Angular 2 docs for ES6/7 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/7600 <comment><USER2> It's the attitude of the Angular 2 team that makes me glad I decided to choose Aurelia instead. Nobody seems to realise that Angular 2 exists first and foremost to meet the needs of Google's internal Green Tea team and not the public.

This is just one of many things that should make people think twice about using Angular 2. The fact the team seemingly take input from a select handful of "Google experts" to guide the framework should be an alarm bell in itself. NG2 is a monolithic and over-engineered framework backed by a company who have proven they conflict with themselves (Polymer) and deprecate popular services on a whim (Google Reader).

I personally use TypeScript in my Aurelia applications, but I think you should allow developers to write using straight-up Javascript. We're getting to the point (or if you're writing evergreen focused web applications, you're there now) where we will be able to write Javascript without a transpiler soon (for most things).

I love TypeScript, but we can't forget what it's a subset of and some have the view that Javascript doesn't need types or interfaces.

<comment><USER3> > I think you should allow developers to write using straight-up Javascript.

They do, just not ES6. "The examples of the docs are planned to be written in TS, ES5 and Dart". I tend to agree with their argument that if you're using ES6, why not just use TS.

<comment><USER4> That quote is talking about documentation, not about coding

<comment><USER3> Which is what this story is about. You're welcome to use ES6 and transpile it. They just don't provide docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After switching to TypeScript, I am not sure whether I will ever go back to JavaScript (after so many years of using JS). I don't use or like Angular2 - but I use React with TypeScript.

Even if we could use ES6 JavaScript in the browser, transpilation isn't going away completely because we need HTML, uglification, vendor-libs, etc to be brought in together before deploying to production.

WARNING: If you are starting off with React+Typescript, expect to bang your head for may be, a couple of days, to get that stuff working. However, once it does work, it saves much more time and effort

<comment><USER6> If you're going React I suggest starting out with (or at least checking out) Flow over Typescript. It's well integrated with the React ecosystem and has type soundness as a goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been learning AngularJS 2 for around 2 weeks now, and I see why they push use of Typescript. They always have. AngularJS 2 was _designed_ from the start to be typed. To be object-orientated. At the least be object-inspired. It makes sense to be consistent. Using a non-typed and functional-structured language for a typed and object-orientated framework is pretty dumb in my eyes.

To digress a little, AngularJS 2 has been awesome, and at times can be simpler than React. The .js and .js.map file bulk with every .ts file is stupid though.

However...

Routing in AngularJS 2.

It is bad.

Very bad.

<comment><USER8> In your logic you equate statically typed and object oriented vs dynamically typed and functional.

Object oriented programming is by origin (Smalltalk) dynamically typed. Class based programming languages (which we really shouldnt consider typical for oop) tend to borrow all their modern type features from functional programming languages. (Think polymorphism, generics, interfaces, etc.)

<comment><USER9> By 'dynamically typed and functional' I think he meant javascript.

Personally i wouldn't call javascript functional but...

<comment><USER7> I dunno, i've talked to and seen the code of a few JS devs and they all code very function-based (i.e. little modularity, poorly refactor-able, flow is difficult to understand, <insert another consequence of functional programming>)

Maybe that's just anecdotal though, since I know that JS supports some form of OOP.

<comment><USER9> Are you confusing functional programming with procedural programming?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another sign that it's designed for enterprise Java camp: old Angular was very popular in such shops because of IoC and service factories. Now it requires java-like language on top of javascript, with type system designed primarily for autocomplete in IDE to work (even unlike Java in which type system is primarily intended to make runtime do less computations).

<comment><USER11> The angular core team from Google even has technical PM that handles business relationships. I've recently been to AngularConnect in London - from what I've gathered their future focus is also very much about ease of use. They try to establish angular-cli as the de facto toolchain by incorporating best practices from the community, similar to ember-cli. There are a lot of nice features with the new compiler infrastructure (AOT with lazy loading support from the router) and types obviously help here.

As a counter point, with ngrx/store being so popular in Angular2 land I doubt Angular2 is as friendly to the Enterprise as you make it sound. On top of Redux you have Rx, many people will have a hard time wrapping their heads around this.

<comment><USER12> ngrx creator (and ng core team member) here - you'd be surprised at the uptake on ngrx/redux in enterprise I think - a lot of the constraints / guarantees redux offers are really attractive to big teams, and pretty much every big enterprise team I've spoken to in the past few months are using or at least investigating using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't see a problem here, we've know Typescript is core here from the beginning.

