More startups fail from a lack of customers than from a failure of product development - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande273/resources/Blank%20presentation%20101403.pdf

<comment><USER2> this is an awesome presentation - I really recommend anyone that has a product and wants customers read it.

Before I wrote my first line of code for my startup I went and interviewed about 50 regular people. I'd go sit at a train station and grab a guy reading a newspaper, and ask him why he wasn't reading it on his phone.

I'd grab people on the bus or in a queue for groceries on their phone (eg, using it, not talking) and spark up a conversation as to what they're upto.

Most of the time they'd happily give me their phone number after a brief chat, I kept in contact with them all, and rang them once I'd developed my product - quizzed them what I thought and so on.

I have another 100 or so users from Mechanical Turk about my product market that I've been too busy to analyze properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> also, here is a podcast by stephen blank that a friend just recommended <http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2048>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really great presentation. It seems to go along with the idea of releasing early and often. I've never really been comfortable or understood sales. In school my only few real experiences in sales was selling some product for some benefit or fundraiser.From that, I got the idea that successful selling required convincing some unknown person that the finished product solved their specific needs that I was basically unaware of. So it was pretty much a numbers game, more attempts mean more money.

I like the idea of a product development cycle where the customers and users are shaping the product. I also really like the idea that I can easily validate a product concept by seeing if the people advising me would actually buy in to demo. This presentation has helped me feel more comfortable with the process of successful product development and sales.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is academic gobbledy gook. I felt like I was hearing a bad tech sales pitch flipping through this with all of its markitecture diagrams.

Beware - just because something comes from Stanford, doesn't make it meaningful or insightful. This is just restating common knowledge with flow charts.

<comment><USER5> Steven Blank has founded 4 startups, participated in 8, sat on many advisory boards and otherwise actively participated in the startup process(es).

On meta note, to elevate the level of discussion here I suggest that you try addressing substance of the matter being presented, not attacking the personality of the presenter.

<comment><USER4> I didn't attack his personality - I attacked 1) the content of the presentation 2) the presentation of the presentation and 3) cautioned against accepting this presentation as great because of the source. My argument wasn't very detailed, but it certainly wasn't an attack on the presenter.

You, on the other hand, did not defend the content of the presentation, but rather cited some qualifications of the author - ironically, just what I warned against accepting as proof of credibility.

<comment><USER5> Your point: Author is theorizing without connection to reality, more literally "This is academic gobbledy gook."

My counterpoint: Steven Blank has vast first-hand experience in startups.

Any more questions?

<comment><USER4> Academic opinions are almost always formed from experiments, and this presentation is academic.

My point was not that the author is theorizing without connection to reality. My point was I've heard the same thing said in half a sentence that he took dozens of slides to say.

But it's got that nice academic sheen!

<comment><USER6> What's the half sentence?

<comment><USER4> Don't neglect sales.

<comment><USER7> Certainly good advice but it may leave HN readers with the idea that hiring a VP of Sales person early is enough. Blank explicitly rejects this and suggests that early sales are the responsibility of the founders. In particular they have to treat their product as a hypothesis, which few successful sales folks are able to do. They treat objections as something to overcome. Only the founders can balance the question of whether they are talking to the right prospects with the right message about the right features.

<comment><USER4> Right, just like I said.... academic gobbleddy gook.

<comment><USER7> My apologies. What follows is only a portion of what's in the talk.

       1. The founders must sell. They must listen to prospects.
       2. They cannot hire a VP of sales until they have learned how to sell the product.
       3. The founders should view their business as a guess.
       4. They can see if they are correct by selling, which will confirm:
          a. Who the customer is (who will pay for the product)
          b. How to talk about the product
          c. If product has the right features

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a movement from waterfall to iterative development in the customer devel side.

That much I got. How to do that with a startup idea, without developing enough to make a showable prototype, I donno. pclark's mechanical turk idea sounds pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you would rather watch video or listen to MP3, here's the link: [http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2056...](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2056#)

</comment><comment><USER9> Working link: [http://www.scribd.com/full/10601416?access_key=key- mf4icwvtd...](http://www.scribd.com/full/10601416?access_key=key- mf4icwvtdyiklcrmdw8)

</comment><comment><USER10> And more startups fail from a lack of money than from a lack of product development.

<comment><USER11> You could have all the money in the world and still make a product that nobody wants. Looks like a guaranteed path to failure.</comment></comment>


Mech Warrior Online - HUD Bug Brief (A post mortem) - <AUTHOR> http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/117769-hud-bug-brief/

<comment><USER2> I've debugged my share of random crashes and memory corruptions, including one where a misplaced delete corrupted Lua state which only manifested itself minutes of game time later. My hat is off to these guys.</comment>


Warning: jobs.ac.uk just emailed me my password in clear text. - <AUTHOR>

The title says it all - jobs.ac.uk just emailed me my password in clear with no regard for security.<p>Be warned. <comment><USER2> Same thing happens to me at a lot of sites. It's infuriating. Especially when I contact the owner and offer a detailed explanation of why this is bad, and they respond explaining how it's not. I might support legislation that outlaws this. Maybe just a small fine to start. I also think if companies do this they should face increased punitive damages in the case of identity theft.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was it a random email or directly after signup? Not that it makes it all that much better, but some sites will email the plaintext as a record for the user, though they only store a hashed version.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why don't you just email them about this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have, but this is just a warning to everyone else. I have no faith that they will do anything about it, and wanted other people to be aware of the complete lack of security.</comment></comment>


Find messages faster with the Microsoft Garage's latest release, Email Insights - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2017/02/14/find-messages-faster-with-the-microsoft-garages-latest-release-email-insights/ <comment><USER2> "not currently available"

I am in Australia. But sounds like a good idea.</comment>


Ask HN: Can i use both WWW and Naked domain for 2 sites? - <AUTHOR>

I want use www.domain.com for a site,and domain.com for another site.Is this OK? <comment><USER2> Of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about Cookie issues? Shouldn't i worried about that?</comment></comment>


How We Built eBay's First Node.js Application - <AUTHOR> http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2013/05/17/how-we-built-ebays-first-node-js-application/

<comment><USER2> I really hate posts like this. It's full of vague statements like:

        "When we found that Java did not seem to fit the
        project requirements (no offense), we began exploring
        the world of Node.js"

and

        "By the end of the exercise, people understood the core
        value of Node.js; indeed, some of the con arguments proved
        to be part of the beauty of the language."

What's wrong with this? The pros and cons of Java versus Node.js aren't explained. In fact, I'm hard pressed to find any specific information in this article at all about what drove their decision making, or for that matter, anything in this article that's remotely technical.

This is a fluff piece that won't inform you about anything besides the fact that eBay is using Node. Cool story? But you're not telling us _why_

<comment><USER3> They talk about how under "Scalability" how "Java did not seem to fit the project requirements"... I'm sure a Java implementation _can be_ less scalable than a node.js implementation, but every anecdotal piece of evidence I have experienced suggests that a good Java implementation will be faster than a good node.js implementation.

If we look to popular micro-benchmarks, they support my anecdotal observation:

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=v8&data=u64)

<http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/>

On a side node: node.js also suffers from the issue that while a small node.js program might be fast, what is actually fast is the C code and as the program grows larger and increasing amounts of time are spent executing actual javascript its performance characteristics change dramatically. This fact seems often lead to unrealistic understanding of node.js performance due to people benchmarking very small examples.

<comment><USER4> This is less an issue with "very small examples" and more an issue of people throwing the practices out when they build more complex software.

Highly performant JS ends up looking a lot like C, and most of the off-the- shelf JS libraries that people use to build software are littered with '.call', '.apply', 'arguments', null/undefined/true/false usage, implicit type conversions, unnecessary closures, etc. All of these are cases that V8 doesn't optimize well, and because the libraries are built to be highly abstract and useful by using these, performance drops off precipitously. It's completely possible to write a large JS application that's competitive with Java in performance -- but nobody does it.

V8 hasn't even really begun optimizing these things, and they're going to be incredibly hard to optimize well. So perhaps a more apt question is: when JS VMs have as much time in the oven as the JVM has had, what will the performance look like?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Our idea was to build a bare minimum boilerplate Node.js server that scales; we did not want to bloat the application by introducing a framework. The first four node modules we added as dependencies were express, cluster, request, and async."

I'm curious how you're using Express if not as a framework.

<comment><USER6> I'm not interested in getting into a debate on the definition of a framework, but Express is not one. It's a tiny bit more than a router.

<comment><USER7> The first four words on the Express website are, in large point font, "express web application framework for node".

<comment><USER8> Not to stop there, it's in the page title too, so anyone coming in from Google (for example) is basically required to click on the phrase "web application framework" and acknowledge that the creators, at least, think that it's a framework.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if they looked at:

<http://mcavage.github.io/node-restify/>

Both self describe as frameworks.

in a quick blurb on express v restify: "I get asked this more than anything else, so I'll just get it out of the way up front.

Express' use case is targeted at browser applications and contains a lot of functionality, such as templating and rendering, to support that. Restify does not."

FWIW I am a backend guy and have enjoyed prototyping and working with restify a great deal ( dtrace ftw :) ), just a user and YMMV of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be interested in actually seeing the Wiki myself. It sounds like some research went into properly addressing concerns; it'd fit the public domain well!

