Entrepreneurism Is Overrated - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/entrepreneurism-is-overrated/ <comment><USER2> I think the author fail to distinct between how "entrepreneurism" and "venture backed business" differ.

A one man consultancy operation is as much entrepreneurism as serving billions of users world wide.

I think we have this misconception that success mean you need to have hockey stick growth on bunch of metrics, anD that you must make your investors 10x return on their investments.

Fundamentally the wrong approach. As an entrepreneur I don't strive to "make money", I strive to learn, adapt, and survive. Money and success depends solely on how well I can iterate those three things.

<comment><USER3> Well said. I should add that as an entrepreneur you don't have to work for some moronic boss or organization. Bearing in mind that if you employ anyone, then you may be it. Either way, this is a biggie for me.

And of course there's always a boss somewhere, whether it's the client or the bank or something else.

<comment><USER4> > And of course there's always a boss somewhere, whether it's the client or > the bank or something else.

Yes. To paraphrase Don Lancaster, it's better to get one nickel each from 100 different sources than 100 nickels from a single source. When someone is supplying all your nickels, they begin to think they own you in some way and will dictate how you do business (for instance, by requiring you to work in a particular place and time). When you get one nickel from each, then you are free to get rid of the sources that become overly demanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> __" The most successful people I know didn't do it with entrepreneurship, but rather they got good-paying jobs, kept expenses low, and invested whatever was left in the stock market or real estate, taking advantage of compounding" __

Yea, this guy doesn 't get what it means to be an entrepreneur. It is not just about the money. It is an itch that has to be scratched. It is an addiction. Only real entrepreneurs feel that itch. The rest are wantrapreneurs.

Entrepreneurs create something of value. They create a product/service that solves problems. The problems can be big/small but a business cannot exist if it doesn't solve a problem. They love creating teams and putting a bunch of people together to achieve something. Big or small. Unicorn or bootstrapped. Doesn't matter. What matters is that they created something that will exist for some time and leave a legacy (hopefully). Entrepreneurship has nothing to do with just making money or compounding or playing it safer. It is in fact complete opposite. Getting rich as an entrepreneur is literally a side effect. Yes, that is one way to get rich as well but if you just want to be rich with minimal risks, there definitely are better ways.

So yes, it is overrated for those who really don't have the itch. Like I said, you can make good money doing many different things and probably with better probability. But that is not what entrepreneurship is all about. Not even close.

<comment><USER6> > Yea, this guy doesn't get what it means to be an entrepreneur. It is not > just about the money. It is an itch that has to be scratched. It is an > addiction. Only real entrepreneurs feel that itch. The rest are > wantrapreneurs.

Nice gatekeeping. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who are doing it for purely the money.

<comment><USER5> I know. That is why I said not _just_ about money.

<comment><USER6> > Only real entrepreneurs feel that itch. The rest are wantrapreneurs.

Implies that people that do it for only money are 'fake'. This is the gatekeeping part

<comment><USER4> Yeah, there is a taste of the No True Scotsman fallacy there, certainly.

That said, I've known and worked with a shedload on entrepreneurs over the decades, and I honestly can't remember a single one that was doing it purely for the money.

In my experience, people who are driven purely by money avoid starting businesses. They tend to invest in startups or get great-paying jobs in established businesses.

I think the reason is that starting a business is a high-risk activity that will consume pretty much all of your time and energy. You need to be driven by something more than just money in order to be willing to do that.

If you're just about money, there are much easier and lower-risk ways of going about doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-c-hewitt >Overall, entrepreneurship is overrated. 5 successes for every 100 failures

This is so ridiculously untrue. There are so many businesses you can run that are almost impossible to fail. There are so many failures that are actually just "OK" in that they break even or lose a little money or whatever but don't actually cause you any problem to wind down.

You have to have a certain personality type to do well as an employee and you need to fit a certain mold that employers demand. As an entrepreneur you just have to give your customers and clients what they want and nothing else really matters. You do not even really need many employees to make a very good living doing a whole lot of different things.

If anything, being an employee is overrated particularly when people have career instability in midlife. Unexpected expenses like divorce and medical crisis often hit employees and people in general very hard because it both makes them less employable and disrupts their retirement plans. As soon as an oldster has a major gap in their resume, their ability to continue to ride on the employee gravy train diminishes by a massive degree.

No doubt you can live well on a good salary and investments, but it is not the best option for everyone nor is it the only option. It is the best option for a certain kind of personality but not for everyone. I know people who dream of starting businesses but are employees but all their side projects suck and don't go anywhere in part because they are just not suited for independent business.

<comment><USER7> >There are so many businesses you can run that are almost impossible to fail.

Can you give examples of some of these businesses?

<comment><USER8> It's not that failure is eliminated, but you can run a business with almost no risk or capital exposure. If that business fails, you walk away with no damage done.

<comment><USER9> >capital exposure

Really, what type of companies are those? I've always seen the comment of, "there are so many more ways of making money than X" without the actual proposition of said companies. Hell, even Sam Altman said it in the Stanford Start-up class, but didn't give any examples.

<comment><USER10> Small consultancy or web dev business. Your risk is the cost of a laptop and your time.

<comment> j-c-hewitt Right. If you bill one hour and don't have to issue a refund, you're in the green. Nearly impossible to mess up. Harder to mess up than being an Uber driver with lower capital requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A hairdresser or a gardener is an entrepreneur too. I dont know where this moronic idea that everyone wants to create some new Facebook or Google just because they want to be on their own.

What happened to growing a sustainable business around the craft you believe you are good at?

<comment><USER12> No, the hairdresser/gardener/accountant etc is self-employed. It's a spectrum, but basically it goes from self-employed but not novel all the way across to world-changing. Both are self-employed, but to the difference between the hairdresser and Elon Musk or Steve Jobs isn't scale. It's novelty.

<comment><USER13> If so, then Microsoft was not an enterprise and Bill Gates was not an entrepreneur when they started. After all, they bought their software and sold for and established company. Zero novelty involved.

(In that vein, almost all enterprises failed, the second coming of the innovation is where things usually happen. Or later.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is just the unfocused ramblings of someone who works in finance and is convinced it's the best possible option.

If your only metric for success is money and you aren't particularly creative that's almost certainly true.

If you live in New York and have wandered into the wrong bar or dinner party a couple times you'll find this sort of self-satisfied pseudo-intellectual rant from a young finance guy pretty familiar.

<comment><USER15> It may be unfocused, but it makes a valid point that is applicable to the masses of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who attempt to create the next unicorn and fail on a yearly basis.

If all you want to do is make money and you're a smart quantitative graduate from a good school, go into finance, because the expected value there is higher and less volatile than building the next unicorn.

The value systems of these young graduates in New York and SV are one in the same -- they are both people who primarily value money. But, the Silicon Valley kid is the one who's wrong about the best solution.

Now, if you're a fresh college grad who values things other than money, like contribution, autonomy, creativity, innovation, etc., then startups are a better fit.

We can sit here and make value judgments, but in my experience, it's impossible to change someone's value framework when they don't want to. So, might as well point them in the right direction.

<comment><USER16> There's no reason to "go into finance." Just get a decent paying job, save, and invest. In some industries this is difficult... but anyone in tech can do this and become a millionaire in 10 to 15 years.

<comment><USER15> The reason to "go into finance" is you can expect on average to become a millionaire in 4-6 years instead of 10-15 years. So, do that, if you can and all you care about is money. Note: this only applies to smart, quantitative graduates from good schools.

<comment><USER17> The irony is you've deviated so far from the average population that it's worthless to tell people to just "do this" because virtually no one is listening.

Yeah, if you come from a good school, got a job with no experience and a degree with no loans, and you are 'smart', you can easily become a millionaire. I'm sure all 3 people with these qualities are thanking you right now.

Actually, you will not become a millionaire within 4-6 years of graduation. That's ridiculous.

Graduates do not get paid 250k p/year. Not even in finance positions. And reliable stocks are too long term of an investment to expect a payout in 4 years with no risk. You live in a fantasy world, sir.

<comment><USER15> >> Graduates do not get paid 250k p/year. Not even in finance positions.

You're right. They make more when you factor in bonuses — in some cases double that.

I'm guessing you aren't in the industry or have an outdated perspective. In recent years, the competition for ML talent at hedge funds has become fierce and compensation has skyrocketed.

<comment><USER17> [https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Data-Scientist-Hedge-Fund- Sa...](https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Data-Scientist-Hedge-Fund- Salaries,-New-York-NY)

(quantitative analysts do not differ much from this in salary, but youre being to vague with your job titles so im not sure what you mean)

Either way, you are ridiculous. Unless this magical position requires more advanced knowledge in which case your claim about it being a simple "finance" position is wrong. Not even true in machine learning either. At this point it's no longer a straightforward and safe career path like you said it would be. Maybe you misunderstood and thought we were talking about PhD graduates. My point still stands.

Please, please, do not mislead people down career paths.

<comment><USER15> Even if we work with averages, it takes on average 2 years [0] to make it from entry level quant at a hedge fund to senior analyst. Senior analysts make on average $750k/yr [1] in total compensation (primarily bonus based) at a mediocre hedge fund. The expected value after 6 years even at a less than mediocre hedge fund puts you north of a million post-tax.

The typical track is 2 years as an analyst @ $200K/year and then 4 years as a senior analyst @ $750k/year. Do the math.