<comment><USER14> I agree

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Typescript is a superset of ES6 anyway, proper JS documentation(e.g MDN) does have the notion of types anyway, but basing the documentation on TS means that the types are sound and consistent along the library.

<comment><USER16> Strictly speaking, TypeScript isn't a sound type system: [https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type- compatibil...](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type- compatibility.html)

</comment></comment><comment> chad-autry To me, many of the comments seem to have it backwards.

ES6 is a superset for ES5, so given the ES5 docs you can write NG2 apps with ES6.

Typescript being a superset of ES6 means it would be a struggle to write an NG2 app in ES5 or ES6 given only the Typescript documentation. I tried during beta, it was an exercise in frustration that I finally abandoned.

Providing documentation for the lowest common denominator of ES5 should let you write in ES6 (heck, it should let you write in Typescript if you realyl wanted to!) But some of the dev's comments are a bit backwards IMO when they say use Typescript documentation for ES6.

You can see my beta NG2+vailla JS project here [https://github.com/chad- autry/ng2bp](https://github.com/chad-autry/ng2bp)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those of you who are saying that TypeScript is a superset of ES6. Stop! ES6 does not have decorators. See [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- decorators](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decorators) .

Almost all Angular2 projects, that claim to be using ES6, are in fact using ES6 + Babel Legacy Decorator plugin [https://github.com/loganfsmyth/babel- plugin-transform-decora...](https://github.com/loganfsmyth/babel-plugin- transform-decorators-legacy) . The legacy plugin adds syntactic sugar on top of ES6. This is no better than TypeScript in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER17> I say good. One of the next tasks I'm going to take, as soon as I get some free time, is to integrate TypeScript into our front-end and start adding in interfaces and parameter types. I'm usually working on the back-end, but get drafted into the UI-side once in a while. The number of stupid little errors caused by typos or not having decent intellisense is troubling. Compared to the level of tooling and safety I'm used to on the back-end, it feels like banging rocks together.

Especially when we've got a gulp build process that takes long enough to run that I want to start some XKCD chair-jousting matches between edits.

<comment><USER18> I am sure that the clientside developers in your company will come to realize their mistake when they see your interfaces and level of tooling.

<comment><USER17> The willfull resistance to embrace practices that make development easier, more efficient, and safer is baffling.

<comment><USER19> then just get the logical conclusion and use ReasonML/Elm/PureScript/whatever for the frontend instead.

Oh, you meant easier/more efficient/safer but only within the comfort zone...makes sense.

<comment><USER17> Baby steps, baby steps. It's a process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Angular core team member here, let me see if I can clarify some of our decisions here:

It's not a secret that we promote Typescript as the first choice for Angular2 - this is a conscious decision based on both technical reasoning as well as feedback from our developer community.

I can count on one hand the number of teams I've spoken to who really want to use ES6 - the vast majority are happy using Typescript.

Typescript also allows us to do the kind of static analysis we use to do ahead-of-time template compilation, something that is significantly more difficult with ES5/6 - we've discussed making this work in the future, but for now it's a lot of engineering investment for something there just isn't the demand for.

A couple of other things I want to mention - "enterprise" gets thrown around on HN sometimes as a bit of a dirty word. We don't see it like that at all - the vast majority of Angular 1 users are exactly enterprise, and we're solving for the problems that large teams like them run into.

Now we're released and stable, I think it's a reasonable ask to add some specific docs on ES6 usage (or at least where it differs from TS), I'll bring it up at the next docs meeting.

Anecdotally, my experience talking to outside teams tells me that TS is not the complexity problem people have - the vast majority of devs coming from ES5-land have trouble with ES modules and bundling, rather than the specifics of ES/TS itself - this is part of the reason we're working hard on the angular-CLI.

As far as Google/Angular's commitment to the outside world - we have a Developer Relations team (of which I'm at member) - our only job is making non-Google developers successful with Angular. Feel free to reach out to me (@robwormald) or @stephenfluin if you've got questions or concerns. We both come from "enterprise" webdev and a big part of our job is making sure outside developers are represented in eng-team decision making.

Also reach out if this is something you care about deeply and want to contribute to the documentation - we'd love your help and I'll put you in touch with the right people.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder why; it seems weird to insist your users either use TypeScript or mentally translate it to es6. I would think allowing community members to write es6 docs would be a good way to get more involvement. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am a strong believer in Angular (1 & 2) and in JavaScript. I am using Ng1 & Ng2 on production. I even have a seed project for Ng2 that uses pure ES6 (no legacy Babel plugins). See [https://github.com/valera- rozuvan/angular2-es6-seed](https://github.com/valera- rozuvan/angular2-es6-seed) .