<comment><USER11> +1 to making the findings in this wiki public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice! Ebay's running webwokers. Do you guys have any plans to start implementing app cache manifests to reduce load off the clusters? Even though ebay's loading time is fast as hell, I could still imagine this would reduce not only load for static content, but also decrease http sizes for end users.

</comment><comment><USER13> Given that they went with Node.js and talked about scalability, I assume they wanted the async nature of Node.js to maintain a large number of connections. I'm surprised they didn't try out Netty since they are a Java shop. The last time I investigated Node.js for async connection support in a project, the benchmarks I did showed that Netty could scale substantially better than Node.js in term of number of connections, memory usage, thread utilization, and raw performance on the same hardware. That was a year and half ago. Things might be different now, but I doubt some of fundamentals have changed much.

Anyway, it's good to try out new things. Kudos to them for doing something out of their mold.

<comment><USER14> httpkit / aleph if you're using Clojure and want high-scalability async.

No CPS pyramid of doom garbage though. To get that, Node.js is your one-stop- shop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still dont get it, sounds like: 'look! ebay employees are also dabbling with node'. What did you actually build? Is it your hackathon project 'Talk' that you build on node, or was it something else?

</comment><comment><USER16> next up.. how yahoo built their first node.js application

</comment><comment><USER17> I would really like to see this Wiki!

</comment><comment><USER18> who cares about ebay anymore?

</comment><comment><USER19> Do you know when it was discovered that the earth is round?

<comment><USER20> I'm sorry, but how is this relevant?

<comment><USER21> See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5726696></comment></comment></comment>


Free chicken for hungry hackers (and everyone else) - <AUTHOR> http://www.unthinkfc.com/

<comment><USER2> You have to install a coupon printer to get the coupon. Makes me nervous. Have you done this?

<comment><USER3> Solution: <http://www.virtualbox.org/> (assuming you have a licensed copy of XP)

Free chicken... should be worth the effort.

<comment><USER4> When I tried Windows 7 inside VmWare, the coupon app detected that it was in a Virtualized OS, and refused to print the coupon. See my other post above on clicking on the red link instead for a pdf file.</comment></comment></comment>


What specific problems are lots of programmers solving over and over again? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a web based medical billing code search engine for my software start-up that will let users search for ICD-9 (and related ICD-10, clinical codes) medical codes used in medical diagnoses and medical billing.
The problem with building the data files for the search is that the Center for Disease Control only releases the file in .rtf Rich Text Format files that are ok for printing and reading, but difficult to programatically load into a database.
There are a few existing ICD-9 search engines out there and I know dozens of other programming teams have tackled this problem for every crappy practice management system on the market. But due to the nature of the field things are very closed and no one has released their data publicly or released code to parse these .rtf files or a repository for the data. The reason is that each company sees the X amount of hours they put into parsing these files into database data as a barrier to entry for competitors.
What other types of specific programming problems due programmers keep solving over and over again, and how do you break the vicious cycle and be the first person to release data or a solution? Or is it ever worth breaking this cycle and releasing your solution and making it easier for competitors? How do you profit or benefit from releasing a solution for a problem like this? <comment><USER2> Even when things are released there is often duplication.

The biggest "problem" is code reuse. Everyone's problem/skills(i.e. ability to understand & trust particular solution)/infrastructure(e.g. needs to run on cell phone vs we gots Big Table) are slightly or massively different. We as a profession still struggle to abstract things correctly so they can be reused.

It's best to not to have a solution or have a partial solution and convince your industry to work on it together thus distributing the costs and benefits. This is commonly practiced as standards and open source.

Another situation were it is good to release solution you paid to build is if there are high maintenance costs associated with that solution. Others will be incentivized to use (and thus share maintenance costs) your solution. You will have "lost" the initial development cost but save on maintenance and there are multiple fringe benefits (publicity, good will, control/influence).

It sounds like the ICD things have low maintenance costs, creates a barrier to entry for competitors and is fundamental to medical billing and thus seen as a core competitive advantage. All factors that discourage openness.

Should sell directly or spin off company to sell libs/software/translation service of the ICD. When you recoup costs and/or sales decline open source it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your analysis is correct. I'm kind of torn between the business person in me telling me to find a good solution and use it as an advantage and the programmer in me that hates anyone duplicating work needlessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Almost every C project re-implements some of the same basic data structures and algorithms (strings, lists, arrays, queues, hash tables, trees, unicode, etc). It's remarkable these haven't been standardized yet and it doesn't appear that the C++ standard template lib has solved the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least in that space at such a low level, there are many existing products people could choose to use if they wanted to. There are no existing free open source projects that solve this problem (and there are other problems where market forces seem to prevent a good common solution from coming about.)

So if you are a C/C++ programmer you have the option to use someone else's low level data structure implementation you can use the STL or tons of open source projects (GLib, Boost).

But just as programmer's love to avoid work and re-use code, they also love to reinvent the wheel which we are all free to do. However, if you were a start- up founder and you insisted on reimplementing low level data structure libraries for your product I don't think your company would last long (unless that is your hobby.)</comment></comment>


Lyft Takes over Ford GoBike - <AUTHOR> https://www.lyft.com/bikes/bay-wheels <comment><USER2> I wonder why bike sharing is still a thing in business world. Hasn't this business venture been proved to be a fiasco in China, where user base is larger in magnitude, operation cost is residual and virtually no regulation friction, compared to the u.s.? Why do lyft, uber and others think it is viable(profitable) in the u.s.?

Another thing beyond me is although the business model/development of this kind seems to be bound to fail, why they are still chased by enormous amount of capital.

My cynical suspicion is these so call tech start ups are just instrument of a grand new ponzi scheme in which a bunch of investors use borrowed money(from banks, insurance company and the likes) to set up a start up and increase the value of it(manufacture hype to justify the inflation along the way) and the sell to public, which is mainly pension funds, 401k, government backed institutions and so one, that is, ordinary folks.

I hope someone would correct me and shed some light on this matter.

<comment><USER3> My 0.02c as a Citi Bike (NYC's bikeshare) subscriber: I wouldn't be surprised if there's a _modest_ profit to be made in bike sharing, at least in NYC. I know quite a few people with a yearly subscription (either personally or via their employer), and I would consider paying for one personally now that I've experienced their convenience. I don't know how much money Citi Bike/Motivate actually makes here, although AFAIK they don't receive any public subsidies (other than free use of public space).

OTOH, I don't think that the e-bike/scooter companies will ever be profitable. I wouldn't be surprised if the people running those companies are equally cynical.

<comment><USER2> I don't have their unit economy data, but I'm still (stubbornly) skeptical of the profitability of bike sharing. One reason is the market depth, in the sense that most of the time it's just young, educated and often bourgeois people in metropolis, which is a tiny proportion of people, who ride bike for purposes other than recreational.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I don't expect bike sharing to ever be profitable outside of (major) city centers. Maybe that's a good thing -- once we get over this stupid fad of monetizing basic improvements to urban life, we'll be able to buy the equipment for pennies on the dollar and run it as a public service ;)

FWIW, I think your analysis (young, educated, bourgeois) is spot on, and that bikeshare companies are completely aware. Check out this map of Citi Bike's availability:

[https://member.citibikenyc.com/map/](https://member.citibikenyc.com/map/)

If you're not familiar with NYC: it's only available in business, wealthly/middle-class, and rapidly gentrifying areas. To continue my baseless speculation: it wouldn't surprise me if Citi Bike's (hypothetical) profitability relied on only serving these populations. Reprehensible, and another reason to agitate for bike shares as an extension of public transport.

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing the "young, educated, bourgeois" demographic is the early adopter of most new technologies. If you wrote off everything that was primarily used by that demographic in its early days, you'd have missed out on the personal computer, mobile phones, digital photography, and many other things that are widespread today.

<comment><USER3> > If you wrote off everything that was primarily used by that demographic in > its early days, you'd have missed out on the personal computer, mobile > phones, digital photography, and many other things that are widespread > today.

Not writing off! I'm in that demographic. But let's call a spade a spade.

That being said, I think there's a _substantial_ difference between PCs/cellphones/digital photography and bikesharing: the former were _also_ adopted as business interests, while the latter is _just_ a luxury or employment perk. PCs and cellphones reshaped the office, digital cameras reshaped newstelling and photojournalism; I find it hard to believe that bikesharing-qua-private-service will be doing much reshaping.

<comment><USER5> One issue with commuting using public transport to a large tech campus is traveling to meetings and lunch places during the day. You can walk 10-15 minutes or use the company shuttle, which takes +20 minutes to be in another building on time. If you came by car, you can drive 2-5 minutes and spend 1-5 minutes parking. With bike, it's 5 minutes door to door. Providing e-bikes for in-campus travel would do some reshaping, as it can reduce need for parking space and would allow for more efficient use of time.

Not as big as cellphones obviously. Still something.

People who travel to client sites in dense urban environments may have even more interesting numbers.

<comment><USER6> Is walking 10-15 minutes (especially in a generally nice climate) really a big issue? I hear scooters and bikes mentioned a lot for those cases where people might need to travel a mile. Most of the time, I'd consider having to walk a mile or so to get from Point A to Point B a feature rather than a bug. Certainly I had to regularly walk that sort of distance around college campuses and never considered it a particularly big deal--and I didn't attend schools in nice weather locations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> After Lyft/GoBike removed all their electric bikes, SFMTA decided to expand dockless bikeshare so people can continue to commute by bikeshare.

