Happy Birthday, quicktype - <AUTHOR> https://blog.quicktype.io/first-birthday/ <comment><USER2> This is really awesome! I wish I had heard about quicktype earlier. I will definitely be using it to generate some code examples for FormAPI [1]. PDF templates have JSON schemas that are used to generate forms and validate API requests, so it will be really cool to also generate some example code from the schemas.

Thanks a lot for working on this!

[1] [https://formapi.io/](https://formapi.io/)</comment>


Leveraging Ada Run-Time Checks with Fuzz Testing in AFL - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adacore.com/running-american-fuzzy-lop-on-your-ada-code <comment><USER2> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7ksivm/leverag...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7ksivm/leveraging_ada_runtime_checks_with_fuzz_testing/)</comment>


Mazda hopes to achieve 56% thermal efficiency with gasoline engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/car-technology/a15915023/mazda-skyactiv-3-gas-clean-as-ev/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad the article references Formula 1 engines. The current generation is really a technical marvel, and was the first thing to come to mind when I read this headline.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumptio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumption#Examples_of_values_of_BSFC_for_shaft_engines)

56% is slightly more than the efficiency of very large low-speed two-stroke diesels (one of the most thermally efficient piston engine types), so I remain very skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stick one in a well-made plug-in/hybrid, and I'm sold.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can this principle be applied to ICE using other fuels, like ethanol?

<comment><USER6> It works. Even with wet ethanol.

[https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cd5b6vq](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cd5b6vq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good to have stretch goals. EV have stretch goals too, as do battery tech designers and power generation and storage. So.. given this is a 25 year stretch goal, what will EV look like then? I think we can predict they will be better than this 57% heat efficiency or not.

I like phev as an interim, but Mazda have to invest now to have a story in phev. This incredible goal in ice engine efficiency could be part of that.

<comment><USER8> what kind of heat efficiency you mean?

<comment><USER7> The Carnot heat engine efficiency. That's what the 57% is talking about in the proposed improvements Mazda are projecting. Getting a single F1 engine there for a circuit is one thing. Getting a road car under varying driven conditions there, on a production line.. that's another. If the 57% was demonstrated they'd have said a deadline inside 25 years. If they project out more than Five, it's a bet, not a certainty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mazda is for me quite an admirable example of traditional car company, esp. compared to the likes of Volkswagen, as the ratio of quality/economics is really good and their new designs are gorgeous given the price range.

<comment><USER10> > their new designs are gorgeous given the price range.

Definitely. Compare their designs to anything else from Japan and you'll find that they manage to be modern and interesting without being too angular and aggressive (see new Honda Civic, esp. the Type R and the Prius Prime).

Besides that, their driving experiences are tuned for pure joy. The CX-5 is by far the best handling mid-size SUV, and of course the MX-5 is unmatched. Best of all, they still somehow find the time to experiment and create masterpieces like the MX-5 RF.

Now if only they can deliver on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, then they'll really check all the boxes.

Source: a 2017 MX-5 soft-top was first brand new car.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, the CTR is a car meant to appeal to a certain audience. Mazda sells nothing that caters to said audience.

<comment><USER12> They had the MazdaSpeed3, which didn't look nearly as polarizing as the current CTR. Granted, neither did the previous Civic Si or Type R.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eventually, you'll run up against the limit defined by the Carnot efficiency. I wonder where this engine will stand in relation to that. Will they be able to burn at a higher temperature in order to drive the raw efficiency up? Perhaps with a improved catalytic converter? Or are these all improvements in internal friction?

What does the technology actually look like? The article was frustratingly scant on details.

Ah. You can track down the video explanation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_No3KSaTrM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_No3KSaTrM)

Contrary to the appeal to the layperson's mechanical intuition in the video, they give away that they are apparently speeding combustion at the top of the stroke, resulting in a better approximation of "constant volume heat addition." This will result in a higher top temperature in the combustion chamber, and is the real reason for their "pushes longer and harder" explanation. This will come with added NOx production, so they'll have to have better catalytic conversion, with a couple caveats. It _may_ be that the emissions rules are on a per-mile basis, so that the total NOx of the engine is lower per mile because less fuel is burned. They may also just be hitting markets with laxer restrictions.

<comment><USER14> There was a nice explanation in an article from Ars Technica a few days ago: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/mazdas-skyactiv-x- shows...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/mazdas-skyactiv-x-shows-the- internal-combustion-engine-has-a-future/)

<comment><USER15> That's the Syactiv X which will not achieve 56%. This article is for the following generation (Skyactiv 3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They should probably stop investing so much in an engine that requires fossil fuels to operate.

<comment><USER17> Stopping investing into a technology that is probably going to dominate the industry for the next 25 years might not be too smart. (EVs are coming, but they're quite far from accounting for >50% of the total vehicle sales.)

It's a bit like telling Microsoft in 1990 that focusing on PCs is stupid because mobile computing is coming for sure. :)

<comment><USER18> You call it domination, I call it slow decline.

Many governments have announced that by 2040 it'll be illegal to sell cars with such engines.

They certainly won't be dominating in 22 years.

The question is not "is this business going to be dead" but "when this business will be dead".

So it's more like telling MicroPro to to stop investing in their cash cow DOS- based WordStar and port that app to Windows, because the writing is on the wall.

MicrPro and many other companies were a bit asleep at the wheel during DOS -> Windows transition and that's why there's no MicroPro anymore and there's no WordStar anymore.

Transition to electric motors will take a bit longer but the window to become a significant player in new technology is not infinite.

<comment> semi-extrinsic > Many governments have announced that by 2040 it'll be illegal to sell cars > with such engines.

That's very much incorrect. What they've all said is that it will be illegal to sell cars _with only such engines_. In particular, plug-in hybrids will be allowed, and will probably be the biggest success both commercially and for the environment.

I mean, if I can have something like the latest Mercedes C350e or BMW 530e, but with a bit faster charging and a ~50 mile electric range, that's going to beat an electric 300+ mile range car any day of the week once the subsidies start wearing off (which is a lot sooner than 2040).

<comment><USER18> The estimate is that by 2020 battery prices will come down to make the price of electric engine + battery be the same as price of diesel engine.

Even with relatively slow progress on batteries, they double in density / get half as cheap in about 5 to 10 years.

Add to this that Tesla is aggressively doubling their Supercharging network every year.

If cars today have 200-300 miles of range, in 10 years they'll have 400-600 miles for less money, eliminating the one issue that stands in the way of mass adoption of evs (range anxiety).

Most likely 7-12 years from now it'll make no economic sense to put 2 different engines in the same car i.e. a single electric engine will be cheaper than a hybrid.

And this is based on linearly extrapolating the past. If battery production follows the same curve as wind / solar energy production, we're systematically underestimating progress and things will happen faster.

We're really in Day 1 of mass producing batteries, with volumes (and therefore investments in improvements) scaling way faster than linearly.

<comment><USER19> I thought we don't have enough lithium to transition the world's autos to electric?

<comment><USER20> You thought wrong. Especially with improved (any) recycling processes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tantek Celik on DiSo 2.0 (part 3) - <AUTHOR> http://www.monkinetic.com/2010/05/tantek-celik-diso-20-brass-tacks.html <comment><USER2> I've been after Tantek to explain Whistle (his url shortener) to me for a while now, and I was glad that it fit in with this series of questions. I particularly liked his point about the url being expandable by any third-party because the algorithm is published.

Obviously this prevents some "monetization" of the shortener, but that's the whole point - to prevent your links from being beholden to a single provider.

I'll be continuing the series of interviews as we work through the 10 basic components of Tantek's personal DiSo 2.0 vision.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I haven't heard of the idea of algorithmic link shortening before but it makes a lot of sense.

Found this and Tantek's custom "personal publishing/syndicating/tweeting/updating web application" Flacon (<http://tantek.pbworks.com/Falcon>) really interesting. The implementation on his personal site leaves something to be desired design-wise but I really like the ideas behind it.</comment>


Feedback wanted on Zabibu: the perosnal cloud assistant. - <AUTHOR>

Hi all! I'm new to this group. Together with a friend, I created zabibu.com: a startup to keep all personal things organized. If you want, please take a look at the www.zabibu.com. We are now in beta and you can sign up freely! Let us know!<p>Thanks Matteo <comment><USER2> When I browse to your site, here's what it redirects me to:

<http://app0.zabibu.com/z/>

I run with Noscript on and I'm not about to enable javascript for that. Redirecting my url seems fishy. Redirecting it to that url makes it seem scary - that specific url pattern is very spammy to me. Something like <http://www1.zabibu.com/> is cool but <http://app0.zabibu.com/z/> looks creepy.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's looking interesting from when you start sinking with Youtube etc. Before that I thought it was just another Evernote clone. I'd like to see more examples like that.</comment>


Microservice Prerequisites - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.html#

<comment><USER2> The article is totally buzzword-compliant. It's an important subject being addressed poorly.