[0]: [http://www.streetofwalls.com/finance-training- courses/hedge-...](http://www.streetofwalls.com/finance-training- courses/hedge-fund-training/hedge-fund-analyst/)

[1]: [https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/266401/the- salaries...](https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/266401/the-salaries-and- bonuses-of-investment-professionals-at-large-hedge-fund-compensation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >Overall, entrepreneurship is overrated. 5 successes for every 100 failures

If failure is defined as going out of business, and success is defined as surviving, then the real five year survival rate for new businesses is ten times higher than the author has written.

[https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small- busine...](https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small-businesses- fail)

<comment><USER13> Surviving is not enough, you need at least sustainability and preferably profit and growth.

That said, a business that is alive for 5 years and not running on VC funding for that time is probably sustainable in medium term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Personally I have found it a bit sad that in the recent decade people have been so lured by the wealth and glamour of popular startup culture that we have forgotten the value of being in service to others. To master one's craft for the benefit of others is an egoless endeavor that enriches the soul and not just the wallet.

<comment><USER20> There is something to be said for an apprenticeship relationship that teaches the respect for learning, method, quality and dedication that a skilled craft requires. However an "enriched soul" doesn't appear anywhere on the list of things I'd be willing to say about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author presupposes the goal of being an entrepreneur is getting rich. Yet his outlier examples all infamously eschewed lavishesness. They were about building something to impact humanity.

No doubt many successful entrepreneurs have a goal of wealth in mind, but for what aim? I can justify my efforts at financial independence to live freely and not to live under any conditions which compromise my personal ethics, as one priceless example.

</comment><comment><USER22> >> if I had to choose between putting a large sum of money, say, $200,000 into a small business, which has a 90% chance of failing within 5 years, or the S&P 500, the choice is obvious..

Unfortunately, I've come to think that investing in the stock market (especially index funds) is unethical because it gives more power to corporations to lobby for regulations which will further distort the market, increase centralization and increase failure rates for small businesses. It's a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without mega-corporations, small businesses would have a much better success rate and consumers would benefit.

Blindly investing in the S&P500 is just feeding the corporate machine. You're giving real money to real companies and you don't know what they're doing with it. In my view, large index funds should be outlawed completely.

<comment><USER23> > You're giving real money to real companies and you don't know what they're > doing with it.

You're really not. You're more than likely buying some other investor's shares. Companies aren't constantly raising money on markets, if they did, shares would get incredibly diluted. Almost all volume is between investors.

<comment><USER24> Most of those sellers are stock market specialized institutional investors who have mostly those same problematic motives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel like I am reading an article from someone who never has run their own business. You start a tech company because you want to do something new, not to get rich.

Further, I don't think it's that uncommon for entrepreneurs to see the employer-employee relations as the following:

\- being an employer is a status in which you take risks

\- being an employee is a status in which you avoid risks

Blaming the other for their current status is dumb, regardless of on which side you are.

<comment><USER26> Definition of entrepreneurship in English: The activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/entrepreneurshi...](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/entrepreneurship)

<comment><USER27> Is it your belief that it is better to make a loss rather than make a profit in return for one's labor?

Do you consider making a profit as opposed to making a loss to be equivalent with "getting rich"?

Do people have a right to be paid for their work that benefits others?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The lack of a byline is incredibly telling, I wouldn't attach my name to this drivel either.

> _just get a 6 figure job and invest in things created by entrepreneurs > because the market is only going up, up up. But don 't be an entrepreneur > yourself._

Y'all got any of them 6 figure jobs lying around back there?

For a 24 year old? One with job security, so like series C or later? I want to get paid, but not take any risks.

<comment><USER29> If you're willing to live in a densely populated metro area (where 100k doesn't go as far as you'd think) you just have to learn some hot skill and how to interview.

100k is north of entry level but certainly not a senior paycheck in Denver. If you can explain blue/green deploys, know how http works, and can use terraform to build out a "best practices vpc" then all you really have to do is tell recruiters that and they'll get you lined for interviews where the hiring manager won't balk at 100k.

It feels like there are Devops and Security hiring managers all around who would love to talk to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow I never knew Bill Gates had a multi million dollar trust fund. Kinda puts the drop out of Harvard and start a software company with your friend in perspective. [https://philip.greenspun.com/bg/](https://philip.greenspun.com/bg/)

</comment><comment><USER31> While I generally agree with the op's sentiment (if your goal is to gain financial independence, a high income and saving+investing will get you to that goal with less risk than starting a company), it's not really certain we'll be seeing 15% or even 5% annual returns on S&P 500 for much longer.

The short term (10 years to retirement) plans are not going to work if there is another global recession, especially if it's a prolonged one. And this time around there isn't much firepower left for financial manoeuvring (QE+lower interest rates)

</comment><comment><USER32> The word "entrepreneur" has lost all meaning, and I say "good riddance". When someone asks you "what do you do" do you answer "I'm an entrepreneur"? If so, ask yourself why? Because you haven't answered the persons question, you've only stroked your own ego because you believe saying "entrepreneur" has a certain cache, which has been destroyed by everyone with an idea calling themselves an entrepreneur.

Drop the pomp and just be what you are. I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm a software engineer that runs a tech startup that is creating a new type of media. That actually tells the person what you are doing. Other professions describe what they do. A lawyer, they practice law. A doctor, they keep people healthy. A chef, he cooks food. An entrepreneur... a well, I run a business. Why? what does the business do? what do you do? Running a business can mean so many different things (ok, sure there are all types of lawyers and doctors too, so I can play devils advocate to my own BS).

But seriously, why do we need this word? I cringe when anybody calls me an entrepreneur, and I recently agreed to be on the panel of a tv show about new media. I got there to find out the show was called "The Entrepreneurs". I cried...

<comment><USER4> > When someone asks you "what do you do" do you answer "I'm an entrepreneur"?

No, I say "I run a software company".

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >The median success for the typical podcast, Amazon seller, or self-published author in terms of income, after one factors in the number of hours involved and start-up costs, amounts to less than minimum wage.

Potentially for the podcast and self published author, those are both highly saturated niches. But I don't believe that's the case for Amazon sellers. I know many people who make 6-7 figures a year profit on Amazon, well above minimum wage.

<comment><USER34> Do you think there might be due to the availability heuristic though?

<comment><USER33> Could be, I see a decent number of people who aren't terribly talented doing ok, though. I don't think the median attempt at doing it full time ends in under minimum wage.

<comment><USER35> I'm surprised didn't expect those figures for Amazon sellers, sort of seems like a saturated marketplace with razor margins for most sales. Would you be willing to share a bit more detail on what kinds of things these fairly successful Amazon sellers you know of sell on the site?

<comment><USER33> I know people doing many different categories. One guy doing a million a month gross just in clothing. One guy doing used DVDs and making over 1k/day profit. Many people doing wholesale in electronics, toys, grocery, health and beauty, pets, and others.

I'm doing electronics and toys and have done as much as 500k gross in 30 days at peak.

<comment><USER35> But the competition must be ferocious for such generic things, which is why Im so surprised by these profit margins. I don't mean to pry with too many questions but are these the sort of sales and margins created even by sales of more or less generic products or do these people put heavy effort into positioning themselves differently?

<comment><USER33> For wholesale it's difficult to position yourself differently than anyone else, you need to get stuff at the right price. I'll have suppliers with thousands of products and I only buy ten of them, have to be very selective.

Other people buy from stores at discounted prices, or any number of different sourcing methods.

<comment><USER35> Sincere thanks for the followup. Interesting points to consider. I'll have to look into products/providers more. Any general sources you'd recommend?

<comment><USER33> Attend trade shows for wholesale and talk to potential suppliers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Judging by the comments, a lot of people value entrepreneurship for the personal freedom and autonomy.

The article suggests being able to save 89k per year. Under reasonable assumptions, 7.5 years of saving at this rate will support an income of 31k / year (the median US salary) for the rest of your life, leaving you with ~50 years of runway for whatever else you care to do.

This is especially interesting if the thing you actually want to do is something that is valuable to society but not profitable eg maintaining free software or raising a child.

[https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=12...](https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=120000&initialBalance=0&expenses=31000&annualPct=5&withdrawalRate=4)

</comment><comment><USER23> "Entrepreneurism" is the only way to make money in many industries. Things exist outside of the internet. For instance, restaurants, which are one of the nation's largest employers, which everyone spends money on, but where workers are often paid very poorly.

For example, I can take the $200k in the article, build a small restaurant, and expect it to do $500k-$1m in revenue per year over the next decade. Given good management and a reasonable lease, it'll net 10-20% per year, plus pay my salary and those of a few other people.

Hair dressers, landscapers, any construction really, and lots of other industries benefit from entrepreneurs. Yeah, moonshot tech companies usually fail, but that doesn't mean "entrepreneurism" is overrated.

</comment><comment><USER37> Lives are complex and have many related factors. Leaving the corporate world to make and sell things on my own has changed everything about my life. It is true that I have less money, but it is also true that I have vastly more focus and don't spend time on things I consider irrelevant. Despite the financial losses involved becoming an independent business person greatly improved my quality of life.

</comment><comment><USER4> > The most successful people I know didn't do it with entrepreneurship, but > rather they got good-paying jobs, kept expenses low, and invested whatever > was left in the stock market or real estate, taking advantage of > compounding.

The author here is clearly defining "successful" as "wealthy". That means that he isn't talking to entrepreneurs like me, though, as I define it rather differently.