But Lyft decided to sue instead: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/7/18657312/lyft-bike- share-l...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/7/18657312/lyft-bike-share- lawsuit-san-francisco-dockless-docked-transportation)

<comment><USER8> You're painting Lyft to be the bad guys because they're suing. It seems like SFMTA is trying to weasel out of a contract. Lyft isn't trying to prevent people from continuing to commute by bikeshare; they're trying to secure their ROI on their Motivate acquisition through the exclusivity contract with SF.

Have you read the contract terms in the article you're linking to? SFMTA is saying the contract was for 'docked bikes only' while Lyft is saying it was for a Bike Sharing Program, which could include docked or dockless bikes. Lyft does a good job describing what 'Bike sharing' is in that document so it will be up to the courts to decide if they're right.

-

 _"Bike sharing" is a public biking system concept that allows customers to rent a bike on a short-term basis from one section of a city and leave it in another section of the city that same day._

-

 _The Term Sheet provided, among other terms, that Motivate was to be the exclusive operator of any bike share system in the Participating Cities for at least ten (10) years._

 _The Term Sheet provided (emphasis added): "During the Term of this Agreement, Motivate shall have the exclusive right to operate a bike sharing program that utilizes public property and public right of way anywhere within San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose and Emeryville."_

<comment><USER9> What if I don't care whether Lyft gets their ROI and just want the best bike share possible?

<comment><USER10> An exclusivity agreement might result in the best bike share possible. I don't want to pick up one company's bike and struggle to find a dock for that same company when it comes time for dropoff. Either one company gets exclusivity, or you end up with a huge amount of public space given over to redundant infrastructure.

<comment><USER11> Or you mandate a docking system that works for all the bike companies. Commoditize the docks using public action and then the free market can actually be free to solve the rest.

<comment><USER12> There ought to be a solution somewhere in this line. This alone won't solve it as a company could flood the docks and block out competition that way.

Having multiple companies running taxis or P2P ride apps doesn't matter so much as users as you can still hail a cab the same way and many P2P drivers use both Lyft and Uber, creating a good user experience.

However, that's not true for these types of bike/scooter shares. The density of bikes/scooters is not so high that I'll be able to pick just one app and have no problem finding transportation. And, if it was, we'd be tripping over them left and right.

Even interoperability between apps would be enough to solve this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was in SF this week and had a chance to try this out. They have 0 (zero) e-bikes despite their app has a column to list the count.

They also force you to pick up the bike from designated racks and drop-off at designated racks which is a pain in the ass.

On the other hand JUMP has a fully e-bike fleet, but bikes were impossible to come by. I parked a JUMP bike that had full battery. An hour later I came back and the app didn't let me unlock it (reason unknown to me). It seemed like things are really glitchy.

I found the entire bikeshare situation in SF to be miserable, in brief. Scooters are no different.

It's funny to see that Seattle were like this 4 years ago. Now LIME and JUMP dominate Seattle with fleets entirely consisting of E-bikes. They are super ubiquitous, and there's no shortage of them, no "glitches", and no need to park them at a designated rack.

<comment><USER14> >They also force you to pick up the bike from designated racks and drop-off at designated racks which is a pain in the ass.

I mean it's pain in the ass when I have to move the crap from the front steps of my building or out of the driveway because people aren't courteous their dockless transport widgets. I'm alright walking a little ways to dock a bike/scooter as a user, but I'm firmly against any company or city that lets users dump crap on the streets without penalties. It's littering.

<comment><USER13> Believe it or not, this doesn't happen in Seattle. Sure there was a month or two when people were treating bikes like shit, because they were new, but now the conventions have been established and people are more respectful. What you're worried about happens rarely in Seattle.

Assuming you live in SF, I'm not sure why you're not worried more about the people peeing on your wall, tossing their shoes or random garbage on your driveway more. Bikes being dropped off at a public sidewalk sounds like less of a problem than these.

<comment><USER14> I'm in Los Angeles where we have Lime scooters all over the place. It's not rare, it's been a daily occurrence.

I can care about more than one thing at a time. Human refuse in my streets is a problem I deal with, and so is dockless transit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My wife and I use Ford GoBike every day and are quite happy with it. It's probably the reason we still don't have a car.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why doesn't the city just run it's own scooter/bike share? Seems like it would exist in the same domain as things like MUNI and in theory would allow the city to make a profit instead of LYFT/UBER etc.

<comment><USER17> Because they can let Uber/Lyft/et al do it, charge them a tax, and have none of the operational overhead or expenditures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like these commute options that make it easier to get around but starting at $2/ride seems a bit high. If I were to use this twice daily for 200 days a year, I'd be looking at $800/year! I'd rather buy a bike in that case, and just use the bikeshare for one offs.

I've never used a GoBike, but are those prices real & what are the typical usage patterns?

Edit: I see, there are monthly and yearly plans that make it much more competitive with ownership. Great!

<comment><USER19> You can get monthly membership and it's free to take trips.

<comment><USER20> Citibike in NYC (also operated by Lyft) costs $2 per ride for using an ebike. And that is if you are already a member. Non members pay $5. There is no membership allowing unlimited ebike usage.

<comment><USER21> In SF for whatever reason there is no surcharge for the electric bikes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember Lyft partnered with Ford on self-driving, but does that have anything to do with Lyft choosing to take this over? Bike shares seems outside the core-competency of Lyft. Is it simply for marketing?

I'm confused why the company would take this on as part of some larger strategic plan.

<comment><USER23> "Go-bikes" were never run by Ford. It was a start-up called Motivate[0] that licensed the Ford brand for their bikeshare service. Lyft bought Motivate last year, and is just now getting around to the rebrand.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivate_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivate_\(company\))

<comment><USER24> Thanks for pointing that out -- I had no idea and it's really surprising to me. Why did they license the Ford brand? Is the Ford name really that attractive to the Bay Area bikesharing market? Would've expected it would hurt more than help, if anything. Is it just: all brand recognition is good brand recognition?

<comment><USER25> I think Ford paid to have it put there (as advertising). In NYC it is Citi Bike share as advertising for CitiBank.

<comment><USER24> Oops, that makes a lot more sense. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ford GoBike have to be some of the worst, most ill-maintained bikes in the city. The product quality is terrible compared to the competition - half the bikes have mechanical issues, the electrical bikes were hazardous.

I was an early subscriber given how cheap it was, but I often struggled to find a bike that worked.

</comment><comment><USER27> I pay $50 CAD a year for bike share across Toronto. This seems pretty expensive, to be honest.

<comment><USER28> How are you paying $50/year? Bike Share Toronto costs CAD$100/year. If you took advantage of their Presto card discount, that used to be 50% off _for the first year_ of membership, recently reduced to 30% off the first year: [https://bikesharetoronto.com/presto/](https://bikesharetoronto.com/presto/)

Bike Share Toronto is heavily subsidized by the city and Ontario, and operates at a loss: [https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2019/02/28/bike- share...](https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2019/02/28/bike-share- toronto-gets-75-million-expansion-despite-operating-losses.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> That is until Lyft gets bored with it and axes it like Lime did to their bikes. Now my town is vacant if any rental bikes, despite their promise of fixing our "last-mile" problem to our train station.

<comment><USER30> > That is until Lyft gets bored with it and axes it like Lime did to their > bikes.

These seem to be be "docked". Wasn't Lime's problem that they were "dockless" and wound up being trash everywhere?

<comment><USER31> I can't read this seriously knowing that cars take 1000000x more space

<comment><USER30> It doesn't matter how little space they take up when you have to step over them every morning ...

My comment was that I thought that Lime stopped because they couldn't make the dockless work because the bikes wound up as trash everywhere. Your comment brings nothing to that discussion.

I have no problem with these services taking up a parking space every block or two in order to put in a dock.

<comment><USER31> if you could park them on the road it wouldn't take space on the sidewalk. I do not want these docks, nobody using scooters or bikes want these docks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another nail in the coffin of Bird?

<comment><USER33> I don't think so. On average, bike share trips are much longer than scooter trips (~1-3 for bikes vs ~0-1 for scooters) and e-bike trips are even further. With this in mind, I think it makes more sense to see scooter competition as walking than bikes or e-bikes.

Can't find the source I read this in originally, but will keep looking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A bike share being owned and operated by one of the biggest threats to cyclist safety is, well, it's something.

<comment><USER35> I would guess from my own experience as a frequent ride hailing passenger that Lyft/Uber drivers are less of a threat to cyclist safety on average than regular drivers.

<comment><USER36> The increased risk is passenger's opening the door right as you bike past or jumping out at a stop light or something. with cabs you know the risk so raise your awareness but with ridesharing could be anycar as you normally can't tell from the rear whose ridesharing.

<comment><USER37> A good heuristic is that they're parked illegally in the bike lane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I recently read that Uber/Lyft keeps even 75% of money for themselves. I wonder if there is an opportunity for third large ride-sharing app where business model would be based on bidding and company would keep much lower fee, just to cover overhead. So you want to go from point A to B, all local drivers are contacted and they have 45 seconds to bid who would charge less. Requester would see how much sorted by less $ and also ratings so he/she can chose someone more expensive but with better ratings.