Facebook is internally architected something like that. Each Facebook page display involves about a hundred machines. The internal message passing isn't REST, though; it's a real RPC system. Many of the components are written in PHP, and Facebook has a PHP compiler to speed things up.

Security is really tough in such systems. Exactly who's trusting whom, and who authenticates what, is a tough issue. Vunerabilities are usually of the form "A cannot do X, but B can do X, and A can talk to B. Can A induce B to do X?"

More fundamentally, we're still not very good at inter-process communication. There's REST/JSON, which means a lot of parsing. SOAP is generally considered too clunky. Google uses "message buffers" internally, which requires running code through special pre-compilers that understand message definitions. Microsoft, of course, has several systems of their own.

Most OSs don't support message passing well. What you usually want is an inter-process subroutine call. What the OS usually gives you is an I/O operation. (QNX gets this right, but only real-time programmers care. Message passing came late to the UNIX/Linux world, and is decidedly an inefficient afterthought there.

Whether this has much to do with how your development teams are organized, or whether you go in for the "DevOps" mentality (which is usually an excuse for not having a competent operations staff), isn't clear.

<comment><USER3> Well, microservices _is_ the new buzzword. Sadly most people who venture down this path do it using technology they already know: HTTP and REST with JSON even though, once you have a lot of services, that adds up to a lot of overhead.

But ignoring the protocols used for a second, another major problem I see with a lot of microservices architectures are the complete lack of transparency to the operations team or developers once you spin up the system.

What happens if a request gets stuck somewhere in the pipeline? Who will know about it? If it's HTTP REST and the request times out owing to poor request timeout tuning then you have to cascade that failure up the propagation "chain" to the original caller -- something a lot of projects fail to do properly.

Security, as you mentioned, is another bug bear. Sure you log in to the "login service" but do you pass a token around with each request -- again, a lot of teams just superficially add this to the front-end facing service(s) only.

Debugging and logging is really difficult to pull off well. The best I've seen was traceable logging that carried over between microservices by fastidious use of "log namespacing" and timestamping to ensure that server time drift didn't screw up the ordering over time.

Bleh. It's just hard to get right and working but because it's such an easy thing to get started with most don't notice these things until it's too late and you're too invested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article very much on point, and it also emphasizes why you should stick to monolithic architecture for as long as possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have experience with using the microservices style for development, but deploying them bundled into a larger unit (e.g., a single Docker image or virtual machine)?

<comment><USER6> Why would you do this? It throws out one of the major advantages micro- services have over monoliths, that of fine grained small deployments.

<comment><USER7> Performance. The network is the slowest part of most applications.

<comment><USER8> It's true that a datacenter network is slower than RAM, of course, but if you're already dealing with internet latencies, an extra roundtrip within the data center is hard to even measure - see "Latency numbers every programmer should know", [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html).

(I _really_ don't like this fact, aesthetically, but it's usually good business to acknowledge it.)

<comment><USER7> Sure, for most people it isn't an issue. But sometimes it is. E.g. if you're hosting some kind of product that collects or inserts data into customer's websites.

If you are really aggressive about performance you'll have data centers within 100-200ms of all your customers. If you do this, and you buy into the microservices, it doesn't take many inter-service calls to exceed the network latency. On the TechEmpower benchmarks most frameworks struggle to return a static bit of JSON in <50ms. Now imagine 10 services communicating to fulfill a request...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's somewhat of a requirement to also secure your microservices. There are a ton of ways to do it, but bidirectional TLS is often overlooked: [https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/securing-your- microserv...](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/securing-your- microservices-via-bi-directional-tls)

<comment><USER10> I agree that securing the services is important.

I don't think bidirectional TLS is enough in many cases. Defense in depth is required. You need to ensure that when services access other services, they aren't granted wide open privileges because you (hopefully, still) own them.

I would add a reasonable authentication and authorization model to this list of prereqs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can understand wanting fast provisioning of new services if you adopt an architecture that requires lots of new services.

But why would this architecture require 'DevOps Culture' any more than any other architecture?

<comment><USER12> Because you will need to deploy a lot more than a single monolithic application of a single version.</comment></comment>


Show HN: GitMagic – Enforce your GitHub contribution guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://gitmagic.io/ <comment><USER2> The API of your configuration could use some work. Have you looked at the validations present in JSON Schema[1]?

Instead of

      {
        "commit": {
          "message_must_be_imperative_tense": true,
          "message_must_include_prefix": {
            "prefixes": ["feat", "fix", "docs", "refactor"],
            "require_after_prefix": " "
          }
        }
      }

Something like:

      {
        "commit": {
          "message": {
            "imperative": true,
            "prefixes": ["feat ", "fix ", "docs ", "refactor "]
          }
        }
      }

[1] [http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html](http://json- schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. The JSON structure is something we will refine, and right now we wanted to have very explicit rules and not too complex configuration settings. But we will evaluate this along the way, and I like your example :)

</comment></comment><comment> l-p Please don't interfere with the native scrolling behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually don't like forced scroll myself, but I have to say that I'm personally satisfied with the results of this site.

But I hear you and when the site goes from landing page to real website we will make sure to have a nice scroll experience for everyone :)

<comment><USER3> A "nice scroll experience" is no scroll experience, don't even think about the scrollbar, it's the concern of the browser.

Good design is unobtrusive. [5]

Good design is as little design as possible. [10]

[5, 10]: [https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good- design](https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN > users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

AFAICT, there's nothing to try yet.

<comment><USER5> > _For example, blog posts,_ sign-up pages, _and fundraisers can 't be tried > out, so they don't count as Show HNs._

indeed.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It took me a while to figure out that there was a second page with no scrollbar and a non-obvious arrow.

<comment><USER7> Oh, there's a second page! Thanks for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just made the arrow a little larger, might not be enough but it's a start. Later I would like to move to a more traditional site.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, which arrow? I don't see one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tired of all the GitHub drama? We're close to launching GitMagic to fix some of that. If you have any questions, please ask, we're happy to answer them :) And all feedback are appreciated.

<comment><USER8> Any plans to have a tie-in for GitLab repos, as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our plans is to begin with GitHub support only, since it is (at the moment at least...) the most popular service. But later we plan to support both GitLab and Bitbucket too.

<comment><USER9> Sweet action! Depending on how far you want to go with the Bitbucket integration, you could potentially inject warnings on the commit, branch, and pull request pages using the Bitbucket Connect framework.

One of our engineers wrote an add-on recently for enforcing some less automated aspects of CONTRIBUTING.md that you might be interested in too: [https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request- guideline...](https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request-guidelines- for-bitbucket-cloud/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that sounds really cool and would definitely be something we will look into pretty soon :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My main feature request would be a way to enforce a PR must be a fast-forward merge.

I tend to have a small set of words I prefix each git commit summary with (Add, Remove, Fix, etc). If I could verify summaries match that pattern that would be awesome.

Also, if it is possible to enforce the guidelines specified in [http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit- messa...](http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit- messages.html) I'd be so happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great ideas, thanks! Sign up for our beta and we will do our best to make you happy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool. I've wanted to try GitCop (which seems to do something similar) for a while, but didn't get around to it yet.

> Magically enforce your GitHub contribution guidelines.

Looks pretty non-magical and quite straightforward to me. I even get to set explicit rules. Why the 'magic' branding?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad to hear that you get our message! The 'magic' branding is there because everything is done automatically (i.e. it's a cloud service) without the need to install anything on the client side.

And we love magic ;)

<comment><USER7> It's a cloud service? I'm probably missing something, but it looks like a smallish git linter script? I guess I'm not seeing where all the work went to make this something more than an OSS script one could write in two hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I will look into how to make that a bit more clear :) This is integrating with GitHubs build checks and web hooks and we want it to be very easy to get started. A script could do local validation but that would require the contributor to actually run the script :P

<comment><USER12> There is a very well known Git guide named "Git Magic" So you might be losing a bit of googlability wth that name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That seems great, but the name doesn't really mean what the service does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We decided to not pick a too specific name (like something with "contributing"), since in the future we want to provide services that automates other types of tasks related to working with git. Hence the "GitMagic" name :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, this really should be a default functionality of github itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be nice, so help us show what GitHub can be!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Between Hound and Travis... I don't really see a use case for this... yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Travis is mainly for running tests and would require you to write your own validations. And I'm not sure if they have support for validating the descriptions of PRs and issues? Hound looks awesome! But it's only for code style validation. GitMagic will enforce contributing guidelines such as how to write commits, branches, what to include in PR descriptions, issues, and even file structure/naming conventions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is technology a neccessary and/or sufficient condition for development? - <AUTHOR>

I see that many tech guys promising that the Technology especially IT can help non developed countries to develop faster. Is it true?
I feel countries like US were developed much before digital revolution. Arent Health, Education , Roads more important than IT ?
But then what about the roles IT can play in agriculture, employment etc?
As you can see clearly, I am confused. <comment><USER2> Can you go away and come back with an easier question?

