Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction - <AUTHOR> https://gking.harvard.edu/50c <comment><USER2> When the NY Times covered the Chinese robotic moon landing, it was in the top 10 stories for more than a week. In the most space-jaded country on the planet. The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party. You can almost always make Chinese English, an AI program could be trained to do it. I wrote to their ombudsman. Down in a day.

<comment><USER3> Very interesting. I always get that uncanny valley feeling even on Hacker News, especially when the comments concern China. This would explain a lot.

<comment><USER4> 50c party is widely accepted as real a thing as Russian troll farms during the election, but I'd be skeptical if HN is a target. (I don't think you need an academic paper to 'prove' it's a real thing.)

The reason you read defensive comments on HN (even from me) is due to how easily anti-China criticism slides from legitimate policy discussion into raw, tribal racism. I simply feel it is my duty to call out anti-Chinese racism when it comes across my path, not just because it makes me mad.

<comment> aaron-lebo In the interest of productive discussion, what do you perceive as racism?

It's rare that I come across comments about China that are legitimately racist on HN. I get some people are and some discussion is that, but more than anything I see genuine concern about how the government is acting and given how the government controls that nation, that's where the criticism can seem so wholesale.

But what do you feel is a racist criticism? I ask because I'm a huge critic of the Chinese government (and many other governments) but don't desire to be racist or to be perceived as that way.

One of the most stubborn critics of China (and Chinese culture) I know is Chinese. If I didn't now that I'd perceive him as racist but he just doesn't like what decades of the Cultural Revolution etc have produced no more than many Americans don't like what decades of materialism/world domination has produced.

<comment><USER4> > It's rare that I come across comments about China that are legitimately > racist on HN

Perhaps your threshold has a different set-point from mine (and from people who are the target of similar comments). I include conscious and unconscious bias, and Chinese people are just as capable of anti-China racism as women are capable of being sexist.*

The same people who criticize the Chinese government for not allowing Facebook and Google to operate in China (even after Cambridge Analytica) will defend not allowing Huawei to be sold by carriers in the U.S. The same people who, when it is pointed out that Foxconn's suicide rate is lower than the population average, will say that any non-zero number is too high. Do they change their tune if it's pointed out that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company and not a Mainland one? You know the type -- in a later breath, they will just as easily say that Chinese people can't / won't innovate, and can only copy.

There was a story in Sheryl Sandberg's _Lean In_ about an experiment where 2 resumes were being considered for a police chief: one candidate had more solid work experience, and the other had more impressive education history. The 2 experimental conditions assigned a male or a female name to each resume, and most subjects (including female participants) chose the male resume, and they'd say it was because of work experience or education that they picked it. If your threshold for sexism includes that, and you adjust your racism threshold similarly, you'll find that a lot of comments have this ... _unconscious bias_ for some reason.

* Criticism of what the Cultural Revolution has produced does not fall under the same umbrella. No one likes what it produced, even the leadership currently in power in China, who suffered in their youth.

Edit: comment in threads down below include ">his stupid uneducated bimbo of a wife" in reference to China's first lady. Here's what CNN has to say about her:

"Peng is arguably more famous than her husband. She has millions of fans... She is a major general in the People's Liberation Army and is China's AIDS ambassador to the United Nations." [http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/20/thursdays-intriguing- pe...](http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/20/thursdays-intriguing- people-44/?hpt=T2)

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry. Where were you when your counterparts kept calling Michelle Obama a "monkey" or Tsai, the President of Taiwan a "old maid", "japanese collaborator" and other things?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pow_pp_-1_v Interesting. The whole thing is so simple. A government wants to get their message out quickly and efficiently before negative stories get too much attention. So, how to do it cost effectively? Simple, ask normal government employees to write pro-government posts on social media when they get time. Plus their career prospects improve if they do it. Finally a reminder on certain days about their duty to spread the good news about the government.

I guess the only weakness in the whole scheme is people reporting back to an authority about their work. I am pretty sure they got rid of that after the leak. The genius of this thing is that if you ask the people who write these posts if they are doing propaganda, there's a good chance that their initial genuine response will be to say no.

<comment><USER6> > if you ask the people who write these posts if they are doing propaganda, > there's a good chance that their initial genuine response will be to say no.

Actually, they'll probably say yes. Most Chinese do not think of propaganda as something negative. Every student club at my university has an unironically named "propaganda department" that manages their social media. "Propaganda" just never underwent the value shift that happened in other countries, so although there's a translation of "PR" almost nobody uses the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great.

Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.

<comment><USER8> >Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.

Especially salient because the idea of censorship in the form of bookburning or restricting speech is still way too dominant (especially in American culture).

Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and misinformation seems to be the new (and much more effective) MO.

<comment><USER9> >Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and misinformation seems to be the new

Nothing new actually. The whole concept is pretty old.

Looks like after trying to follow "guidelines" from Orwell's "1984", we are just trying Huxley's "Brave New World".

<comment><USER10> > Looks like after trying to follow "guidelines" from Orwell's "1984", we are > just trying Huxley's "Brave New World".

This guy gets it. I absolutely agree that China needs the searing scrutiny of the world for the sake of its people and the world but China is also still in absolute infantile stages of propaganda sophistication. Straight up censorships and news suppressions are things the West did in WWI. Astroturfing is a step up but operating under the premise of a palatable freedom of information and political choice while being inundated with what to think without ever receiving 'literal fake news' is light-years ahead of China.

<comment><USER7> Yea, I'd argue the whole goal of Western government operators is to create a well-oiled propaganda machine. Everything else is a negotiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Xi is a very smart fellow, and he seems to sincerely want what is best for his country. That said, I think he is making some terrible mistakes. Instead of helping the population become smarter, better-informed thinkers, he is trying to turn them into robots.

Xi is creating an illusion of unity, which means if things start to go seriously wrong, there will be an explosion, as happened so many times in China's past. Citizens will lack the sort of intelligence and ability to work together that would be needed to resolve problems, and the country likely will either fall into chaos or under the rule of a malevolent emperor.

Let me add that Xi claims to be following Confucian principles, but that is not at all true. Confucianism is a set of principles that everyone from the top down was required to follow. Xi, in contrast, answers to no one, and is simply making up his own rules.

To the Chinese out there, let me say that what you need to do is get your hands on all the information you can from independent sources, and study political philosophy, so that you will be in a better position to make intelligent decisions in the future.

<comment><USER12> I agree with your starting premise about Xi and your concluding advice about independent (or at least, non-Party filtered) information.

But I don't think it's wise or diplomatic to phrase it as a growing "intelligence" deficit in Chinese people. That word is tricky enough to define as it is, but people can hold deeply one-sided views about a lot of things and still be highly intelligent.

As a counterpoint, browsing social media in open information societies and liberal democracies these days gives a sense that people can be extremely biased and polarized even without living in a closed propaganda information ecosystem.

With that criticism lodged, I agree with the spirit of your argument that a more filtered public discourse very likely makes it monotonically incrementally harder to patch any present or future social discord.

<comment><USER11> >But I don't think it's wise or diplomatic to phrase it as a growing "intelligence" deficit in Chinese people. That word is tricky enough to define as it is, but people can hold deeply one-sided views about a lot of things and still be highly intelligent.

I think the term "intelligent" has more than one meaning, and one of them is what I was trying to get at, something like "able to act in an effective manner." But perhaps you can suggest a less ambiguous term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so- > called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government's side in > political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts > openly accused on social media of being 50c.

I am not a native speaker. I can't parse that sentence :/.

Why is this `also` true ? In addition to what ? Wouldn't it follow that posts arguing in favour of the government's side are tagged as `50c` since `50c` seems to be defined by being `pro government` ?

And then:

> [..] we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with > skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss > controversial issues.

If I ignore the `also` word in the first quote it all makes sense.

<comment><USER12> I read those two sentences to describe an existing misconception among BOTH (sentence 1) academics/journalists/activists AND (sentence 2) people posting on social media. The misconception is that the strategy of 50c party posters is to argue loudly from the perspective of the CCP.

The following sentence in the abstract helps put it in context: "Yet, almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime's strategic objective in pursuing this activity. "

This third sentence presents the paper's challenge to the supposed misconception.

Therefore, the concluding quote you highlight makes perfect sense as the paper's thesis for what strategy drives 50c party posts.