Such model would kill Uber/Lyft overnight - they would not be able to adjust to that model because then their stocks would be cut down 95%. However, it is a win-to-win situation to both drivers and ride-takers - drivers get paid more and more stays in their pocket, while takers can chose if the ride is affordable, and at over 50% cheaper than what Lyft/Uber charge, it sure would be!

<comment><USER39> You're getting downvoted because this is both a bad business idea, and a bad product idea.

Uber and Lyft have proven that drivers and riders don't want to think particularly hard. They want a magic button that either a) makes a car show up or b) feeds them customers.

As for the business side, there's no good reason to think that this would even cut costs on Uber's side -- they still need to maintain all of their lobbying costs, their server and engineer costs to maintain the bidding app, their marketing costs, etc.</comment></comment>


Simple CSS Layout Tip: Use a "debug" class - <AUTHOR> http://mitchfournier.com/2011/05/12/simple-css-layout-tip-a-debug-class/ <comment><USER2> I used to do this before I discovered web-developer tools for FF (FF version 1, possibly about v0.8, can't recall), then I found firebug, don't think I'll go back.

Once I made a topology presenter bookmarklet that would break a site down into grey blocks with body text removed, that was handy back in the day too.</comment>


Bookmarking is more complex than you think - <AUTHOR> http://dfernandez.me/articles/5_Bookmarking_is_much_more_complex_than_you_think/ <comment><USER2> It's complex, or like with project management, there seems to be so many different use cases, and also legacy ideas and workflows. For example for some people tags are the most important thing in a bookmarking service (even you when you have a full-text search for everything), and for some they're just annoying.

What I think about it, is that bookmarking, most of the time, isn't bookmarking anymore. It used to be that to bookmarked a site like "yahoo.com" to your browser since domains were hard to remember. Now you "bookmark" things, like the OP described, to use the them now or later.

Also most of the time you care more about the content (article, image, video) than the url or the site. What I think bookmarking is, is that it's a way to research, use and understand information on the web.

Why I collect or bookmarks stuff, is because it's my way to learn and remember. It's like making notes on lectures, so you actually try to pay attention to what it's being said (and sometimes you just want to focus on other things and save things for later.)

(we're working on it <https://kippt.com>)

</comment><comment><USER3> After reading the article, I still dont see what you mean by complex. I saw a wishlist of things that might or might not be related to bookmarking.

Storing a URL, how ever, is more complex that you would think. There are no size limit on urls, so every time update your database schema (I know, SO '90), a longer URL will show up.

Short story; Ive worked on a bookmark service. One day, the database went all crazy on us, and we didn't know why. The commit logs kept growing, and the service was slow. The system pushed more data than normal, but all user metrics show normal usage. We spent some hours debugging this, until a guy poped by our office and asked "Have you seen google's new favicon?! It looks like a toilet seat!".

Then it hit us; We where storing a copy of favicon with each bookmark; suddenly half the bookmarks in our database got updated.. ;)

Next time, I'll tell you about that porn site that used the full size images as favicons..

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there an open-source library for archiving a URL, including all assets (JS, graphics, etc.)?

This task is trickier than it initially seems.

I'd love to have a local cache of bookmarked URLs.

<comment><USER5> Wget can do it, with variable success.

I thought about building one in PhantomJS, since it seems it can extract all the required assets, but gave up on it since most of the content I care about is in my RSS archive anyway.

<comment><USER6> Wget is good if you have the right options ([http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/06/using-wget-or-curl-to- down...](http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/06/using-wget-or-curl-to-download- web.html)).

For some audio/video sites there is youtube-dl, there is a list of sites it handles here: <http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/documentation.html> .

EDIT: there is a writeup about that is partially based on wget here: <http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#local-caching> (also includes extracting URL from firefox history)

EDIT2: and if you're really desperate you could always use tcpdump/mitmdump and something like this: [http://justniffer.sourceforge.net/#!/justniffer_grab_http_tr...](http://justniffer.sourceforge.net/#!/justniffer_grab_http_traffic)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One-upmanship right in the title, it would have been more accurate to say, "...than _I_ thought."

Bookmarking is a productivity aid, and so has the same variations in personal (customer, user) needs as the dozens of todo list apps and websites can attest.

<comment><USER8> The correct word to prefix "is harder than you think" is always "humility".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly I had that exact discussion with some friends yesterday too.

I normally divide it up a little different.

1\. The things I want to save for possible use later. 2\. The things I need for something specific but only once. 3\. The things that I want to read later. 4\. The things that I use now and then or often but can never remember the url for.

The last of the four to me is the one most often overlooked and is why I still haven't found a tool I like.

Things that fall into that category is.

My netbank, internal links, insurance site, things I am a member of, online tools, asset libraries that I use often etc.

The best analogy I have been able to come up with so far is a desktop/launchpad for the browser and it might be exactly that way of thinking about bookmarks that will make someone come up with a good enough solution one day.

<comment><USER10> My favorite for #4 is Google's +1. You need a Google Plus account. +1 is like Facebook like, only it boosts the ranking of that link whenever you are logged in and search. Not every page has a +1 button, but there is a chrome plugin for that. Side effect: the links you +1 are boosted for your G+ friends too, so the bookmarks are sort of public.

<comment><USER9> Yeah what I want is a cluster of links that is always "floating" no matter how i tagged them and no matter how long it's been since I bookmarked them.

So +1 doesn't really work since I want to tag them #LinksINeedNowwAndThenButAlways

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It isn't difficult at all. You just have to shift your perspective.

Now: Keep them in your browser, local to you. Keep the frequently-used ones right in front of you in the bookmark toolbar. For example, I don't rely on Chrome's Apps tab, so I have Gmail in my bookmarks toolbar folder called 1.Launch (1 because I have several others sorted accordingly).

Later: Link blog them (on Tumblr or G+ may be). Or you can even keep them local to you using above number 1 perspective.

Future: Don't worry about loosing the bookmarks you have already consumed and not going to come back to them anytime soon. Again, if you're link-blogging the content you feel you need to save, than you don't need to worry about future.

<comment><USER12> That is neither easy nor a solution.

<comment><USER11> If it works for me then it is a solution, isn't it? As I said, it requires you shift the perspective. Bookmarking-on-the-server is an over rated phenomenon. People can keep the URLs locally to themselves.

<comment><USER12> I have no issues against you using your method, I'm glad it works for you, but I can't see how this could possibly help the majority of of people.

> Now: Keep them in your browser, local to you.

What do you mean by local, I wanted them synced with my phone and my three other computers, but I may have misunderstood you.

> Keep the frequently-used ones right in front of you in the bookmark toolbar.

How often do I have to rearrange them? Or delete them? Or send them to the later? Or should I just keep adding them to the toolbar until they naturally disappear and create an endless mess of unsorted bookmarks?

> Later: Link blog them (on Tumblr or G+ may be). Or you can even keep them > local to you using above number 1 perspective.

Why would I, it seems so much more trouble? I'd rather bookmark them in a folder named later.

> Future: Don't worry about loosing the bookmarks you have already consumed > and not going to come back to them anytime soon. Again, if you're link- > blogging the content you feel you need to save, than you don't need to worry > about future.

This is the one I disagree the most! This isn't a shift in perspective, it's ignoring the problem, I go back to my bookmarks months (years?) after I've booked marked them, and I'm happy to find them.

\---

Honestly I manage my bookmarks pretty well with chrome now-a-days specially with the built in sync system, I'm very happy I don't have to worry about sync anymore, I even have them in my phone all the time.

What honestly I think is missing is better search, you can only search by title or URL as it is. The URL of an old enough one is virtually impossible to remember and the title so many times doesn't help much either, you might not remember it or it might be a smart ass title that is not a good description of the topic in question, so many times I end up finding it quicker in Google by inputting the text I remember rather that going through my bookmarks, since I tend to remember the essence of the article.

I think labels would also help since an hierarchical organization that would actually help would be insane, I'd rather write a couple of words referring to the article, but the truth is most of the times I can be bothered.

So yes, I agree with the author, it is not an easy problem.

<comment><USER11> > I wanted them synced

Both Firefox and Chrome sync. But you already answered this yourself.

> How often do I have to rearrange them?

You don't rearrange any bookmarks in your browser. Frequently-used links like Gmail, Twitter, Weather etc is something you keep in front of you all the time. These are links to other services you use daily.

The Read-later types, those you can simply either delete (from the Read-later folder) or you move to another folder when you know you have consumed them. It takes few clicks.

The reason you link-blog them on Tumblr or G+ is because you may want to revisit the sites to refresh your memory, or you may be sharing your link-blog with someone else (not necessarily the whole world though).

> I go back to my bookmarks months (years?) after I've booked marked them

There was an article not too long ago which suggested that people don't really visit their bookmarks but they think that they will.