Seriously, there are two cases here. First, the idea that developing countries (I believe the term "non-developed" is frowned upon) need certain skills to "compete" in the modern world. Now this is in some way a political or at least philosophical position, because it implies that all countries should seek growth. For example, you can imagine an island country with fertile soil where everybody makes an abundant living through agrictulture or fishing and have access to a reasonable standard of medical care. Do they need IT? Well I don't know. Depends who you ask.

The second case is: for the countries desiring to progress economically, is high-tech a good solution? I think there are some good examples (eg. India, South-East Asia) where the answer does seem to be yes. In particular the reason high-tech (of which IT is one part) is a good choice for a developing country is that it allows you to leapfrog certain historical stages thus eradicating your relative disadvantage faster.

The classic example of this is network infrastructure. The developed countries got network by literally having to dig the ground up and lay cables in order to wire up a city. Now if you were a city in a developing country that only now is getting around to be connected, you can go straight to wireless at a much lower total cost. So, the fact that you are so far behind becomes a comparative advantage - instead of being 20 years behind your developed counterpart you are suddenly only 2 years behind.

Of course the big issue now is energy. Suppose this afternoon someone announces a true renewable energy breakthrough - say a massively efficient but cheap to make solar cell. This kind of technology would allow a developing country to leapfrog centuries of expensive inefficient energy production (coal, oil etc) straight to the best solution. This is the great environmental fear right now - that populous countries like China and India will start laying down "dirty" energy infrastructures before the next best solution is invented.

Do you need high-tech more than hospitals? No. Does high tech help you decent hospitals faster? Many would argue yes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Technology is certainly necessary. Technology is the only way to increase production. Increasing production is they only way to get wealthier, by definition. Not only is it necessary, but technology is also sufficient for development. I'll take development to mean progress on indicators such as GDP as well as life expectancy, literacy rate, and freedom of expression. As I said in the first paragraph, technology is THE way to increase production. But increasing wealth also improves things that seem unrelated to the economy, like freedom of speech, the right to vote, and more. When people are starving, they are desperate for money and will do crazy things to get it. Once they pile up enough money to relax and feel like they have an interest in keeping society stable, they demand (and get) more human rights. South Korea, for example, went from a third-world nation of unproductive farms to a super- productive industrial nation, and, at the same time, became a democracy and a civilized place to live. South Korea just adopted new technologies and the rest followed.</comment>


The Need For A Low Cost iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://lowson.co/blog/cheap-iphone I was getting annoyed at people saying the cheap iPhone was un-apple so I ranted about why. <comment><USER2> _Apple is a for profit company. They work in a fully capitalist view, as opposed to Amazon who will sell everything at cost so you use their services, with no interest in short term profit, or Google who will give products /services away for free or at cost in order to sell ads. Apple sells products, they are expensive and they make a significant profit margin per device they sell._

There is no "capitalist as opposed to..." in this. Apple, Amazon, and Google all are fully capitalist. Some make profits by selling a few things with high margins, others by selling lots of things with tiny margins, others by giving away stuff so other stuff can be sold alongside. Some bank their profits so they can take advantage of opportunities with big piles of cash, some shovel profits right back into expanding profit centers, some spend profits on wild ideas hoping that a few will reap crazy huge rewards. Whichever way, you can't deny all three companies are earning a LOT of profit, in full embodiment of capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER3> You shouldn't render your blog's contents with JS.</comment>


The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds - <AUTHOR> http://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-the-alpha-nerds/ <comment><USER2> When I was at my last gig we had a very active board game community and Diplomacy was eventually brought out. We played twice while I was there and it sowed an unbelievable amount of enmity and discord. It was incredibly fun.

The first time we played a majority of the players had never played before. We got through one "year" a week, with Spring and Autumn troop movements due by the end of the day on Tuesday and Thursday respectively. Then we'd resolve conflicts and submit build or retreat orders. Then we'd plot.

It was really fun but I think it was too fun - I think office productivity seriously suffered for it. Especially considering the amount of time we spent thinking/scheming/talking versus the scarce minutes in the evening actually "playing" the game. Still an amazingly well balanced game once you understand the subtleties. I fared extremely poorly by treating it like Risk and being far too aggressive. On my second playthrough I became much more docile and cooperative, and was thoroughly stabbed in the back for being so trusting.

<comment><USER3> Similarly, I introduced our office to Conquer Club (an online, slow-turn, RISK clone [0]) and it led to such a lack of productivity that it was subsequently banned. Too much fun!

[0]: [http://www.conquerclub.com/](http://www.conquerclub.com/)

<comment><USER4> I have a couple friend groups that I play Warlight [0] with. It can be a slow, massive multi-day game down to a fast paced 2-on-2 "realtime" game.

[0]: [http://www.warlight.net/](http://www.warlight.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back in 2009 I was playing a game with Brian Ecton. My Germany was on the decline -- I'd played the preceding game with the Austrian player and the tournament director erred and put us next to each other again. It was my turn to read the orders and Brian stepped out for a smoke. When I got to Brian's England, I intentionally misread his orders and put his army into disarray. He was a bit cross when he returned to the table.

[http://www.world-diplomacy- database.com/php/results/tourname...](http://www.world-diplomacy- database.com/php/results/tournament_board.php?id_tournament=1245&id_round=2&id_board=4)

<comment><USER6> Do you recall what the criteria were for the awards in the bottom-right of that page? I'm especially curious what one would have to do to merit the title of 'Kissing Pigs' or 'Golden Pickle'.

<comment><USER5> I'll write to Conrad (the tournament director) and see if he can recall.

Edit: 'Drunk' was almost certainly meant literally. 'Golden Pickle' was awarded to Frank who had traveled from the Netherlands. I believe the criteria was "furthest distance traveled".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Resistance is a great bluffing and lying game. I don't think it's enough to lose friends because each game doesn't last very long (roughly 20 min.), so it gives other people a chance to exact revenge or screw other people over in future rounds. However, the length of each game can go up dramatically with arguing and bickering, thus the possibility of ruined friendships.

<comment><USER2> I introduced this to my friends and it proved very popular at first and then . . . very controversial. If you've played with 9-10 players several times you know how insanely difficult it is for the Resistance to actually win. But one round the Resistance won, and the Spies were immediately yelling and screaming. It turned out that one of the chosen Spies (not his first game but his first as a Spy) had decided that working for a totalitarian regime was immoral and that it was unethical to "spy" even though that was his assigned role in the game. Thus he passed the mission for the Resistance every time, not out of a spirit of trolling but out of sincere moral belief - and he indicated that he would always cooperate with the "good guys" no matter what card he drew. The rest of the players were angry, Godwin's Law was invoked in record time, and we never invited him back for game night.

<comment><USER8> Sound like a good reason to punish and ostracize the most religiously ethical people. I hope this was your goal.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like a good reason to not play with people who don't want to play the game for their team.

Seriously, if you can't tell the difference between spying in real life, and spying in a game, you're not the most 'ethical' person, you're the most confused person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd argue that Diplomacy is only a game for "nerds" in a rather peculiar sense. The people who are really good at it are those that are capable of lying/acting convincingly. Face to face, that's quite difficult and falls outside of the skill set of the classic nerd. Online games are another matter. Here, I think long range analysis combined with good writing skills matter more, although the social elements are still in play.

<comment><USER11> We can split hairs over the different kinds of nerds, but I'm interested in how you would describe a group of people who sit in a room for 8 hours in a row while roleplaying foreign affairs on a fin-de-siècle map of Europe ;).

<comment><USER12> Political science students?

<comment><USER13> We played Diplomacy for extra credit in one of my International Affairs classes at Georgia Tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Playing weekly or semi-weekly is the way to go for Diplomacy. Setting aside a full day for it and getting a full complement is too tough.