Edit: I agree those sentence are a bit awkward. To help parse them, eliminate some of the connecting words:

1: "Academics/journalists/activists claim 50c posts argue for government's side."

2: "This is also true of posts accused on social media of being 50c" (this = argue for government's side)

3: "Yet, no evidence exists for this claim"

<comment><USER14> I still don't get it. To me, they are saying that the general online public thinks "pro-CCP" and "50c" are the same thing, just as everyone says pro- HillaryClinton people are "Correct the Record" troops, and all pro-Trump people were Russian trolls, and all pro-Israel posters are AIPAC troops, and all shitposters are 4channers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love it when we have moments like this where truth comes out (in the form of scientific research if need be) that previously was moronically dismissed (by people including government shills I'm sure) as 'conspiracy theory'.

Snowden and NSA spying was another one. Truth is not as boring as they may make you want to believe. The world is very, VERY interesting and you just have to discover it.

</comment><comment><USER16> "In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime."

Sensible. Cuts, however, against my mental caricature of an astroturfing shill.

<comment><USER17> Kind of makes you wonder how many of these operatives on here on HN.

There are certainly blocs of people who downvote certain topics en masse.

<comment><USER18> The more influential HN is perceived the greater the problem will be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> great food for thought that applies to any public forum, whether it's infected with these massive secret governmental operations or not.

</comment><comment><USER20> T - 30 mins before this post gets buried. I don't understand despite the high upvote count, why do articles critical of China are not able to be in the first page for more than a couple hours.

Also, China is the new Saudi Arabia. With the economic power, they can get away with anything and actually, you can't do anything to stop that. Even Trump who was so critical wanted to help ZTE as soon as the Chinese asked for interference.

<comment><USER6> 1 hour later and this story is #6 on the front page. I get it, complaining about perceived censorship is fun, but this submission hasn't quite gone full flame war yet, so I think it will stay for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this one will stay, but mainly because the content is an inoculation against the kind of trolling that usually leads to China threads getting buried.

I do have an irrational hope that the inoculation will last for more than a single thread though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is literally and exactly what Correct The Record ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record)) is and is as standard as it gets in American political discourse online [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction...](https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction_period=2016&disbursement_purpose_categories=other&data_type=processed&committee_id=C00578997&min_date=01%2F01%2F2015&max_date=08%2F05%2F2016).

<comment><USER21> > This is literally and exactly what Correct The Record [...] is

No, it's not. Propaganda by competing domestic partisan interest groups seeking to influence elections in their own country is not "literally and exactly" the same thing as state sponsored propaganda.

<comment><USER10> Ah, I see where we might disagree on.

I think you would argue that from the perspective of the propaganda targets, the CCP is the establishment vying to influence public opinion and American political parties are not. They're simply political instruments in a machinery that then determines what becomes the establishment.

I'm not saying it's a binary dichotomy but I'm more leaning on the side that <oversimplification> there are no American 'political parties' in the sense that the Green Party will never be like the Canadian NDP etc </oversimplification> and the 'parties' is just an established, acceptable non-real-power-threatening Overton Window that directs shared class concerns and energy into a black hole of oxygen draining wedge issue arena.

The establishment is the establishment and money is the establishment and from that perspective, I would argue CTR is a class interest group rather than a partisan interest group.

Anyway. I think we disagree but I think it's the context we disagree on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Political entities linked to the US government do this too.

</comment><comment><USER23> as if we don't have our own Wag-the-Dog-ish distractions also?

<comment><USER24> This itself is a distraction. There is no "us," "we," or "them"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't access it on Harvard website any more. Luckily the paper is already published so if you have access to the journal, download it here: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american- political-s...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political- science-review/article/how-the-chinese-government-fabricates-social-media- posts-for-strategic-distraction-not-engaged- argument/4662DB26E2685BAF1485F14369BD137C)

<comment><AUTHOR> This link doesn't work for you?

[https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_...](https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_government_fabricates_social_media_posts_for_strategic_distraction_not_engaged_argument.pdf)

It's the "article" link on the page, and it works for me right now.

<comment><USER25> Now it is working!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Chinese global trollism is getting worse. From Airlines who don't label Taiwan under China to kids in primary school in Australia who paint a Taiwanese flag on a bull, the Chinese are really becoming more and more belligerent. The Chinese internet army of "hurt feelings" and stupid whataboutism and fake moral equivalence is entering HN as well.

Whenver there is any negative story about china, the downvotes happen immediately and "defends of the honor of china" pop up magically throwing dirt everywhere.

I'm sure when PG made this, having nationalistic Chinese trolls degrade the forum with their "China is always right" bs was probably not on the top of his mind.

I wonder if we can ask the mods. Is there a pattern of downvotes whenver there isa negative story about China? I wonder if a bunch of Tencent/Alibaba "patriotic chinese" simply created lots of accounts and upvoted themselves to get to the point they can downvote across their accounts to "keep the internet clean" of anything that embarasses Xi Jinping and his stupid uneducated bimbo of a wife

<comment><USER17> On HN it's not unique to China. Anything negative about India is downvoted into oblivion. You can almost time it to the rising of the sun in India Standard Time.

I'm not saying that it's being orchestrated by the Indian government, but it does happen.

<comment><USER20> This is the distraction the linked study was talking about. I'm not sure if it happens about articles related to India, but since we are on the topic about China's article getting down-voted (anecdotally I have seen multiple times), I think we should focus on that atm.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. Not trying to divert attention from the topic at hand (like the people cited in the Harvard study do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We should definitely be wary of attempts by the Chinese government to distract from meaningful discussion. It's worth remembering that leftist organizations in the US and around the world during the Cold War were sometimes funded by the Soviet Union.

At the same time, I am reminded of how organizations that in hindsight we know were definitely not funded by the Soviet Union were accused of exactly that during the 50s and 60s. For example, we now know that at one point the KGB and the FBI were concurrently running smear campaigns against MLK.

In that light, I'm skeptical of Lionsion's motives in posting this. Yesterday he was rightfully called out by some including me for writing of Chinese internment camps in Xinjiang that

> These camps appear to be the result of high-level Chinese government policy > that explicitly targets this ethic group. There are no contemporary > parallels in the US. If you think there are, do you think Obama was in on > it? The US situation is unfortunate, but it's more the result of poverty and > lower-level racism, not a policy to imprison blacks.

The whataboutism in his last statement of course goes against the consensus of US academics studying criminal justice issues, the consensus of criminal justice advocates, as well as what (again, thanks to the passage of time) we now know about the deliberate decisions of politicians leading up to the War on Drugs:

[https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs](https://www.aclu.org/other/race- war-drugs) [https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman- rich...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard- nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html)

I think Hacker News should place where we can have a civil discussions about issues. Thanks to the wonders of technology, we are able to have multiple (not just one!) threads and thus to discuss multiple topics. And as I have said previously, most of us can both walk and chew gum at the same time; if someone is unable to even read comments discussing US education reform on an article by an American looking at the Swedish education system, for example, without being "distracted," I think that's more of an issue for the easily-distracted person than for the discussants.

But the strange trend of accusing everyone who would like to discuss the relevance of an issue to the US of being funded by the Chinese government is as intellectually demeaning as it should be rhetorically suspect.

I'd be happy to prove that I'm an American citizen not funded by the Chinese or any other government, but I think that might be relatively hard to prove in a fair and respectful way over the Internet. On the other hand, it is much easier to look at someone's public comment history and to see the unsettling trends there.

More generally, I'm getting tired of having to battle this recent uptick in China scaremongering on what used to be a much more reasonable forum. Lionsion's account is very new, and I wonder if they are part of the recent influx of new users who have arrived with their own bad habits. Seriously, check the account creation date for users who post things that seem to be weird pro-China or anti-China propaganda. They seem to mostly have been made around 2016.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps ones karma score should be displayed with the username on post flagged as political.

<comment><USER26> I think it'd be neat if we could also separate karma out by the type of post, somehow. For example, although my account is relatively old, most of my karma is just from a series of comments about the Uber autonomous car crash. I'm not sure that my karma accurately reflects that I'm primarily a lurker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do you know it is not Russia? Maybe Russia is manipulating China and USA at the same time!

