabet.html](http://www.chessvariants.org/alphabet.html)

<comment><USER8> Yes, I also found the claim on the name "Chess 2" vaguely annoying. I mean, jeepers, just look at the S page, locked to "Games" only: [http://www.chessvariants.org/index/mainquery.php?displayinve...](http://www.chessvariants.org/index/mainquery.php?displayinventor=1&displayauthor=1&itswhatsnew=&groupbyweek=&sortdescending=&daysyoung=&daysold=&orderby=LinkText&startswithletter=S&language=English&category=&type=Game)

<comment><USER9> I miss sites like that. Thanks for the nostalgia.

<comment><USER10> same here. inspired in large part by [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the- year-the-stream-crested/282202/) one of my planned projects for 2014 is to put up a website with that 1990s sense of "jumping-off point for lots of interesting stuff, according to me, your friendly curator and tour guide"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bah. There are hundreds of chess variants, to name yours chess 2 is extreme misplaced arrogance. And more than likely it has a dominant strategy and is flawed.

<comment><USER12> I've followed Sirlin for a long, long time. He definitely has a ton of misplaced arrogance (it's arguably his defining feature), but he is extremely good at game balance. I'm sure there are flaws with Chess 2, but I highly doubt that a dominant strategy is one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Chess 2. For me, it's called starcraft, and it already addresses all mentioned problems.

Nevertheless, I applaud game designer to have the balls to try to evolve something so established. Loving chess a lot, I'll certainly give that a try.

<comment><USER14> Although Starcraft 2 comes close, Blizzard still has not solved the problem of realtime strategy games being too hard to control to allow it to really be about strategy and tactics, and perhaps they don't want to either.

<comment><USER13> I beg to differ :)

Maybe it's the case at the beginning, when realtime can be overwhelming, but at higher level, people have a lot of different tactics, be it build orders (like chess openings), general game flow and timing, specific offensive tactics (there are actually so many that getting information about what your opponent is doing is one of the most critical part of the game) and choosing army composition based on opponent's one weak points.

As for strategy, I think fast decision making should be considered in the field of strategy too : you have to act quick while still following a bigger plan, and be quick to change it in case of problem. After all, nobody would say blitz chess games are not about strategy. But yes, it can feel totally random for casual players, just like blitz chess.

<comment><USER14> You say higher level like it's something that's attainable by simply playing a bit more often but actually you mean 'highest'. A level of skill with manipulating units that's only attained by 0.0001 of Starcraft players, it is not something people suffer from 'at the beginning'. It's a skill that's generally thought not to be attainable or even sustainable past the age of 30.

I am not debating whether Starcraft has strategy, tactics or whether fast decision making is a cool element of a game. I think it's all true. It's just that in Starcraft those things are all only relevant when you're better at manipulating units than your opponent is.

It's what makes Starcraft more a sport than a game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My favorite variant is Twilight Chess [1]:" The general idea of twilight chess is fairly simple : you can move any of your piece, but the king, into a twilight zone (warp moves), and any piece on the twilight zone may be moved to any empty square of the board (drop moves), but pawns on the last rank. "

[1]: [http://membres- lig.imag.fr/prost/Twilight_Chess/index.html](http://membres- lig.imag.fr/prost/Twilight_Chess/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> `Chess 1` has been tweaked over the centuries as well: castling and en-passant are quite recent.

As to memorization of openings, the current world champion Magnus Carlsen thinks the attention to opening theory is overrated.

The only thing that really bothers me is that an opponent can continue to play a position that's obviously lost for a number of hours. I think adding the concept of a doubling cube (like in Backgammon) might address this.

<comment> V-2 _castling and en-passant are quite recent._

They're not, really. They date back to middle ages. Quite recent is only that they were made "official" and rules were uniformized.

 _As to memorization of openings, the current world champion Magnus Carlsen thinks the attention to opening theory is overrated._

Yes, but you need to know the context in which he thinks it's "overrated" :)

It's not unusual these days that more than half of the game is prepared at home.

Eg. when Topalov played Anand in World Championship 2010, Anand lost the first game, because he forgot the correct 23rd move of his home preparation. The game went on for 7 more moves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The rules link goes to a checkout process meant for selling things, with the price set to zero. It has required-fields for billing address (even though it doesn't collect actual payment information). Then it emails (to mailinator, in my case) an order confirmation email, followed by a separate shipping confirmation email (shipped to empty-string). It didn't send an actual download link, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting variant, but it still bothers me that he made it to set out to help solve the problem of experts, most of whom will never play this game. One of the biggest reasons it was created was to solve the issue of constant draws at the highest tier. Seems like it would be more advantageous to target such a game to amateur and intermediate chess players.