We played a game of this in the Google NY office this way. It was glorious for a bit -- intrigue upon intrigue upon intrigue. A week between turns really gives you a ton of time to stew over your plans. It got pretty serious; I remember having to call a cubemate (who wasn't part of the game) after I'd left the office and ask him to destroy a planning map I'd realized I'd accidentally left out.

Alas, the whole thing ended in acrimony. One guy who was getting trounced announced he was quitting the game -- in which case his pieces just passively stand their ground and are slowly overtaken -- but then changed his mind and submitted moves the next round after all. Another player called that out as bullshit (and let's be honest, it was kind of bullshit, but it was a friendly game and the rest of us were prepared to let it slide.) It turned into an irate shouting match in the office and the group abandoning the game halfway through. I believe there are still people in the Google NY office that avoid each other in hallways on account of that game.

<comment><USER15> I would argue that tricking people into thinking you were doing nothing is what Diplomacy is all about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my second-to-last year at University, eight others and me implemented Diplomacy as a "scalable web service" in Erlang. The game is hilariously brutal; I've vowed to never play it with my girlfriend. I played it on the web for a while after, but stopped playing, the complete lack of empathy in this game was too much ;) Maybe I should try it again some time.

You can find some documentation here, we were the "Erlang Solutions" project:

[https://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/projektDV/ht11](https://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/projektDV/ht11)

The code is on github: [https://github.com/treacheroustalks/Treacherous- Talks](https://github.com/treacheroustalks/Treacherous-Talks)

</comment><comment><USER17> I never played but want too. If you live near SF and want to give diplomacy a go with a few fellow hackers that don't know each other this Friday evening (the 20th), email me (address in bio) first come first serve - I'll host an event in our office (right off 16th Bart station in Mission). Once we get a small group we can coordinate logistics over email.

</comment><comment><USER18> What an excellent article. I think this needs a documentary, in the style of Wordplay[1] and King of Kong[2].

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordplay_(film)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordplay_\(film\))

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

<comment><USER19> Agreed, it sounds like this game breeds interesting stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We played this a lot when I was younger. The biggest challenge for us was patience. The friend who was the best at it ultimately wound up a tenured political science faculty member in the DC area. Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER21> I learned a lot of my people skills from Diplomacy. It also helped me work out a number of trust issues.

Before someone gets worried about the first statement, it does not mean that I am the kind of person who will betray someone - in fact, all my friends will testify that I am unreasonably loyal even under difficult circumstances. What it does mean is that after playing Diplomacy, I became much more self-aware about what I was doing to build friendships and/or relationships, and what others were doing, and also much more flexible at considering things from other people's point of view and therefore constructing deals that actually work for all parties.

</comment><comment><USER22> For a really long running game that is _guaranteed_ to lose you friends, try Riskopoly ( [http://www.gilwood.org/riskopoly.htm](http://www.gilwood.org/riskopoly.htm) ).

I describe it as Risk with a military-industrial complex.

<comment><USER23> Risk-tego is another, it's just like risk but every time you attack a territory you play a game of stratego to determine the outcome.

<comment><USER24> How about Risk-tego-poly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The ultimate test of endurance is probably _The Campaign For North Africa_ game with a listed play time of 1200 _Hours_ with 10 people.

[http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for- nor...](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for-north-africa)

<comment><USER26> That's insane. I wonder how many matches have been completed of this game.

<comment><USER27> Two more than a world series in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statis_Pro_Baseball](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statis_Pro_Baseball) Statis Pro Baseball?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very interesting.

But I hate this kind of writing.

It's way to long and runs in circles to many times for my taste.

<comment><USER29> I have to agree. I'm sure it's great for those with the time, but there was nothing for those wishing to skim through and get an idea of what the game/story is about. I'm interested in this sort of game, but I already have a lot of long-form in my "To Read" bookmark folder, and a stack of books beside the bed as it is.

<comment><USER18> An ironically lengthy way of saying "tl;dr".

<comment><USER29> Except that if anyone sees this longer explanation, they can realise there are often ways to improve the way they've presented their story and create something to that appeals to a broader range of people.

Things like bullet points, pullquotes, images and so on are a bit like an inline TL;DR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have to put in a plug for Scott Nesin's [http://gamesbyemail.com](http://gamesbyemail.com), which has an implementation of Diplomacy, as well as several other great games.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice!

Has anyone here played War on Terror [http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/](http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/)? Think Risk, but with an Axis of Evil, Terrorists, and a balaclava (not baclava, unfortunately) included in the game pack.

It was also branded criminal by the police - couldn't ask for better promotion: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/war-on-terror- boa...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/war-on-terror-boardgame- branded-criminal-by-police-889287.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> I am always looking for people to play Diplomacy and none of my friends are interested. I think I need new friends.

<comment><USER33> Then when you find new friends, you can play a game... and you will need new friends again.

<comment><USER34> There's no such thing as friends, only people you haven't yet played diplomacy with.

<comment><USER21> Counter: There is not such things as enemies... only people you haven't played Diplomacy with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> We never got into it at my office, but there's another game that offers similar tactics and is playable online, called Neptune's Pride[0]. It offers similar amounts of negotiation (and backstabbing), and we found that the game grew so contentious that people legitimately lost trust with each other in the office. Could be that we're just a sensitive bunch, but it was surely an interesting dynamic change.

[0]: [http://np.ironhelmet.com/](http://np.ironhelmet.com/)

<comment><USER36> Be warned: Neptune's Pride has the fatal flaw (or killer feature, depending on who you ask) of occurring in real time. Later in the game, as it speeds up, players who log in more often gain a tactical advantage.

<comment><USER37> There's a sequel out now, at [http://triton.ironhelmet.com](http://triton.ironhelmet.com) that has the option of progressing time in steps once everyone confirms orders.

So you can set it to 12h steps, get payday every 2 steps, or whatever you feel like. With the right settings, if everyone is active during the day you can get maybe 4 or 5 steps complete and then nothing happening over the weekend.

<comment><USER35> Yep - this is what we ended up playing. Though we did just do it time-based, which also created a bit of a hit on productivity :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So, here's a crazy idea: create an AI to play as one of the players in the web/mobile version of the game. It's a modified Turing test.

<comment><USER39> Cool idea. I'd actually really like to see that. You could start by programming it for gunboard (no-press) games, then expand from there to adding the communication elements. (Which, while challenging, would be much easier than a standard Turing Test, since the scope is limited. Plus, even if a potential ally is able to identify the computer player, they may very well still be willing to ally with it.

<comment><USER9> There are some diplomacy AIs - I worked on a simple one as a project in college. There's a standard for communication and a range of bots already implemented. See the mailing list at [https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dipai/info](https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dipai/info)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We play Diplomacy at our office and I jokingly refer to it as "team building". All said everyone has a pretty good time and can recognize it's a game. We play one move a day and games typically last around a month. I have been certainly been hurt by broken alliances, but I think it's a great character building experience to go trough.

All is fair in diplomacy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Diplomacy. It's interesting that the movement (and support) mechanics are easy, it's the social aspects that are hard.

<comment><USER42> The battle star galactic board game is another game where the social side is the important bit basically one or more of the payers are secretly cylons and have to subtly sabotage the game so that the human side loses.

The fun thing is part way through the game you can suddenly find that you are a cylon and have to switch sides.

The D6 generation is a good podcast that covers a lot of games both board and minatures

<comment><USER43> Or The Resistance, where some hidden spies try to fail the missions. You have to choose the team members for a mission but you don't know the spies ... unless you are the spy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I played quite a bit in college with my friends. The most fun game I ever had was when I allied with the group's worst backstabber for the entire game and we won. The suspense every turn was awesome and the disbelief at the end was even better.

</comment><comment><USER45> Here are the maps from the silliest game of diplomacy I ever played: [http://www.jefftk.com/p/dip-space-nine](http://www.jefftk.com/p/dip-space- nine)

There are many rule variants, but Star Trek is just too much.

</comment><comment><USER46> I used to play about 10 years ago via email with a small group of rotating players. It was always a frustrating, but enjoyable experience. Maybe I'll play again someday.

</comment><comment><USER47> I played Diplomacy once. I ended up foiling a veteran player's plan to screw me over at the end, leading to a two-way tie between us. It was great!

</comment><comment><USER48> This sounds fascinating and the kind of game I'd get a rush from. Is there a popular forum to find other face to face players?

<comment><USER47> Yes! [http://www.webdiplomacy.net](http://www.webdiplomacy.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I played one game of Diplomacy by email.

In preparation for that I read everything I found about (advanced) strategy, all the possibilities that are open to the different countries and so on.

In the end I was probably the only English player who never managed to leave his island...