</comment><comment><USER28> American govt fabricates wars for social distraction, China needs to step their game up!

</comment><comment><USER29> So does the US with it's media machine.

<comment><USER24> Nobody is saying it doesn't, but the two things are entirely independent from each other. It's not a competition between countries, it's a question of how people of earth can get the best lives for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm inclined not to trust an article that uses propaganda-rhetoric like 'regime'.

<comment><USER31> Right, so you're ignoring peer-reviewed article with hard data, analysis and conclusions in the favor of propaganda-rhetoric use of the word "regime". You're doing a disservice to yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone think this does not happen in other countries? Maybe even in your own country (but not ours, obviously)? And not just by governments, but by political parties, foreign entities, corporations, lobbying groups, interest groups, etc, any entity with an interest in distracting, muddying, defining a narrative, or swaying opinion?

And once you consider that, consider the numerous potential reasons why social media companies appear to do nothing about the huge numbers of obvious bots, astroturfers, sockpuppets, trollfarms, etc on their services.

Interesting times we live in!

<comment><USER33> Hungary doesn't need it. The government simply mangled any opposition media.</comment></comment>


Mailparser dev just closed every open issue without comment - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nodemailer/mailparser/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+sort%3Aupdated-desc <comment><AUTHOR> This is a pretty large library used by many organizations to process mail in a node environment. The developer recently re-licensed the parent project "NodeMailer" back to MIT from EUPL with a blog post about how people were simply violating the terms of the license. His frustration in that post, combined with this sudden burst of closings is worrying to those of us who rely on his projects.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good opportunities to meet potential co-founders in the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> I'm an engineer at a startup that's been itching for a long time to start a company. I know it's definitely ideal to source cofounders from one's colleagues, but most of my experience is at small startups so I don't have the connections of a large company or a huge personal network.
Any ideas for ways I can put myself in a better position to meet potential co-founders? I live in San Francisco but curious to hear about networking in other areas as well.
My interests: - Healthcare (EHRs, patient services, labs, insurance) - Education (learning management systems, academic publishing, intellectual property) - Social welfare - Messaging/communication <comment><USER2> The only way to attract co-founders in SF is to create value. An idea and a Resume alone have no value. Build something and showcase it. You'll create real opportunities and you'll become a magnet.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might get more targeted advice if you share your skills and interests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER4> Would love to connect. My email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi. If you're interested would love to chat. My contact info is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER6> feel free to reach out I'm in the bay area</comment>


San Jose unveils proposed scooter regulations - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/22/san-jose-unveils-proposed-scooter-regulations/ <comment><USER2> > In addition to paying operating fees, Smith said the city wants the > companies to provide multilingual customer service at all times, and to > commit to addressing problems quickly. And like Ford GoBike — which > currently has an exclusive contract with San Jose to operate a docked bike > sharing program in the city — the city says scooter companies should be > required to offer discounts to low-income residents and operate in what it > calls "communities of concern."

What a world we live in, where a company cannot operate as it would like to. As long as no one is getting hurt, why can't a company choose its target demographic? Where does it end? Do all movie theaters have to show films in all languages? Are Whole Foods and starbucks required to open discount price stores for the same goods in "communities of concern"?

I lived in San Jose for 5 years. I was flat broke, and living in a rundown 12-people-in-a-5-bedroom apartment, in the most violent and dangerous part of town. San Jose still has an immense amount of issues with drugs, violence, gangs, and a lack of pedestrian friendly streets. The city's priorities, much like San Francisco's, are laughably backwards.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I'm reasonably libertarian but "operating in communities of concern" is fine by me for transit infrastructure providers. Taxis used to have laws that required them to go to any destination requested, and stop for any person hailing a ride. Now that Uber has largely replaced taxis, a vital piece of community infrastructure (point to point transportation) is only available to people with smartphones. I have no problem requiring that Uber take fares by phone, or that scooter companies service all areas, as transit infrastructure shifts from publicly owned to privately owned.

<comment><USER4> >Taxis used to have laws that required them to go to any destination requested, and stop for any person hailing a ride

Laws that in my experience the taxi drivers completely ignored with no consequences. At least with Uber they pick you up before they find out the destination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can they crack down on rampant use of cars? Are car companies paying operating fees? (Not quite the same, I know, but still).

<comment><USER6> If cars start driving on sidewalks I'm sure they'll crack down on it.

<comment><USER7> The irony of this statement is that cars _created_ the modern, rigid distinction between street and sidewalk. The term "jaywalking" was around before cars, but its modern meaning was heavily promoted by pro-automobile interests in the 1920s:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defe...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defense_of_jaywalking.html)

Cars don't need to drive on the sidewalks, in other words, because they already took over everything else (and in doing so relegated all other transportation modes to what was left).

<comment><USER6> Kind of what I was getting at. Car culture isn't going away any time soon. It's a lot easier to regulate something new than something that's been a part of American society for nearly a hundred years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Which other businesses will be forced to operate multilingually? Will mine?

<comment><USER9> If you provide what amounts to a utility, possibly.

<comment><USER8> Is a scooter rental a utility? Is a jet-ski rental a utility? Is a luxury car rental a utility? Is a cheap car rental a utility? I'm just having trouble codifying it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would prefer that dense cities allow the scooters and instead prohibit cars. Granted, we would need to solve some issues with accommodating those with disabilities in a way that is more effective than using a car, but I think it could be done.

In the meantime, levy huge fines on anyone who uses the scooters irresponsibly so we can quickly set the precedent of socially acceptable scooter usage.

</comment><comment><USER11> Austin, TX has forced all dockless scooter companies to have up to 500 scooters total in the city.

</comment><comment><USER12> Things are are left on the street should be re-cycled into other things

</comment><comment><USER13> This shows the benefits of local government. I think this is a bad policy. Fortunately, I also don't live in San Jose. If I did, I'd try to elect new local politicians.

</comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't surprise me, from the same stupid state that shut down a startup just for putting more buses on the road

<comment><USER15> the story isn't as simple as "shut down a startup just for putting more buses on the road". it's that the local transit authority has a monopoly on public transport, so no other companies can compete. the logic for that is that otherwise, for-profit entities would only operate profitable routes, leaving distant/poor/low density areas unserved. by operating as a monopoly, the transit authority can subsidize the less profitable routes with the more profitable routes, ensuring everybody has service, not just the people who live near the profitable routes. a similar logic exists applies to the USPS, which has a monopoly on letter mail (except for express services).

<comment><USER14> Government transportation does have a monopoly but not necessarily private companies. If private companies set up new transportation lines, it doesn't prevent government from adding more.

Furthermore, if you regulate everything before it has time to flourish, you deny society all the benefits of any tech that would have developed.

Also, it's short sited to shut down bus routes that don't go directly to your house. Just because it doesn't go to your specific neighborhood (yet) doesn't mean you can't benefit. Increasing bus service, decreases pollution for everyone (c02) and may even reduce the amount of traffic on your commute.

<comment><USER15> >Government transportation does have a monopoly but not necessarily private companies. If private companies set up new transportation lines, it doesn't prevent government from adding more.

Are we talking about the same thing (monopolies on public transport) here? The whole point of granting the transit authority an monopoly is so they can exercise that monopoly to transfer funds from the more profitable routes to the less/not profitable routes. If private companies are allowed to run their own buses, they can undercut the transit authority's fares, because their fares don't include the "subsidy" to the other routes.

>Also, it's short sited to shut down bus routes that don't go directly to your house. Just because it doesn't go to your specific neighborhood (yet) doesn't mean you can't benefit. Increasing bus service, decreases pollution for everyone (c02) and may even reduce the amount of traffic on your commute.

Obviously having some buses is better than no buses, but what the monopoly is trying to ensure is that _everybody_ can ride the bus, regardless if they live in the outskirts or downtown. You can disagree with whether or not it's the government's job to guarantee public transit for everybody, but that's the logic for why the laws were enacted.

<comment><USER16> > they can exercise that monopoly to transfer funds from the more profitable > routes to the less/not profitable routes.

As pointed out in a different sub-thread, using monopoly power to effect this transfer can be detrimental to consumers.

The more traditional wealth transfer power of governments is taxation, which seems like a more straightforward method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was in San Jose today and noticed they hadn't gotten rid of scooters. I guess this is why we can't have nice things.