</comment><comment><USER38> He's comparing the best employment outcome ( cushy working conditions, a six- figure salary, and generous stock options ) with worst entrepreneurism outcome ( failure, small commodity business, too much work ).

There is a BIG difference between what is called "small business" and "startup". Small business doesn't scale, while startup starts small, but it can scale globally and create better moat ( scale, network effects, brand ).

People here are interested in startups, not small business.

Tech entrepreneurism is actually underrated since nowhere else do you have low starting costs, global audience, low marginal costs etc. ( [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3324-commercial- freedom](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3324-commercial-freedom) ) .

</comment><comment><USER39> It is and it isn't. For who? Everything is relative. Anyone that says X is Y is fundamentally biased and as such 50% right and 50% wrong.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the "get rich slowly" method. It does work, but most people don't have the discipline to do it.

</comment><comment><USER40> > 5 successes for every 100 failures

Never tell me the odds.

<comment><USER4> Indeed!

Here's how an entrepreneur would look at those odds: they mean that I only need to start 20 companies to have one be a success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> s/corrections/connections/

</comment><comment><USER42> tldr: Making it by doing your own thing is most likely going to fail. You are better off being successful working at a high paying job and investing in the stock market.

<comment><USER42> article seems to just focus on the idea of wealth or making money (more likely on fire). doesn't account for what success is defined as or what people want in their life other than money. eg. lots of people rather be their own boss than be a corporate drone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think you have to look at it as a journey as with anything. A good analogy is computer programming. When you first try to write a program you will fail miserably but it will be a major learning experience, with each successive attempt being better than before and offering new learning experiences.

If you are in one swoop starting your first business to share your major passion in life with the world there is a good chance the near inevitable failure will be the end of your entrepreneurship. If you realize that is an almost guaranteed part of the journey you might keep trying.

I want to see the stats on failed entrepreneurship where the person gives at least 5+ good attempts.</comment>


In a competitive market, why is movie theater popcorn expensive? - <AUTHOR> http://economics.stackexchange.com/q/437/174 <comment><USER2> 1\. It's not a competitive market; each person who wants to watch a particular movie only has between one and maybe four choices of venue until the travel costs outstrip any differences in price. Any number of these could be owned by the same chain.

2\. In addition, there's no way to compare concession prices easily before making that choice; once the potential buyer of popcorn, even assuming they're looking at the popcorn prices before buying a ticket, has seen those prices, they need to add the relative travel time to speculative estimates of other theaters' popcorn prices.

3\. Lastly, they collude, and all the prices are about the same. Good luck getting somebody to let you run their movie in your theater-killer that leads on concession prices. Vertical integration was a term invented about the movie theater industry; contracts are in place.

<comment><USER3> Re #3: Game theory suggests theaters can approach the same higher prices without colluding. Seeing as how price collusion is illegal (in the U.S.), and the results are reachable in another way, the accusation isn't necessary.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious what the effective difference to society is between a group of businesses all agreeing not to compete on price, and a group of businesses which each individually decides not to compete on price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meh. This one's pretty simple. Ticket revenue mostly goes to the studios. The theater pulls in the cash through the concessions. The cost of the concessions, while high by microwaveable popcorn standards, are highly competitive among their peers.

<comment><USER6> You're bang on - all of the economic jargon on the StackExchange page is funny. People are overcomplicating matters. I used to work for the largest theatre chain in Canada and remember that George Lucas demanded 100% of ticket sales for the first 3 weeks of his Star Wars releases (and re-releases), which is unheard of, but he can command that.

Popcorn & soda is where theatre chains make their money. From what I recall the marginal cost of each soda was about $0.25, popcorn is even less.

<comment><USER7> There had to be a bit more to the Lucas thing, though. Like a minimum ticket price.

Otherwise I would have (as a theater owner) slashed my ticket price by 99% and doubled the cost of popcorn. Still a win for the moviegoer and theater owner.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's not really reasonable. Now you have different ticket prices for different movies (patrons would be outraged) and then you have inflated concession prices for all patrons (or only some?). The software that movie theatres use to run their POS terminals isn't that flexible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMO, the movie theater lobby is _not_ a competitive market, and this is why it is expensive.

(This being because people habitually think about food only after they have gone through ticketing and are committed to the movie- and some theaters also disallow outside food)

If you don't believe this theory, then ask yourself why is food sold after ticketing, rather than before?

<comment><USER9> If you just mean that a lobby isn't like a food court where multiple vendors can try and sell you food, I agree it's not a competitive place and ignore the next paragraph.

I think most if not all of the theaters I've been in didn't require a ticket to reach the concessions counter in the lobby, so you could if you wanted buy food there and just leave like any other walk-in fast food place. (Of course the ticket place has been the closest place relative to the parking lot but I don't remember it ever blocking further access.)

The reason for theater non-competitiveness and high food prices has more to do with non-competitiveness in Hollywood, I think. Theaters typically take only 20% or less of the ticket price with the rest going to studios, in some cases depending on the movie (such as Star Wars Ep 2) the studios can demand up to 100%, for the first week or two. (They get more as time goes on but then less people go to see it so it's moot.) Rising costs to make the movies also hits the theaters as studio agreements demand more money. Theater owners are in the candy business, not the movie business.

<comment><USER8> Don't get bogged down in what profits they do or do not make on the tickets (not that you are wrong). Whether or not they make good money on the tickets, market theory tells us they will sell the candy for as much as they can get away with :)

<comment><USER10> That's true. However, they can only get away with selling it at that price because all the theater chains are in substantially the same position _vis-à- vis_ the studios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The reason that none of the explanations make logical sense is because the theories presented only look at the demand side (Willingness to Pay) but the answer is on the supply side.

The movie theater business is a surprisingly low profit business. Net income accounts for less than 3% of revenue ([http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RGC&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RGC&fstype=ii))

Theoretically the prices on concessions are already the lowest point possible for the theaters to still make a profit. In essence, all the demand side stuff the authors mention is correct, but they mistook what the actual marginal cost was.

</comment><comment><USER12> There was a Channel 4 programme (in the UK) recently where super chef Heston Blumenthal goes to various food based businesses and tries to re- invigorate/turn around fortunes.

In this particular episode ([http://www.channel4.com/programmes/hestons- mission-impossibl...](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/hestons-mission- impossible/episode-guide/series-1/episode-2)) he goes to a large multiplex to see how he can create alternatives to popcorn. He produces some amazing concepts but the bottom line is popcorn is too profitable to strike off the menu; less than a penny to produce a bag of popcorn that retails for £3-£4. Even the paper bag the popcorn comes in cost more to buy than it does to make the popcorn.

PS: Link may only work in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is another way to segment the customers. Theaters would love to charge the total price (ticket+concession) on everyone, but not everyone is willing to pay such a high price to watch a movie, so theaters segment the customers into two piles - one willing to pay the basic price (ticket) and one willing to pay the premium price (ticket+concession).

</comment><comment><USER14> Because most people do not consider the price of popcorn when making a decision as to which movie theater to attend.

<comment><USER15> Right, like you're supposed to call ahead and shop around? Or remember the relative prices of the different theaters in your town.

All I remember is that the concessions are ridiculously expensive, the theaters show you ads before the movie, and often Hollywood films have subtle advertisements in the movie itself.

This is why I rarely go to movies. I don't like feeling ripped off.

<comment><USER16> It is interesting to me how much a subset of hacker news readers, such as yourself, hate advertising. Many laypeople find the pre-movie advertisements a lot of fun. Heck, my girlfriend prefers TV advertisements to many shows.

<comment><USER17> Personally, I'd be happiest if I never had to view or listen to another advert again. I can get away with this by timeshifting TV and listening to the BBC instead of commercial radio (the quality of the BBC output is generally higher anyway and seemingly no one's been able to sustain a commercial equivalent of Radio 4). Of course, vehical side advertising and billboards are unavoidable, but that's life I guess.

Re cinema advertising. In the UK, the cinemas only start to fill up after the adverts are over.

We have about 10 minutes of adverts followed by 10 minutes of trailers. The seats start to fill up while the trailers are on. A lot of people take it as a given that the film will start 20 minutes after the advertised time and so plan accordingly.

<comment><USER18> > _A lot of people take it as a given that the film will start 20 minutes > after the advertised time and so plan accordingly._ //

I can't understand how this is allowed by the ASA (in the UK). Why is it you can't advertise the ticket price as £8 when it's really £12 but you can advertise the start time as 7pm when it's really 7:20pm; it's not like they didn't know the start time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think all the options there ignore the _very_ _very_ obvious fact that popcorn is _not_ a competitive market, because most of the consumers in the market don't know the prices! If you disagree, try to recite for me how much popcorn costs at your nearest three major theaters right now. Do you check before you decide where to go for a movie?

This is well in line with my own pet theory of the free market, which says that people's brains can handle optimizing on one or _maybe_ two things when making a product decision, and anything else is overwhelming. For a theater, that's what movie you want to see, and what price you have to pay. Anything beyond that and you have to start making spreadsheets, and it's not worth it to anybody. So beyond the price and the main desirable quality of the product, producers aren't really forced to compete, because nobody will call them on it.

<comment><USER20> It sounds like you'd enjoy looking into "the paradox of choice" (the econ literature, not the junk science book with that title). There is a good bit of evidence that too many choices reduces utility and induces irrational behavior

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How many people would decide which theater to go to based on popcorn price? I look at if it has the movie I want to see at the time I want to see it, if it's convenient to get to, and how nice the theater is. Driving out of my way or going to a crappy theater to save one or two dollars on popcorn is not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I hope that reading the ridiculous theories by the economists (with the best answer voted down) doesn't look like what an economist sees when they read our analysis of software.