After that I was so terribly frustrated that I never tried another game.

<comment><USER39> Sometimes it happens. If France and Germany decide come hell or high water they're going to take you out - maybe they've even allied in previous games, so you never had a chance - there really isn't a whole lot you can do (unless you're really lucky with all the other powers). Even so you're not likely to win, but might eek out part of a tie.

<comment><USER50> When you tell your neighbors that it is your first time, they will gut you ever so quickly. New players are usually just too unpredictable and unreliable to trust. Best you can hope for is to promise to be someone's slave and do exactly what they say so maybe you can avoid being the first one eliminated.

<comment><USER39> Or don't tell them it's your first time! :) Even if you're playing in the newbies section online, you could say you've played some FTF games, or email games on a different server or whatever. Once you figure out what power you are, just read the Diplomatic Pouch openings article for that power, and you can fake experience pretty well.

IMO you want to come off as knowledgeable but not _too_ experienced anyway. People are looking for allies who are going to be reliable (and communicate well!), but who won't be too tough to run over when the time comes. So that's what you look like... until you're ready to pull out the knife!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Oh man this game looks right up my alley, any idea how a man on the otherside of the world could play? I don't like the idea of playing by email or mail and I also don't want to ruin any of my friendships

<comment><USER39> You really should give play by email a chance. It can be great fun. Games usually take a few months, with turns generally once a week, sometimes every two weeks. While you could invest more, it certainly doesn't need to take up more than an hour or so a week of your time. In fact... I may have to see if I can find a game now. It's been a few years!

<comment><USER52> Do you know where I could go to find people who are playing it through email?

<comment><USER39> I used to play at DipWorld, but it looks like it's a lot less active lately. It appears that the most active community now is at the Diplomatic Pouch. The site design leaves something to be desired, but after some clicking around, this appears to be a decent place for a new player to start: [http://www.diplom.org/Email/](http://www.diplom.org/Email/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I love Diplomacy and have played it forever, in person, by email, even as kid by snail mail. There is a great variant called 1900 by Baron VonPowell that is actually better. But it is my all time favorite game.

</comment><comment><USER54> If you want a video game that engenders the same kind of backstabbing, tension and mistrust, you might want to give Defcon a go. It's nerve-wracking.

</comment><comment><USER55> Played many years of it with friends... The before D&D claim is dubious on the basis of pooularity.

I've been a big friend of Avalon Hill titles over the years.

<comment><USER56> Regardless, the roots of D&D can be traced back to Diplomacy; Jimmy Maher talks about it here: [http://www.filfre.net/2011/07/dungeons-and- dragons/](http://www.filfre.net/2011/07/dungeons-and-dragons/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I have never played this, it sounds great.

If you are playing over email and one person becomes unresponsive, what is the standard thing to do?

<comment><USER58> There are established deadlines for submitting orders. When someone misses it, one of the following things happens (which one happens is agreed upon before the game starts):

\- units for which orders haven't been submitted just hold still, or

\- whenever anyone's orders are missing after the deadline, the game gets paused and there is an open call for replacement players in a mailing list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Each year for the past 3-5 years me and my friends have been getting together for a weekend to play a few years of WWII. The game that we have been mostly playing is Columbia Games' Eastfront II, which covers the eastern war with Germany and Soviet Russia. It's basically a hex-based map with different terrains, rivers, weather changes, HQ-driven troop mobilization and combat - the rules are abstract but not overly so to uphold an enjoyable immersion. The game also employs fog of war with thick wooden standing unit pieces, which certainly adds to the excitement.

The game is advertised for 2 players, but we went ahead and modded the rules for 6 players + a referee. We made both sides consist of 3 field commanders plus a supreme commander. We looked at the map and divided it into 3 parts: the north, the middle and the south. For each part of the map, a German field commander and a Soviet counterpart would sit against each other and hold command of their own area. They saw only units that moved on their map. We decided that each 4 turns (a turn was a fortnight) the field commanders could all go have a meeting with their supreme commander, discuss strategy and synchronize information. We usually set these meetings to last for about 10-15 minutes.

The role of the supreme commander was to dole out repair points plus reinforcements and to send messages to their field commanders. Each turn the supreme commander could send a message to all of his subordinates, and each turn all of his field commanders could send one message to their supreme commander and one message to their fellow field commander. A message could be intercepted with a possibility of 1/6\. Intercepting the message meant that the referee would toss a die and if it turned out one, he would take it to the enemy supreme commander without the sender knowing about it until the next meeting.

As an addition, the supreme commander had a map, but he had nothing in it except his own unit, which was good for moving singular units, sending paratroops and air strikes. The supreme commander would also get all the dead units brought out to him when units started dying. You would definitely know things were bad when infantry that were at the edge of Moscow 3 turns ago (or so you recall...) were handed to you by the referee!

Last year we upped the ante and tried out EuroFront II by Columbia Games. It was an epic attempt to play the final year of the war with the whole map of Europe, the winner being the one who holds the most Victory Cities (historically notable European cities) in their supply network by May 1945. With over a dozen players we anticipated problems in our message delivery system, which mainly consisted of a two guys gathering a bunch of papers from players and throwing dice for each message per turn per player side.

We opted for an easier solution and I set out to build a simple messaging system. It was a horrible PHP Slim-based Bootstrap webapp, with business rules written in postgresql functions and code structure being an implementation of pasta. I suspected it would be a maintaining nightmare (and it sure was!), but it worked without a problem during that weekend. Everyone loved it, including our refs' feet.

This year the game is Eastfront II and the messaging is modified for two player sides. We will also allow messages to pass through to their original recipient even if they are captured. With this we will experiment whether the turns will become more interesting for the players whose messages are always captured.

Based on this horrid ad-hoc prototype of mine, I'm currently working on building a more generic, a rule-based messaging system for our guys. Definitely more maintainable this time, promise.

Ps. For what it's worth, the ultimate alpha nerd war game seems to be The Campaign for North Africa. I will invite you to read the description of the game as described in Board Game Geek [0].

[0] [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for- nor...](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for-north-africa)

</comment><comment><USER60> don't promote shit titled like this in Hackr News

</comment><comment><USER61> Hmm I thought it would have been BattleTech.

</comment><comment><USER62> I would argue that its a geek game, not a nerd game.

Either way I have wasted dozens of hours playing, and it taught me how tedious other people can be.

</comment><comment><USER63> Why would you play Diplomacy if you can play Twilight Imperium 3, A Game of Thrones the Board Game or War of the Ring instead?

Pretty sure us "alpha-nerds" would rather battle it out in fantasy/scifi settings than with boring old "real world" troops (Here I Stand is excellent if you want that). All of those games are also a lot better imo.

Always thought Diplomacy was pretty meh :)

<comment><USER64> I can't speak to the other games, but similar to Chess and Go, I love Diplomacy because there is zero chance involved in the game. Nothing ever comes down to a dice roll or coin flip.</comment></comment>


Evolution Paradox - Why Some People Are More Attractive Than Others (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.science20.com/news_articles/evolution_paradox_why_some_people_are_more_attractive_others_explained <comment><USER2> I assume the actual journal paper makes more sense, but I don't think this is much of an explanation of it. As I understand it the "Lek paradox" doesn't apply to humans, it only applies to animals that mate in leks.

A "lek" is a kind of display where all the males compete for attention among all the females. The one who wins the lek gets to mate with _all_ the females, while the others go home frustrated. The supposed paradox is then the question of why, if the females always pick the best-quality males, doesn't this erode genetic diversity within a number of generations to the point where all the males are indistinguishable awesome?

While weak analogies between leks and certain forms of human behaviour are obvious, it's really not the same thing; in a lekking species only a tiny portion of the males in any generation will actually procreate. For humans, it is (I assume) well over 50% (varying by culture, no doubt) so the persistence of ugly people is not puzzling.</comment>


Star Wars: Return of the Revenue - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-star-wars-force-awakens-revenue/ <comment><USER2> The new video experience is here. There's a new way to find videos and enjoy the experience of music, See the future of video search here: [http://bit.ly/1TLFsFk](http://bit.ly/1TLFsFk)</comment>


Comparing alternatives to ZenDesk - <AUTHOR> http://www.grobmeier.de/comparing-alternatives-to-zendesk-26052013.html

<comment><USER2> HappyFox is certainly a worthy alternative to Zendesk. Quoting Mashable.com: "Foursquare uses Zendesk, but other popular options include Get Satisfaction and the beautifully designed HappyFox." (<http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/downtime-communication-tips/>)

HappyFox is way simpler and we do have zendesk data import feature that will move your data too.