<comment><USER12> You can, there are many free scooters and Ebikes on the streets of San Jose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > requiring the companies to pay a deposit to cover potential scooter-involved > damage to city property

so I guess if they damage non-city property, tough shit?

<comment><USER19> It doesn't make any sense at all. It's not like we are living in Vienna or Paris. It's freaking California with Stucco walls and cheaply made buildings.

<comment><USER20> "City property" encompasses much more than "some of the city's buildings".</comment></comment></comment>


This is your brain on mathematics - <AUTHOR> https://anthonybonato.com/2016/04/20/this-is-your-brain-on-mathematics/ <comment><USER2> A pet peeve of mine is when mathematics itself is described as a language, instead of distinguishing mathematics from mathematical language. It's like saying Neuromancer is just a language, that Neuromancer is just English.

There is content in mathematics that is independent of the language used to express it. Mathematical notation is also incidental. It is not mathematics itself.

<comment><USER3> It might be incidental but the history of mathematics is rich with dissent and conflicting methodologies and syntaxes. Just even the initial mathematical symbols that started to be used were quite the ambitious effort by Peano. [1] That reading will take you down the wormhole of efforts for a "universal language" between mathematicians based on latin. And then you'll end up reading about 20 different other takes on the ideas. No, it's not just incidental -- there were international congresses of mathematicians about these issues and the adopted solutions were mostly elegant and looked upon favorably. There are always going to be some dissenters though, and they have some validity - but well, conventions are usually a compromise between effectiveness and majority opinion. There is still huge rift in mathematics on the issue of constructive proofs vs intuitionistic proofs. There are a lot of camps in formal mathematics. Kinda like functional programmers and the constant "tripes" they'll knack on. Whimsical stuff :-)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This will probably sound wacky but here's what I think:

There are two steps to conveying a thought in a language:

1\. recall the grammar rules and vocabulary 2\. form the sentence

The steps are fundamentally different in that the first one is an exercise in recollection whereas the second one is a "creative" process of some sort.

To prove a mathematical fact you go through the same two steps:

1\. you recall all the past mathematical knowledge 2\. you deduce the fact in a creative process of meshing together the facts you just recalled

So conveying a thought in a language is sort of analogous to proving a mathematical fact.

But clearly when doing math step 2 is given the spotlight whereas when you are talking in a foreign language step 1 is by far the hardest.

<comment><USER5> just out of curiosity, how many human languages do you speak fluently?

<comment><USER6> English, Canadian, Australian and American English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't surprise me. I spent my youth thinking math was impenetrable, and only when I started programming later in life I realized that mathematicians shouldn't be naming things.

<comment><USER3> Mathematics is a lot more rigorous than programming. But considering I'm learning Group and Ring Theory with the 1999 textbook 'Learning Abstract Algebra with Mathematica [Library]' I don't exactly disagree. Working with abstract structures in a more concrete way is a crystal-shattering way to intuit them -- I don't know if it will be an ultimate downfall though yet. As a programmer it just seemed natural to me to be able to manipulate these structures as if they are instances of an abstraction -- of a type. If it peels out for me, I will have a unique perspective among mathematicians. I just see a large sect between those who appreciate the abstractions, and those who bastardize them for utility. I didn't have love and enigmatic affinity for mathematics until I realized that even up to Calc II, the number-crunching utilitarian bastardization of mathematics was conveyed and taught to me -- not the beauty or philosophy of mathematical approach and thinking. Unfortunately, when only results and empirical justifications fill a programmers' mind, the beauty is lost. I feel there is definitely a more mastered perspective by being both a programmer and an inspired mathematician that is lost by being in exclusively one camp or the other. Until education reform is had, this unique perspective will just be for those who incidentally stroll down the path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Without even looking I guarantee that the Periodic Table of Finite Simple Groups is garbage --- there's no way that the space of finite simple groups have the same structure as the space of atoms.

<comment><USER3> A little silly to speak with such overconfidence considering the only similarity is the "table" paradigm. The actual periodic table is poor for its use anyways, and there have been valid criticisms that call for a more abstract grouping, like a spiral/ring table [1] [2] But in any case, the properties of numbers are intrinsic to the relationship between space and time - the ability to store a number physically [in memory] and then act on it at a later time. You can try to claim that physics transcends mathematics -- but I would argue that the properties of numbers, and hence algebras, are more fundamental than even physical field theories are.

[1] [http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM130W/03-BuildingBlocks/Chaos...](http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM130W/03-BuildingBlocks/Chaos/SpiralTable.jpg) [2] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/The_Ring...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/The_Ring_of_Periodic_Elements.svg)</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Fast and Lightweight Android App for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreambits.net/hackernews/ <comment><AUTHOR> There are many excellent apps on Android for Hacker News. However, a lot of them don't follow Material design, haven't been updated recently or simply don't have all the features available on the web.

I built this app to make a fast, full featured, yet lightweight native client. Please try it out and let me know what you think.

<comment><USER2> Looks nice! FOSS?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't published the code, primarily because it isn't in a share-worthy state yet. Definitely happening sometime soon though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty nice!

I've been using com.premii.hn 6.0.6 (which, now that I check, actually no longer appears to be in the Play store).

The main thing yours appears to be missing is the ability to reply directly to a comment.

Other requested UI tweaks:

\- Highlight the username of the OP when they comment

\- Add downvote button

\- Add toolbar buttons to toggle directly between comment view and article view

<comment><AUTHOR> com.premii.hn was my favorite too; it worked surprisingly well given that it was webview based. But, as you said, it's been taken off the Play store and not getting any more updates.

Re. your feedback:

Replying to comments directly can be done by long pressing the title of the comment you want to reply to, which brings up other options as well.

I'll consider your suggestions for UI tweaks, but is downvoting even possible? Or did you want an option to hide a story/comment only within the app?

<comment><USER3> After playing with it a bit more, refreshing comments seems to be iffy. I had this specific thread open when there were only 6 or 7 comments, and tried hitting Refresh repeatedly later when there were about 10 comments visible in my desktop browser. None of the new comments showed up, even when I backed out to the threads list. I think they only appeared after I did a complete refresh of the threads list and reopened this thread.

Overall, though, it's pretty good and I want to switch over - just feels like it needs a bit more polish first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying it out. What you saw might be due to over-aggressive caching, which generally is used to provide a fast experience even under bad network conditions.

Manually refreshing should actually do a full fetch so it sounds like a bug, which I'll look into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw that viewing user profiles is an option. That made me think that HN's search is often missing from app versions of HN. "Search first" (or 2nd, or 3rd or n'th) might be a vector worth developing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Search is something I miss often as well. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you add a link to [https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker- news](https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I will. Thanks for the suggestion.</comment></comment>


British economy will be largest in Europe by 2030? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2529306/British-economy-largest-Europe-2030-Austerity-UK-surging-ahead-Germany-France.html <comment><USER2> Right. Although Austerity hasn't actually worked in the past 5 years for the UK (with GNI _down_ by 15+ percent [1], compared to up 4% for Germany [2]), it will magically start working in the future. Wishful thinking at best.

[1] [http://data.worldbank.org/country/united- kingdom](http://data.worldbank.org/country/united-kingdom)

[2] [http://data.worldbank.org/country/germany](http://data.worldbank.org/country/germany)</comment>


Gratitude would have been better - <AUTHOR> http://fairduty.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/gratitude-would-have-been-better/ <comment><USER2> "As reported by Joe Silver at ArsTechnica on 14 May 2014, Hadfield chose to remove the video himself, in compliance with the agreement he had made with Bowie, and that plans were underway to renew the license. This was a private matter between the two parties, and could have stayed that way."

It amazes me how much foolishness results in gawking commenters involving themselves in other people's business. Screw asking for a reason and what the plan is, just show outrage and hashtag away.</comment>


Static Website Generators - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/05/02/top-ten-static-website-generators/ <comment><USER2> I just use emacs + org mode -> org-publish to generate my site [1] from org- mode with some customizations; it's been the most flexible and fun way to build a site I've had across all my attempts so far, particularly given that I can go meta and also publish the htmlized raw org files at the same time [2].

[1] Publishing config: [http://explog.in/config.html](http://explog.in/config.html) [2] Org Source: [http://explog.in/config.org.html](http://explog.in/config.org.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm a vim user, but org mode is one of the things that I really like the sound of from emacs.