<comment><USER23> I'm not an economist, but I think the top answer makes plenty of sense. Price discrimination is an important concept for many products: cinemas, bus/train tickets, computers...

Instead of just proposing theories with nothing backing them up, like the answer that's being voted down, the top post refers to people who have actually modeled the problem and checked that their theories explain the data.

<comment><USER24> I tend to agree with the OP on this; the top post cites a lot of complicated language but the conclusion is kind of weak (why do these "popcorn lovers" feel it's worth more to buy it at the movies?). The answer further down that points out that someone on a date buys it there so as not to look cheap is, to me, more insightful than citing a bunch of papers. I guess I find an explanation of why the market will bear the high price at the theatre more interesting than a whole lot of economic jargon around it. Although this is the economics stack exchange thing, so maybe that's what's expected...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "competitive market" clause seems like a faulty assumption to me. In most areas, the number of theaters are showtimes are quite limited. And I'm not sure what sorts of entertainment are legitimate alternatives to seeing a movie on the big screen (at $12 for 2.5 hours, it's one of the cheapest forms of entertainment).

</comment><comment><USER26> _The idea is that a customer's intensity of demand for aftermarket goods (e.g. the concessions) provides a meter of how much the customer is willing to pay for the primary good (e.g. admission). If this correlation in tastes for the two goods is positive, a high price on the aftermarket good allows firms to extract a greater total price (admissions plus concessions) from higher type customers._

I absolutely love this answer. I think it explains to a T the best way to extract value from a social network - and Zynga is proving it more than anyone.

The cost to join a social network is some amount of personally identifiable information. The value you get out of joining is that you will be able to contact, keeps tabs on, and enjoy various types of media with people you're interested in (friends on Facebook, celebs/friends/thought leaders on Twitter).

However, the cost to joining the social network is lower than the cost that some people (higher type customers) are willing to pay, so social networks and their app makers seek to extract the surplus by charging for various types of digital content (ironically, sometimes movies - [http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/now-playing- face...](http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/now-playing-facebook- dark-knight-20110308-070056-341.html) ).

Zynga takes this to an even greater level by offering you a chance to play with your friends for free, and then charging higher type customers for additional content.

In both of these cases, the value provided to the customer is directly correlated to the number of people using the service (you know, Network Effects, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effects> ), but to those higher type social butterflies that need to show off their good taste by buying kitten icons or can't watch a movie online without their friends watching with them or need to be able to school their friends at Mafia Wars, they are willing to pay more than others and will pay a great deal more than their friends for a similar experience.

One last thought: the "activities with celebrities" marketplace is incredibly fertile. Night clubs pay celebs big money if they party on the premises. Celebrity golf events bring in big cash for charities. It seems like Twitter is perfectly positioned to cash in on this phenomenon, and I have no doubt that their are some higher-type Twitterers that would pay big money in a scarcity situation to play Mafia Wars with Shaq.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Before entering the theater I can choose among theaters > and compare the > opportunity costs of my movie-going > experience (which would include the > utility of consuming > popcorn after its cost).

Doesn't this answer the question right here?

People don't do that. Everything we know about cognition and human decision making (from neuro scientists, not from economic philosophers) tells us that humans are not rational actors making decisions using game theory.

All the answers certainly show the descriptive power of economic philosophy, but since the same group could be just as convincing about "why movie theatre popcorn is so cheap" I'm not sure what the point is of debating these things in a framework without any predictive power.

<comment><USER28> Except that if "rational actor" didn't describe humans at all people couldn't even manage to get to work in the morning. There are a large number of ways in which people aren't rational actors - we are loss averse, we overuse the availability heuristic, we're subject to anchoring effects, etc. However, if you look at the space of all possible ways someone could behave, we're not too far from being perfectly rational. If I'm in a store and I'm thirsty I'll buy a drink rather than some salt or a mop. If I want to get to my friend's house I probably won't try to get there by swimming except in really unusual circumstances.

<comment><USER27> Right, but predictions or descriptions of human behaviour based on guesses as to where humans fall on the line between perfectly rational and completely irrational are also guesses.

And when discussing movie theatre popcorn I think it's pretty clear that the irrational or arbitrary aspect of human rationality is in play here. The discussion on stackexchange is silly, you mentioned anchoring effects yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think a lot of the discussion (including the accepted answer) is missing the point: how, _in the presence of competition_, is the theater able to profitably price discriminate. The competitive assumption is supposed to imply that price should be driven to cost. Without competition, any business will price discriminate if they can.

As others have pointed out, probably price of popcorn is not a big factor when choosing theaters. People don't have it in mind, or don't expect to buy popcorn (but then are suckered by the butter smell). It may come down to whether people are responsive to popcorn price; showing times and proximity are probably bigger factors.

Even if people were responsive to popcorn price deltas of ~$2, perhaps theater owners know that none of them has a unique ability to compete on popcorn price. Theater X can cut their prices, but theater Y can always respond and match it. As long as the cut is being matched, the theater does not "steal" any customers, and is only shedding revenue.

Two theaters can compete all the way down to marginal cost; what, $1 for a bag of popcorn? Let's say theater X has even better popcorn technology: it can produce popcorn for $.90, $.10 cheaper than anyone else. Still, theater X is not incentivized to sell their popcorn cheaper, since it is doubtful theater- goers will choose a venue based on $.10 off popcorn.

So with a little foresight, perhaps theaters realize none of them would profit by competition on popcorn prices. That's the other answer being kicked around: collusion.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Owners joke about being in the candy business. If you didn't have > concessions at a movie theater, there would be no movie theater. We have > movies just to get people in to buy popcorn and candy, where we make our > money.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=movie+theaters+make+money>

Someone really dropped the ball giving out those answers. That thread is pure intellectual masturbation.

It's widley known that ticket prices barley cover the expenses and fees associated with getting and showing those movies...

In general, movie theaters don't make money on movies. They make money when someone comes in and buys the very expensive popcorn, drinks, and candy. Which then maybe nets you a profit that keeps the doors open.

Also, gas stations are about the same... They don't make money on gas. They make 70-90% of their profit when someone comes in and buys the cigarettes, lotto tickets, and products.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this is like flight pricing. People don't typically think about luggage fees, meal cost, wifi charges, etc. They only look at the flight price and whether the flight time is convenient for them. This means airlines/theaters are free to charge a premium once you've purchased the main ticket.

Also, the numbers involved here are pretty low. I don't know many people who would drive across town for a theater with cheaper popcorn, even if such a theater existed.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is why I love HN. A question as "simple" as this has sparked so much discussion and as a result I have learned so much about the movie showing/theater industry and how the business works.

Thanks mates!

</comment><comment><USER33> For the same reason porn is expensive inside a hotel, and not elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER34> Price discrimination. Expensive food is a mechanism for bringing people closer to their maximum willingness-to-pay by charging for a convenience: available food that you can't be thrown out of the theater for eating. The high pricing tier is patrons who buy the expensive food-- people for whom the price difference between a $15-per-person movie experience and $10-per-person is small. The low pricing tier is those who either eat before going to the movie or who bring in their own food (taking a risk, albeit a small one, of being caught and kicked out, which tends to ruin the experience).

Popcorn is especially easy to sell because of its low-volume-to-nourishment ratio. You can buy candy at a corner store and sneak it in pretty easily, but popcorn? It's less annoying just to pay the high price than to bring a large bag of popcorn in. Same goes for those disgustingly large sodas.</comment>


The Y combinator in Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-recursive-fixed-point-y-combinator-in-javascript-for-memoization <comment><USER2> Curiously enough, the JavaScript Y combinator is in the Firefox source and has been since at least 2007: [http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/file/fc78ee766770/js/s...](http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/file/fc78ee766770/js/src/Y.js)

<comment><USER3> That is by far the clearest implementation of the Y-combinator I've ever seen. And I'm not even a JavaScript programmer.

<comment><USER4> Really? What about

        function Y(f) {
            var g = f(function(arg) {
                return g(arg);
            });
            return g;
        }

The inner() function from Mozilla's implementation is actually unnecessary in languages that support lexical closures.

<comment><USER5> That's a fixed-point combinator, but it's not actually the Y combinator; in fact, it defeats much of the purpose of Y, since it's defined using explicit recursion, which Y is designed to avoid.

If you just want a clear definition of a fixed-point combinator, you might as well use a non-strict language like Haskell, which doesn't require you to eta- expand g. Here's one recursive definition of fix in Haskell:

        fix f = f (fix f)

This is probably the clearest definition you could ask for of what a fixed- point combinator actually _is_ (other than something like "fix f = f (f (f (f (f ...", which is more difficult to give to a computer).

Here's another one, which closer to what you gave in JavaScript (this is what you'll actually find in the Haskell standard libraries):

        fix f = let x = f x in x

(Of course, due to type-checking, it's non-trivial to define the actual non- recursive Y in Haskell; you usually have to resort to using some type-level recursion. But in an untyped non-strict language you could define it easily enough.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is absolutely fascinating, but I'm having trouble really grokking the principle behind this. I understand fixed points of mathematical functions with numbers, but my mind seems to explode in the transition to functions of functions.

Is there a really clear explanation anywhere of the idea behind all this? Or is it the kind of thing where this is simple as it gets, and I just need to put in more work to get it?

