Entanglement Made Simple - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160428-entanglement-made-simple/ <comment><USER2> I always understand entanglement as 'cannot be factored'. It's really just that mathematical and simple.

Say there are particles a and b that can be in states 1 or 2

entangled: a1 * b2 - a2 * b1, vs not entangled: (a1+a2)*(b1+b2)

So, when you apply a measurement operator on the state of particle a, you know something about particle b in the entangled case.

Schrodinger said: "the best possible knowledge of the whole doesn't necessarily include the best possible knowledge of the parts." An entangled state should be treated as a whole, and not a sum of parts, kind of like how a book is treated as a continuous story, not a sum of letters.

<comment><USER3> "So, when you apply a measurement operator on the state of particle a, you know something about particle b in the entangled case."

You do now know something about particle b, but your explanation suggests that information existed all along.

<comment><USER2> The quantum information did exist all along; it just 'leaked' into the environment through a process known as decoherence: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence)

This is why I object to classical analogies using envelopes and cards and pennies that end with "Yeah QM is strange". It's really a fundamental physical/mathematical effect, and it's much less intuitive if you make a mapping to objects in a classical world. I often feel conceptual maps to information worlds (like books and the internet) are more intuitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure trying to instill an "intuitive" sense of quantum mechanics by appealing to classical principles in this way is such a great idea. The example of entanglement given here implies that each system was a circle or a square "all along" i.e. from the moment of being entangled. That's not actually how it works, and thinking about it that way will lead to misunderstandings later on, should you try to study QM more deeply. You will have to unlearn the lesson taught here.

It also leaves you unequipped to reason about quantum computing, by the way.

Also:

> _1\. A property that is not measured need not exist._

> _2\. Measurement is an active process that alters the system being > measured._

These are both misleading enough that they can probably just be called 'wrong' as well. We shouldn't assign mysterious properties to "measurement" as though it's some magical thing that just makes quantum mechanics happen. Just call it what it is: entangling the state of your brain with the results of an experiment. That conveniently also provides for a good jumping off point into Many Worlds / Relative-State Formulation of QM.

<comment><USER5> Describing measurement as "entangling your brain" is a particular viewpoint that is not widely accepted. Most physicists would agree that the LHC's particle collision data constitute measurements, even though most of those results have never been looked at by a human.

Measurement is at its most mysterious in the MW interpretation, because measurements are probabilistic and probabilities are hard to get out of a purely deterministic theory like MW.

<comment><USER4> It's not clear what point you're trying to argue. Yes, the particle collision data constitutes a measurement in the sense that it is entangled with whatever medium the data is being stored on (and, in practice, a while lot else), even if a human hasn't looked at it yet. Measurement as we usually mean it when talking about this stuff in the context of QM means a human looking at a thing, but sure that need not always be the case. I mean if you want to split hairs we can go back and forth all day, but that doesn't strike me as an interesting or enlightening avenue of discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I read anything on how wierd quantum mechanics is I wonder how theoretical physicists can stay sane.

It's all so bizarre that I don't see how anyone can look that deeply into it and not come away thinking our entire existence is one big pointless hoax.

<comment><USER7> It is not bizarre; it is being presented as such, though. The actual mathematics of quantum mechanics is simple (vectors, matrices). What is confusing is:

\- trying to describe quantum mechanics without mathematics (since we have no direct intuition/experience, many analogies do not hold),

\- inventing some profound philosophy to describe facts.

For example, my entry on that: [https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/quantum- supe...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/quantum- superposition/) (not entanglement, but - an electron being in two places at once).

[Full disclaimer: I am an ex theoretical physicist. I don't claim I am sane, though.]

<comment><USER8> It's not bizarre if you skip the tricky bits like how does it work, why don't the equations work for gravity, are there many worlds and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ruud-v-A Here's an analogy: I put a red card in one envelope, and a blue card in a different envelope. I send one envelope to Alice (but I don't say which one) and one to Bob. Alice and Bob could be on opposite sides of the planet. When Alice opens her envelope, she knows which colour she has, but she also instantly knows which colour Bob has -- without communication with Bob. Bob might not even have opened his envelope yet. There is no faster than light communication or magic going on.

<comment><USER3> This analogy is fundamentally misleading. In this analogy, the blue card was always blue in the envelope, and the red card was always red. In this analogy, this information was set right from the start. It's really misleading.

<comment><USER9> It's an analogy.

The weirdness of QM comes from the following, slightly more complicated, situation.

You have two cards, a red one and a blue one. You also have two envelopes. Without looking at anything, you put one card in each envelope. You label them, and send one each to Alice and Bob.

Now, we know for sure that when Alice opens her envelope and looks at the card, we immediately know which card Bob has. There is no information being exchanged, so Alice knows what card Bob has immediately when she opens her envelope.

The weirdness of QM comes from looking at the _intermediate_ states. i.e. the states _before_ Alice opens her envelope. There are (waving wands) ways to tell what the intermediate states _could_ be, by varying certain (QM) magical properties of the experiment.

The weirdness of QM is this. _Every single idea you have about the intermediate state is wrong_.

What do I mean by that?

You could say there are "hidden variables". i.e. one envelope "really has" a red card in it, and the other envelope "really has" a blue card in it. This interpretation is _wrong_.

Every experiment shows that the envelopes are in a "superposition" of states. That is, the envelopes don't contain either a red card or a blue card. They carry... something... that is maybe red and maybe blue.

That seems strange, but OK. What happens when Alice opens her envelope?

When Alice opens her envelope, the card which is "maybe blue, maybe red" suddenly becomes either 100% blue, or 100% red.

The weird part is the next step.

When Alice opens her envelope, Bob's card _immediately_ becomes the opposite color. This happens _no matter how far away Bob is from Alice_.

So is information traveling faster than the speed of light? No. We knew Alice's card was red or blue, so Bob's card must have been blue or red. Lo and behold, Bob's card turns out to be one of those colors.

And yes, Bob's card _really is_ in an indeterminate state prior to Alice opening her envelope. And once Alice opens her envelope, Bob's card _really is_ 100% either red or blue.

The confusion comes from what is _really_ happening behind the scenes. i.e. What is the _real_ explanation?

The current QM research shows that the answer is "Uh... right... we're not actually sure."

Somehow the two cards are connected (QM people say "entangled"), because when you look at one, the other immediately "decides" (?) what color it is. But there's no information being passed between the cards. There's nothing exchanged between the cards. Yet somehow Bob's card "knows" that Alice has looked at her card.

This is profoundly strange and confusing. No one has any idea what's going on. Physicists have many theories, but it's difficult to either prove or disprove most of them. That takes time, money, expertise, etc.

So we're left with "QM is strange". As Richard Feynman said, "QM is not only stranger than you can imagine, it's stranger than you can possibly imagine."

<comment><USER10> _But there 's no information being passed between the cards._

I am not sure that this is the correct or best way to describe it. That looking at the cards does not allow exchanging any information between Alice and Bob does not necessarily imply that the process of determining the colors of the cards does not involve any information exchange. It seems almost necessary that an information exchange happens between the two cards, after all they have to acquire different colors and they have no definite color before looking at them. That this process can not be exploited by Alice and Bob to exchange any information is a wholly different issue.

<comment><USER9> > I am not sure that this is the correct or best way to describe it.

That's how physicists describe it. So it is the best way.

The thing to remember is that information (in physics) means "particles". The screen gives your eyes information in the form of photons.

In the case of QM entanglement, _nothing_ is exchanged. So no information is exchanged.

> It seems almost necessary that an information exchange happens between the > two cards, after all they have to acquire different colors and they have no > definite color before looking at them.

That's the issue with QM. You would _like_ to think that something happens. But as I said, whatever _really_ happens is different than what you think.

<comment><USER10> _That 's how physicists describe it. So it is the best way._

I am not sure that this is correct. I think the usual statement is that it does not allow Alice and Bob to exchange information, not that no information exchange is involved. When Alice looks at her card and sees that it is red something happens, i.e. red as a possible colors for Bob's card is eliminated. The wave function collapses if you want to use that picture. The state of Bob's cards changes instantly from maybe red or maybe blue to definitely blue. One can now argue whether that change should be called information or whether the term information should be reserved for things that can be exploited by Alice and Bob but that does not change the fact that a non-local instantaneous effect changed the state of Bob's card.

 _The thing to remember is that information (in physics) means "particles"._

That is pretty vague and might or might not be true. Do you mean every information exchanges between two spatially separated parties necessarily requires the exchange of (real) particles?

 _That 's the issue with QM. You would like to think that something happens._

Something happens, the wave function changes.

<comment><USER9> > I am not sure that this is correct.

<sigh> So you're smarter than every physicist alive.

Well... no.

> One can now argue whether that change should be called information ...