For vim, I use vimwiki[0] in (github flavour) markdown[1] mode, and also publish the entire site to HTML. I really just use it for notes, rather than an entire website, but still, one could.

[0] [https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki/](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki/) [1] [https://github.com/patrickdavey/vimwiki_markdown](https://github.com/patrickdavey/vimwiki_markdown)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main problem for me is that the absolute majority of them target blogs and if you try to adapt them for a more complicated website you gonna dive very deep inside the code or continue constant search. Now I look at hugo as it seems to be a more general-purpose tool that allows to play with structure and content types.

<comment><USER5> Personally, the biggest issues is the CMS backend part of the process. I'm fine writing content for an SSG, but the marketing department is not. What I really want is a fast, open, and simple CMS BE that has a publishing workflow where the output is a static site. I've yet to fine the perfect candidate. The ones that are close are SaaS platforms and that is unfortunately unacceptable. I'm perfectly ok paying for software, at least if I get the source. If anyone has some suggestions, I'm all ears.

Edit: Just to add, I have multiple needs here that aren't enumerated, one of which is full translation support for the source content to support multi- linguale/multi-locale sites.

<comment><USER6> Funny you'd mention that. We're putting the final touches to an Open Source Jekyll CMS we've built for ourselves (called Jekyll+) that does just that; give a nicer interface for marketing folks and provide multilingual support out of the box.

Preview of my local copy we're prepping up for a release end of the week: [http://i.imgur.com/1VyxGzqr.png](http://i.imgur.com/1VyxGzqr.png)

Happy to have you testing it out and give me feedback.

<comment><USER5> Feel free to send me an email, I'll test it out.

<comment><USER6> Will do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I crave simplicity in my life right now and am using markdeep: [https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/)

I write my documents in markdown and add this tag at the end of my document <script src="markdeep.min.js">

I "publish it" by copying it to my server and renaming it .html

* note: To get started, here is the suggested starter document: [https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/starter.md.html](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/starter.md.html)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure if this counts as a "static website", since the page is not delivered exactly as _stored_. It requires JavaScript to actually renders the page, which seems like an overkill.

<comment><USER9> That's just client side templating. Which has the same problem they all do of being greeted with a white page until ALL the content is ready.

If someone is prepared to accept this it's not that hard to accept generating the html page yourself and uploading that.

<comment><USER10> > That's just client side templating. Which has the same problem they all do > of being greeted with a white page until ALL the content is ready.

Or being greeted with a white page period if you're using a non-JS enabled HTML client (noscript, CLI browser).

<comment><USER11> In this particular case, wouldn't they see the plain text markdown? (which in many case is just as good the html)

<comment><USER10> Kinda, it looks like they add a bit of CSS (basically make everything monospaced & pre) so the Markdown text is visible when JS is _disabled_ (noscript), but in a CSS-less browser (e.g. links) the file is received as HTML, and the Markdown code is directly interpreted as HTML, which makes for an unreadable mess (the whole thing is a single "line" with newlines collapsed to spaces)

You're really better off using a static conversion tool, or using markdeep as a static conversion tool (with ?export)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've wanted to make a static site generator generator for a while. Run the script and out comes another script with a wicked cool name that uses one of the many markup options, header formats, and templating engines (either manually or randomly selected).

Somebody, please make this.

<comment><USER13> I probably failed to understand what you described but recently found out about Nikola[1] while looking for publishing solution supporting Org mode.

It does support multiple input formats and at least Jinja2 and Mako for templating:

      - https://getnikola.com/handbook.html#supported-input-formats

1\. [https://getnikola.com/](https://getnikola.com/)

<comment><USER14> Hakyll supports anything that pandoc supports, so it does both org mode and markdown :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have been eyeing Lektor[1] for a little while, it seems to have good documentation, and an interesting, opinionated dev behind it.

1: [https://www.getlektor.com/](https://www.getlektor.com/)

<comment><USER16> What is the benefit of lektor over nikola and pelican?

<comment><USER17> I've used lektor and pelican but not nikola. Lektor provides a nice gui where pelican does not (ime). They both work well and pelican seems to have more themes due to it being older.

I ended up with wordpres (shrugs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The main question for me is comments. I don't want to use something like Disqus, and to require something like Discourse would cancel the whole point of having a static site generator that I can host on Github Pages or Gitlab pages. Ideally, what I would like to do is to have an hackernews post automatically generated for each post, and to redirect people to the HN post if they want to comment, but I am not sure that HN allow this kind of use ?

<comment><USER19> That would be absolutely awful. Imagine if every site did that. Would this be a site you would want to visit?

Maybe what you want to do is have a link that sends you to the HN submission page with the fields pre-populated. That wouldn't be so bad.

<comment><USER20> The comments on my technical blog were always so friendly and encouraging. People telling me how my tutorial helped them or answering each others questions.

Redirecting them to the HN pit of cynicism and leave-no-stone-left-unturnedism sounds awful. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've tried pelican, lektor, hugo, and even a cobbled-together flask-based (using frozen pages module) custom static site builder. One of the biggest challenges/time sinks/annoyances of adopting any of these types of platforms is the time spent on the initial wiring up of the templates. Maybe I'm lazy in this regard, but I'd rather use a GUI/WYSIWYG interface to do the initial UX (not talking about design here, only placement of site objects/elements) for the site within the context of the relevant template. I don't mind spending a few minutes on setting up the build environment, setting up any dependencies, because its a local app that's being installed, so I get it that it requires a tiny investment in time. But setting up the templates, boy, that annoys me; especially for small sites which only have few pages and infrequent additions.

Case in point: I really wanted to use lektor; it's elegant persistent storage mechanism (no database required, basically text files organized within folders), and its brilliant idea for use of a local web GUI were what attracted me to it in the first place. But setup - for example - was annoying as hell on Windows (hey some of us can't afford to keep buying Macs!), and then of course after the install/setup comes the wiring of the templates (ugh). I can not imagine a conventional (non-dev.) user - who I would guess is a good candidate to extract great benefit from using a web GUI - won't have the patience or inclination to dive into code to wire up the templates. I don't mean to pick on lektor (I highly respect the team behind this!!), but it is an example of what most of these static site generators do: they mean to simplify things but 1 or 2 aspects of the system _seem_ like quite a time sink.

<comment><USER22> I've used Lektor recently and I think you're missing its main advantage: it does NOT aim to introduce web dev to non developers or to dramatically simplify the process of wiring up templates. In fact, its use of models is an additional step in the traditional process for static site generators.

BUT...once setup by a developer, Lektor's structure and Mac app allows a non- technical user to edit files and publish changes to a website, which can be hosted on S3 or other options for peanuts and has none of the security issues that afflict Wordpress.

So viewed through the lens of a potential replacement for Wordpress, I think Lektor is pretty phenomenal. The idea of a Static CMS--whether Lektor can pull this off or not--just makes so much more sense than our current CMS model.

<comment><USER21> Certainly good points. It is definitely headed in the right direction with relation to its use of a web GUI, and its content models (at least once one wraps one's brain around the model approach). Perhaps I should have not expected it to make template wiring easier. Please don't get me wrong, I'm actually a fan of lektor, and wish it to really succeed. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://staticsitegenerators.net](https://staticsitegenerators.net) Boom.

<comment><USER24> OK, this list rocks! Thanks for sharing it.

Btw, on LibHunt you can compare the projects by dev activity as well - [https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/categories/1986-static- site-g...](https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/categories/1986-static-site- generators?order=activity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm very surprised that Sphinx wasn't listed. It powers readthedocs.org and is generally very popular for software documentation.

<comment><USER26> huh...I would have never through to classify Sphinx as a static site generator, but it is.

I think it's just the context of it being used mostly for API docs and tutorials that it's overlooked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not so sure Octopress belongs on this type of list anymore.

I've been using it for about 4 years now, and I simply haven't had the time to convert it to anything else but plan to as soon as I can.

Over the last couple years I've dealt with countless type error issues, gem incompatibilities, etc. I have one single machine that Octopress generates my site from now, and it's an old Linux install that I refuse to update (because that will break OP). I believe the author tried his best to make what's essentially a clever Jekyll hack work as well as he could. He's tried creating a newer, smarter version but I'm not sure what the current status is. I'm guessing it's going slowly because most he, like most people, don't have time for such a huge project that isn't paying bills. I appreciate the attempt for sure, it worked great at first.