The reason you can technically forget about your online bookmarks is becuase Google search is handy. If you can search your saved-bookmarks using tag words or other keywords, than you can do the same on Google. Again, the shift-in- perspective I am talking is already making sure that you are keeping the most important bookmarks (your tools, your read-later articles etc) closest to yourself. You are only ignoring the not-so-important URLs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like the author of the article, I also use more than one service for bookmarking - Pocket for Read later articles, Google bookmarks for tagged bookmarks for unspecified future use, and toolbar in Chrome for all other. But I don't agree with the notion that it is overly complex, or that I want to consolidate all this to one service.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pocket covers nearly all of the requests you posted from HN; cross-device compatible, Pinterest style layout, export to html, search, tagging & sharing. I'm really enjoying it as a private bookmarking service.

<http://GetPocket.com>

</comment><comment><USER15> Another problem I always had with bookmarking websites was my lists would grow too long and interesting bookmarks would get lost in the mess without pruning them.

So I created a website 2 years ago that constantly visits the URL and lets me know whats changing on the website the bookmark is pointing to and emails me the deltas.

Not trying to hijack the OP's thread but if interested , visit diphur.com

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm using the open-source Zotero for organizing my research. I imagine it would work well as a bookmarking tool. <http://www.zotero.org/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one here that is quite satisfied with the bookmarking system in my web browser?

</comment><comment><USER18> most currently existing bookmarking services support tags... you could use "now", "later" or "future" tags?

</comment><comment><USER19> Superb explanation !</comment>


Roaring Bitmaps: Implementation of an Optimized Software Library (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07821 <comment><USER2> Great Library. Available in most of the popular languages. I use it all the time to keep track of node ids instead of using sets of Longs. [http://roaringbitmap.org/](http://roaringbitmap.org/)

<comment><USER3> This is very true.

I created something like this for our database engine, ElevateDB, in 2011 or so. It divides up the bitmap space for a signed, 32-bit integer (our engines are embedded and have a limit of High(Int) on the number of rows) into nodes and, optionally, has a parallel array in each node for attaching object instances to each bit. Originally I just used them for representing sets of rows, but once you start using sparse bitmaps like this, you realize that you can use them for all sorts of things. Now I use them in buffer managers and many other areas. They're extremely efficient at locating a given row/tuple by its integer ID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Edit: I misspoke. It seems that they did a very thorough comparison with Word Aligned Hybrid compression scheme. I was just searching the PDFs for 'fastbit'.

Past discussion of Roaring bitmaps[0].

I find it interesting that there is no real comparison (at least under the publications at the home page[1]) between Roaring bitmaps and FastBit[2] except for this little quote from 'Better bitmap performance with Roaring bitmaps' [3]:

Our approach is reminiscent of O'Neil and O'Neil's RIDBit external-memory system. RIDBit is a B-tree of bitmaps, where a list is used instead when a chunk's density is too small. However RIDBit fared poorly compared to _FastBit_ —a WAH-based system: _FastBit_ was up to 10× faster. In contrast to the negative results of O'Neil et al., we find that Roaring bitmaps can be several times faster than WAH bitmaps for in-memory processing. Thus one of our main contributions is to challenge the belief—expressed by authors such as by Colantonio and Di Pietro [1]—that WAH bitmap compression is the most efficient alternative.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796997)

[1]: [http://roaringbitmap.org/](http://roaringbitmap.org/)

[2]: [https://sdm.lbl.gov/fastbit/](https://sdm.lbl.gov/fastbit/)

[3]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.6407.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.6407.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are using the Go port, do not do json marshal on the object, there is PR implementing it but is unmerged</comment>


Research suggests strategy for more equitable Medicare reimbursement - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/slu-rss042919.php <comment><USER2> > "This suggests that such adjustment would not only reduce potentially > inappropriate penalties among providers that disproportionately care for > vulnerable populations but would also reduce inappropriate bonuses for > providers that care for less complex populations," Johnston wrote.

These bonus reductions won't go down well with the Medicare Advantage providers that optimized for the healthiest patients and greatest profits.</comment>


Practical Accountability of Secret Processes - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/697 <comment><USER2> > balance the competing goals of (1) secrecy, so the target of an > investigation does not discover and sabotage it, and (2) accountability, to > assure the public that surveillance powers are not misused or abused.

Interesting problem, but seems that signing and encrypting the order with some court key would be enought: publish it encrypted, and when the relevant time has passed and the information can be disclosed, use the private key to reveal it. Isn't that ?

<comment><USER3> That would solve part of the problem. But publishing a hash would solve the same part without any need for key management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the low hanging fruit would be making all gag orders expire in a year or less. Long investigations can issue new, overlapping gag orders.

As it is, good luck inquiring about the status of an investigation you're forbidden to talk about with anyone.</comment>


Best Cities for Freelance Web and Software Developers - <AUTHOR> http://payable.com/blog/best-cities-freelance-web-and-software-developers <comment><USER2> What is the difference between a software developer and a web developer?

<comment><AUTHOR> In this research, it's looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Web Developer definition there is [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and- information-technology/w...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/web-developers.htm). Software Developer is [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/s...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/software-developers.htm#tab-1).

The short answer: Back-end as opposed to Front-end

<comment><USER2> How about someone who does desktop app GUI? It's "front-end" but doesn't involve web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. No definition is perfect and is going to handle every edge case. But, it's the BLS's attempt to group different job types and provide the data around it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Users Betrayed as Australia Adopts a Copyright Censorship Regime - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/users-betrayed-australia-adopts-copyright-censorship-regime <comment><USER3> A big problem I have with every law like this is how inherently inconstant and big business favored its enforcement is.

Say for example that you are a content developer and finds that illegal copies are sold on ebay. You ask them to take down one seller only to find new ones every day, and thus you go to the police and ask them to block ebay.

I doubt the person will ever get a day in court. There could be thousands of illegal copies listed each day and yet the political nature of blocking laws means that enforcement is depended on who does the accusation and whom the accused is.

<comment><USER4> Or, say a large game publisher pirates your content.

Guess whose site will go down. Hint: not yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet again, and of course as usual, the government of Australia demonstrating how much they value their citizens by totally ignoring them in favour of big business. Good job Tony.

<comment><USER6> Whilst I agree with your sentiment as a legal permanent resident of Australia, I think it is dangerous (if very seductive) to blame Mr Abbott. He's been the party attack dog for so long that people focus their energy on making it personal with him (much as the Democrats focus on Bush and the Republicans have a thing for Obama).

First, from the little I've been tracking this issue, it appears it was the "relatively moderate", friendly, centrist, old guard Turnbull that was behind these moves. Chances are it's done as a favour to someone in Washington who needed something from someone connected to the Hollywood lobbies. Not the strongest of motives and the kind of thing that popular opinion can reverse.

Second, legislation doesn't magically happen in a vaccuum when the PM says so. Australians, you MUST get in touch with your local politician, both to let them know (politely) how you feel about certain issues, and to give them arguments to use in Canberra if you want any chance of legislation being passed the way you like it. It's not about Labour vs Liberals. Whoever has been locally elected, is now responsible for listening to you. They also don't do much thinking so it helps to do it for them: "This proposed legislation infringes individual rights like this, this and this; moreover, as per the Constitution, that" goes much further than "I am pissed at you for letting the PM get away with it".

This is of course not a personal response to your comment, but a general note that I thought about and that was triggered by your Tony note. I've found Australians relatively politically disengaged, with the general opinion - <USER2> least in Sydney - basically being "they're all scumbags anyway, things will work out in the end", followed by some expletives about Gillard, Rudd or Abbott depending on where the Australian leans...

<comment><USER5> A very good point, and well written. My only observation is this: politics doesn't happen in a vacuum, but the current government has set about ignoring polls and comments from the public on a range of other issues making me less inclined to believe they will shift for this one. That being said Labor isn't innocent of this either.

My local member has on several occasions refused to even answer calls or meet me to discuss this, based only on the fact that as a young adult my opinion must not be valid.

<comment><USER7> Send a registered, written letter. There are legal requirements for written letters that mean MPs have to respond to them. I'm told that you should also ask a couple of disparate questions in the letter, as this means they can't simply respond with a form letter.

letter-to-MP tips [https://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/lobby.html#tipsletter](https://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/lobby.html#tipsletter)

<comment><USER8> MPs are under no obligation to respond to a letter

<comment><USER7> Hrm. Perhaps things have changed? I was told a while back by someone closer to Canberra than me that there were legal requirements for responding to letters; email was a boon, because it wasn't subject to those requirements. My apologies if I've misled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't really think people from any other county should be looking down on Australia. This is the progression in every country, just at varying degrees currently.

People will look back on the first few decades of the Internet as the wild- west era. Kids will be born knowing nothing but draconian rules and enforcement for the Internet. And the powerful elite will once again have squelched anything that challenges their dominance. Business as usual.

<comment><USER10> I'm glad there are others in the information war who don't share that defeatist attitude. SOPA and PIPA were defeated and the exposure of the NSA phone metadata program has spurred an unprecedented movement to encrypt the web. The fight isn't over by any means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's sad to think that with these laws being passed, regardless of what position you take, that we still don't have any Fair Use provisions in Australia. There was even a discussion paper [[http://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/4-case-fair-use- australi...](http://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/4-case-fair-use- australia/summary)] put forward by our Law Reform Commission suggesting this. I would have though the productivity benefits associated with education and innovation alone would make this a no brainer

<comment><USER5> I believe one of the only amendments to this bill that got through was a requirement that Tony Abbott provide a formal response to that paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apparently the ISPs are just going to use DNS poisoning, which anyone will be able to circumvent by using an overseas public DNS server, like Google's 18.104.22.168

<comment><USER13> That's not really the point though. The fact that a minority of tech-savvy users will be able to get around it doesn't change the fact that it's a very effective measure against Joe Sixpack and his family having unfettered access to information.