No, you can't. You're using colloquial English to reason about physics. This is wrong. Physicists have a very specific definition for "information" (as I already said, and you ignored). And in this case, no information is exchanged.

> That is pretty vague and might or might not be true.

As the published nuclear physicist in the argument... yes, yes, it's true.

> Do you mean every information exchanges between two spatially separated > parties necessarily requires the exchange of (real) particles?

Yes.

<comment><USER10> _< sigh> So you're smarter than every physicist alive.

Well... no._

The usual statement is that entanglement can not be used to exchange information between spatially separated observers, right? I totally agree with that. But what about the wave function? If the wave function is spatially extended, then the change of the wave function has to propagate through space if one assumes that the change is caused by a local measurement. And the wave function contains the information that fully describes the state of the system but one can not learn the wave function in general because some operators are not commutative. Nonetheless a change of the wave function means a change of the information describing the system whether an observer can detect that change or not. That are of course two different things, the information describing the state of the system and the information an observer can learn about the state of the system, but I see no conflict here.

 _No, you can 't. You're using colloquial English to reason about physics. This is wrong. Physicists have a very specific definition for "information" (as I already said, and you ignored). And in this case, no information is exchanged._

If I measure a spin without prior knowledge of its state, I obtain one bit of information, I guess that is the sense in which you want to understand information, right? If I repeat the experiment with identical preparation over and over again, then I can learn the wave function, maybe 30 % up, 70 % down. If Alice and Bob do this with their entangled cards, then Bob can decide between the case that Alice saw a red card in which case he will always see his card blue and the case that Alice did not look at her card in which case he will see his card as randomly red or blue. When Alice looks at her card she must of course perform a post selection to get rid of the pairs where she saw her card as blue.

I hope you notice that I am not trying to argue that you are wrong, I am just trying to understand what you say, especially why one would consider the result of a measurement as information but not consider the wave function as information.

<comment><USER9> > But what about the wave function?

Looking at the wave function changes nothing. It's all the same physics, and all the same concepts. You can't get different behavior from the physical system by "looking at the wave function" instead of looking at the particles.

> If the wave function is spatially extended, then the change of the wave > function has to propagate through space

... via _real particles_. Which can't go faster than the speed of light.

> And the wave function contains the information that fully describes the > state of the system but one can not learn the wave function in general > because some operators are not commutative.

That... doesn't make any sense from a physics point of view.

You're trying to understand which is good. But you're mangling the concepts.

> If I measure a spin without prior knowledge of its state, I obtain one bit > of information, I guess that is the sense in which you want to understand > information, right? If I repeat the experiment with identical preparation > over and over again, then I can learn the wave function, maybe 30 % up, 70 % > down

No. You're learning the _probability distribution_ of the wave function. i.e the _statistical_ distribution of the wave function, taken over many measurements.

> If Alice and Bob do this with their entangled cards,

... they learn that 50% of the cards are blue, and 50% of the cards are red. _Which they already knew_.

> ... Bob can decide between the case that Alice saw a red card in which case > he will always see his card blue and the case that Alice did not look at her > card in which case he will see his card as randomly red or blue

I'm not even sure what that means. It's based on a misunderstanding of the underlying concepts, so the sentence doesn't really make sense to me.

> I am just trying to understand what you say, especially why one would > consider the result of a measurement as information but not consider the > wave function as information.

I never said that.

The wave function is a probability distribution.

Information is exchanged via real particles.

You can learn new information through measurements... but not when the underlying measurements are random. i.e. with entangled particles, all you measure is that (in this case) half of the cards are red, and half are blue. Which you already knew.

Since you already knew that half of the cards are red and half are blue, the measurements give you no new information.

The concepts are really quite simple, once you throw away your "common sense" understanding of what is going on.

<comment><USER10> _Looking at the wave function changes nothing. It 's all the same physics, and all the same concepts. You can't get different behavior from the physical system by "looking at the wave function" instead of looking at the particles._

Alice hands Bob a particle that is either spin up or a superposition of spin up and spin down. Bob can not distinguish those two cases with a measurement. But if Bob would know the wave function he could tell the difference and Bob could learn the wave function be repeating the experiment many times. So there is a difference between looking at the outcome of a measurement and looking at the wave function.

 _... via real particles. Which can 't go faster than the speed of light._

If Alice measures her particle of an entangled pair the wave function of Bobs particle will change without any particle transporting any information from Alice to Bob. Bob is unable to detect that change with a local measurement but the wave function changed and no particle has been exchanged.

 _That... doesn 't make any sense from a physics point of view. You're trying to understand which is good. But you're mangling the concepts._

What is wrong with that? The wave function fully describes the state of a system but you can not learn that state in general because you would have to perform several different measurements and those measurements do not commute in general and change the state to an eigenstate of the measured observable. Only in an experimental setup with repeated measurements on identically prepared systems can you learn the wave function of the system.

 _No. You 're learning the probability distribution of the wave function. i.e the statistical distribution of the wave function, taken over many measurements._

No, I said identically prepared systems, so the wave functions are identical in every run of the experiment. I then obtain a distribution of the eigenstates of the operator by repeating the experiment and that determines the wave function up to the phase.

 _I 'm not even sure what that means. It's based on a misunderstanding of the underlying concepts, so the sentence doesn't really make sense to me._

Alice prepares a set of entangled particle pairs. On two thirds of the sets she measures her particle and sorts them by outcome. Now Alice has three sets, unmeasured, measured up and measured down. Bob can determine which set is which by measuring his particles, he gets 50/50 up and down, 100 % down and 100 % up respectively.

 _I never said that._

You did or at least I understood it that way. You say that information is what an observer can learn about the state of a system by performing measurements but there is also the information describing the state of the system, the wave function, which is not necessarily accessible to an observer.

 _The wave function is a probability distribution._

It is not, it is a description of the state of the system. You can obtain a probability distribution of eigenstates by repeatedly performing measurements on identical wave functions and that distribution is determined by the magnitude of the amplitude of the wave function but the wave function itself is not a probability distribution.

 _You can learn new information through measurements... but not when the underlying measurements are random. i.e. with entangled particles, all you measure is that (in this case) half of the cards are red, and half are blue. Which you already knew.

Since you already knew that half of the cards are red and half are blue, the measurements give you no new information._

I did not dispute that, observers obtain information about the state of a system by performing measurements, but that is not the same as the information describing the state of the system. The later is the truth, the former is what an observer knows about the truth.

<comment><USER9> Let's back up.

You're using colloquial English to reason about physics. This is wrong. Physicists have _very_ specific definitions of the terms they use. Which are sort of similar to the common ones, but differ in key points. Those key points are what you're getting hung up on. And it's difficult to explain the differences without explaining all pf physics.

On top of that, you've disagreed with the common definitions used by physicists "I'm not sure that's correct". Well, it is. If you think that's wrong, you either think you're smarter than all physicists alive, or you're wrong. Pick one.

> ... But if Bob would know the wave function he could tell the difference ...

No. No. A thousand times no.

It just doesn't work like that.

> If Alice measures her particle of an entangled pair the wave function of > Bobs particle will change without any particle transporting any information > from Alice to Bob. Bob is unable to detect that change with a local > measurement but the wave function changed and no particle has been > exchanged.

That is a bunch of pseudo-physics words put together in a sentence.

>> You're trying to understand which is good. But you're mangling the concepts. > What is wrong with that?

Everything. If you're not using the correct terms in the correct way, you might as well be putting random words together in a sentence.

>> No. You're learning the probability distribution of the wave function. i.e the statistical distribution of the wave function, taken over many measurements. > No, I said identically prepared systems, so the wave functions are identical in every run of the experiment.

So... you know better than the nuclear physicist.

This should set off alarm bells that you either don't understand the topic, or you don't care to understand it.

> You did or at least I understood it that way. You say that information is > what an observer can learn about the state of a system by performing > measurements but there is also the information describing the state of the > system, the wave function, which is not necessarily accessible to an > observer.

<sigh> The observer can do multiple measurements to determine the wave function.

>> The wave function is a probability distribution. > It is not, it is a description of the state of the system.

Again, you're arguing with the nuclear physicist.

The probability distribution _is_ a description of the system.

>> Since you already knew that half of the cards are red and half are blue, the measurements give you no new information. > I did not dispute that, observers obtain information about the state of a system by performing measurements,

Yes.

> but that is not the same as the information describing the state of the > system. The later is the truth, the former is what an observer knows about > the truth.

<sigh> I'm trying to educate you on physics, and you're arguing pseudo- philosophical metaphysics.

Please stop. Your understanding of the terms is largely wrong. As a result, your arguments are based on falsities, and therefore also wrong.

Please go read a popular book about QM before discussing this with anyone.

And stop arguing with the nuclear physicist. This is one situation where I can appeal to authority without it being a logical fallacy. I've explained repeatedly why you're wrong. You don't seem to understand.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately I have not enough time for a full reply right now, but I will come back over the weekend.