I don't want to sit and complain about a free product but would caution others about investing in it heavily like I did. I spent a considerable amount of time on overhead with this product as it sits. There are much easier (non Ruby!) solutions out there.

<comment><USER28> Same here, I appreciate the work that was put in, but it has become a major problem for me. My torment here: [http://garfieldnate.github.io/blog/2015/07/20/hacking- throug...](http://garfieldnate.github.io/blog/2015/07/20/hacking-through-an- octopress-update/). Any time I want to write a new blog post, the release is a big ordeal, and all of the commands are very slow. It's a mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use Hugo for several websites and I enjoy it a lot.

One favorite part is the ability to create content of different types.

<comment><USER30> This statement caught my attention in the article:

> It is optimized for speed (Hugo sites can be built in milliseconds)

Is that true, or does it just happen to be fast? It seems to me that the performance of a static site generation is irrelevant, and thus time spent on this is really wasted effort.

I don't care if it takes several minutes to build.. it'll happen on the CI server in the background, and so long as the actual deployment is atomic, it makes no difference.

A site that has time-sensitive content or update requirements of more than hundreds of times per day seems to be a poor candidate for use with a static site generator.

<comment><USER31> > It is optimized for speed (Hugo sites can be built in milliseconds)

I suspect it's based on a minimal set of test cases, not a full site. With hundreds of pages mine takes anything from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to build.

<comment><USER32> As with everything, this is a huge oversimplification (i.e. Go = faster than scripting languages). I'm dubious if the algorithmic part of static site generators dominates. Would have though it's I/O bounded to some degree, in which case Go isn't going to be faster than anything else.

Besides, caching solves this issue better, unless you change the underlying templates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sort of related and shameless plug but I'm building a "comments as a service" application that isn't disqus. My first target market is static sites.

Check it out here: [http://www.remarkbox.com](http://www.remarkbox.com)

<comment><USER34> Also sort of a related, shameless plug--

I've been working on Formingo ([https://www.formingo.co](https://www.formingo.co)), a form processing service for static sites so you can receive your form submissions directly to your email without the need for server side code or your own backend.

I've actually had a couple people ask me about comment systems that were an alternative to (and more simple than) Disqus, so it's cool to see someone working in that space.

<comment><USER35> Your API is exactly what I would expect to see from such a service. Your pricing is also exactly what I would expect to see, so props.

I only need a POST endpoint that will accept a few parameters and redirect back to my success page, and I will definitely keep your service in mind for that.

Although, how do you keep everyone from sending spam from you?

<comment><USER34> Right now there's domain and email verification so that you don't get spammed from people taking your form and embedding it into their website, but I have some upcoming plans for spam detection.

In fact, the first parts of this system is in place already-- if you have an account and create a pre-validated form, you can go into your dashboard to see the responses and mark them as spam. This will become the training data for the spam filter at a future point in time.

<comment><USER35> Ah, I more meant "how do you make sure people don't send spam to arbitrary destinations sending your form", but I see you're doing email verification of the recipient first. I thought "put this form on your site" was literally all there was, at first, hence the question.

<comment><USER34> I see-- yes, when you embed a new form, you receive a verification email for the page URL-email combination. Meaning if you change the email address or use the form on another URL, you get another verification email.

If you register for an account, however, you can bypass this and pre-register your domains and verify your email address and get a special URL without your email address in it (it's an arbitrary token).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One complain about static generators is that they often require the use of HTML or any other markup language. Users just want a management system with a friendly WYSIWYG editor. They don't care if their site is static or generated on the fly by the server.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you're inclined to eschew hosted comments a lá Disqus and want to own it yourself, note that Discourse supports comment embedding for static sites which I've used for a couple years and have been very happy with: [https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments- vi...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-via- javascript/31963)

</comment><comment><USER38> Have really wanted to look at making WP into a static site generator. Have too many clients using WP that could be using it as a static site but won't move away from it... So the admin backend / familiar publishing interface but generating it out to something that could be dumped into S3z

Some people have done variations of it but not well or easy. Is easy enough to trap events that should trigger page regeneration. Just haven't taken enough time yet.

The AWS CLI has extremely amazing performance, having something that could leverage that kind of multithreading for publishing would be great. Especially for the initial site publish.

If anyone is interested in working on this project or taking it on (I'm happy to contribute ideas and/or money) feel free to reach out. mike503 at gmail.

<comment><USER39> Been a few years since I looked at WP, but isn't this essentially what the super cache etc. plugins used to do, i.e. generate static versions of pages?

<comment><USER40> Yes, but there is still a vulnerable (dynamic) WP backend sitting on the same domain name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Are there any real differentiating factors or are there so many because they're so easy to do? I built a custom one for a client once for no real reason.

<comment><USER42> When I reviewed a bunch of SSGs looking for the one for me, the differentiators were:

* What language it's in (assuming you want to be able to hack around issues if you need to)

* What intermediary formats it uses (EJS/jade/stylus/LESS/SASS, etc. - assuming you don't want to publish a site that looks like the SSG's demo page)

* How opinionated it is about its output pipeline. Some SSGs have fully-formed plugin systems, so you can choose your favorite minifier, add a transpiler, etc., which is powerful but more work. Others just do what they know how to do and if you want to add steps you'll have to post-process the output.

That said, running through the "publish a hello-world page with default theme" was pretty much the same for every SSG I tried. You have to really start futzing with things to see the differences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is there some way to use a static site generator with a flat file database utilising standard CRUD functionality?

To me, using a static site generator and handing off database to another service like firebase or other sas, although works really well and has many benefits is still an external dependency I would rather live without. It also somewhat defeats the point of using a statit site gen for my use case anyway.

This is the main thing stopping me from switching from php/mysql.

<comment><USER35> I used Lektor and that's what it does, and, AFAIK, it's also what all other SSGs do (Jekyll/Hugo/Pelican/etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've been using wintersmith ([http://wintersmith.io](http://wintersmith.io)) to power my blog for years and am very happy with it. It's incredibly flexible, is hackable at just about every level, and has no problem if you just want to dump some html/css/js into a directory and serve it. So I'm able to "host" several of my projects right within my blog.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm still using Dreamweaver. WYSIWYG HTML generation.

You really want to lay out web pages in in Markdown?

<comment><USER46> well, if you are happy with it, stick with Dreamweaver. Markdown is not for layouting, it's more for writing and reading the source code without hurting your eyes ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> There's also Haunt, written in Guile Scheme:

[https://haunt.dthompson.us/](https://haunt.dthompson.us/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I recommend checking out [https://forestry.io/](https://forestry.io/)

<comment><USER49> Co-creator of Forestry here (a CMS for static sites). We're big fans of Hugo and Jekyll (obviously). We use Hugo to power our blog and docs [https://forestry.io/blog](https://forestry.io/blog) [https://forestry.io/docs](https://forestry.io/docs).

Using Algolia for search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Another one: [https://ikiwiki.info/](https://ikiwiki.info/)

<comment><USER51> Making static websites for over a decade, now.

(Can make user-editable wikis as well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think the future may be CMS-style applications that do static publishing. Either run locally (may be a great use for electron actually), and/or as a service. At least in this space competitively, the biggest complaints tend to center around the amount of manual configuration/changes... opposed to the overhead of say wordpress.

The only downside to static publishing to say S3/ABS is that you loose server- side analytics to some extent.

<comment><USER21> But then, couldn't you insert the google analytics javascript snippet within the html that gets loaded/served up from S3? Or did you mean something like piwik? I have to think S3 would not be a block here, as many users of static site generators also use some sort of analytics tool.

<comment><USER52> There are bits that JS based tooling will miss in terms of a bigger picture... they don't represent your real load when you run a site that is getting hit by a lot of different smaller search bots. Of course, once you're on s3 or a similarly cheap static delivery option (and/or CDN), you may not actually care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I considered using one of these but then I realised all I needed was pandoc and a makefile.

</comment><comment><USER54> Maybe I'm just oldschool but I've never understood the point of these. What's wrong with varnish + [any dynamic platform]?