<comment><USER7> I don't know if these ramblings will help, but here are some thoughts :)

First of all, the Y-combinator is a function of a function of a function (of a number), so we're three levels deep, which is part of what causes the head- spinning, I think. So ignore the Y-combinator for the moment.

Simply consider the function of a function (of a number) F:

      F = function (f) {
       return function(n) {
        return (n == 0) ? 1 : (n*f(n - 1)); };
      };

Here the argument f is a function number -> number, and the return value from F is itself also a function number -> number.

We can pass whatever functions from numbers to numbers we want to F to make new functions from numbers to numbers.

E.g., we could pass in

      exf1 = function(n) { return n };

and we'd have

      F(exf1) = function(n) { return (n == 0) ? 1 : (n*(n - 1)) };

Or we could pass in something like

      exf2 = function(n) { return 1; }

in which case we'd get

      F(exf2) = function(n) { (n == 0) 1 : n - 1 };

So now imagine god gives us the factorial function:

       fact: number -> number
       fact(n) = n*(n - 1)*...*1

Then if we pass this in to F we get

       F(fact) = function(n) { return n == 0 ? 1 : n*fact(n - 1) }

But the above is simply a recursive definition of fact! So F(fact) = fact, i.e., fact is a fixed point of F.

Now consider the Y combinator. We know the Y combinator gives us a fixed point of a functional, i.e.,

      F(Y(F)) = Y(F)

(Note Y(F) is simply a function, even though the argument to Y is a functional, i.e.,

      Y: functional -> function

or

      Y: (function -> function) -> function

or

      Y: ((number -> number) -> (number -> number)) -> (number -> number))

So we know that one possible value for Y(F) is fact.

The article makes the claim that there is only one fixed point of F, which means Y(f) must actually be fact, but to be honest, I'm not sure why we know there can't be other fixed points of F which Y(F) might give us (though maybe this is obvious and I'm being stupid :).

But anyway we can tell by tracing through the definition of Y that it we really do get Y(F) = fact.

<comment><USER7> Oh, in the morning it occurs to me that a simple argument by induction will show that any function g with g = F(g) must in fact be factorial, so that's one way we can know the fixed point is unique. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I flubbed a job interview when asked how I'd implement a factorial. Of course I did the well-known recursive version, but then they asked how I could do it without recursion, and I blanked. I _think_ they wanted me to talk about memoizing and the Y-combinator, but...I don't know, maybe they'd have settled for a naive for-loop.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Clearly there is no recursion, iteration, or mutation."

I don't see how it's clear there is no recursion. Perhaps my definition of recursion is overly broad? I will now proceed to demonstrate my deep ignorance. :-) [edit ... I'm not being sarcastic here ... I suspect I may be wrong on some definition or other.]

Drop the example in a debugger and you can step in until there are 7 instances of the callsite "return ((n == 0) ? 1 : (n*fact(n-1))) ;" on every other frame of the callstack.

I would describe this as the anonymous function in the Ycombinator calls the generator corecursively making a callstack proportional to the number of times you must call the generator before it finds the fixed point.

<comment><USER10> Your definition of recursion is overly broad.

        var Y = function (F) {
         return (function (x) {
          return F(function (y) { return (x(x))(y);});
          })
                (function (x) {
          return F(function (y) { return (x(x))(y);});
          }) ;
        } ;

        [...]

        The Y combinator is a closed expression--it makes no
        explicit reference to an outside variable or to itself.
        Clearly, there is no recursion, iteration or mutation.

Look at the definition of Y—there are no capital Ys after the 5th character (or any equivalent things like arguments.callee).

<comment><USER9> Ah ... I misinterpreted the statement to encompass the expression rather then just the application of the Ycombinator.

Y(F) is not recursive. (Y(F))(X) is recursive. Is that accurate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> it looks like all the magic happens with the U combinator, where "recursion" is avoided by finding F = f(f), and passing f as a parameter such that F can be reconstructed.

which still smells like recursion, a type of recursion where the recursive element keeps getting punted around as a parameter like an epileptic cannibalistic stem-cell with no name.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's actually a simpler fixed-point combinator for JavaScript than the 'standard Y' - see <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Y_combinator#JavaScript>

<comment><USER12> "However, pseudoY() is not a fixed-point combinator'".

<comment><USER4> I'm not talking about pseudoY(), but Y()</comment></comment></comment>


How the brain perceives rhythm - <AUTHOR> https://news.mit.edu/2017/how-brain-perceives-rhythm-1205 <comment><USER2> Without a more cross-cultural study this falls more into the domain of cultural bias (still interesting) than what the title suggests. I'd love to see what the results look like incorporating data from cultures whose musical traditions are rhythmically complex and better documented. Godfried Toussaint's work on Euclidean Rhythms ([http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf](http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf)) makes for a pretty convincing survey of "evenly spaced" beat distribution, albeit sometimes over uneven lengths. This doesn't even get into things like the polyrhythm and syncopation in much African music or the complex rhythmic cycles found in Indian percussion.

<comment><USER3> That's a good point, and we are on it: [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00285/full) We are working on a follow up in this direction with more cultures. (N.J)

<comment><USER2> Nice! Looking forward to seeing where this leads :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The wording of the summary at the top is hilarious:

A team of neuroscientists has found that people are biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios — for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals.

Breaking news: the preponderance of rhythms in 4 and 3 beat patterns in virtually every music across the globe isn't a freak coincidence.

<comment><USER5> Yep. This article seems like yet another of MIT's attempts to aggrandize its "scientific reputation" in every field, even when the 'insights' gained are obvious or non-novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody explain what they mean by 1:1:1? Their description suggests a four-on-the-floor pattern, like in house music, but I'm not really sure.

<comment><USER7> They're describing the space in between the notes... so 4 equally spaced notes would have 3 gaps of 1:1:1 . It is indeed a bit confusing, as it says nothing about the duration of the last note, which to my ears would be an intrinsic part of the pattern.

<comment><USER8> Yikes that is a lousy notation. How would they designate the Bo Diddley beat: 0.75: 0.75: 0.75: 0.5: 0.5?

<comment><USER9> or 3:3:3:2:2?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hoped the piece would comment on the role rhythm plays in visual designs. Is auditory rhythm more "complex"? Are other rhythms favored by the eye?

In auditory perception, rhythm seems very natural and is easily explained. We find the same term used in visual art, but it's meaning is less intuitive than "proportion".

I hoped for a moment a scholarly source would include both, although I'm not surprised. I imagine the complexity of drawing conclusions would cause any such reseach to be preceived as suspect. meh.

<comment><USER11> Have you heard of the architect Christopher Alexander? His life's work seems to be close to what you are describing. I'd highly recommend the 4 volume series 'The Nature of Order.'

I've always felt that there is a whole other math based explanation to art and music, that may even bridge the two, hiding in plain site. Alexander is the only person I've read who has come close to describing this math.

Any body else here know what I mean?

<comment><USER12> Not exactly what you are looking for but... visually speaking, Paul Klee's notebooks are incredible resources and online as PDFs.

[https://monoskop.org/log/?p=10127](https://monoskop.org/log/?p=10127)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The brain seem to have a dozen mechanisms for perceiving various types of rhythm:

[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/1525/1955.full.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> In the end, the question in title was not answered. Also, it would be interesting to see and compare rhythms they came up with.

<comment><USER15> Nit: it's not a question. "How does the brain perceive rhythm?" would be a question. "How the brain perceives rhythm" is a promise to explain it to us.

However, you are correct: there is no satisfactory explanation here.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the only conclusion we find here is that cultures with music that follow certain beat patterns are biased towards recognizing those beat patterns. Not exactly surprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They don't talk about what kind of musicians. I quite distrust the notion of integer rhythms for them. Rubato is non integral, same goes for swing which constantly shifts the momentum of the beat. In my non researcher mind, momentum is the closest definition of what rhythm is (and much more telling than empty space between stimuli)

<comment><USER11> I agree with your momentum theory but furthermore it seems to also have a strong synesthetic element. As I mature as a musician these synesthetic experiences become more vivid while in the midst of making music.

The best unscientific metaphor I can think of to describe it would be like casting the Patronus Charm from Harry Potter.

<comment><USER17> I don't know HP enough to get your analogy. When I'm in flow, music is like surfing a multi dimensional curved space. If my body isn't tuned enough and I'm not relaxed enough I lose "sight" of the surface and energy loss occurs, otherwise you just follow the valleys or hills as you see fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I taught music for many years. When people can't accurately reproduce a rhythm it usually means that they simply arent yet capable of reproducing the pattern. This study suggests that they can reproduce it but are imposing a bias on it.

</comment><comment><USER2> I mean, what would the priors look like for this dude?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZBmELy1Dc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZBmELy1Dc)

<comment><USER19> It still seems like they're keeping to a steady "integer" rhythm, but being clever about what they fit inside that rhythm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> transfer of culture through beat rhythm priors distributions is a pretty neat idea. _For cultural awareness, choose bayes theorem._ Reminds me of Aumann's agreement theorem!

</comment><comment><USER21> And I'm wondering whether this has something to do with the rhythm of language... The heart-beat would give the baseline but language would create different patterns...??

<comment><USER22> Last year the lead author was a post-doc in the lab I work in and we discussed it... Nori and colleagues are certainly interested in how prosodic differences between languages may affect the priors. But it's probably not going to be a very straightforward story... the rhythms in languages are considerably more complex than the ones they find people have a preference for.