More generally, this is why i'm very sceptical of technical solutions to political problems. Years from now, you might find yourself along with your technically proficient minority of friends being the only people able to still access the Internet freely—most of it might have already become a corporate- controlled walled garden. I for one don't want to have to end up living in digital almost-exile just because we were too lazy to Do Something™ now, when there is still hope.

I admit that this is at once probably rather tinfoil-hatty but also almost reality (how many people would be able to find whatever they're looking for if something like Google Search were blocked? 5%? Never mind if DNS poisoning was added to that). We on HN would be fine, but this would seriously impede democracy, given how the other 95% would be stuck without access to information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At this point in our society, does this even matter? If you go against the status quo, you will be silenced by special interest groups and other users online for only expressing your opinion.

They did it to themselves. When you create a system where anyone and everyone can be silenced for their opinions, this is the result.

Bravo!</comment>


Ask HN: What happened to the semantic web? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER4> The Semantic Web Meetup happens at MIT in Cambridge, MA occasionally: [https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup- Gro...](https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Group/)

Though it seems mostly cancelled / sporadic now, it had a lot of interesting people presenting on interesting academic uses of the semantic web / RFD / etc.

A couple times I was there Tim Berners-Lee himself was there too. He's an interesting guy to meet.

Overall though, I think due to business reasons (really companies are not incentivized to share) it has mostly caught on in academia. With a shining example in "microformats" which gained adoption because companies like Google adopted them as a way to make gathering (as opposed to sharing) data.

Edit:

Personally I found a lot of aspects useful but others not all that well thought out when it comes to practical specs. The community has a tendency to try to build complete taxonomies rather than taxonomies that have long term usability. As a result they become stale. For example, Friend of a Friend (FOAF) [1] is nice but it is very narrowly speced in some areas but not others. For example, there is a tag for AOL Instant Messenger ID but none for Facebook.

Microformats in a way has some similar issues though not as bad.

[1] [http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/](http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Most technologies that were specific to the "Semantic Web", such as OWL and SPARQL, failed to scale and failed to solve realistic problems, and therefore died. (I always maintained that running a SPARQL endpoint amounted to running a DDoS on yourself.)

However, we got something kind of cool out of the RDF model that underlies it, especially when some sufficiently opinionated developers identified the bad parts of RDF and dumped them. We got JSON-LD [1], a way for making APIs describe themselves in a way that's compatible with RDF's data model. For what I mean about sufficiently opinionated developers, I recommend reading Manu Sporny's "JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web" [2], a wonderful title for the article behind the main reason the Semantic Web is still relevant.

Google makes use of JSON-LD in real situations: for example, an airline that uses JSON-LD can send you an e-mail that Google Assistant can use to update you on the status of your flight, and Gmail can use to give you a simple button for checking in.

[1] [https://json-ld.org/](https://json-ld.org/)

[2] [http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld- origins-2/](http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the main issue is that even though "knowledge representation" with ontologies is an enticing goal, it's simply a fact that real entities, as used by humans at a practical level, don't map neatly onto mathematically-sound hierarchies.. . To see this, just look at the arguments the ancient Greeks already had as to whether a human is a "two-legged featherless animal" or the endless online arguments as to whether a "circle is an ellipse" or vice versa.

Because of this, there's just not much utility in taking the time to generate semantic markup- it'll be sloppy and incomplete even when done by a PhD student specializing in this subject.

<comment><USER7> > don't map neatly onto mathematically-sound hierarchies.

I think they do, but finding the right mathematical model is very difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be a mathematics PhD.

Learning to program is becoming efficient at recognizing the right spherical cow in any given situation, because such shortcuts are essential to getting shit done.

<comment><USER6> I think you'd change your tune (like I did) once you dig into the ugly details of such mathematical modeling. A book like this will show you just how hard this is [https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Representation-Reasoning- Ar...](https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Representation-Reasoning-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/1558609326)

<comment><USER7> I recognize it's difficult since I literally said that. But programming is simplified mathematical modelling of a sort (for instance, via Curry-Howard), hence my "spherical cow".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Semantic Web is incompatible with the commercial incentives of most technology companies. For instance, it would currently be irrational for Facebook to voluntarily publish their social network using the friend of a friend schema. Their profit is derived from their centralized, private ownership of this data. Hopefully we can move towards a decentralized or federate, public web.

<comment><USER9> Yes, once everyone thinks that 'Data is the new oil', things like public shared standards fly out the window.

There are many open upper level ontologies available (I counted 16 when I did a review a few years ago - [http://www.acutesoftware.com.au/aikif/ontology.html](http://www.acutesoftware.com.au/aikif/ontology.html)), but the really complete ones are not publically available (Cyc full version, Googles internal ontology and the countless others held in corporate servers).

<comment><USER10> Where is Googles internal ontology used exactly?

<comment><USER9> I don't know, but I just assumed they use it everywhere. They have a very good mapping of related terms and a fairly consistent mapping.

A visible example is when you look for organisations and they have a classification against it.

e.g. Google IBM and they call it "Computer manufacturing company" \- these classifications are different to many of the standards for specific sets of data

<comment><USER11> Where do you see google calling IBM a "Computer manufacturing company" if you search for IBM? I'm not saying they don't. I just want to see examples of what you are talking about.

I googled IBM, and did not see it classified as such.

<comment><USER9> When I am logged on to Google I see companies details in a right hand side pane (when the search term is unambiguous)

For IBM it says

      IBM
      Computer manufacturing company
      Image result for ibm
      IBM is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York,
      United States, with operations in over 170 countries. Wikipedia
      Stock price: IBM (NYSE) USD155.39 +2.71 (+1.77%)
      10 Apr., 4:00 pm GMT-4 - <USER2>
      Founder: Charles Ranlett Flint
      Founded: 16 June 1911, New York City, New York, United States
      Headquarters: Armonk, North Castle, New York, United States
      Subsidiaries: Trusteer, FileNet, IBM Global Services, Ustream, MORE
      Executives: Ginni Rometty (CEO, President, Chairperson), MORE
      Did you know: IBM is the world's eighth-largest information technology company by revenue.
      wikipedia.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Onthologies are hard. Curation is harder. People are lazy.

The ideas are still around; some [1] were lifted by Facebook [2], for example. There's also continuation work that's related, like web annotations [3], but generally the commercial web is moving even more away from neatly-organized resources [4] and towards Javascript state machines [5].

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160713021037/http://dig.csail....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160713021037/http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215) [2] [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph- api/overview/](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview/) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846#12207459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846#12207459) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345693#12346371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345693#12346371)

<comment><USER13> I think you hint great points especially with "People are lazy".

The semantic web was a great idea, but in the period from 2000 to 2010, people advertized it as a kind of AGI that would solve all hard problems with junk data.

It is still used in biology, for example in Gene Ontology [0] but the main use case ( _People are lazy_ ) is "If your research cannot find interesting stuff, just query Gene Ontology".

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

<comment><USER13> While re-reading what I wrote, a part of a sentence makes me wonder " _a kind of AGI that would solve all hard problems with junk data_ "

<comment><USER14> What does AGI mean in this context?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the big things to come out of the semantic web was RFD-A (embedding semantics in unstructured web pages) and similar technologies (microformats, JSON-LD, schema.org). It's what lets Google show product reviews and rankings in search results, and lets shopping aggregator sites show things like price comparisons from other websites. While it's probably not as widespread as its boosters from a decade ago hoped it would be, it did lead to some helpful technologies that are in widespread use now.

I wonder if Facebook won't someday be forced to publish its social graph data in FOAF format the same way Microsoft was forced to publish its Office document specs as part of an anti-trust decision.

Speaking of Facebook, the OpenGraph tags are another example of widely-used semantic data on the web, maybe the most widely-used, since all kinds of sites pull in page summaries, images, and other data from those tags. So while Facebook doesn't make social network data available, it did popularize a format for sharing other types of data (about companies, articles, websites, etc.).

<comment><USER15> Sorry, that should be "RDF-A," not "RFD-A."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Long ago I wrote a blog post as an introduction with an identical title: [https://joelkuiper.eu/semantic-web](https://joelkuiper.eu/semantic-web)

At our company we still use Semantic Web (or rather, RDF) for inference and annotation with medical ontologies (UMLS, Gene Ontology, Human Phenotype Ontology, etc). The ease of use of triples + SPARQL (basically a PROLOG-ish unification scheme) is really powerful (and quite performant when using Jena/Fuseki with Lucene as a text index). But it's a far cry from the "dream" of semantic web like federated queries and OpenAnnotations (now just W3C Annotations). Still, every time someone implements an EAV scheme without even considering an RDF triple store I cringe a bit.

</comment><comment><USER17> It was the sort of largely academic tops-down exercise to organizing information that has mostly lost out time and time again to more organic bottoms-up/self-organizing approaches. Think Yahoo vs. Google. [ADDED: i.e. manually populating hierarchies vs. search, in case that wasn't clear] I remember when it was going to be Web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee gave a talk about it when he won the Draper prize.