Wave function and probability distribution. You repeatedly insisted on precise language, that is why I objected your statement that the wave function is a probability distribution. And I still do, nuclear physicist or not. A wave function is complex-valued, a probability distribution is usually defined by a real-valued probability density function or a real-valued cumulative distribution function. The state 1/sqrt(2)(|0> \+ |1>) has probability amplitudes of magnitude 1/sqrt(2) for both states, the probability distribution you obtain when you repeatedly measure particles in that state has probability 1/2 for both states, the square of the magnitude of the amplitude. The wave function certainly defines a probability distribution but it is not itself one.

 _< sigh> I'm trying to educate you on physics, and you're arguing pseudo- philosophical metaphysics. Please stop. Your understanding of the terms is largely wrong. As a result, your arguments are based on falsities, and therefore also wrong. Please go read a popular book about QM before discussing this with anyone. And stop arguing with the nuclear physicist. This is one situation where I can appeal to authority without it being a logical fallacy. I've explained repeatedly why you're wrong. You don't seem to understand._

I haven't read everything again but most of your responses, especially in your last comment, simply state that I am wrong without pointing out why or providing a supposedly correct point of view. It is of course not you job to teach me physics, but simply stating that I am wrong is only of limited help to overcome misunderstandings. Besides that we are discussing a topic that has not been definitely settled and where there is disagreement even among professional physicists, so maybe we should not be too surprised about a certain amount of disagreement.

I would very much appreciate if we could continue this discussion a bit once I had time for a full reply - and I agree, we have to back up quite a bit, the discussion got fragmented pretty quickly - but I won't blame you if you declare me a lost case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author "makes it simple" by using a crappy get out for explaining the seeming faster than light influence in quantum entanglement:

>This "spooky action at a distance," as Einstein called it, might seem to require transmission of information — in this case, information about what measurement was performed — at a rate faster than the speed of light.

>But does it? Until I know the result you obtained, I don't know what to expect. I gain useful information when I learn the result you've measured, not at the moment you measure it. And any message revealing the result you measured must be transmitted in some concrete physical way, slower (presumably) than the speed of light.

The thing is when the results are obtained you can write them down or similar. Unless you are presuming the written results and other records change as you mail them to each other you are left with the faster than light type paradox. I'm with Einstein on that one in that something odd is happening.

My guess is that quantum mechanics is the fundamental nature of the universe and the appearance of space and time are a resulting epiphenomenon. As a result of that the particles appear far apart but are in some ways are still connected.

<comment><USER11> As I understand it though, because the result is random you can't actually transmit meaningful information faster than light. You can know what the other measurement was but because it was random it's rather useless information. But I don't know maybe I have it wrong...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _The interesting effects, which EPR considered paradoxical, arise when we > make measurements of both members of the pair. When we measure both members > for color, or both members for shape, we find that the results always agree. > Thus if we find that one is red, and later measure the color of the other, > we will discover that it too is red, and so forth. On the other hand, if we > measure the shape of one, and then the color of the other, there is no > correlation. Thus if the first is square, the second is equally likely to be > red or to be blue._

That's not paradoxical, that's just two objects with the same random shape and the same random color. Quantum entanglement is stranger than that, it can't be explained by hidden correlated information about both objects.

Here's an example of quantum entanglement. Imagine that Alice and Bob live far from each other and can't communicate. There are three possible yes/no questions you can ask them, but each person can only answer one question. These facts are known:

1) If you ask Alice and Bob the same question, they always give opposite answers.

2) If you ask Alice question 1 and ask Bob question 2, the probability that both will say yes is 5%.

3) If you ask Alice question 2 and ask Bob question 3, the probability that both will say yes is 5%.

4) If you ask Alice question 1 and ask Bob question 3, the probability that both will say yes is 20%.

Under classical assumptions, there's no way for Alice and Bob to prepare a strategy beforehand that would lead to such probabilities. The reason is that case 4 is completely covered by cases 2 and 3, but has higher probability than the two of them combined. Here's a proof:

        (4)
        => A1Y and B3Y
        => A1Y and B3Y and (A2N or A2Y)                    // tautology
        => A1Y and B3Y and (B2Y or A2Y)                    // by (1)
        => (A1Y and B2Y and B3Y) or (A1Y and A2Y and B3Y)  // logical operations
        => (A1Y and B2Y) or (A2Y and B3Y)                  // logical operations
        => (2) or (3)

Now, as strange as it sounds, in a quantum world Alice and Bob can defeat that proof and prepare a strategy beforehand. When you ask Alice a question, she will consult her prepared photon in a box, and measure it in a way that depends on which question you asked. The measurement will mess up the photon's state, so you don't get to ask another question. Elsewhere, Bob will do the same with his photon. The two photons were prepared together, but are completely separated at the time of the game.

Before you ask, it's provable that such tricks cannot be used to send information faster than light. Quantum "spooky action" is somehow more powerful than hidden correlations, but less powerful than outright communication. It's pretty subtle and most popular accounts don't get it right.

<comment><USER13> I don't quite follow your proof on the last two steps; would you mind explaining? You say it's by logical operations, but I'm missing something because I see:

(A && B && C) || (A && D && C) == (A && B) || (D && C)

<comment><USER12> It's =>, not ==. We need to show that (4) is contained in the union of (2) and (3).

<comment> mh-cx I think you misunderstood his question. I have the same problem.

How do you get from this line:

        (A1Y and B2Y and B3Y) or (A1Y and A2Y and B3Y)

to this

        (A1Y and B2Y) or (A2Y and B3Y)

BrandonSmithJ just did some replacement to make it easier to read. Maybe he shouldn't have used the same letters to avoid confusion.

Let's write it differently: Why are these terms equivalent?

       (u && v && w) || (u && x && w)
       (u && v)  || (x && w)

<comment><USER12> They are not equivalent. The former term logically implies the latter term. That means the set of situations described by the former term is a subset of the situations described by the latter term. That means the probability of the former set should be less or equal than the probability of the latter set.

<comment> mh-cx Ah, makes sense now. Thanks!

Now I also get your previous comment. I've read your => as arrows instead of "equal or greater".

<comment><USER12> They are arrows, logical implications :-)

<comment> mh-cx Argh. Right. After more thinking equal or greater than wouldn't make much sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found this video [1] to be a remarkably engaging and informative (but Bohr biased) overview of this topic.

Alain Aspect's comment regarding "if you just want answers you simply compute" in context of "understanding" entanglement is spot on.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/-LklvINk_L4](https://youtu.be/-LklvINk_L4)

<comment><USER14> This is a much better upload of the same film: [https://youtu.be/BFvJOZ51tmc](https://youtu.be/BFvJOZ51tmc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      > Entanglement arises in situations where we have partial knowledge of the state of two systems.

What happened to the notion that entangled states were about particles being in many places at the same time?

<comment><USER16> Superposition is a necessary precondition for entanglement but not what entanglement itself is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A horrible article, it can only contribute to confusion than to present what is known.

No, there are no squares and circles, and no cakes. It isn't simpler an there's no insight to be gained by thinking about the cakes and squares and circles.

Much better learning about what is. For example, to get some intuition for the things you can't directly observe try considering what's going on in the "simple" act of water drop forming and detaching.

[https://youtu.be/c4MUTij8f6I?t=120](https://youtu.be/c4MUTij8f6I?t=120)

It's waves all the way down.</comment>


Trouble in the House of Stackoverflow - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thecloudblocks.com/post/14016289180/trouble-in-the-house-of-stackoverflow The lag between question and answers are getting longer in Stackoverflow and this was long coming. <comment><USER2> I wonder if this increased responsed time is uniform across all tags. I work on ML implementations (SML/NJ and Manticore), and I've basically given up on answering questions on SO because every time I go there every question has been answered within a few hours. Even the difficult questions, and -- especially on SML/NJ -- often by people with no relationship to the implementation team who have clearly spent serious time spleunking the depths of our source tree to answer it.

Hard to tell without some statistical data. My tags may also be odd because I suspect our user base is skewed towards a mass of novices (intro to CS students) and a small number of experts, with very few people in the middle.

<comment><USER3> There probably has been an increase over most tags, but I strongly doubt that it's uniform. If you're at all interested, there's a SEDE query that shows which tags have the most unanswered questions (by raw count and proportion of questions asked) that you can use to find tags to follow that need more attention.

[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1320/unanswere...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1320/unanswered- questions-by-tag)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least one problem is that overzealous moderators seem to be clamping down on every tiny little deviation from perfection.

A thread, an old thread on Stackoverflow, was linked from HN the other day, and was in fact now dead, but it was closed as not appropriate, two or so years after being opened, closed by a flock of moderators, for some utterly spurious reason. I believe it was marked (my paraphrase) as 'may cause discussion, closed as not appropriate'.