It is the only product which is time-tested both with large corporates and small businesses. HappyFox was originally a product I launched as Helpdesk pilot, in 2005 with in-premise and traditional licensing model.

Our email integration is simple and unlike Zendesk gives you email integration that works with your domain name right from the start. We were the first ones to launch a free plan that actually has features that you would need like Advanced Reporting and professional support.

We'll soon be launching our new pricing and a switch program that will allow you to make the most of our existing investment into other products.

</comment><comment><USER3> +1 for HelpScout. Their email integration is a god send. Your customers will never know that their support emails are going through a support desk system. It looks and feels like email <-> email communication.

We were using ZenDesk for about 2 months and it was killing my productivity. The web interface was slow and clunky. I dreaded opening support tickets.

With HelpScout I do a lot of the management directly from Gmail. Their web interface is very responsive but I don't normally have to use it.

<comment><USER4> Ditto. I love Help Scout as well. I just started with it last week and it was a pretty easy decision. I messed with ZenDesk last year as well, and it was just too much. Since I do most of my work through Google Apps this was perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use HappyFox and I like it because it provides a simple backend with a clean interface. It's not cluttered with icons everywhere. It just has what you need to respond to tickets and get them closed. It offers the ability to customize the colour.

They offer a hiding free plan underneath their plans and I've used them for my communities ban appeals and couldn't of wanted a simpler solution. Thanks HappyFox!

</comment><comment><USER6> As an aside, it's pretty interesting to note that two out of the three products considered are from startups based in Chennai, India. The startup scene here is very nascent, but I wonder why the help desk business seems to attractive to folks here.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've personally been pretty happy with SalesForce's Desk.com, it offers a great interface, one agent is free and you have the option of flex agents ($1/hr) instead of paying for a full seat every month when you just need an occasional helper.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about RT? It's self hosted and free as in speech AND beer. There are also support packages available from BestPractical if your company needs them.

<comment><USER7> RT doesn't meet the criteria of "easy to use and setup", unfortunately. Great product, but installation isn't anywhere as simple as signing up for these SaaS products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> UserVoice is also an alternative, free for one user.</comment>


Employee #1: Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-amazon/ <comment><USER2> _Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn't figure out?_

 _Shel : Stay up late._

Hahaha. I remember building an online art gallery back in 1996. It was for an internship. I got it because I bluffed and said I knew HTML. After I was hired, I purchased a book on HTML. Turns out, the company's "CTO" did the same thing.

We both learned on the job and stayed up late trying to put that site together. It's almost hard to remember how "primitive" that was now that there's Google and SO.

<comment><USER3> [http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz](http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz)

[https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/71639058321702912...](https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/716390583217029124)

<comment><USER2> So true. So, so true.

So true that I often question technical interviewing practices that look solely for ability to memorize complex algorithms exactly, vs ability to seek out an even better solution and apply it effectively.

<comment><USER4> I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour, I'll be back to check on you in 20 minutes. Go!"

I felt like this was SUCH a better test of my abilities as a professional programmer versus remembering specific algorithms or reciting "best practices" for X, Y and Z.

<comment><USER5> Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code (unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately, most web software seems to already be written in portable languages).

<comment> jon-wood The better solution I've seen to this problem is for them to warn in advance that something like that will happen, suggest bringing your own machine with you, and point you at a skeleton git repository to start working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting:

      Craig: Had you and Jeff stayed close?

      Shel: Not really. When he replaced me in my original job and I
      was moved into the CTO slot, I was nominally in charge of
      architecture, but in fact that just meant rubber stamping
      projects that were 95% complete by the time I saw them. That
      was all after having told me that my job was mine as long as I
      wanted it. And I didn't have resources other than myself to
      work on anything I was interested in either. So I would say we
      were not really on particularly friendly terms at that point.

<comment><USER6> Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

<comment><USER7> I think this was more honorary than anything. It sounds like he didn't necessarily have the skills necessary to be a true executive, but putting him on a team where he's managed by someone else would seem like a slap in the face. This was a decent way to keep him compensated fairly for his past contributions.

I've seen at other companies where people like this are moved into "R&D" so they can keep working on cool projects while the company can do what's needed to grow.

Edit: fixed typo

<comment><USER8> Personally I actually wish more liberal use would be made of this strategy. I've worked at a lot of companies where obstructionist employees are kept in their slots due to management's concern over the personal fallout (both for their relationship with the employee and for the employee's relationships with others).

It's none of my business whether they stay on payroll or not, and I don't mind at all if they do if that's what management desires, I just want them put in a sandbox where they can't do damage anymore. Scoot them over to R&D, give them a title with a nice ring to it, heck, even give them a pay raise, but just keep them out of the way.

<comment><USER9> That's an awful way to burn someone. Better to fire this person or really put an effort to find a better position that he/she really wants.

<comment><USER10> We are talking startups: Your typical early employee that didn't grow past mid level dev is out of position by year four. Even though their options are vested, chances are that can't afford to exercise them, and will be worth zero if they quit. Therefore, firing those kind of people as a matter of course is probably not what they want. You joined early for the great equity (a bad idea in the first place). Imagine how bad it would be if you risked getting fired if you don't grow into a good architect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On modern technology:

"You walk down the streets, you have to weave around people standing there in random orientations in the middle of the sidewalk looking at their cellphones. Then you see people speaking robotically so that their speech recognizer can understand them. Now they are running around in mobs in parks with their phones in front of them trying to catch imaginary animals. I don't necessarily see all that as a positive development."

<comment><USER12> People, or at least children, have been running around in parks trying to catch invisible animals for decades. As adults, it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I.

<comment><USER13> "it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I."

Seriously? Just curious... what age range are you in?

<comment><USER14> Were you asking because of his interests or because of his grammar?

<comment><USER15> What's wrong with his grammar?

<comment><USER14> s/I/me/

<comment><USER15> I'm not a native speaker but I do think "my wife and I" is perfectly legit, although maybe not in use in america.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> amzn-336495 An Amazon employee less than #10 does a seminar about SDE careers at Amazon where he/she brags about how Amazon fired all their early engineers because "they weren't good enough." Yeah the people who got Amazon off the ground weren't good enough. Then he/she talks about how if you want to be promoted you better start sucking up to the people deciding your fate in "smoke filled rooms" because you're wrong if you think it has anything to do with your work. This is supposed to be a seminar on how to get promoted at Amazon. It is truly vile and goes to the core of Amazon's culture. Smart people are only there to be exploited.

So I read this article interested to see how long engineer #1 lasted: 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon.

[https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de- babel#TOC-...](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC- Lisp)

<comment><USER17> It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

<comment><USER18> How do you do, fellow Kaleidan [1]?

We worked together with Eric Benson and Dan Bornstein on ScriptX [2], which was basically Lisp with objects instead of parenthesis.

I found ScriptX quite useful for web programming [3]: "Link Globally, Interact Locally"!

ScriptX's legacy lives on: After Kaleida shut down, John Wainwright, the architect of ScriptX, created a very similar language called MaxScript [4] for 3D Studio Max, which I later used at Maxis for programming the character animation content pipeline for The Sims [5].

[1] [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow- kids](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX)

[3] [http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx- www.htm...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max#Features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max#Features)

[5] [http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/30](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/30)

<comment><USER19> +1 for Don. Thanks for all your hard work on The Sims!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a friend that got an offer to be employee #15 or so, but turned it down because "nobody wants to buy books online!".

<comment><USER21> Ironically there is some truth in that, with moving towards ebooks, selling other shit and of course AWS

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Multiple people have asked about his wealth. In the S-1 it gives you a good overview of the minimum amount of wealth generation potential he had.

His agreement stipulated that he had ISOs for 709,568 shares at a strike price of $.001471.

[http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847...](http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=384706)

"This Amended and Restated Incentive Stock Option Letter Agreement (this "Agreement") amends and supersedes paragraph 2(c) of the Employment Agreement between you and the Company dated October 24, 1994, regarding the grant to you of a stock option (the "Option") for the purchase of 709,568 shares (the "Option Shares") of the Common Stock of Amazon.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation (the "Company") at an exercise price of $.001471 per share (reflects stock split effected on November 23, 1996)."

<comment><USER23> A lot of people would haved bailed during the dot.crash of 2000. Amazon lost was high flyer and lost over 80% of peak value. Who knew it would become atop ten most valuable company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The most important question left unasked :

Did he make enough money to retire after it?

<comment><USER25> Unquestionably! Lets say he had a typical 5%, no conservatively lets guess 1%. So 1% of 366 billion! Let you do the math. On the other hand if he had 10% which would not be unreasonable, he would be very rich.