<comment><USER55> Assuming the learning curve to use a static site generator is addressed, I would say simplicity and stability are key points the the users of these appreciate. For example, even though I'm technically savvy, I struggle with Wordpress (wordpress.com) and its unintuitive UI. Almost every other (major?) release changes the locations of items and starts having some new-age UI vs. classic UI differences. I'm guessing that many other dynamic platforms are also bloated a lot when one looks at the features that most people use. Of course, there are dynamic platforms like Ghost [1] that have made it simpler, but Wordpress is still very common (so are other heavy platforms like Drupal and Joomla).

For those who do use these, my best guesses on the benefits are, in no particular order:

1\. The speed of transmitting and rendering the pages.

2\. Flexibility to host the site anywhere where there's just a web server, even a low powered, low resource one (no need to look for mod_php or for a host that allows running rails or anything else).

3\. Simplicity of having all content stored as plain text in files. There's no database to fiddle with or administer.

4\. Flexibility to easily create their own templates (probably using a favorite templating engine).

5\. Better and simpler control over security since the web server and the underlying OS are the main concerns (without adding several more layers on the server - this may be an oversimplification, but there are fewer things to worry about in general).

6\. Better stability (fewer moving parts).

7\. Version control of content, if one uses git or something similar.

[1]: [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> What are people using for hosting? I've thought about using github pages, but css ended up being severely limited.

<comment><USER46> GitLab Pages [https://pages.gitlab.io/](https://pages.gitlab.io/) it also supports private repos and nearly every static site generator through gitlab ci

<comment><USER35> I'd like to second Gitlab Pages, I'm using it with Lektor for [http://portfolio.stavros.io/](http://portfolio.stavros.io/) and it's been fantastic so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Nobodu mentioned Hakyll, Haskell static site generator motovated by Jekyll.

I've been used it for over 4 yrs and still surprising.

</comment><comment><USER58> Here's my experience: I previously used Middleman to build my blogshop and all was fine until I added more complexity. The codebase grew large and that's when I really hit the (Ruby) language's limits (too much type checking).

My intention is not to turn this into a language war, but I think using a good static site generator written a strongly typed language helps a lot. I considered Hugo, but eventually I decided to write my own in Scala and it has served me well.

A good static site generator should unleash a slew of goodies including code- reuse, viewing your website as a collection of functional components rather than just a bunch of partials. It's almost a full blown MVC project.

For example, my blogshop (not exactly 100% static) has 3 types of "Marketing" components - one of them is a widget asking for email subscriptions, the other is a popup for displaying offers, or email subscriptions based on the view it is used in, based on the parameters passed to it and finally the last one is a recommendation engine.

I don't trust Disqus nor Facebook especially after Facebook lost all my comments once (long ago, though). So, I host microservices for each of the components of my blogshop - One for recommendations, one for comments and so forth. They all live inside Appengine and I hardly hit the paid tier. The best part is that my blogshop can be written in any language I like and I can afford to write my other components in other languages. For example, I wrote my recommendation engine in Python, wrote my comments system in Scalatra. They all communicate with JSON APIs with each other.

For my authentication service, I use something called Apache Shiro. So, my static website is basically talking to each of my service through Ajax and injecting content using JS from the response from my microservices.

I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it really works well for me and is much better than using Wordpress which is something generic that is forced to fit into my workflow/business model.

</comment><comment><USER59> .. nanoc, [http://nanoc.ws/](http://nanoc.ws/)

</comment><comment><USER60> I made a somewhat unconventional static site generator in Powershell, as part of my Arkdata project. It produces flat HTML reports every minute, which IIS (or any other web server software) can simply serve. It calls a JavaScript file, as I was playing with sortable columns, but works without the file. I use a mobile CSS file for better mobile display too.

Github: [https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape](https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape)

Demo site (IIS up, but it's not currently generating reports): [http://gilgamech.com/ark/PvP-Hardcore- OfficialServer92.html](http://gilgamech.com/ark/PvP-Hardcore- OfficialServer92.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> And I guess, Lektor and Pollen are still the only ones with a (dynamic) web interface for writing articles and then exporting them (statically)?

Besides Bricolage (ancient, abandoned?, never got it to work – even the VM image they provide as a demo) and Movable Type (expensive), of course.

</comment><comment><USER62> here is a better "article"

[https://staticsitegenerators.net/](https://staticsitegenerators.net/)

<comment><USER63> [http://www.staticgen.com](http://www.staticgen.com) (hosted and maintained by Netlify, article's author) is similar although stats differ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> We are running a React based static site using [https://instant.cm](https://instant.cm) for content management. Works like a charm and Instant basically works on every static site.

</comment><comment><USER65> For my website I have a custom python script, and I use RestructuredText for markup. If I started now, I would replace the script with a set of Makefiles... or better use any existing generator.

<comment><USER66> Hugo supports rst, for what it's worth. There's still time to make the jump :)

<comment><USER65> Thanks, I've never heard about Hugo, I've seen Sphinx mentioned by mixmastamyk. But... I wish I had enough spare time to do migration. My TODO list is getting longer and longer. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Static site generators are easy to learn and host for free on Github pages but setting up TLS with a custom domain name is a pain. I currently have Cloudflare in front handling that for me.

<comment><USER68> Check out netlify ([https://www.netlify.com](https://www.netlify.com)) - we'll let you setup https with let's encrypt as a one click operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Nobody's mentioned Hexo yet (edit: here), so I will. A while back I reviewed the top 5-6 Node-based SSGs and hexo seemed like the best tradeoff between simple and flexible.

[https://hexo.io/](https://hexo.io/)

I also wrote up all the stuff I learned migrating and existing Wordpress blog to static:

[http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to- static/](http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/)

<comment><USER69> > Nobody's mentioned Hexo yet

Hexo is #2 in the list in the article...?

<comment><USER42> Sorry, I meant commented on their experiences with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> For a client I built a custom one (~150loc) that uses react templates and builds files from markdown on contentful. By using react templates, the static website and frontend code can be written in the same manner and our designer can start with something then hand it off to our frontend eng without fuzz. The designer wanted to learn react so she's technical enough to write jsx (which might not be the case for everyone). Ping me if we should see about OSS.

</comment><comment><USER71> [http://www.staticgen.com/](http://www.staticgen.com/) seems to provide a more exhaustive (and searchable) listing

</comment><comment><USER72> Yes! I was looking for a decent selection of single-page app SSGs for so long. This is only the second one I've found, the other being Lingon ([https://github.com/spotify/lingon](https://github.com/spotify/lingon)), and this one looks like the only one that can still work as a blog.

Does anyone have any feedback or alternatives for SSGs which build static single-page blogs?

<comment><USER73> > single-page app SSGs

How does that work? Isn't "single-page app" the exact opposite of a "static site"?

<comment><USER72> The "app" in this case would be client-side logic (e.g. written in JS) which might then render the blog client-side by pulling down the text for the blog. Ultimately, everything on the server is unchanging until you do a rebuild with new content.

So long as the hosted content isn't dynamically generated server-side when you visit, it's static.

<comment><USER74> Single page app uses .js to load page inside index.html w/ push state.

I like this 'serverless' approach.

<comment><USER75> It most certainly is not serverless.

<comment><USER74> Do you read? Ex: [http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Serverless.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Serverless.html)

Or dozens of other? You are not in a cave.

<comment><USER75> Who gave Badri Janakiraman authority to define what serverless is?

<comment><USER74> martin fowler is an authority.

Here so you can try [http://bfy.tw/7nJE](http://bfy.tw/7nJE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Jekyll has the significant advantage of support Asciidoc out of the box as Asciidoctor is written in Ruby. We really need alternative asciidoc implementations.

<comment><USER77> Please note that asciidoctor already is an alternative implementation. The original asciidoc tool ([http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html](http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html)) is written in python.

Both, the original and asciidoctor, offer a CLI tool to convert asciidoc to different formats (and there is always pandoc). Additionally, asciidoctor aims to integrate with JVM languages courtesy of JRuby. So you have multiple implementations callable (in one way or another) from any language imaginable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also, do you know any SSG which allow me to have a really complete home page like [http://demo.tagdiv.com/newspaper/](http://demo.tagdiv.com/newspaper/) , where I can clearly display separated category with last articles by category, and with a thumbnail automatically attached to the post ?