I can't speak for other people, but since the rise and rise of moderation like this, I am much less motivated to post or answer questions on Stackoverflow.

<comment><USER3> How is this even slightly related to the problem of hard questions not getting answered? Stack Overflow isn't designed for the kind of questions that frequently get closed as "not constructive." There are plenty of other places on the internet to have discussions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Solution: The longer a question goes unanswered, the more points you aught to get for answering it.

<comment><USER3> That would incentivize _waiting_ to post an answer. That's definitely not desirable.

<comment><USER5> Except that someone else could answer while you are waiting.

<comment><USER3> Now it's a dilemma. I can just write up my answer and wait to post it until someone else posts, maximizing the amount of reputation I'd get for the same answer. If everyone does the same, the net outcome is a longer waiting period to get answers to questions. I'd rather keep game theory out of it.

<comment><USER5> A possible solution: When someone answers, the karma clock is "reset", so it is then based on the time since the last answer given.

<comment><USER3> Snap! That's a good idea. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My problem with Stackoverflow has been that for the majority of the questions I've asked, I'm more of an expert in the subject matter than the people answering the question. Most of the answers I receive are to the wrong question, or are an answer that I specifically mentioned in the question as not being viable.

<comment><USER3> Examples? I'm a moderator and can delete non-answers. I also have a lot of rep to burn, so I can place bounties on good questions that aren't adequately answered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article nailed it. Chances are that the world of QA sites is switching from narcism based reputation systems to the real web currency: user attention. That is, if I spend some of my attention on your problem, the system will remember it the next time I have a question.

This is what I am doing with <http://www.TwoToReal.com>: Unlike SO/Quora/etc. it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate) and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one expert. Thus the currency of attention.

<comment><USER8> I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question.

Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".

<comment><USER7> That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having searched around for a while.

E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at <http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/>

I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.

<comment><USER8> That's a good point. I was thinking about it as a direct replacement of SO, but like you said it doesn't have to be. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, SO does have a way of dealing with it through the use of bounties. As far as I'm aware, it requires the person asking the question to give up some rep though. Maybe there should be some internal bounty on all unanswered questions after a period of time.

<comment><USER3> Most questions that don't get answered are just poorly phrased questions that either don't get enough attention or aren't really answerable. These eventually get deleted. I like the current bounty system because any user with enough reputation can put a bounty on any other user's question. That means a human has to look at it and deem it worthy of a bounty, which I think is better than automatically bumping questions based on age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> what I really like about stackoverflow is that it is very well designed to be a permanent, constantly accreting repository of useful information. I've even managed to answer one of my own questions by posting it, and then noticing a useful fact in an answer to one of the "related questions" in the sidebar (and this was after a lot of unsuccessful googling first).</comment>


A proof of Löb's theorem in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0d/a_proof_of_l%C3%B6bs_theorem_in_haskell/

<comment><USER2> Interesting to see you can jam something like this into Haskell despite its inappropriateness. The (genuine) Agda proofs are much, much nicer.

<comment><USER3> Agreed :-)

One of the big questions to me now is whether we can prove the Diagonal Lemma, not just assume it. Do you know if it's possible in Agda? I heard somewhere that it might be hard to find an intuitionistic proof.</comment></comment>


How I optimised my Git checkout flow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-at-holvi/optimising-my-git-checkout-workflow-ace58e342e69 <comment><USER2> Very handy article! I didn't know about these custom Git commands. I'll now have to invest some time on writing a few.</comment>


Being a B student bringing me down... - <AUTHOR>

Hey
As the title suggests, being a B student throughout university has really been killing my confidence. I think to myself, if I can't do school right, how can I ever do a startup? Or even contribute at a successful company? I remember while reading Steve Jobs' biography his insistence on keeping B players out... And for good reason I figure.
My history is as such: deemed "smart" in high school, I decided to do engineering, not really knowing what it was. At least I've come to very much like it over the years. My first year completely took me by surprise, I didn't really try (that oh-so-useless self excuse) and ended up with Bs. Second year came around, and I really did start trying, but still, same result... Third year, same thing. Due to my marks I was never able to get good summer research opportunities (why not choose the A students?) which I feel is really closing doors for grad school for me.
But I don't even care so much about that as it really drains on me mentally. I need to drastically reframe this somehow, and come up with a plan of action to get myself going. This summer I'm trying to work on a side project at least, but I'm also tied up between trying to pre-study for other courses I could take in my last year to try and raise my grades. I honestly can't decide what the right course of action might be.
Yeah there's kids who don't get to go to college and kids who are starving and all that... But if anyone were to try and give me some other perspective I'd be very appreciative.
Cheers <comment><USER2> I was deemed "smart" in high school (I was regularly teased and mockingly called "Professor"), but lazy enough about things like homework that I stayed on the "B" honor roll all of the way through.

I went on to do very similar in college, getting a "B" average and graduating with a "useless" BA in English.

I had always enjoyed playing with computers and, in a desperate attempt to find a "real job" after I graduated, I took a job as a tech writer for $32K a year. I hated it.

Thinking it was the job, I switched to another tech writing job, which I hated more than the first. Turns out, I hated the profession.

At that point, I decided that what I saw the software developers doing around me was really what I wanted to do, so I spent the next couple of years working my ass off to become qualified to get hired as a software dev. I took writing gigs that were largely web-related and started building stuff in my evenings and weekends to have something to show people when applying for jobs.

A year later, I was working as a web developer at a consulting company, building database-driven web apps for 3M and Wells Fargo.

A year later, I quit full-time employment and became an independent software developer.

I have done so for 9 years. For the last 2 years running, I made $170K (in Minneapolis, MN, equiv to $235K in San Francisco).

I'm working on a product/platform to branch out from consulting revenue.

Am I retiring because I built a startup that went from 0 to $50 million in a year? No. However, I do have a comfortable life, love what I do and not a single soul has asked me about my college or high school transcript in 15 years.

What they HAVE asked me about is what I've built, what I've accomplished, etc. That's all stuff entirely within my control. I work hard to build stuff and, in doing so, get opportunities to build more interesting stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks a lot for the reply, really means a lot. It's good perspective because you've accomplished so much in tech and I guess I have a head start in that regard.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MuSE - Markup using Symbolic Expressions. What do you think? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/draq/MuSE

<comment><USER2> I'd suggest you make it easier for people to read the specifications. The html is minified into a single line, making it impractical to read the source straight out of github.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the advice. It is a single line because it was parsed from the specification.muse file, which should be quite human-readable (to a certain degree). I will put the specification into README.md.</comment></comment>


New Zynga titles struggle - <AUTHOR> http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/18/new-zynga-titles-struggle-analysis-call-for-increase-in-daily-a/

<comment><USER2> "Zynga has constructed a super-sonic ultra-high-altitude aircraft to recover the bar it's accidentally set for itself in the exosphere." A fine finish for this article! I think this means Zynga has probably peaked?</comment>


Know Your Company - <AUTHOR> https://knowyourcompany.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm uncomfortable with the one-time pricing. This is the second product 37S has released with that pricing scheme (first: basecamp breeze). could be an innovation. i think it creates more ambiguity. if i pay onetime for something I feel like i should own it, not rent it. Still, interesting experiment.

<comment><USER3> So.... you'd rather keep paying for it and not own it, than pay for it once and not own it?

<comment><USER2> I'd like to rent it, because that's whats actually happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting to see a long form sales letter being used by 37 Signals. It's good copy, but light on details and I'm still not sure who this is targeted at.

Is this meant to be launched or is this something that leaked?

<comment><USER5> Launched, guessing from DHH's tweet: <https://twitter.com/dhh/status/341590377863729153>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like this: <http://www.15five.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> "You can't come" technique.</comment>


Google's future 'searching without searching' - cool or creepy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/internet/114407/googles-future-searching-without-searching-cool-or-creepy <comment><USER2> Allow me to be the first to call BS. (Am I allowed to do that with Google?)</comment>


Unirest: Polyglot Lightweight HTTP Request Client Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://unirest.io/?

<comment><USER2> The Python version looks pretty similar to what you'd get with requests. Its almost like this is a clone of requests. Really not much incentive to use this over requests.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had been running some unit tests in node with the built in http module, but the superagent-like syntax used here just "feels better". Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why would you choose this over requests for python?