As others have said, classification is difficult under the best of circumstances. And it just doesn't fit with the way the Internet has evolved. We have Wikipedia, not the Encyclopedia Galactica.

<comment><USER18> I think there's a lot in this. The first users of the Internet saw themselves as librarians and curators, and sought to impose that vision of the world on everyone else. For a long time, people had trouble with the idea that everything didn't need to link to everything else.

<comment><USER17> Hierarchical structures are how we organized things historically. So I think it's pretty natural. I know that for a long time I was relatively careful about filing email, files, etc. into a folder hierarchy and categorizing my music collection. I won't say folders (and tags/labels) don't still have their uses. But I've definitely moved away from spending so much upfront time to carefully organizing stuff that I may want to find some tiny percentage of some day. Instead I mostly figure I can search for it if I need to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It happened.

We got meta tags that tell us the published date, author and type of web page.

We got schema for job ads.

We got schema for recipes.

We got schema for thumbnails and images associated with a webpage.

We got schema for ecommerce products

<comment><USER20> This is all speculation and I have no idea of the actual roadmap for the specs. As I was reading this comment it gave me another reason to love component based architecture... I would think it would make sense just to allow users to self define stuff like that rather than try to do everything top down.

[https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/components#w3c_all](https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/components#w3c_all)

<comment><USER21> Google guides for SEO show you how the semantic web happened.

[https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data- types/product](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/product)

Noone knows it's called the semantic web these days. It's just what you have to do to have you page get picked up and highly ranked by google, and to get more links from direct product traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Turns out it's not profitable to encourage understanding, rather it's better to be a hosted service provider, keep knowledge in a walled garden and charge for it.

</comment><comment><USER23> 1\. We've realized that people in general can't reliably and consistently mark data up. That's a problem of incentives, technical difficulties, UI, bitrot of invisible metadata, etc.

2\. We've settled on extracting information from "raw" text (with everything from regexes to recognize flight info in e-mails to getting word statistics from terabytes of garbage) and duct-taping that with special-purpose APIs.

<comment><USER24> The flight info example is one of the places where semantic web tech went mainstream. Those flight emails have embedded metadata in JSON-LD (linked data) format and Gmail uses it for more specialized display[1].

[1]: [https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/flight-...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/flight- reservation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It pivoted to Linked Data [1] with less focus on ontologies and AI and more focus on linking, open data and a Web of Data [2].

One nice demo of the latest advances is how you can query Wikidata client-side without downloading the whole database for queries like "Directors of movies starring Brad Pitt": [http://ldfclient.wmflabs.org](http://ldfclient.wmflabs.org)

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

[2] [https://www.w3.org/2013/data/](https://www.w3.org/2013/data/)

</comment><comment><USER26> It was always a cruel joke, never to be taken seriously.

At its core were SEO hucksters trying pass off page rank hacks as a business model for consulting work, during the post-dot-com bust period, when money was scarce and web design couldn't pay the bills anymore.

Many ascended to the priesthood of RESTful web microservice development, where they poo poo and tisk-tisk improper path grammar and noodle with JSON objects, in between periods of intense navel gazing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I spent 2 years using a semantic reasoner to develop an ontology for reasoning about smartgrid vulnerabilities. Ignoring the web aspect, ontologies are very hard. In addition, one needs to use multiple languages like one to express the ontology, and another to express a query. Change the ontology a little bit and the query will break when you run it. There was no integrated IDE that was complete.

</comment><comment><USER28> I had a project where we wanted a ticketing / events ontology and budgeted 6 weeks for three people to build it, in the end we spent probably 3 person years on it, which was dim... but we got suckered in by the idea that the ontologies themselves would be valuable (spoiler - nope).

So, knowledge engineering scales badly, but there were other problems. There was a big debate in the EU community about what kind of reasoner to use, and for some god awful reason F-logic was chosen, at the time we thought that reasoners like Otter wouldn't be able to scale and do FOL tractably. It's a shame that answersets and MCMC probalistic reasoners were 10 years later - <USER3> think that the weak reasoning and poor representation systems were big gaps.

The other problem was institutional, the way that EU semantic web funding worked, and the way that the projects developed. A lot of money was spent, and then there was no money - there was no self sustaining legacy.

</comment><comment><USER29> It didn't add any value for commercial entities (and minimal immediate value beyond self-satisfaction for non-commercial entities) so they didn't devote any resources to implementing it.

</comment><comment><USER30> What about NIEM (National Information Exchange Model) [1][2].

I see this tech is supposed to be replacement for paper documents and be the medium for government information arbitrage. The only obstacle for using it everywhere is structural complexity of NIEM and lack of tools. I've spent a bit of time hacking it with XML queries and my mind is blown [3].

You can interpret NIEM as a type system similar to types in programming languages, but for composing electronic documents; it could be integrated with payment systems. I think progress will go two ways: composing new documents will be happening with NIEM, older docs could be converted with natural language processing.

The latest version 4.0 is dated 2017, and US has spent lots of money to build an XML representation of real-life objects.

[1] [https://www.niem.gov/](https://www.niem.gov/) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Information_Exchange_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Information_Exchange_Model) [3] [https://github.com/NIEM](https://github.com/NIEM)

</comment><comment><USER31> In a way Freebase and DBpedia were/are practical applications of the concept. Now when you search on Google they try to understand a simple query and send you the answer. In Freebase you could write queries about facts retrieved from many sources.

The utopia is more than this but I assume that few people will used these tools directly.

</comment><comment><USER32> It was a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER33> Hardly. The promise is still there, but there are barriers in place to get there.

One of the most useful aspects of the semantic web is how it enhances the search for information. Some web citizens have become conditioned to see Google as the pinnacle of what we can achieve through search, but we can do a lot better. Let's use an example to illustrate this. Imagine a presidential election was taking place and you want to understand the positions of the candidates on topics that matter to you. Let's say foreign policy was something you were interested in, including their proclivity for war. By allowing for searching on a richer set of metadata you can more easily access the information about the positions of these candidates, without the distortions of Google's page rank algorithms. Think of it like treating the information of the web as a database you can query more directly. That's the main promise of the semantic web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The simple reason is that people are lazy. Someone isn't going to put in the extra work of marking up their text with the correct semantic structure if they don't get much out of it, and the ROI for an individual site owner was dubious at best. People keep talking about RFD, but that barely qualifies IMO, it was more of an agreed upon RFC so that search engines didn't force site owners to all adopt differing indexable formats (events, addresses, etc). Even with the backing of Google, RFD is not something that most sites are doing until they start tackling some enterprise grade SEO optimizations.

</comment><comment><USER35> We got separate JSON API's instead of machine-readable web pages.

</comment><comment><USER36> It became useful for people who have as job using public data or providing it. Such as the life sciences, governments and the archaeology/history and more. It allows for nice bottom up standards and user interfaces such as flight data in your e-mail.

If your not consuming a lot of public data or providing data to the public it is not very useful other than having a bunch of better graph databases associated with it.

</comment><comment><USER37> The semantic web is alive and well. It's just not in the places you're looking. I recommend checking out indieweb.org for a community devoted to building on the semantic web. Just because the big websites aren't using it doesn't mean the technology is dying.

</comment><comment><USER38> the (semi)automatic annotation never really happened. there are ontologies, there are amounts of raw data everywhere on the web, but we haven't discovered a way how to reliably turn those data into rdf triplets matching the ontology without doing it by manually hand.

</comment><comment><USER39> Google got good enough at divining the content and meaning of a page without needing magical XML pixie dust to annotate the facts on it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the triple model is awesome, but we haven't been able to develop decent triple stores to back it up.

</comment><comment><USER41> Machines should learn to understand understand human language, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER42> It was a stupid idea, although remnants can be seen in html5 with elements like address and , nav, and section.

Turns out that keeping presentation and data separate is much, much easier. Hopefully HTML 6 will get rid of everything except for div, span, and form elements.

</comment><comment><USER43> I wasted time, money and effort on it.

What happened is that it was pointless.

Build something people want, not the semantic web.

</comment><comment><USER44> Answer: it became obsolete by the use of Machine Learning.

</comment><comment><USER45> uhh...haven't you heard of JSON-LD?

</comment><comment><USER46> We call it "blockchain" now.

A lot of the solution in search of a problem work that went into semantic web just shifted to the crypto currency space.</comment>


HyperCard Zine - <AUTHOR> https://crime.team/~hypercard/ <comment><USER2> More comments on this earlier post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16548508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16548508)</comment>


My last project: Amazon Associates Product Links Ad Network, feedbacks? - <AUTHOR>

Is the message about what we do clear ? i would like to know if the HN community thinks that 'normal people' and not hackers will understand the site. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot! http://adwizzy.com <comment><USER2> Since the site doesn't look very polished, my first concern as a consumer would be whether or not your service is legitimate. Is what you're doing within Amazon's ToS? (I'm not suggesting that it's not, but that would be a question I'd ask.)

Also, where are you getting your data for behavioral targeting? Your explanation doesn't really say.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool product, but how do you deal with privacy issues ?</comment>


Rival tablets ready to bite into iPad lead - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed1ac0b6-6c1f-11df-86c5-00144feab49a.html <comment><USER2> If I were preparing to make decent, reasonably usable Android tablets to debut at, say, $300 or $400, I'd be super annoyed at the folks making $100 or $200 tablets because they're just gonna taint the brand as being utter unusable crap for anything but particular hackerish use cases.