<comment><USER26> A quote from a 2011 Geekwire article. " Jeff was working on it full-time already, and his wife, Mackenzie, was writing checks every once in a while. But that was it. I didn't get founder's stock."

0\. [http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom- empl...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/)

<comment><USER27> Nope.

[http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage](http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage)

[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom- empl...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom- employee-1/4/)

"So, after five years were up — and my stock was all vested — I probably would have left a little earlier if that had not been the issue.

 _So, did you hang on to all of the shares because Amazon hit a rough patch just after you left?_

"I don't know what the effect on morale inside the company was since I wasn't there. But I did do a lot of selling during those times, because from the outside, without knowing what was going on inside the company anymore, I didn't know if it was going to be a casualty of that era or not, so I cashed out quite a bit of my position. But I did hold on to some of it, and I continue to.""

Probably between 1 and 2%, I would guess. Some of which he cashed out when the stock was at a low. So between what his current shares are worth now and what he cashed out, probably at least $100 million.

EDIT: His foundation has $53 million in assets, so that should give an idea...

[http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/651/65121...](http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/651/651211107/651211107_201412_990PF.pdf?_ga=1.239708291.1265744493.1455540321)

<comment><USER28> A lot of money to be sure, but he'd have an order of magnitude or two more if he were the last cofounder instead of the first employee.

<comment><USER27> Well, he was given the option to put up some money with Jeff at the beginning and declined. I'm guessing that would have doubled his eventual stake...

 _It was all done on a threadbare budget. At first Bezos backed the company himself with $10,000 in cash, and over the next sixteen months, he would finance the startup with an additional $84,000 in interest-free loans, according to public documents. Kaphan's contract required him to commit to buying $5,000 of stock upon joining the company. He passed on the option to buy an additional $20,000 in shares, since he was already taking a 50 percent pay cut to work at the startup and would, like Bezos, earn only $64,000 a year. "The whole thing seemed pretty iffy at that stage," says Kaphan, who some consider an Amazon cofounder. "There wasn't really anything except for a guy with a barking laugh building desks out of doors in his converted garage, just like he'd seen in my Santa Cruz home office. I was taking a big risk by moving and accepting a low salary and so even though I had some savings, I didn't feel comfortable committing more than I did."_

(From "The Everything Store")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> His review of "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

[https://www.amazon.com/review/R3J863C5ZP53BA](https://www.amazon.com/review/R3J863C5ZP53BA)

"I wasn't really planning on reviewing this book, because I was mentioned in it several times and it didn't seem appropriate. But several other people who were also mentioned in the book have already posted reviews, and in fact, MacKenzie Bezos, in her well known 1-star review, suggested that other "characters" might "step out of books" and "speak for themselves".

I was at Amazon for the first 5 years of its existence, so I also have firsthand experience of those times at the company, and I have been a fairly close observer since I left. By and large I found Mr. Stone's treatment of that which I know firsthand to be accurate -- at least as accurate as it is possible to be at this great a remove, and with no contemporaneous documentation of the early chaotic days or access to certain of the principals. Relying on people's memories of nearly twenty-year-old events is of necessity somewhat perilous. Of course there are a few minor errors here and there, but I don't have firsthand knowledge of important mistakes much less anything that appears to be intentionally misleading. But there are a few minor glitches. In my case, I can testify that I did not, in fact, have a bushy beard at age 17 when I worked at the Whole Earth Truck Store & Catalog in Menlo Park. It was a publisher and seller of books and other things, not a lending library. It was in a storefront and was no longer a mobile service operating out of a truck by the time I worked there (p. 32). But I do not think this is a reason to disregard the entire book; it's just some not terribly relevant detail the author got a bit wrong in a way that doesn't change the story materially. MacKenzie listed one error, which didn't seem especially awful or material to me, and then referred only vaguely to "way too many inaccuracies". Without a more explicit list of mistakes it is hard to know what to make of that. Breaking news: a new 372 page book has some errors!

Since Mr. Stone did not have access to Jeff Bezos for this book, but had to rely on previous interviews and the accounts of others, it would be surprising if there weren't a few mistakes regarding his thought processes. As part of my agreement to be interviewed for this book, I was allowed to read a draft of the chapter which covered the time I was there, and I offered a number of corrections, some of which Mr. Stone was able to verify and incorporate. To the extent I am quoted, my quotes are, while not complete, fair and in context. I don't love or agree with everything that Mr. Stone wrote about me -- especially his broader conclusions regarding the circumstances of my departure from the company -- but I do think it was fair and reasonable. I am aware of at least one other interviewee who was also given a chance to check over the chapter in which his story was discussed. I obviously can't know this, but I suspect that if Mr. Stone had been granted access to Jeff Bezos, that he would have extended a similar courtesy. I have a pretty high degree of confidence that Mr. Stone made a significant effort, and did what was in his power, to make the book accurate.

The irony is, of course, that by reviewing the book as MacKenzie Bezos did, she has brought an immense amount more attention to it -- there are dozens of articles referring to her review via Google News this morning -- and its sales rank has shot up considerably. The book is not a fawning hagiography, but it is also hardly a completely negative account either. It describes not only Amazon's ultra-hardball business practices, but the better aspects of their services and products as well. To the extent of my knowledge it is a pretty realistic account, though necessarily incomplete. Of course Mr. Stone has his own point of view, and of course he does what nearly all biographers do, which is to impute thoughts and emotions to the people he writes about. It would be mighty dull reading without that, but I think readers are generally smart enough to understand that when they read biographies, especially unauthorized biographies, the author has to recreate some kind of persona to make the subject appear life-like. That doesn't make it fiction. This was written as a business book for a popular audience anyway, not as an academic treatise, so expecting every "Bezos thought..." to be footnoted, or couched in hypothetical language, is not realistic.

Especially in comparison to the sad collection of awful books that have been written on this subject, this one is much more detailed, more interesting, and a lot more deeply reported. Sure, there is plenty more that could be written about, and maybe someday somebody will. If and when that happens, I can only hope it is also "unauthorized" and not sanitized by a corporate PR department, and that some real investigative journalism is done, like Mr. Stone did here."

</comment><comment><USER29> >We were even talking about possibly locating it in Santa Cruz. This was in spring of '94. Jeff went back home to New York and started thinking about where he wanted to locate. We were looking at office space in Santa Cruz but as he learned more about mail-order business he eventually decided it made more sense to be in a smaller population state or one that didn't charge sales tax.

How California lost out on hosting Amazon because of taxes

<comment><USER30> Not true. Washington has a high sales tax rate. Washington won out because of its smaller population.

<comment><USER31> no income tax in Washington, as well. B&O[0] taxes can make up for that, though.

[0] [http://dor.wa.gov/content/findtaxesandrates/bandotax/](http://dor.wa.gov/content/findtaxesandrates/bandotax/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Well, yeah. Those days were still before everything that's happened with glorifying startups. If you were going to do a startup business, there wasn't a huge expectation that it was going to be glamorous in any particular kind of way. You were going to work really hard and maybe it was going to work, though probably not._

Indeed.

Some might even go so far as to say:

      if (glorifying_startups > BUBBLE_MAX) { kaboom(); }

Anyway, great stories!

</comment><comment><USER33> > He connected us with Jeff because he knew that Jeff was going to leave to > start a web-related business that he had analyzed for this hedge fund. For > whatever reason, that company didn't want to pursue it but Jeff did.

This makes it sound as if (i.e., connotes that) the idea for Amazon was DE Shaw's, not Jeff's. Is this true?? I was under the impression that Bezos personally brainstormed a bunch of ideas for businesses that he thought would be useful with the new internet -- with books being low on the list -- and then, over time as more analysis was done (by Jeff), it rose to the top. I'm sure he talked with fellow DE Shaw employees about his thought process along the way. But the idea was his.

I got this from internet folklore + reading the Jeff Bezos bio that came out a few months ago. Am I right or wrong here? I find this historical fact pretty interesting, so want to get it right :)

<comment><USER34> The "idea for Amazon" being "bookshop" \+ "on the internet" is not a something that can or should be owned or protected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > For one reason or another, sorting out architectural issues to scale more > gracefully was something I could never convince Jeff to allocate resources > to do. There were always too many customer-facing features that needed to be > developed.

Some things never change.

</comment><comment><USER36> Prior discussion from the Geekwire article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122)

</comment><comment><USER37> I can't imagine how much he would worth now if he got any stock option like the employees of today's startups.

</comment><comment> enahs-sf Go Banana Slugs!

</comment><comment><USER38> Woah that last question and answer...