The java code is a little simpler than what you'd get with a jax-rs client, but not by much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Make a rust version and you are my hero</comment>


Automated Unsubscribe Service for Your Inbox - <AUTHOR> https://unroll.me/

<comment><USER2> This is a great service!</comment>


Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1 <comment><USER2> This is the most important video you'll see for a while. Please, watch.</comment>


Show HN: ReviewApp – puzzle planet to knock your brain - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brain-knock-puzzle-planet/id941623871

<comment><USER2> Sounds cool! How it differentiates itself from Sensor Tower and alike?</comment>


The End of the Mexican Road - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/02/11/the-end-of-the-mexican-road/?awesm=bothsid.es_Hns&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=bothsid.es-twitter&utm_source=t.co&utm_content=awesm-publisher

<comment><USER2>
      In face, your goal in a negotiation is not always to get
      the lowest possible terms. Your goal is to understand the
      needs of your partner and create win/win outcomes where
      both sides are incentivized to continue to want to work
      hard together – now and into the future. Sometimes that
      means you want the absolute best deal you can get. Other
      times it doesn't.

That's a lesson that applies to employee salary negotiations as well. I've seen too many instances of employers trying to take advantage of an employee's lack of negotiation skills, trying to squeeze out that last $5k/year. It's much more important to have an employee who is happy with their compensation and dedicated to your company than to shave a few grand off your annual payroll.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad to hear someone who likes to negotiate talk about the downsides of getting too good of a deal. It's a dimension too often ignored by people who forget that if the other guy isn't happy you might end up with far worse of a product/service/employee, etc.

There are even times when it makes sense to pay more than the asking price for better service or for the long term sustainability of the deal.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe this guy gets to decide whether people get funded.

<comment><USER5> And why is that, Michael? Which bits did you find objectionable? What would you prefer to hear? People negotiate. We can pretend they don't, but they do. For business people it's important to understand that.

But I'm all ears if you think I missed something.

<comment><USER4> Actually that post was fine, if a bit banal. It was your "busy execs hate lunches" idiocy that inspired the comment, which still stands.

<comment><USER5> Ok. Fair enough. Thanks for expanding. FWIW, in the busy execs hate lunches post - I was really just trying to offer honest advice to young entrepreneurs. I do lunches all the time. But I also get requests from random people I don't know to do lunch or dinner. I thought it was worth educating some of these younger people about what common-sense etiquette is. I know you think it's obvious - but based on my sample data it isn't always.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Berkshire Hathaway buys Dominion Energy natural gas assets in $10B deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/05/warren-buffetts-berkshire-buys-dominion-energy-natural-gas-assets-in-10-billion-deal.html <comment><USER2> To me this signals that Buffett believes that huge growth of cheap and crazy- popular wind and solar generators will continue to be directly correlated with a massive expansion of fracked natural gas (i.e. high-carbon fossil fuel) to back up their intermittency.

Fracked natural gas is certainly better than coal in almost all metrics (way less deadly air pollution, arguably less carbon emissions given better pipeline seals/maintenance), but it is not compatible with a climate solution because of its high carbon footprint.

I'm always advocating for 24/7 low-carbon, low-land, low-material energy (i.e. energy with high power density) like nuclear but it appears that the public simply is not interested. It would help if we could just choose a reactor design and serialize it like the Koreans did to get costs way down.

<comment><USER3> While I don't think Buffett is going to live long enough to see if this bet pays off, it's reasonable that this natural gas play is going to fall flat considering renewables uptake and the cost decline curve of battery storage. This is without even discussing that many jurisdictions are considering or are starting to ban natural gas distribution to residences. After coal is driven out for electricity and heating, climate advocates and policy makers will be coming after natural gas next (and rightfully so if we intend to limit total carbon emissions).

It's not quite as "dumb money" as SoftBank, but very similar to T Boone Pickens' natural gas play. Dominion sees the writing on the wall and found a greater fool.

[http://pickensplan.com/the-plan/natural-gas/](http://pickensplan.com/the- plan/natural-gas/)

[https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utilities-dont-see- stranded...](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utilities-dont-see-stranded- assets-as-a-top-risk-should-they/572246/) ("We get approached a lot about buying gas plants in the U.S. — I wouldn't touch one ... In a lot of these [jurisdictions] it's the next coal, and I think it's coming quicker than we think." — Ken Hartwick, President and CEO, Ontario Power Generation)

[https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-storage- poised-t...](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-storage-poised-to- undercut-natural-gas-prices-increase-strande/562674/) ("If all proposed gas plants are built, 70% of those investments will be rendered uneconomic by 2035, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute")

<comment><USER4> I agree, in that this seems like the wrong tech to back at this time.

However, I do wonder if these pipelines could be transitioned to something like HVDC; rip out the pipe and use the right of way for an entirely different, safer purpose that will have tremendous value in the future.

Building new transmission is unbelievably difficult in this age, and I think most of the opportunities for doing so will require repurposing existing, defunct infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> > Building new transmission is unbelievably difficult in this age, and I think > most of the opportunities for doing so will require repurposing existing, > defunct infrastructure.

I think this is a very astute observation. Don't underestimate the value of an existing pipe running to almost every building in America.

<comment><USER6> Is Buffett prepping for home-based molecular assemblers?

<comment> blaser-waffle I want my Lady's Illustrated Primer ASAP

<comment><USER6> Careful, in the wrong hands, results can be . . . unexpected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > With the purchase, Berkshire Hathaway Energy will carry 18% of all > interstate natural gas transmission in the United States, up from 8%.

Always interesting to learn what XX% of a random industry a random conglomerate owns.

<comment><USER8> Fun fact / challenge: nobody reading this comment is in a room without a product made by Koch industries.

<comment> nappy-doo Prove it. I spend a significant amount of my time making sure I buy brands that DO NOT fund that hateful family. I have also written to companies I like that advertise of Fox News.

(I don't need a hobby, I like using my time to vote with my dollars.)

<comment><USER8> Look at these brands: [https://www.kochind.com/companies](https://www.kochind.com/companies)

Guardian might've made your windows (car & home); Invista might've made the nylon in your clothes; Molex makes the liiiiiiitle tiny bits of plastic in the computer you're using.

Live pretty much anywhere except the coasts in the US? Koch probably sold the softwood lumber used to build your house.

You sure your car doesn't burn gasoline from Flint Hills?

Do you ever use paper products? Georgia Pacific (Brawny, Dixie, Angel Soft...).

They're so foundational in so many basic industries, they're just unavoidable.

<comment> nappy-doo I avoid the GP products. I can't change the plastics in my computer. My house is older than dirt, and the windows are so old you can see the glass warping. The lumber's proper sized, not scaled by 0.5inches (eg, rafters are true 2"x8"), but I get your point. It's hard to PROVE what the state is.

Let's just say, I try my hardest.

<comment><USER8> You certainly try harder than most!

Plus, most of these companies are in B2B commodities industries where purchasing is the margin driver, not sales. So I wouldn't worry too much about whether the Nylon 6,6 in your yoga pants was made in an Invista facility... your purchasing decision just wouldn't matter that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dominion and Duke Energy also cancelled the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline the same day this deal was announced, citing mounting costs from legal uncertainties.

[https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dominion-energy- and...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dominion-energy-and-duke- energy-cancel-the-atlantic-coast-pipeline-301088177.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Lots of analyzing what Buffett is signaling. My bet is he had little to do with the purchase and it was more likely made and informed by Greg Abel.

Rather than nabbing a bargain, they probably thought the deal just made sense to expand their existing energy assets. In other words, the deal wasn't good, but it wasn't bad either. There hasn't been much bargain buying in wide moat companies at Berkshire for the last ten years.

<comment><USER11> Berkshire Energy is continuing buying energy transmission networks and utilities. This fits their long term strategy.

Buy utilities, connect them together. Dominion's gas pipeline fits nicely to Berkshire Energy's pipeline coming from California.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what this is signalling, when it comes to how Buffet's firm stands on market volatility? With stocks up and fresh bad news about the state of the pandemic rolling in, I would think that they would be more inclined to wait now and buy later.

Maybe they feel that the energy sector has gotten "discounted enough already" and that the short-term gains from waiting longer would be outweighed by the relatively safe gains that the investment promises post-pandemic?

<comment><USER13> Warren Buffett's long-standing position on market volatility is that he never worries about it or tries to time the market.

If he finds a deal and he believes that the fundamental value proposition is there, then he makes the purchase without regard to what might happen tomorrow.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. It's possible a better deal could be made later but he looked at it and believes it's a good deal now so he'll do the deal now. It makes a lot of sense really.

<comment><USER15> If you can afford to do so , yes it makes sense .

However public company leadership and professional fund managers cannot stop worrying about short term impact , their job is on the line .

There is enormous pressure to deliver short term results very few people like buffet can escape that.

He is able do it due to his reputation, wealth and peculiar holding structure of Berkshire Hathaway (no splits or dividends )

I should mention as much as short term focus is painted as bad , _on average_ it is good strategy to base people's performance on. It is better management fails faster than fails slower . "Blue chip" companies should reduce risk more than maximise gain .

<comment><USER13> There is room in finance for multiple strategies, and a lot of niche funds that you've never heard of.

As an extreme example, Taleb's black swan hypothesis requires investors who are OK with losing money day in and day out. And yet people are willing to invest in Universa Investments. (Which is making a killing this year.)