Sort of a "magazine theme" or a "newspaper theme" for a SSG.

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure exactly what you mean, mainly because I think all the SSGs can do it. I tried Lektor recently, and I don't see why you shouldn't be able to do exactly this. It's not even hard (unless I'm missing something).

EDIT: Maybe what I'm missing is that other SSGs are very opinionated, while Lektor is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> For those thinking of writing a ssg as a challenge, I recommend reading Rhodes and Rocco's _500 Lines or Less_ [1] chapter about an incremental build system. It describes the general strategy behind tup.

[1] [http://aosabook.org/en/500L/contingent-a-fully-dynamic- build...](http://aosabook.org/en/500L/contingent-a-fully-dynamic-build- system.html)

<comment><USER79> Great link! I'm building my own SSG for fun and this is something I've been thinking about tackling for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I am a long time WordPress user. I tried a few but didn't like them much. WordPress is the nice middle point of internet publishing. A well designed web, desktop, and mobile interface, themes, plugins, and commenting system. Cost of hosting is a little prohibitive but it works pretty well.

I am currently trying out Hexo which seem to work just time too.

</comment><comment><USER81> "These days, speed and security is the name of the game." And it´s no problem to achieve both with WordPress. Maybe my mileage varies enormously from everybody else, but I am maintaining about 40 WordPress instances.

We have tools to manage updates remotely, make fully automated daily backups, all sites are rated with 85 or more points on Google Page Speed Insights (YSlow and Pingdom Tools don´t rate bad either), we didn´t have any breaches or hacks in the last two years (been in the company for that long) and our clients can easily manage their sites with the built-in tools from WordPress. We have locked the sites down, eliminating attack vectors as far as we can. All sites are using caching tools or even full page caching to improve the speed. No complains and complications at all. Oh, and we have comments and user registrations and more...

It seems most people just can´t handle WordPress the right way. It´s complex software and you have to know (and learn) what you are doing.

Installing the first plugin you stumble upon, ideally from a shady developer who sells it to a malware distributor 2 months later, is a pretty fine way to run you into "WordPress is slow and insecure". Free themes, always install several at once , you never know when you need one, are another great way, too.

But yeah, just throw some fancy JS framework and Markdown at the problem and then start to wonder how you could possibly get some commenting system up and running.

WordPress is quite fine software. For sure, it has flaws and some of them get fixed slower than you would wish, but it´s not bad in the end, if you know what you are doing. Finding people who know what they are doing is probably hard, but that´s the same for everything.

<comment><USER82> I don't disagree that wordpress is fine, but claiming it's easy to manage after saying you have a team to manage yours and have setup a load of software to handle its complexity for you is odd. And then you say "most people just can´t handle WordPress the right way", which is basically another way of saying "it's not easy".

And 85 points on Google page speed insights or yslow are generally useless metrics. They give as much weight to complaining about a 5kb image not being compressed properly as not having a cdn. It's automated dumb, they're stupid tools with quite often stupid rules. Like I just checked a site I'm responsible for and lost points for not compressing a js file that would save 524B. Yes, that's _bytes_.

That's not contributing to site slowness at all. And yet at no point did it say "hmm, you've got rather a lot of poorly optimized js there".

<comment><USER81> I am a one man army on that point, "we" is "our company", websites are not our main business. ;-)

The only software I use regularly is InfiniteWP to have a look for updates. Although it sends me a mail to my "status messages" slack channel, so no big deal on that end. Backups run automatically by BackWPUp Pro, caching and lock down are done when setting up/finishing a new site, so there´s not really much software involved at all.

85 points or A ratings or whatever alone are "just metrics" for sure. But I don´t think that I need to tell you that if you want to reach and keep a high value on those scales, you have to take care of compressed CSS and JS, auto- optimized images, caching, fast servers etc. pp.

Which in the end leads to fast(er), better accessible websites without dropping backend usability or features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> is there an ssg that is entirely web based? I don't want local files or to use a terminal. I would move away from Wordpress (and would like to) if something let me click a few buttons to set up a simple blog. I don't need anything fancy.. Let me make some basic choices and post my blogs.

<comment><USER84> If you like WordPress as a writing and management tool, it's worth noting that there are several static site generators for WordPress.[1][2]

[1] [http://en.staticpress.net/](http://en.staticpress.net/), [https://github.com/megumiteam/staticpress](https://github.com/megumiteam/staticpress) [2] [https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply- static/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> What would be a sane deployment workflow for a static site generator, so that the static content ends up behind an Apache web server in my box?

edit markdown -> push github --> server does a pull -> builds -> deploy ?

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm a big Gatsby fan.

</comment><comment><USER87> Ive been trying to make Sandra.snow work for me but it seems to be so focused on azure and ssg-as-a-service that I can't figure out the simple parts.

</comment><comment><USER88> Another good alternative is Grav [https://getgrav.org](https://getgrav.org)

<comment><USER5> That's not a SSG, is it? Last I remember reading about it, it was still a dynamic site, just powered by a flat file DB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> What about using whatever engine you want, then extract static pages with a script using good ol' _wget -r_ ?

<comment><USER90> I sort-of-but-not-quite did this when migrating my old dynamic site to static generation: I used my model API to build a list of all the pages and then faked requests by building my own request objects that I called my Sinatra app with.

Made for a quick and dirty way of reusing my old code, and means I can still run the dynamic version for dev/testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> [https://phenomic.io](https://phenomic.io) is missing in the list

<comment><USER86> Have you used Phenomic? What's the difference to Gatsby?

<comment><USER92> I was going to use it but stuck with Jekyll for now, but they have a FAQ page for that [0].

There were also a few mentions of Phenomic on Gatsby's discussion from a while back [1]. Search for it on that thread.

[0]: [https://phenomic.io/docs/faq/gatsby/](https://phenomic.io/docs/faq/gatsby/)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128989)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> I've been using cactus and really like it. Really simple and uses the django template engine.

</comment><comment><USER94> Why is that website only using the middle of the page, and has a blank line between every line of text.

Is there some competition for who can use as little of my screen as possible in a useful way?

<comment><USER95> It's to increase readability. An ideal column width can help users to scan through the paragraph effortlessly.

[http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column- widt...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-width-for- paragraphs-online)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Anything that supports .docx documents?

<comment><USER97> What why?

<comment><USER96> There are people who like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> OP is a paid shill for Netlify.

Previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12401849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12401849)

</comment><comment><USER99> A number of these (Jekyll, Octopress and Hexo) are disappointingly similar. I wish they offered novel solutions rather than the same Liquid templates + YAML front matter + Markdown/ReStructuredText.</comment>


Here's A List of US Airports Currently Using Full Body Scanners - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5694997/heres-a-list-of-us-airports-currently-using-full-body-scanners?skyline=true&s=i

<comment><USER2> Incredible. I wonder if with enough public pressure, some airports will opt out of the TSA screaning. I hope so.</comment>


Show HN: JavaScript RayCast engine without grid maps - <AUTHOR> I got hired recently and I'm not having much time for personal projects. But I'm glad I made this little ray cast "engine" using javascript canvas. It uses lines instead of the traditional grid map (wolfenstein) giving the ability to have diagonal walls. The textures are a mess right now, but I'm glad I got it to work. The code is pure garbage as well. As soon as I have something more robust I'll share the code. Until then, check out the video I made:<p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8A3mdn-tPw <comment><AUTHOR> Well, what the heck, here's the source code:

[https://github.com/victorqribeiro/myRaycast](https://github.com/victorqribeiro/myRaycast)

It's a mess, but maybe someone will step in and help me figure out the textures.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> textures are a little better.</comment>


Journal of Glenn T. Seaborg (1946-1958) - <AUTHOR> https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x002049132&view=1up&seq=5 <comment><USER2> For those who don't know, Seaborgium is the 106th element and is named after Glenn T Seaborg.</comment>


SVPT – Next Generation devices for biofeedback in PT(Article 2 in series) - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/svpt-next-generation-devices-for-biofeedback-in-physical-therapy-article-2-in-series-d23f8866c8f6 <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

This is the 2nd article in series discussing our companion device platform for physical therapists. Please take a look and let us know what you think!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some examples of gorgeous/elegantly designed iPhone/iPad Apps? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> okcupid app is pretty descent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Square</comment>