</comment><comment><USER39> "Shel Kaphan was the first employee at Amazon. _He is currently pursuing personal interests and still living in Seattle._ "

Yes bro, live the dream.</comment>


Learn Computer Graphics with Processing - <AUTHOR> http://www.processing.org/learning/

<comment><USER2> I had to do a Processing group project course as part of my CS degree.

While it's a nice toolkit for doing very basic visualizations of data, it's a pain in the hole to do anything more advanced than that.

They made us use it to develop a GUI application with text input, buttons, tables, and graphs, in order to visualize some IMDB-style movie ratings data.

Unfortunately it's absolute crap for doing things like that. I basically ended up implementing GTK in it, with widgets rendering to buffers and having a hand-rolled DOM-style event system. I implemented scroll views on my own, and used them to create text input boxes and scrollbars. While I'm personally proud of making it actually work, it was a horrifying experience to do using the really basic tools provided.

The IDE that's included with Processing is also really awful. It can't do indentation correctly, doesn't work at all in tiling window managers, and seems to make people write horrible code. Walking around the labs trying to help people, I found that the vast majority of people's bugs were missing curly braces and things indented wrong simply because of the awfulness of the text editor.

If you want to do anything useful in it, you need to import core.jar into Eclipse (or do it on the command line) and do it in Java. It seems that the processing compiler is really just a small preprocessor over Java that wraps the whole thing in 'public class Main implements PApplet {' and '}' and replaces #FFFFFF with 0xFFFFFF.

I also used processing to make a tetris game (<https://github.com/sipefree/setris>), which was much easier than doing a GUI application, but I really didn't get any decent drawing performance on non state-of-the-art hardware.

TL;DR it's nice but a pain in the hole.

</comment><comment><USER3> Processing is excellent and I have used it extensively. I have also used Nodebox, which is something similar but in Python: <http://nodebox.net>

Most recently however I have switched to using Field. I'm not a huge fan of Java syntax, so being able to write Processing apps in Python/Jython via Field is a big win for me.

<http://openendedgroup.com/field>

There are lots of features I haven't even touched in Field yet...

<comment><USER4> This is the kind of thing I read HNN for - stuff I never even knew I needed. Do I understand correctly that Field lets you build graphical representations _of your code_? Kind of like ... graphical literate programming?

This is where my wife would say "Jézus Mária és minden szentek". It's ... full of stars ...

<comment><USER3> You can attach code to visual elements and then "scrub" across them in real time, a bit like how a DJ would scratch a record.

You can also embed sliders and colour-pickers etc. directly in your code to give you even more ways to modify things.

Yes, this is as amazing as it sounds!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found processing powerful and really easy to pick up. It is also very easy to port from processing to javascript (processingjs.org)!

</comment><comment><USER6> Processing is pretty cool, I messed around with it a while back. Problem is, once you start making complex enough sketches, you hit a point where it would be really useful to have a debugger, and last I checked processing didn't provide that.

I expect you could probably debug it with java tools somehow, but given that I only learned java via processing on a lark, I didn't explore that path.

<comment><USER7> You can do processing in Eclipse to get this.

<http://www.processing.org/learning/eclipse/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Processing is amazing. It's the only "open" substitute for Flash as a cross- platform dynamic graphics generation tool.

Learning Processing gave me the confidence to pursue C and Objective-C.

</comment><comment><USER9> I highly encourage playing with Processing.js: <http://processingjs.org/> It's art on a web browser!

</comment><comment><USER10> processing is indeed my choice for graphics. I tend to use ruby & clojure processing libraries. <https://github.com/rosado/clj-processing> <https://github.com/jashkenas/ruby-processing></comment>


Google releases Chrome extension that alerts users of breached passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/google-password-checkup-cross-account-protection/ <comment><USER2> I read the link but did not find any explanation of how the extension checks your login/password against the 4 billion known compromised credentials, without exposing your login/password to a third party.

<comment><USER3> It's part of the under the hood image which gave a brief explanation

<comment><USER2> What under the hood image?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what this will mean for Have I Been Pwned. This is essentially the same service, but with the behemoth of google behind it.</comment>


Ask HN: What are Amazon RDS (multi-AZ DB hosting) alternatives? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Galera cluster. It's a synchronous replication library for the mysql family of DBs. With haproxy it makes a highly available setup pretty easy... Depending on the latency between dc it can be pretty good. You may want to have asynchronous between dc as a standbye if there is a lot of latency

<comment><AUTHOR> Just read an article about it ([http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2013/09/24/from-mysql- mmm-...](http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2013/09/24/from-mysql-mmm-to- mariadb-galera-cluster-a-high-availability-makeover)), seems awesome; gonna take a deeper look at it. Thanks !</comment></comment>


Facebook Overtakes Yahoo: Now the Second Most Visited Site in U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/facebook-unseats-yahoo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29 <comment><USER2> Every so often an article crops up discussing Yahoo's popularity, and I am again and again amazed at the fact that so many people still visit Yahoo in general. I haven't used their portal since late 1999, and I don't know many other people who do. There are a few ancient relics out there who still use yahoo mail, but even they seem to be fewer and further between (somehow gmail just appears to be more...professional, My friends would put gmail on their resume, but would not be caught dead with a yahoo mail account... it is akin to a hotmail account for professional purposes)...

I would _really_ love to see a thorough study of yahoo demographics and traffic driven, as well as how much of it is actually through partnerships (in Canada, Rogers partners with yahoo, so they kind of force feed you a lot of their services through the yahoo portals) and not direct yahoo traffic.

<comment><USER3> As an ex-Yahoo (I quit this week), I can tell you our demographic in two words: flyover country.

Here's a demographic study on Google vs. Yahoo from 2 years ago: [http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather- hopkins/2008/02/yahoo_...](http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather- hopkins/2008/02/yahoo_search_draws_younger_aud.html)

Google's big groups: affluent suburbia, upscale America, rich small towns. In short: you, probably.

Yahoo's big groups: struggling societies, blue-collar backbone, remote America. In short: middle America (and also poorer urban folks).

Within Yahoo, the general consensus is that our biggest market is middle-aged housewives from the midwest. This is a big group, although as the study points out we actually trend younger than Google -- this is because our media properties, likes games, sports, and IM, attract teenagers, a market Google doesn't really serve.

While a certain amount of traffic is driven through partnerships, it's nowhere near big enough to account for Yahoo's enormous volume. Although they're not new or cool, properties like the Yahoo.com frontpage, Yahoo News (bigger than CNN and the NYTimes combined), Sports (bigger than ESPN), Finance (by far the biggest) and Mail (40% of the market) absolutely dominate their respective categories and, despite the general perception of Yahoo as a company in decline, are mostly holding steady or growing slowly in terms of audience.

The selection bias amongst tech professionals in their perception of Yahoo is a huge barrier to Yahoo's hiring, acquisition, and new tech launches -- simply put, the tech community doesn't use our products, and as a result, they believe _nobody_ uses our products.

It simply isn't true. Yahoo isn't growing as fast as Facebook -- hence being overtaken -- but it's still growing and attracting new users every day, both domestically and worldwide. It's just not doing so in a particularly new or exciting way.

<comment><USER4> _The selection bias amongst tech professionals in their perception of Yahoo is a huge barrier to Yahoo's hiring, acquisition, and new tech launches -- simply put, the tech community doesn't use our products, and as a result, they believe nobody uses our products._

Is that not considered worth fixing by the Yahoo leadership? Having good support from early adopters seems pretty important when you're a tech company...

<comment><USER5> Yahoo is old enough and big enough now that it's worth it for them to consider becoming a GE or a Walmart. Ubiquitous with everybody _but_ early adopters. And I know that plenty of very good engineers work at GE (and Walmart corporate for that matter, their transaction volume and business intelligence systems are insane).

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, the notion that Yahoo management could decide to do something and then do it makes me laugh and laugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo,+facebook&ctab=0&ge...](http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo,+facebook&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

<comment><USER8> [http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo%2C+facebook%2C+facebook+log...](http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo%2C+facebook%2C+facebook+login&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

<comment><USER9> <http://google.com/trends?q=facebook+login,+login>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In the first month of 2010 ... Facebook's traffic rose to 133.62 million visitors" <http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/facebook-unseats-yahoo/>

"More than 400 million active users" <http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>

<comment><USER11> Surprisingly enough the US isn't the only country in the world :P

<comment><USER10> Ohh yeah, I forgot Compete was US only. How especially useless.

For Tipjoy, Compete tracked each site that had our javascript or iframe. So any widget company is being extremely over counted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey, people are primarily interested in other people. Go figure.</comment>