Given [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham- and-Doddsville) it there should be an appetite for niche funds following the value investing approach. And indeed [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/071415/five-...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/071415/five- wildly-successful-value-investors.asp) shows that there are successful funds that follow such approaches. They aren't very popular. But the excuse that professional fund managers CANNOT do something like this is clearly specious.

However as Taleb says, courage is the one virtue that can't be faked. Running a fund that follows a different strategy than the mainstream requires having the courage to tell investors that if they are not on board with your fund's strategy, then you would prefer that they take their money elsewhere. That kind of courage is rare. (And can be indistinguishable from stupidity for unbounded times.)

<comment><USER15> Niche funds are exactly that _niche_. _Most_ (in numbers not the money they control) are not accredited investors and cannot afford to lose their whole investments. There is not much room for multiple strategies in mainstream investments for good reason .

Correspondingly most fund managers are not fancy hedge fund managers who can simply be _courageous_ , the legal and the corporate framework they operate under would not allow for that kind of risk taking. Popular media and writers like Taleb focuses way more on this niche segment because it sells more books/movies etc, or is more interesting to write about, and perhaps also because the industry does control a large amount of wealth.

Buffet himself strongly believes that hedge funds simply do not justify the management fees they charge and famously bet a million dollars on that thesis and won. Even of the fund managers who actually do have the chance to take aggressive decisions do not always do better than say index traded funds over a long enough time period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh interesting. I'm part of the Dominion Energy Green Power initiative. I have no idea whether I'm actually making a difference...but I pay more and get a green sticker + pamphlet, so that's cool. Saving one starfish and all that.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Dominion plans to use about $3 billion of the after-tax proceeds to buy back > its shares later this year.

So, they sold this asset to buy back shares? This seems like a seriously short-sighted play.

<comment><USER18> I don't get people's aversion to stock buybacks.

If a company has money it cannot productively spend, it should return that money to shareholders. Stock buybacks are a tax efficient way to do that.

The company believes the asset wasn't very profitable for them to own, so they sold it and gave the shareholders the money back.

<comment><USER19> Could it not spend some portion of that money on research and development? I feel that literally any industry could find improvements.

<comment><USER18> To justify spending that money, they'd have to think they'd get better returns on their R&D than shareholders could get elsewhere (e.g. by just buying the S&P 500).

It is quite difficult to beat the S&P 500, and they're saying they don't have any ideas which can.

<comment><USER20> If the shareholders don't think the R&D is going to be profitable then they can sell their own shares. It doesn't seem like the company should be making that decision for them.

More to the point, if the company is seeing such great profits then their competitors should be undercutting them. If they don't have competitors then maybe they should be regulated more like a utility and give that money back to the customers. Stock buybacks usually end up being just a handout to the rich, which they don't need.

<comment><USER21> > If the shareholders don't think the R&D is going to be profitable then they > can sell their own shares

It's not that the companies aren't profitable, it's that past a certain point their money is more valuable as cash to their shareholders than anything the company could use it for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It just means Berkshire Hathaway has too much capital and needs to do something. Those gas assets are worth half their book value, if that.

</comment><comment><USER23> > clean energy production from wind, solar and natural gas

Wait a sec, how did "natural gas" end up in the "clean energy" category?

<comment> kube-system Well at least it's not "wind, solar, and clean coal" anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Curious; I like hackernews but what about this article is relevant to this community?

<comment><USER25> HN is just another news aggregator, while it is obviously more tech-focused, the people that use it tend to be interested in more general news as well.</comment></comment>


Why App Speed Matters: Revenue - <AUTHOR> https://fly.io/articles/why-fast-pages-are-important/ <comment><USER2> If fly.io is serious about their marketing, this is not the way to do it. Find a really slow website that sells something, give them your service for free and run half the traffic through your fast version vs their slow version. Show me how much money they made in increased sales vs the amount of time it took to implement and the ongoing costs of your service. I'm pretty confident the math won't work out, but I'd be open to being convinced. Trotting out the 10 year old Google and Amazon studies about sub-1% gains isn't the way to do it.

For the vast majority of startups or websites, there should be 50 things on your to-do list that have the potential to increase your conversions more than 1-2%, and your time is almost certainly better spent working on those things than adopting a service like this. I know engineers like taking the same thing and making it faster, it is fun and satisfying, but it almost certainly isn't the best use of your time when it comes to the bottom line. And that is assuming making your site faster actually will increase conversions by any meaningful amount, which is a big _if_ (very old and very specific studies be damned!).

<comment><USER3> (disclaimer, I work on fly)

This is really just meant to be decent content, not a sales pitch. We obviously want to grow our business so we write about stuff that's close to what we do. Most people are really uninformed about site performance (still), you'd be shocked how many people don't even know about the 10 year old studies.

Also note, Amazon's -1% per 100ms of latency holds up for the ecommerce companies I've worked with. It's not a small number for any company, and we're actually really cheap for companies with a high value per user (like ecommerce! or saas!). You probably wouldn't serve billions of page views through fly with very cheap ads, though.

That said, I pretty much agree with you. We'll only succeed if we can keep proving that we're valuable. It's part of why we give enough traffic away for free that you can legitimately test us out. I don't particularly want people using us if they don't get any value out of it.

<comment><USER4> About 5 years ago, I undertook a significant web performance effort on an IR top 100 e-commerce property. We sped the site up significantly and, being the good data nerds that we were, split-ran the hell out of it and found a zero- point-zero (sub-noise) difference in average session value, conversion rate, and average order value.

Believing those then 5-year old studies, we went in the opposite direction and intentionally slowed the site down in multi-variate testing. Out to 1000ms of intentional slowdown per dynamic page, we saw zero-point-zero change in ASV, CR%, and AOV.

We kept the faster experience, because "hey, why not?" and we'd paid all the NRE for it anyway, but the project was a technical success but a big bust versus business case.

<comment><USER5> That's really fascinating! What about things like Google ranking that's supposedly also affected by page speed? (Or maybe it's not? I have a very limited SEO knowledge)

<comment><USER6> it's only really affected from a negative perspective (think: so slow that google can't crawl your website or load it).

Anything faster than 2-3 seconds has very diminishing if not 0 returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not true. Faster isn't _always_ better. If some features seem to take a lot of time, it appears to the user that it's "working". Take a website I hate a lot - TurboTax. A lot of the wait times between transitions is incredibly long. But I'd bet money that it increased conversions.

Yes, it's more of a UX issue than an engineering one. But users don't give a shit. If something appears slow, no one knows/cares if it's an animation or a slow server.

<comment><USER8> While you're right that people sometimes value operations that take time, that's certainly an edge case - in general, snappiness leads to a better user experience.

Also: if an operation is fast, you always have the option to make it appear slower. The inverse is not true.

<comment><USER7> > in general, faster operations leads to a better user experience

That's just too general of a statement. That's like saying a landing page with a hero image is, generally, a better page. It's a good place to start, but it's just bad advice in the long-term.

I agree that response times from the _backend_ should be fast, especially the initial response (as the article mentions). But anything on the frontend experience should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

<comment><USER9> > That's just too general of a statement.

Every time I've ever conducted user experience testing the results have always been _far_ more positive the faster the app or page is. In fact, while it's still only anecdotal, I have never seen a decrease in any of the overall measurements of a user study where, between two versions, the speed of the app or page improved and little else changed.

Honestly I think it's a great general statement. I'm sure there are exceptions but that's the case with almost any general rule of thumb.

> That's like saying a landing page with a hero image is, generally, a better > page.

No, not at all. Speed isn't everything and no one was suggesting that. A faster application, however, is always better than a slow one _as long as_ you are comparing apples to apples.

With the way technology works nowadays it's actually very doable to get the 75th percentile to load really, really fast. But it's not without effort and earlier work may need to be redone, something many avoid at all costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a little thing, but 14.4kb/s should really be stated as kbit/s. 14.4kbit/s is 1.8kB/s. Looking at this reminded me how fascinating the Wikipedia entry for "modem" is [1]. Apparently "The first 9,600 bit/s modem was developed in 1968, and sold for more than $20,000."

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

<comment><USER11> Thanks, ultrasandwich. I have fixed this in the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the other hand if you want to reduce the time you spend online, as a user you should prefer slower websites.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I follow. If I can do what I want to do online and do it fast, then I run out of things to do much faster and I can get off the internet for a bit or do anything else.

<comment><USER12> You mean you've reached the end of the Internet? What's it like? :-)

Entertainment websites tend to keep providing more things to do, so you never run out. You can read them all day, like watching TV.

To help break the habit, It might be helpful to interrupt the temptation to read just one more thing, by making it cost a bit more. You don't want it to be effortless.