Listen to kids and non-techies talk about music players... there are "iPods" and there are "MP3s"... most often expressed in a form like "Oh it's not an iPod, it's just an MP3." Tablet makers are gonna be in a pickle if the same dichotomy arises around iPads and "tablets".

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks familiar.

s/rival/CrunchPad

Oh, there it is. A recycled press release from the last time somebody offered to bring out a tablet at half of Apple's price.

What I find interesting is that Apple prices their products very aggressively these days. It's true that cheaper tablets are "just around the corner," but why do we assume that Apple's price will remain at its current level? WHy do we assume that Apple won't be just as relentless at reducing iPad pricing as they are at reducing iPod pricing?

Sure, there will be really cheap no-name competitors, but I think the prospects for name brands like Dell or HP are daunting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone else tired of hearing about all the mythical rival tablets that are "just around the corner"? I mean, Call me when you have a product and I'll be interested but for now stop bugging me.

Especially from the OLPC project which has a history of promising price points that they can't meet. Again, once they have a product in hand I'll be impressed but these types of articles are tantamount to FUD (albeit a kinder, gentler FUD with unrealistic hope replacing fear)

<comment><USER5> It's just the headline (hoping to be link bait).

The substance of the article warrants something more like: "Rival tablets _hoping_ to bite into iPad lead." But you know the effect of competitive pressures among media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It'll go the same as with the iPod and iPhone - the first generation or two of competitors will fall flat on their face. The UI will be awful. The software on them will be awful. The software for syncing to them will be awful.

We'll see a viable alternative to the iPad as soon as someone writes the software to run it. Once that happens, the hyper competitive device market will take it the rest of the way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Aren't they tired of always playing catch-up ? I'm pretty sure the iPad $500 starting price surprised a lot of them so claiming now that they will release a "rival" table for $200 or so is mostly wishful thinking.</comment>


Climate lawsuits are breaking new legal ground to protect the planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00175-5 <comment><USER2> Why not sue the government of Norway while we're at it? Their entire economy relies on oil, which contributes to Climate Change.

I really can't take environmentalists seriously, especially when nuclear reactor technology has been impeded over the years through protests..which is the only true solution to climate change.

Bernie Sanders also wants to outlaw Nuclear energy.</comment>


The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/06/the-singular-universe-and-reality-of-time-universe-smolin-review <comment><USER2> Personally, I can also recommend Philip Turetzky's Time for those interested in the question "What is Time?" from a philosophical (rather than a physical) POV. The book is a survey of thinking about Time from the ancient Greeks through the 20th century. It is not light reading, but no philosophy PhD is needed if you read it carefully.

<comment><USER3> One could argue that a large part of a philosophy PhD is learning to read carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I find that a much more comforting idea" is not the most compelling argument I've ever heard.</comment>


Ask HN: Election coming up, any political projects? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I am working on code to do logistic regression and predict voters for a local campaign. Take in the past voting patterns from public records, and tell you who will vote this time so they can get pamphlets and volunteer visits.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Can you explain how one would predict voters based on past voting patterns? Or do you know about similar projects? It seems that Offensive Politics is more into mapping election results. It seems to me politics is not a field where you can easily predict the future by looking at the past :-)

I was thinking of setting up a poll website (for French elections) but all the online polls seem to exhibit major bias, with way more far right-wing votes than in reality, so I haven't done anything at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <https://openpoll.us> \- It's a platform for voting and discussions on legislation.</comment>


JSIL: CIL to Javascript Compiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL

<comment><USER2> Also check out the demos at <http://jsil.org/>

The developer has implemented very basic functionality[1] of the XNA library (so there are games :D).

Programming a complete game in .NET (super-powerful IDEs, with code-completion and integrated debuggers, profiles is nice), then deploying it to the Web is a pretty cool thing. Of course this project is not nearly as mature[2] as GWT.

But I like the approach of compiling bytecode better, than GWTs Java compilations. Many cool .NET languages exist (like F#), which you can use that way.

[1]: that's basically it [https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL/blob/master/Libraries/JSIL...](https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL/blob/master/Libraries/JSIL.XNACore.js)

[2]: page says "JSIL is still in development. You will hit bugs."

</comment><comment><USER3> Also check out the author's blog, which has articles about the creation of this compiler and some of the challenges involved.

<http://www.luminance.org/>

</comment><comment><USER4> JSIL is awesome. It's exactly in the direction we want. .NET client-side code.

We are hoping Kevin & the JSIL community follow the Knockout JS approach, with HTML5 databinding to ViewModels written in C#, compiled to Javascript.

Just think - C# ViewModels calling a WCF service, from Javascript. Pretty awesome direction.

Ryan

</comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty impressive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Full disclosure: I'm a Mac guy.

I don't understand why I'd want this, though I would desperately love to understand why one would. Can anyone help?

Please & thank you.</comment>


Vimer - Avoid multiple instances of GVim with gvim –remote[-tab]-silent wrapper - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/susam/vimer <comment><USER2> I have a shell script I named 'e' (for edit) that does basically this. If VIRTUAL_ENV_NAME is set (by virtualenvwrapper), e opens a new tab in that gui vim remote if gvim or macvim are on PATH, or just in a console vim if not. [https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/e](https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/e)

'editwrd'/'ewrd'/'ew' does tab-completion relative to whatever $_WRD (working directory) is set to (e.g. by venv) and calls 'e' with that full path: [https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/_...](https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/_ewrd.sh)

It's unfortunately not platform portable like vimer, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> > alias myvim="gvim --remote-silent"

I frequently switch between Linux, Mac and Windows. Is there a good way to set up such aliases on Windows?</comment>


Show HN: CodeBERT a RoBERTa model pre-trained on Python Code (Colab) - <AUTHOR> https://colab.research.google.com/drive/17QNGQOsQOUBPlblqc7maiOKPbT4hDZfv?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

We have released CodeBERT few days ago and now we make available the first in a series of notebooks to show different aspects of it. We will also provide fine-tuning and other types of notebooks soon.

If you have any questions, please post it here. I will do my best to answer your questions.

Happy coding!</comment>


Inflammation links heart disease and depression, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-inflammation-links-heart-disease-depression.html <comment><USER2> I'm a bit dubious about the connection between heart disease and depression explicitly. Inflammation seems to be the general "something is wrong" check engine light of the body, and so drawing cause/effect from it, or even co- morbidity based upon it's presence makes me wonder. I wonder what lines could be drawn between another pair of conditions that are caused by/cause inflammation, like anxiety and diabetes.

<comment><USER3> You're not wrong, but on the other hand this is far from the only thing suggesting a link between cardiovascular disease and depression. The "vascular depression" hypothesis has been around for a while, and post-stroke emotional changes are a well-established phenomenon.

<comment><USER2> > post-stroke emotional changes are a well-established phenomenon.

I'm not arguing with you, I'm just looking for more information on this point - wouldn't it be hard to suss out the difference between the depression caused by the inflammation and the actual neurologically damaging event that is a stroke? And does inflammation occur after the stroke? I would assume it would be there leading up to it as well - after all aren't strokes mostly caused by plaque or clot build up which would be caused by inflammation? Does the same post-stroke emotional changes occur with hemorrhagic strokes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to know what this means on a practical level.

Say you had depression and/or anxiety. What does that mean? Are there tests you should run? Is there any point telling your doctor about it?</comment>


Need for speed: Accelerators pick up where incubators left off - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedeal.com/techconfidential/vc-ratings/napsters-children/need-for-speed.php <comment><USER2> _"One common criticism is that the approach amounts to throwing a handful of ideas at the wall to see what sticks. More important, no top-tier startups on the order of a YouTube Inc. or Facebook have emerged from accelerators."_

It might be true that no top tier startups have appeared from "accelerators" yet, but I have a couple points that I'd like to make really.

 _Don't count your chickens before they're hatched_

I think it's only a matter of time until an event like this occurs. How many top-tier startups are there in comparison to total number on non-accelerator startups? I would dare to say that number is incredibly small (0.1% chance?).

Wouldn't it be more prudent to wait and see for a more definitive answer on if the model gives startups a better or worse off chance.

 _A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush_

Does it really matter? I thought the model was designed for returning investments & making profit. I'm sure the guys at reddit & omnisio are crying themselves to sleep at night with their millions of dollars.

 _Good artists borrow, Great artists steal_

If there are several groups mimicking YC now, I don't think it is necessarily because the idea is fundamentally unsound.

Given the average acquisition time for startups and how long YC (or any of them really, but I'm basing my thoughts off YC's start time) has been up and running, logic tells me to wait and see yet emotions tell me it is the right course of action.

</comment><comment><USER3> PG: how do you feel about the term accelerator?

<comment><USER4> "One of many metaphors you could use for YC is a steam catapult on an aircraft carrier"

from <http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"One common criticism is that the approach amounts to throwing a handful of ideas at the wall to see what sticks. More important, no top-tier startups on the order of a YouTube Inc. or Facebook have emerged from accelerators."_

Is that really a criticism? Isn't that pretty much the definition of VC.</comment>