<comment><USER3> Some of our preliminary research about speech rhythm did get to the Current Biology paper. Figure 6 in the paper uses the method to study prosody of 5 sentences in English. (N.J)</comment></comment></comment>


In Search of the Science in Economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-14/seeking-science-in-a-social-science-like-economics <comment><USER2> "You don't need matrix analysis to know that if you tell everyone to wash their hands, infections will go down."

No, but you will need a well designed study or two, maybe a few accidental experiments (situations where a single variable is changed among two randomly selected groups of people), to tell if it's actually true.

And it may be that your hypothesis is incorrect. It may be that telling everyone to wash their hands actually makes infections go up in some specific contexts. I can imagine a couple scenarios where that might be the case. One is the false sense of security of the washing hands message leads to a slightly sloppier application of other protocols such as sterilization of tools or cleaning furniture. Or the means of spreading the message its self, say on plastic posters, could be a breeding ground of airborn bacteria. Sure, these are highly improbable, and there's even more I can't imagine, but I wanted to point out that the original hypothesis isn't as airtight as the author intended... if taken literally.

<comment><USER3> Damn straight! THere are a lot of things in medical science where people say "Oh, this is obvious. X causes Y, so if we eliminate X, Y will go away." Running careful experiments with proper controls and randomization is the only way to come to the appropriate knowledge required to make good policy. This is just as true in economics and every other science as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nobody argues that social sciences are useless because it's impossible to find patterns. People argue that social sciences are useless because they find random pattern in a specific data and don't attempt to reproduce the result. And when attempted, turns out that most of them are just random patterns that only occur in that study data and don't correspond to everyone.

<comment><USER5> The main problem of social science like history or economy is that they are political shaped sciences. Both pick those pattern that fit into their world view, to form a religion like truth of how the world worked. And state payed historian or economic scientist will normally preach the view of their system.

I did not have time for this year Riksbanks Rris, but e.g. in 2013 we saw a typical price " should discard its mathematical pretensions " and better just tell its political agenda straight. Instead they used a positivistic computer simulation, which basically means: I have a row of theories (CAPM, OPT, EHM, ...) that have several unknowns and I tweak their parameters till simulation shows the results that I want to show.

<comment><USER4> So they find random pattern in specific data. It wouldn't be bad if their results fit some political agenda, as long as the results are truth. Problem is it's not just a matter of showing results that fit political agenda and remaining silent about ones that doesn't fit. Problem is that almost everything, fits agenda or not, is false, ireproducible random noise. You almost never see the results building on earlier results in social science, like it is in all other sciences. You only see "studies" spewed out like from some kind of social study generator, and none of these matter even to themselves as they are forgotten as soon as they are published.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _the idea that economics is only a social science_

That's exactly how I see it. And the only way to put science into "social science" is the proper application of statistics. Kurt Tucholsky's observation that _sociology was invented so people could write without experience_ is still true today.</comment>


Ask HN: What tech solution cost more than the problem it initially solved? - <AUTHOR> Technology involves trade-offs, but unfortunately costs aren't clear until long after adoption.  What tech have you adopted in your current work, or prior, that probably wasn't necessary and cost more than anticipated?  What would you do differently going forward? <comment><USER2> Some people think _null_ might be a candidate:

[https://medium.com/@hinchman_amanda/null-pointer- references-...](https://medium.com/@hinchman_amanda/null-pointer-references- the-billion-dollar-mistake-1e616534d485)

[https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2015/08/31/the-worst- mis...](https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2015/08/31/the-worst-mistake-of- computer-science/)</comment>


SSL tunnel through browser? - <AUTHOR> Is it possible to run a SSL tunnel through my website in a browser, and connect it to a VPN?
What I'm looking for is a solution where I can go to tunnel.example.com, login, and browse any website through that portal, without the need for a systemwide VPN or SSH tunnel, which isn't possible due to a school or work controlled computer (on which I have no admin access).
I would prefer to host the portal on my own website, and run it through a VPN configuration I already own (NordVPN or PIA).
Thanks,
Seb <comment><USER2> VNC through WebSocket is another option.

[https://github.com/novnc/noVNC](https://github.com/novnc/noVNC)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Might run it with a google cloud server. Thanks :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can run this docker container on your server and interact with a browser through your browser: [https://github.com/moondev/gtk3-docker](https://github.com/moondev/gtk3-docker)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks moondev. That's a rather complicated server side implementation as far as I can tell, but I'll try it :).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is a website creator with no design required a good idea? - <AUTHOR> I've built an instant website creator, that gives you a live website with an SSL in less than a minute. You can change the style, theme and colour, but that's about it.
Is there a need for this amongst super busy people who are short on money?
https://donedave.com <comment><USER2> Webflow is pretty good. Also competing against squarespace and wix.

What's the value prop? What do their users want? Do you have different users from them? Do they already have this and then some?</comment>


A Mind Is Born (256b C64 demo with technical description) - <AUTHOR> http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/index.php <comment><USER2> 256B</comment>


The web design company that never charges you. - <AUTHOR> http://mute.co/index.html <comment><USER2> What's the catch? Do you guys get equity out of the startup?</comment>


Ten Features I Like About CoffeeScript - <AUTHOR> http://openmymind.net/2012/5/16/Ten-Features-I-Like-About-CoffeeScript

<comment><USER2> The amazing thing about CoffeeScript is that most of what it does is tiny little changes that _shouldn't_ matter that much, yet the overall effect is huge. For example, string interpolation involves _one_ fewer character than concatenation, yet the effect on readability would be hard to overstate.

A similar feature in another language is PHP's ability to mix in with HTML. It would be utterly trivial to convert the HTML sections of a PHP file to echo statements. Yet this tiny bit of sugar goes a huge distance toward making up for the language's short comings (also known as "almost everything else about PHP").

</comment><comment><USER3> My single favorite thing about CoffeeScript seems tiny, but makes a huge difference: the chainable existential operator.

It's gotten to the point where I keep trying to use it in Ruby and getting annoyed that it's not there. Rails at least adds Object#try, but it's not nearly as nice.

<comment><USER4> There's also the andand gem, but again it's a lot less clean and expressive than a simple ?.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Kilometer.io – Analytics for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://kilometer.io/

<comment><USER2> Sounds promising - anything that can improve on our current use of the frankly non-intuitive Google Analytics in providing clear metrics is worth a shot.</comment>


Show HN: I made a site that lets you download entire Playlists off of YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://coconvert.com <comment><USER2> Yet another youtube-dl wrapper

</comment><comment><USER3> "Terms of use" returns 404, which I find bit funny for a service in a gray zone

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this legal? and wouldn't YouTube block it?

<comment><USER5> no it isnt, and yes they will.

and this is why we cant have nice things.

yes. there exists a tool called youtube-dl that anyone can download and do this for themselves. its not overly well known outside "i know how to use a console / command line" circles and this is a good thing. and it enables exactly this sort of "enterprise".

what this sort of low effort SaaS website really does is not democraticising such software for the masses. software that humanity needs. instead it will get projects like youtube-dl shutdown, all for a few ad clicks.

copyright exists. it is evil. but please stop trying to profit from tools that bypass copyright. let those tools live in the shadows so that we may all enjoy the fruits of their labour.

<comment><AUTHOR> Websites like mine have been around for ages they probably will still be around for ages.

The only thing I am doing differently is to allow users to download their playlists/channels in a little more comfortable way.

And these tools are freely available on GitHub, don't think that would count as living in the shadows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have any ideas on how to download or at least get a full list of my "watch later" playlist?

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome, I will use this, thanks for making it.</comment>


Ask HN: MAMP vs Manual set up? - <AUTHOR>

When setting up PHP Server for the first time on a computer and working for clients as a freelancer is it recommended to use MAMP/WAMP or set up Apache, PHP and MySQL manually all together? <comment><USER2> I'd go with MAMP (or XAMPP, both are solid). Everything is configured out of the box for the most part, so you shouldn't run into any sysadmin issues. If you go the manual route, you'll be spending a lot of time configuring .ini files, ports, and other crap that takes from your development time!</comment>


Open a python shell and "import antigravity" - <AUTHOR>

:) <comment><USER2> Here is the source code: [http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/antigravity.py?v...](http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/antigravity.py?view=markup&pathrev=66902)</comment>


If you read one thing from me, please be this - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@behdadesfahbod/if-you-read-one-thing-from-me-please-be-this-2262ec7b8af2 <comment><USER2> OK I read it, your welcome.

PS: Why is there not an embargo law preventing Iran from gaining access to google servers even with your credentials? There shoukd be geoblocking schemes to allow for this and jail terms for those offering proxies to the Iranian government, just like the US is trying with that Huawei lady right now.

Good luck with the drugs, I hope you manage to get stable soon.</comment>


Maya – a DSL for math and numerical work - <AUTHOR> http://pizzaforthought.blogspot.com/2015/01/maya-dsl-for-math-and-numerical-work.html

<comment><USER2> You named your DSL the same thing as an industry standard animation tool known and used the world over.

Do you want to be completely ungooglable?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just thought 'maya' would be the perfect name for something that is temporary and largely illusory. And a search for `maya dsl` gives appropriate results, so it's fine by me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry, but in this particular case I think even javascript would be more readable than this particular DSL in this particular example.

<comment><USER4> How is this a useful comment? This is for Clojure. You truly suggest people load a JS engine every time they use math in Clojure? Why JS and not Java then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like graph [1] can be helpful here, too.