<comment><USER9> Hmm. Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Totally off-topic but I always take slight offense when headlines talk about "apps" when the actual meaning is websites or web services.

For example I clicked on the headline expecting content about the speed of Android / iOS apps (which is something I care about professionally), but then was disappointed (and frustrated) to find that the actual content is all about web stuff.

When you mean "Web App", say "Web App"!

<comment><USER11> That's really great feedback. I wrote something about API building a couple weeks ago without specifying I was referring to a _web_ API. I'll try to be much more conscious of this going forward. Thanks for the expression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Note that the fly.io docs let you know that the bandwidth price is per GB, but the pricing page doesn't let you know that the price is per GB.

<comment><USER3> Whoops, something got chopped there that shouldn't have. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the difference between fly.io and any other CDN? Can it serve dynamic encrypted data from the backend to the edge faster?

<comment><USER3> We're designed specifically for dynamic apps. In fact, we tell people to use traditional CDNs for static files. You can think of us as a combo load balancer and edge.

This means we do things like handle unlimited ssl certs (for apps that support custom hostnames), do load balancing on app instance, including geo load balancing, and even run code at the edge.

My favorite thing we do is app friendly caching. We're "aware" of app users and can handle caching logic well beyond the http cache control and vary headers.

<comment><USER16> Do you support Meteor.js as a back-end as long as it's hosted on Heroku?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well how much do I gain by a bit more speed after you took your horrendous 18 cents per gb flowing out?

</comment><comment><USER18> your site (not blog) has a bad scrolling experience in Firefox on Android

<comment><USER3> I dug into this a little bit and can't figure out why. We don't actually do anything with JS that would affect scrolling. If you feel like emailing me with more details I'll keep lookin'.

<comment><USER19> edit: i'm illiterate

from articles/assets/js/index.js:

        $.fn.arctic_scroll = function (options) {

            var defaults = {
                elem: $(this),
                speed: 500
            },

            allOptions = $.extend(defaults, options);

            allOptions.elem.click(function (event) {
                event.preventDefault();
                var $this = $(this),
                    $htmlBody = $('html, body'),
                    offset = ($this.attr('data-offset')) ? $this.attr('data-offset') : false,
                    position = ($this.attr('data-position')) ? $this.attr('data-position') : false,
                    toMove;

                if (offset) {
                    toMove = parseInt(offset);
                    $htmlBody.stop(true, false).animate({scrollTop: ($(this.hash).offset().top + toMove) }, allOptions.speed);
                } else if (position) {
                    toMove = parseInt(position);
                    $htmlBody.stop(true, false).animate({scrollTop: toMove }, allOptions.speed);
                } else {
                    $htmlBody.stop(true, false).animate({scrollTop: ($(this.hash).offset().top) }, allOptions.speed);
                }
            });

        };

      var $document = $(document);

        $document.ready(function () {
            ...
            $(".scroll-down").arctic_scroll();
            ...
        });

<comment><USER3> He said "not blog". :)

<comment><USER19> oops

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A minor thing, but it bugged me -- 0.74% of 3.5 billion searches is 25,900,000 searches, not 259,000,000 (as mentioned on 7th paragraph).

<comment><USER21> That's not minor, it's an order of magnitude difference! ;)</comment></comment>


Amazon Personalize: Real-Time Recommendation - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/ <comment><USER2> The democratizing march of technology. Once the exclusive domain of tech giants, now even small businesses can integrate this service and attempt to sell fridges to customers who have recently bought a fridge.

<comment><USER3> What are you talking about? You just searched for an SNL skit. Are you telling me you don't want to now watch every single SNL episode ever made as well as join an improv troupe?!

<comment><USER4> That was Interest-based advertising several years ago (or at least the last time I surged around without an ad blocker). I found it ham-fisted. However - the interesting thing that comes out of this is that if someone buys, say, chocolate and marshmallows, there's a reasonable chance they want to buy graham crackers. So why not offer them graham crackers at checkout if it's not in their cart?

More insidiously - why not offer a higher price on graham crackers if they seek them out on their own? They've already made a decision.

<comment><USER5> To take it a bit further, you'd probably want to mark down the checkout suggestion to not only make it look better, but also because you're only suggesting a very limited amount of options, once customers are used to trusting the checkout suggestions for a good deal, you introduce higher-margin and/or promoted products.

More or less the same tactic Amazon used for search results: Return useful/functional results for a few years to train you users to trust what is near the top, then start putting promoted products at or near the top and generally ordering the search by what increases your revenue the most, rather than for any user-oriented goal, AKA "sort by relevance".

Also the same thing Amazon did with prices in general, get people used to thinking you're the market with the best price/deal, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honestly using Amazon is like tip toeing around a lion to get something valuable. Knowing that at any moment they could wake up and and absolutely swallow you whole.

If you use their cloud products, ala Netflix, they may decide to compete with you any moment. Netflix may have been too far along to be beat but the next product won't be. If you sell products on their market place and if they do well you run the risk of them copying you. If you do anything in their ecosystem you are living with the fear that the lion may wake up and swallow you whole at any point and time.

Edit: Maybe I'm a bit paranoid but this feels like a great way for them to get to know exactly who your customers are and what their behavior is. All the while training their own personalization to get much better.

<comment><USER7> They also like to buy shares in smaller companies or outright acquire them. Not always competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, like with the YC startup Scaphold turning into aws appsync:

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I'm actively working on a similar project at AWS. It isn't that Amazon wants your data to help it make decisions, so it builds a clever product to get all your data. On the contrary, Amazon has so much damned data and years of experience turning that into a valuable asset, that it has started experimenting with ways to sell that value to other customers. The idea that it wants some mom and pops retail data is just silly. Our biggest problems are scaling the internal services we built 5 years ago to handle all the growth.

SageMaker was a ground floor service and you should expect to see many more services built atop it.

<comment><USER9> Amazon's years of experience usually end up recommending you the same thing you just bought or just glanced at and never came back to the same category

<comment><USER8> If you could solve the problem better, at scale, I'm sure they would pay you a lot of money to come solve it. Along with Netflix, Google, and all the other places that use standard algorithms designed to solve these sorts of problems.

<comment><USER10> It seems odd though to suggest the same item I just bought over and over again.

Same as YouTube's algo now recommending already watched videos, over and over.

This is either being gamed by bots or someone at those cos is not dogfooding. And if all else fails, for the love of god, give me an option to train your dumb algo manually by blocking shit I don't want to see ever again.

<comment><USER11> Sometimes it makes sense, for consumable goods or even non consumable things like storage containers, where you might buy more of the same item at different times. Other things like books I agree don't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!"

I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Why would anyone want to use the same algorithms?

<comment><USER13> > You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few > weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!"

Patrick explained it why it might be like so: [https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209](https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209) (thread: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html) )

> I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them > useful.

Amazon does various forms of recommendations (no way limited to just recent purchases) based on

1\. Purchases

2\. Searches

3\. Browsing history (via trackers, ads, affiliate links)

4\. Activities (on their digital devices, tagging things on their websites in wishlist, adding preferences in your account etc)

5\. Global and Local trends (people in your area/country buy..., people with similar buying pattern buy..., It's Eid and you're Muslim, so you buy...)

...And probably many other signals I might be missing.

They must have got pretty good people working with this and enough data to get their models right.

Also, Amazon makes decisions on new retail businesses to start depending on those signals. [https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label- bran...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-brands-are- killing-it-says-new-report/)

That, and considering the fact that Amazon has an unshakeable culture of making data-driven decisions for everything it does...

I guess what I'm trying to say is, Amazon and its subsidiaries may not be as dumb at AI/ML as it might seem to be by gauging against one datapoint.

Also see: [https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre- pregnan...](https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-pregnant-and- thats-not-all.html)

<comment><USER14> Patrick's explanation is that because of buyer's remorse, and because if a thing is going to break, it often breaks early in its expected lifetime, people are more likely to buy an item (e.g. a refrigerator) soon after buying another one than they are to buy the item in general.

Okay, that makes sense to me. They go from 0.02% likelihood of wanting to buy a fridge to, let's say, 2% likelihood. A marvelous leap!

But even though they are now much more likely to buy another fridge than the average person ... I would think that they would be more likely still to buy other types of products than to buy another refrigerator.

Even if their likelihood of needing to buy more consumable products (e.g. deodorant) is only 5%, that's still double the likelihood of their likelihood to buy a fridge again.

So I would think that there would be some bias toward more frequently purchased items, even if your likelihood of buying a less frequently purchased item does indeed increase after purchase.

I'm sure the math checks out somehow, and that the creators of the recommendations algorithm wouldn't be pursuing strategies that don't work, but I don't think Patrick's explanation fully captures it.

<comment><USER15> The revenue on the refrigerator to Amazon is 10x or more higher than the deodorant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If AWS was ever found to be "leaking" information to Amazon the retailer/logistics company from the services that it sells, it would be the end of AWS.