<comment><USER19> You have to design mainly for high-level play; otherwise you get a game that people try, maybe play a few times, but that nobody sticks with long enough to cycle around to evangelizing it and training the next generation in it.

For a flash-in-the-pan iOS game title, that might be okay, but if you're actually trying to reinvent something like _chess_ \--something with hundreds of generations of people who have come into a thriving "chess culture" and added their own contributions to it--then you have to aim high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Okay, I might be crazy, but this reads like a clever satire on the tendency of gaming companies to release sequels with new "features" at the expense of game-play.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightmare_Chess](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightmare_Chess)</comment>


You Don't Need JQuery - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oneuijs/You-Dont-Need-jQuery <comment><USER2> Looks great, maybe wrap all that up into a library to be a little less verbose.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, then call it 'Almost jQuery 100500'

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you wrap this in one library then it becomes some kind of lite version of jQuery, I checked some of those examples and I can say that I prefer using one liner that 5+ liners :), but good work</comment>


30M bytes to mb - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=30000000%20bytes%20to%20mb

<comment><AUTHOR> You trust these guys for your search ?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you and your company work towards carbon neutrality? - <AUTHOR> Or being environment friendly in general?
Through technology?
- Do you buy specific hardware or software? Buy less hardware?
- Do you use automation to turn hardware off?
- Do you use green alternatives to service provider (web hosting, …)
Through culture?
- How do you promote less flying?
- Specific food, activities, furnitures, …?
- Code of conduct? <comment><USER2> A better question to ask would be "How do you get your company to acknowledge that being environmentally friendly is good?"

<comment><USER3> the company doesn't need to understand good or bad, just profit. so, regulate them. disincentivise the negative externalities of greenhouse gas pollution through a carbon tax.

then the next question would be "how do we get our government to install a carbon tax? (and not revoke it after a few years)" and "how do we negotiate trade deals with other governments that haven't signed up to a similar carbon tax, to pressure them to establish one as well?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It also matters what the company does -- like, what direct and indirect impact does it have upon the physical economy, in terms of what the company does to generate a profit.

Extreme thought-experiment: suppose our company is just one person with a pen and notebook and a head full of ideas and a bicycle. Suppose this one person in our company is rather clever, and invents a new technique to make it cheaper to extract certain oil reserves that would not previously have been profitable to extract.

To the right company, in the right context, this clever new idea could be valuable. Let's suppose a second company estimates that if the technique works, they can use it to extract 10,000,000 additional barrels of oil that they previously would not have been able to extract, at a profit margin of 6% instead of 0%. So roughly this might be worth something like $50 / barrel * 10 million barrels * 6% so $30m in profit to the second company if everything pans out.

Maybe lets say that the second company estimates that it will cost $5m in testing to see if the clever idea works when scaled up, and they estimate there's a 50% probability the test will succeed before they've spent the money to try it out. So they might be happy to buy exclusive rights to the idea from our company for $1m -- if it doesn't work out, they lose $1m + $5m, if it does work out, they make $30m - $6m = $24m. Pretty good odds if you've got a lot more than $6m to fund speculative R&D projects.

So our company has a $1m sale, and we haven't directly done anything except thinking and talking to people.

But if our idea pans out, the value of our idea is based upon being able to extract and sell +10,000,000 barrels of oil that weren't otherwise going to be extracted and sold on the market and eventually consumed by some other part of the physical economy. Let's assume that there's no greenhouse gas impact involved in extracting the barrels (hah) or transporting them (hah). The greenhouse gas footprint in consuming all 10,000,000 barrels is something like 4.3 million tons of CO_2. We don't know if the idea will pan out yet, so the expected impact is half that -- lets call it an even 2 million tons of CO_2.

So, arguably, the carbon impact of our company is 2 million tons of CO_2 . Or something like $ 0.5 of revenue per ton of CO_2 , which is maybe two orders of magnitude a worse trade compared to what people might think a reasonable carbon price was [+]. But superficially our company might look very environmentally friendly: it's just one person goofing around all day with a notebook, cycling to meetings with executives or other researchers.

Part of this environmental impact attribution is book-keeping. In the above example I've blamed all emissions from the (assumed) consumption of 10 million barrels of oil to our one little company with one clever idea. Is that "fair"? Maybe part of that environmental impact should be blamed on the company that does the extraction, or the end consumers of the oil. Maybe if we didnt extract that oil, someone else would have extracted 10,000,000 barrels of slightly more expensive oil, which would have had a similar impact, but put a little more pressure on some consumers to switch away from oil to other cheaper energy sources...

[+] this is maybe getting a bit silly, but in this example it might even make sense for environmental groups to fundraise and pay $5m to outbid an oil extractor and buy exclusive rights to your idea so that no one can actually use it to extract additional oil, if that $5m buys 10,000,000 barrels of oil that stay in the ground.</comment>