[1]: [http://blog.getprismatic.com/prismatics-graph-at-strange- loo...](http://blog.getprismatic.com/prismatics-graph-at-strange-loop/)</comment>


Tiled Shadow Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonnall.com/polar/ <comment><USER2> Interesting approach. I'd be shocked if an algorithm based on two polar transforms, plus resampling, was ever faster than more traditional raycasting based algorithms (see <http://www.redblobgames.com/articles/visibility/> for one detailed example) - especially given that you can do the raycasting algorithm entirely in hardware now on pretty much any machine, including the resampling.

Maybe you could do the polar transforms in a pixel shader to make up the difference? The transform also seems to introduce a not-insignificant amount of error, which is unfortunate if you want to use visibility data for AI (in which case you want full precision at whatever your target resolution is).

<comment><USER3> Obviously a hardware accelerated implementation would be ideal if not required, which is why I was going to first implement this in a shader, if possible.

The artifacts you mention are sort-of inherent in shadow maps, and depend on the resolution of shadow map you are working with. The demonstration I did had a lot of error, but you can see at the bottom some examples of higher resolution test cases which have significantly less error.

<comment><USER2> If you use a raycasting method, you can rasterize a shadow map with exactly the amount of precision you need and not have any artifacts (for 2d, of course - for 3d the necessary amount of precision is hard to calculate and sometimes prohibitive).

My old game Chimaera ( <http://www.luminance.org/chimaera.html> ) did this - lightmap rendered at full screen resolution (1-1 mapping) in full precision, with an on-demand raycasting solution for offscreen pixels. A raycasting method also allows you to cache the shadow data for static geometry and static light sources, which can be a big win for complex scenes. (I think maybe you could cache the polar data, but it wouldn't be as easy since you can't just translate by x&y like you can with a normal 2D perspective?)

<comment><USER3> For line of sight you couldn't cache, no, but for static lighting you certainly could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of converting to polar and back again, could you do something similar by "raytracing" a 2d line from each tile to the players position backwards; starting in the middle and stepping out toward the target tile in a bresenheim-type stepping, marking as shadows after touching an obstacle? If you start by stepping around the outer edges, you'd fill most of the tiles in one pass, and then you could probably interpolate or re-trace for any missing pixels?

(Edit: I guess you'll lose the nice shades-of-grey effect that the article's bitmap processing technique yields)

<comment><USER3> I assume you mean for generating the shadow map before it is scaled and pixelized? I'm not familiar with techniques for doing such a thing. You could probably step through each object and draw lines from the corners based on the angle between the player tile and the object. The approach I listed would actually save you from testing every single object—as soon as a black pixel is detected in an algorthm, it moves to the next line, meaning that the number of objects that may exist in that direction at a greater distance is completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER4> I guess I was thinking something like this: [http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Eliglos...](http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Eligloscode)

(the second example, "raycasting"). You'd work on the "native tile resolution".

I.e. you just "swipe" lines starting at the player position to the edge of the map, in a circle; as soon as you hit an obstacle tile, you stop marking the tiles ("pixels") on the line as lightened. No need to do any per-object iteration (as long as the tile map contains object references in tile positions)

<comment><USER3> This works, but gives you no indication of whether the tile is partially visible or not, much less how visible. An accurate indication of this would require many more rays and a lot of processing.

<comment><USER4> Right.

I was thinking about whether there could be a way to apply your technique, without having to do the polar + cartesian conversions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My own approach to this problem would be to consider each tile as a square polygon, then simply project the vertices outward from the light source. Then you take the resulting triangles and rasterize them on to an image scaled such that each pixel represents a tile and use antialiasing (or simply rasterize them on to an image 8 times as large as you need it and scale down, which is essentially the same thing). This gives you roughly the same end result, but would allow you to hardware accelerate almost every single aspect and avoids all the artifacts of shadowmapping. Notably, by restricting each polygon to a square, the projection could be done entirely as a vertex shader, without requiring geometry shaders. This would likely be vastly more efficient due to taking advantage of hardware acceleration.

<comment><USER3> Depends on how much of this algorithm you can heft onto the hardware. I'd like to see a polar coordinate textures and operations on graphics cards in the future. Thanks for reading!

<comment><USER5> Even if you moved the polar coordinate shift to the hardware, you're doing pixel ray operations on the texture, followed by rasterization. I do vertex operations only, which are vastly fewer in number even in a worst case scenario, and then rasterize that. I'm willing to bet that even if we implemented this on the CPU, my algorithm would still be significantly faster and more accurate. Furthermore, your algorithm would struggle to take into account soft shadows, which actually become a noticeable problem in certain situations in large tilemaps when you have very large light radii.

I think the polar coordinate transformation trick is really cool, but I feel like this is the wrong use for it. This is essentially a solved problem using polygons in 2D lighting engines already - to make it work for tiles, you simply scale down and back up to map to tiles.

I have to admit I'm sorely tempted to implement this in WebGL just to see what happens.

<comment><USER3> I don't deny that simple 2d operations would be faster nor do I claim this to be a fast solution, I simply wrote the idea as it came to me and I have taken no time to implement it yet nor to compare it with other techniques in any detail. As always, thank you for reading and for your thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This kind of Field of View algorithm is integral to any roguelike and there's a variety of methods for achieving the results [0]. I'd be interested in how this algorithm holds up against the usual raycasting or shadow casting. My intuition is that it'd be slower (especially with a 1024px shadow map resolution) due to it being based on pixels rather than grid values.

[0] [http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Field_o...](http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Field_of_Vision)

<comment><USER3> I'll take a look at the algorithm—thanks for sharing. I fully intend to update this article later to give some details on how it performs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're not averse to C#: Eric Lippert has a series about visibility in a rogue-like game (it's either/or, no shadows, but still a nice read) on his blog:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/12/12/shado...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/12/12/shadowcasting- in-c-part-one.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting approach, but like some others I'm wondering if this is the fastest and easiest way to do this kind of thing, especially since you are working with a tile based grid.

Probably a combination of 2d portals and raycasting would do the same trick, but more efficiently. I also think it would be easier to implement, and more flexible if you want to have moving obstacles. Most of this stuff is standard fare in even the simplest of 3d engines and well documented, the 2d case would actually be a simplification of those algorithms.

Nonetheless I think your solution is pretty clever and interesting, so kudos for that.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are the games featured in the screenshots?

<comment><USER10> The one on the left is Project Zomboid <http://projectzomboid.com/blog/> while the one on the right is from LambdaRogue <http://lambdarogue.net/>

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I have a soft spot in my heart for isometric adventure games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting idea. I have wondered about this problem too. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for looking. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting way to solve the problem. Just as curiosity, have you ever checked the ascii roguelike "Brogue"? It has a kind of line-of-sight and color scales.

<comment><USER3> Nope, I'm still fairly new to the indie/rogue community, so I'm still familiarizing with a lot of it. I'll take a look. Thank you for reading!

<comment><USER12> Give it a play. For me it's a "beautiful" roguelike. Like making a simpler, more straightforward Nethack and somehow adding it stunning... ascii graphics :D</comment></comment></comment>


Safari on iOS 7 and HTML5: problems, changes and new APIs - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/safari-ios7-html5-problems-apis-review <comment><USER2> Yeah - we are hitting some odd issues but there is still one that I've yet to confirm. It appears that cookies are not being shared from safari and home screen bookmarks

</comment><comment><USER3> Worst thing is that serious bugs in Safari that surfaced during beta are not fixed for release.</comment>


Friday Code Monkey Song - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crowdstorm.com/?p=154 <comment><USER2> Coulton's stuff is great. And although this is one of my favorites, it's important to remember that you don't HAVE to be a code monkey if you're a software engineer. I think a lot of students are getting discouraged from the computer science field because they don't want to be pre-Matrix Neo or stuck in the daily grind from Office Space.

You definitely can end up in that situation but if you're smart and passionate, you won't. Being a developer in a startup is an example of that. If you love what you're working on and you're contributing to its potential, you're not going to be that monkey.

Or if there's nothing already out there where you can apply this passion, take the entrepreneurial route. That's likely why we're all here on this site to begin with. :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is really funny - think of all you are missing by not being a coder for a faceless corporation.

<comment><USER3> Jonathan Coulton rocks. Check out his other stuff and buy his music at http://www.jonathancoulton.com/</comment></comment>


Adder: Python with a Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.thibault.org/adder/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the language I presented two years ago at the 2009 International Lisp Conference. It's finally ready for people to try out.

From the documentation:

Adder is a Lisp-1 which compiles to Python. It aims to integrate seamlessly into Python: every Adder function is a Python function, every Adder list is a Python list, etc.

Python-on-Lisp has been tried before; I think Adder has two advantages that previous attempts did not. The first is technical: Python's metaprogramming has gotten better in the past few years, which allows Adder to integrate more smoothly. The second is social: Clojure has prepared the ground for the notion of a Lisp that integrates into an existing language.

It has one bit of non-Lispy syntax: foo.bar.baz means exactly what it does in Python, and .bar.baz is a function, defined so that (.bar.baz foo) is identical to foo.bar.baz.

<comment><USER2> Hi, thanks -- this looks great!

Does it support tail recursion (in constant space)?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, because it compiles to Python. I suppose I could finagle some way to manage it for self-calls, by putting the whole function in a loop.