They are certified under HIPAA and PCI/DSS in terms of their isolation of customers data from other customers and their infrastructure management.

Anyone who thinks they would deliberately attempt to steal customer data is beyond paranoia.

<comment><USER17> Paranoid or not, why would I trust a potential competitor with the centralization and management of all my information?

<comment><USER18> The reason to be cautious is because they could raise prices or cancel your contract at their will. But as long as you are able to change providers by the time the current contract expires (which can be several years for large corporate clients), you're fine.

A reason not to use AWS as a competitor of Amazon is that you wouldn't want to give them cash they can invest in their other business lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll get right on using this the instant I want to bombard my users with 20 recommendations for a product they already own. Is there a bit of a lack of knowledge of how their recommendation system is perceived by the general public or is this something more interesting/explicable by corporate politics?

<comment><USER20> I haven't worked at Amazon for several years, but back when I was still there, there was a massive drive to find existing technologies which could be turned into AWS services - I guess part of trying to sell the AWS ecosystem as a uniquely full-featured package of services.

I worked with Amazon recs on one of my teams. We all complained about how inane the recommendations could be on a regular basis. So I doubt it's a perception issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hope they're giving it away, because their recommendation system sucks.

<comment><USER22> Is that based on data or your personal perception?

<comment><USER23> I don't know anyone who thinks Amazon recommendations are any good. They recommend the same product after I already have purchased it like 90% of the time. And I'm not talking about batteries or cosmetics that one might buy monthly.

<comment><USER24> Do we really think that Amazon doesn't have the talent and ability to tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest return?

Maybe enough people return their fridge right after and buy a new one, or are flipping houses and need to buy multiple washing machines, or are moving into a house with more rooms and new multiple TVs, or decide to buy a mattress as a gift for their parents after buying one for themselves, or any other of the hundreds of events that some exceptional to you or I but happen frequently enough in the aggregate to actually make it a normal enough occurrence to still recommend items that are usually one off purchases.

Or maybe one of the most valuable companies in the world that has gotten to that point largely off of selling us crap is too stupid to realize that people don't usually buy 3 fridges or is unable to hire the talent to tweak the models to reflect this sort of behavior. I've got no firsthand knowledge, but I feel like the former is more likely than the latter.

<comment><USER21> > _Do we really think that Amazon doesn 't have the talent and ability to > tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest > return?_

A/B testing a bad model does nothing. I'm sure Amazon's recommendations are the "best they've got" given their tech. Which sucks.

Google runs a massive recommendation system at scale: their ad placement product (in Search and elsewhere). Google's recommendation tech is astoundingly better than the equivalent at Amazon, rapidly putting the most profitable ads in front of the best potential customers.

That said, Google will never release their ad tech recommendation system "as a service", since it would kill their golden goose. That whole part of their company is a black hole of information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Literally handing over your most valuable customer data to a current or future competitor. Surely only small time ecommerce operations in niche industries would dare use this.

<comment><USER26> Amazon: "All data analyzed by Amazon Personalize is kept private and secure, and only used for your customized recommendations."

Anyone know if there's something in the AWS contracts about Amazon using your data?

<comment><USER27> The AI services have a clause allowing them to use your data for training their models unless you opt out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My recommendations was not so bad: after CPU purchase Amazon suggest me RAM, HDD or another PC stuff - not overpriced and not cheap Chinese noname brands.

<comment><USER29> Long ago, when I was at Amazon, we used Collaborative Filtering pretty heavily. It's great when there's a heavily sweetened path with lots of things ordered together or in a chain.

It's horrible for moderately popular items though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> i'd find it more compelling if they'd base it on the tech they used circa 2004-2008. it's been years since their recommendations were valuable.

</comment><comment><USER31> Any idea why this page has a tracking pixel from Linkedin?

<comment><USER32> Hidden amazon recruiting (tracking) effort maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm curious to know how their algorithm works when a site offers truly unique items? In other words, if I was buying a custom hand-crafted ring what would it recommend?

Going a step further, if I was buying the Mona Lisa, would it know to recommend me other Da Vinci items, or other renaissance items, or would it fail to make that inference due to there being no co-occurrences in purchasing behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER34> Heh. So Amazon gets to mine your product browsing event stream and conversion funnel, and use the insights to guide their own purchasing and manufacturing, and on top of that they'll charge you for giving them all your data. Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER35> This seems relevant for online retailers, although using a competing giants technology doesn't sound like it would be in their interest?

</comment><comment><USER36> It is amazing how Amazon search & recommendation works almost never for me. Not sure about other people.

</comment><comment><USER37> I remember having to build one with solr, that was a mess.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wait, someone would use this? :P

</comment><comment><USER39> If one uses this product do users have to be notified of this, in light of privacy / GDPR and all?

I built a very basic recommendation engine myself but would love to try out something with actual brains behind it, just being curious about the results.

<comment><USER40> Unlikely because you aren't going to share personal, identifiable information with this service; you would just send the primary key of the user in your database (usually an integer, guid, etc, as long as you aren't using some string that includes personal information like email or possibly username where they user picks their own name).

You can share all the information you want with other entities under GDPR as long as the information you are sending as long as you can't uniquely identify someone from that data _without_ additional information.</comment></comment>


CoffeeScript - JavaScript the Good Parts - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/coffeescript <comment><USER2> "The first person to create a pleasant end-to-end system for programming JavaScript web applications wins the next five years of web development, period."

That's the point which always got me going the first few times this language appeared on HN. A future developer with HTML5, video and audio, a library like sproutcore(note the recent news about Katz) in coffeescript matched up to a Sinatra-like base in CS running on node.js is going to be able to work like grease lightning. That world would be quite profitable in terms of the hosting opportunities (herokuish?), consulting and book deals. Much of it applies already to the node.js stuff I suppose. It's a pity Ruby or Python isn't in the browser as it would have the same multiplying effect (and add Python's vast libraries in other domains, at least on the server-side).

<comment><USER3> IronPython is in the browser at least... <http://ironpython.net/browser/>

<comment><USER4> And it apparently doesn't require Silverlight. Interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does require Silverlight (as do all DLR languages if you want them to run in the browser). Take a look at the js: <http://gestalt.ironpython.net/dlr- latest.js>

<comment><USER4> Ah, thanks for the clarification. The way the page phrased it made me think you just needed to include that Javascript and it would work. There are language implementations like that, so it seemed plausible. That's too bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "cleaning up the semantics of broken JavaScript constructs" I actually like JavaScript. So what does CoffeeScript fix?

<comment><USER6> Leaving features off the table and just talking about semantic cleanups, here's a few:

* Switch statement doesn't fall-through by default.

* Variables don't need to be declared with "var", and can't ever become global accidentally.

* Equality is strict, using `===`, if you want coercive equality, you coerce the object yourself.

* Loops that are used to generate functions close over their index variables, so that all inner functions don't share the final value of the index. This is the same problem that ECMAScript Harmony introduces "let" to solve.

* Splats largely replace use of the "arguments" object, so you don't get bit by "arguments" only being a faux-array.

* Comparisons can be chained, as in Python -- so you can write: "100 > x > 25", and have the answer be correct.

* Multiline strings are valid without having to escape the newline.

* And the big one: everything in CoffeeScript is an expression. Without having to use temporary variables, you can return the result of an if/else from a function, pass a comprehension (loop) directly into a function call, assign the result of a try/catch, and so on.

I love JavaScript semantics as well. I think it has the cleanest object/function model out there, in terms of scripting languages -- but that's not to say there aren't parts that can use a little touch-up.

<comment><USER5> Don't get me wrong. As I am learning JavaScript right now I am only interested in the real fixes and not the nice to have features. Chaining comparisons, multiline strings, everything is an expression are IMHO "just" nice features.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Wufoo not accepting new signups for some countries - <AUTHOR>

I get this message when trying to see the pricing:<p>We're sorry, but Wufoo is not currently accepting new signups from your country or region. <comment><USER2> Where are you from?</comment>


Mobile-First Web? - <AUTHOR> What's happening to the idea of the mobile-first web? Most of the new fancy APIs like notifications in mobile browsers are mainly used for bad purposes (spam from websites there's no point getting notifications from), while legitimate usages are really uncommon. Messenger and Slack have disabled their mobile webapps and force users to install a full-blown, standalone app (which, I suppose, in terms of user-facing functionality is more or less the same, but allows for far more tracking and precious data collection). Github has recently released a beta version of their Android app. Why not put some more work into the mobile website instead?<p>In my view, mobile web is getting more and more hostile towards users with all these popups you have to close, constant nagging to install apps or add shortcuts to your launcher, weird alternative-reality AMP versions and/or with (artificially) limited functionality <comment><USER2> > but allows for far more tracking and precious data collection

I think you answered your own question there.</comment>