Although that would bind the function name earlier than usual for Python. In Python, you can (in theory) do this:

      def fact(n,sofar):
        if n<2:
          return sofar
        else:
          return fact(n-1,n*sofar)

      f=fact
      fact=lambda n,sofar: 3

...whereupon f(7,1)==3. I suppose I wouldn't really mind if Adder broke that _consistently,_ but I don't think I like the idea of breaking it only for functions that do self-tail-calls.

<comment><USER2> Have you considered using a "trampoline" function like this?

<http://paulbutler.org/archives/tail-recursion-in-python/>

<comment><USER3> You'll get a lot out of _Lisp in Small Pieces_ ([http://pagesperso- systeme.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiS...](http://pagesperso- systeme.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html)), as well.

Python wouldn't be my first choice, and I'm unconvinced that Lisp-Py makes sense, but I'm sure you'll find ways to adapt it regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case you're wondering, you can also put your Python in a Lisp:

<http://common-lisp.net/project/clpython/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I have an unreleased/unfinished Scheme to Python interpreter, which is intended to be a full compiler. I'm using trampolining for everything as I wanna be able to support call/cc at some capacity, so there's a factor of slowdown to using it, but it's pretty fun nevertheless.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. The name isn't the best to google for, though...

<comment><AUTHOR> True. It comes up as #2 and #3 if you google for "adder lisp", though.</comment></comment>


Docker in Production for 18 Months - <AUTHOR> https://convox.com/blog/docker-in-production/ <comment><USER2> Been using convox across 2 startups for many many months. I have never once encountered docker-specific problems. Usually it's my mistake which the convox team is always helpful with[1]. I can say Noah, David and the team know what they are doing and I can't imagine DIY-ing the convox management and tooling layer.

Seriously, I'm using Docker for development AND production and I don't see the problems the other rants are talking about. And they talk as if it's a daily occurrence.

If you're already using AWS, give them a try. Painless & contained install- uninstall operations too[2].

[1] [https://convox-public.slack.com](https://convox-public.slack.com) [2] [https://convox.com/docs/installing-a- rack/](https://convox.com/docs/installing-a-rack/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. This is collected from notes/comments I've had on some of the other "Docker In Production" articles on HN over the past week.

I love the discussion we having going on here. It's how we figure all this out together.</comment>


Tell HN: How A Car Works earned $2,400 in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.howacarworks.com/a-year-on

<comment><USER2> Those are pretty good numbers. Great idea too. How do you find that here stealing content without a link?

If you CC maybe that will encourage others to share it properly. Are they stealing to boost their site or is it legit content that would generate a nice back link for you? If it's a content farm you probably don't want a back link.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm happy to share any numbers or code if anyone wants it. Just ask.

<comment><USER3> You provide # of visits and revenue--how about # impressions, clicks, uniques, etc?

edit: actually i shouldn't have ignored the pictures, thats my bad... one ad per page, 480k page views. 201k uniques. still curious about performance on that ad unit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I cut some of that off because Adsense terms might prohibit disclosing it, I'm not sure. 480k page views, 4.6k clicks.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: UX feedback on a website I made - <AUTHOR> Hey, I was wondering if you could give me some feedback on this website I made. It's for a wonderful farmhouse in Tuscany, Italy. I made it because it's a property of my wife's family.
Hope you don't like it so you can give me painfully brutally honest feedback :D
http://www.boschidimontecalvi.com
Alessio <comment><USER2> The website looks very nice. It also does a good job describing the atmosphere of the place, which is what makes it unique.

However, its hard to tell what the options for accommodations are. The "villa" name is confusing, since a villa is a house, but the villa is described as being inside the farmhouse. In general, I'm not understanding how the property is laid out - a map would be very useful, to make it clear how the different suites are connected. In addition, its hard to tell the options apart. Without clicking on each individual item, I can't tell how big each room is, which is something I would want to know when picking a room.

More photos would be helpful. I would add a photo of the interior on the homepage, and some photos of the food on the Food page.

On the "accommodations" page, I would make the entire photo of each accommodation clickable, not just the button.

The logos of the different review sites should be clickable, so that I can easily go and read the reviews.

Finally, I would consider adding a section about the surrounding farm, and the pool. Reading the TripAdvisor reviews, they sound really nice, so I would want to read about them on the website.

Edit: typo in the description: "100 ectars" should be "100 hectares"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you stranger :) It's very actionable feedback. I'll correct that typo rightaway ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would move the large text off the building (or choose another color) for readability. Maybe italicize _authentic_ for emphasis.

Maybe a different color for the smaller text.

"An ancient typical farmhouse with panoramic pool on the hills of Tuscany" sounds a bit awkward to me. I would reword as "A(n) historic Tuscany farmhouse with modern conveniences" (assuming there _are_ any besides the pool, otherwise "outdoor pool" or open-air pool or whatever)

"Boschi di Montecalvi" I would put in a different font or color for emphasis... if there is a page with underlying history that is public, make it a link.

I would say instead: " _Boschi di Montecalvi_ is set in the beautiful hills of Tuscany, near the small medieval town of Suvereto. (perhaps a link for Suvereto?) The estate features a swimming pool with breathtaking views and is surrounded by a 100-hectare(?) park. Accomodations include XXX rooms _(what kind of rooms? how do they differ from the apartments?)_ , apartments, and a fine restaurant with typical Tuscan dishes. (and local wines, maybe?)

"Real food, real wine..." capitalize Tuscany (always, for English version) and lose the "a" and the comma: "Come enjoy traditional Tuscan cuisine featuring local dishes and organic produce."

"How to get here" I would change to "Planning your visit"

"A farmhouse in Tuscany for children" / A farmhouse in Tuscany near the seaside / Last minute farmhouse in Tuscany

Maybe instead:

A welcoming locale for the whole family / Near the Tyrrhenian coast / Short- notice visitors welcome

<comment><AUTHOR> that looks very helpful feedback! Thanks DrScump for taking the time!

<comment><USER3> the important thing is to get the _content_ you want... we native speakers can help you with _presentation_ , but _you_ are the one who knows the attractions of your place and what makes it special.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe don't have the link in the last callout section ("meet us") be only visible on hover. It doesn't match the other sections and i'm not sure it offers much. Also you probably don't need that callout section on the "Meet us" page.

Otherwise looks rad!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, nice catch

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> that orange color clashes in some places, notably that blue section halfway down the index page

higher resolution images would be nice

otherwise, looks good. straight to the point, modern, nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't notice that, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Navigation isn't bad... Not sure about the washed out photos in the first pages the concept is nice but not quite there... Seems like you are going for italy travel poster look, maybe?

The photos and styling is upscale but the body font and background are.. well ...pretty plain. Slight parchment/aged plaster effect background and a stylish font set.

First time you go into any of the room pages the photo catalog scrolling is jerky (in FireFox, Linux) might want to do a browser check.

Not getting much "experience" in my mind; I think (as a customer) I'd me more intrigued with some point-of-view shots of looking over the country side from a spot on a porch or in a room, or maybe a POV with that scrumptious food to get a better sense of the atmosphere. OK, some are in the accommodations - need to have one or two out in the front.

The pictures of the food in "meet us" should at least be in the food section as well. You have some awesome food pics on your facebook page...

      "watch a sunset..." a picture's worth a thousand words they say... hint.

Directions...is just a map... maybe a paragraph or two about where one could fly in from. "enjoy a Scenic 45 minute drive from xxx airport, international airports are yyy and zzz, or if you prefer to boat in, there is a port at www..."

No mention on what's nearby/activities; even if no cities, are there recreation/hiking spots? Roads to Bicycle? Old towns to explore?, festivities? Local wines, artisans, culture?

Looking at facebook headline page... same outdoor photo - looks like it was taken on an overcast day...

You've got some great underutilized photos on your facebook history! Print em out and play with em... Here's some notable ones, there's a lot more (used timeline dates to identify)

January 7 EXCURSIONS AROUND BOSCHI DI MONTECALVI (Definately needs to be in your website, maybe with a map.); April 5, 2015 (I think this is better than the copped "meet us", because it is one of the few that has a vista); May 3, 2013; May 27, 2013 (wow a live person smiling! I have a thing about too many empty scenes); June 14, 2013 (wine with rose - hint toward romantic getaway); October 18, 2013 · (local culture!); July 16, 2014 (an inviting patio); February 10, 2015 (Nice inviting pool shot); February 20, 2015 (even better farmhouse/pool shot); March 2, 2015 (very outdoor party friendly); June 4, 2015 (food porn); July 30, 2015 (cozy dining atmosphere);

Heh, landscape reminds me of where I live in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Gets hot and dry in the Summer? Suggest day trips and relaxing great evenings.

Hope that helps

<comment><AUTHOR> wow that was honest feedback ;) Thanks Larry! I will do some browser checking these days to make sure everything works at its best.

You're right, we need to communicate what the real experience is. We need to use facebook's photos I agree. We need sections to describe how romantic/adventurous/breath-taking this place is.

I was thinking of adding a background video in homepage. It could be like a drone flying over the property. People having fun. Having a romantic dinner. Cooking pizza in the oven. What do you guys think?

Thank you again

<comment><USER6> Video - Drone flying over? I dunno, people having fun, romatic dinner, cooking, etc. Those are good bets.

The one influential travel series comes to mind is Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, wherever he visits it's a mix of local music, culture, cooking, dining, and conversation... I would look for inspiration there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again Larry. I really appreciated it!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html <comment><USER2> Maybe the OPM data breach [1] started earlier (2010) than claimed (2014). It was detected in April 2015 and said to have started just one year earlier, with some uncertainty.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach)</comment>