I know how much it hurts when you can't find decent documentation for Ng2 with ES6.

</comment><comment><USER21> ES6 is next version of ES5 so whatever works for ES5 should work for ES6, no need for special DOC for that.

<comment><USER22> I would think that ES6 offers more affordances in the ways you can express ideas in code. The new docs would probably offer slightly different examples taking advantages of those affordances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not a big deal. If you're using ES6 then TypeScript should be straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER24> That's duck _

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure what's going on, but the reply link on your comment appears in italics.

Is this a formatting bug or some new HN thing I'm not aware of?

EDIT: I guess formatting bug. The comment ends with a trailing <i> in the DOM inspector.</comment></comment>


Snobbery Helped Take the Spice Out of European Cooking (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking <comment><USER2> One of the best jokes I have heard is - English invaded most of the world looking for spices and still have not figured out how to use them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm reminded of an exchange from Futurama:

Zoidberg: Goose liver? Fish eggs? Feh! Where's the goose? Where's the fish?

Elzar: This is what rich people eat; the garbage parts of the food.

</comment><comment> d--b I am surprised by the judgmental nature of the article, as if the author sides with the spice-ful type of cuisine, as being the "non-snob" and "delicious" one. And that it should topple the "supremacy" (really?!) of French cuisine.

</comment><comment><USER4> This varies a little from my understanding I learned in school that food used to need to be heavily spiced because it was old/rancid, and that died down as fresh ingredients became more available.

I have to imagine that was it at least in part.

<comment><USER5> As best as I can tell this is an oft repeated myth.

The best evidence against it is that spices are expensive, if you could afford them, you could afford fresh food.

<comment><USER6> But actually, that's part of TFA's argument.

As spices became less expensive, TFA argues that became popular among poorer people. And so richer people instead came to emphasize the intrinsic flavors of foods.

But for that to work, those foods had to be high quality, and unspoiled. So, by TFA's argument, it was poorer people who came to use spices to mask low quality and spoiled foods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never got the whole "white people food is bland" meme, seems like an American thing to me. If everything you make and eat has the same spicy curry mix, well then isn't that kind of bland as well?

When using better raw ingredients, there is less rot and foulness to mask with spices. Also better storage and refrigeration makes some spices have less of practical benefit.

<comment><USER8> These are foods of Mesoamerica [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Mesoamerica](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Mesoamerica)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've long wondered if Europeans and their descendants have evolved a more intense affinity toward meat that other cultures have, by virtue of having a lower population density for so much longer than Asians have -- thus, they could "afford" a less efficient diet rich in meat.

We know that tastes are related to genetics. Most famously, is the understanding that Asians dislike cilantro at a much higher rate than Africans, and we know a single gene is heavily responsible for the aversion to the specific aldehydes in cilantro.

It's not crazy to think that humans may have a "carnivorous" gene, which controls ones love of meat.

<comment><USER10> It wasn't too long ago that Europeans were mostly peasants working the fields, including my ancestors. They rarely ate meat and if they did it would be on a holiday or very special occasion. Killing a chicken means you can't get eggs and it's the same for milk producing animals like goats, sheep, or cattle. Not to mention you couldn't hunt on the lords land. I'd say it's been less than 200 years since Europeans could afford to eat meat.

The article is comparing Indian food to food that was only eaten by the European elite. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison. It does give us a history of western food as we eat it today. Lots of good food history comes from the haute cuisine of the 1700s to early 1900s.

<comment><USER9> You're thinking in hundreds of years, while I'm talking in the tens of thousands of years.

We know that neanderthals ate a diet that consisted of 80% or more meat, while humans had a much more varied diet. We also know that neanderthals did contribute to European human DNA. A genetic affinity toward the taste of meat it certainly a reasonable thesis.

<comment><USER11> Tens of thousands of years? Give us proof that even 200 years ago Europeans ate more meat than Asians as you claim.

<comment><USER12> I'm not going to wade into this petty European vs Asian pissing contest but I'll offer that there was plenty of meat in the Viking diet (roughly 700-1100).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sugar was ubiquitous in the middle ages ! I think not

<comment><USER14> The article states only that sugar was ubiquitous among the dishes of those who could afford it, not that it was generally ubiquitous.

<comment><USER13> It was phenomenally expensive then the BBC did an interesting history of sweetmaking though history.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sprout (formerly GitMac) the Fast Simple Git Mac App - <AUTHOR> http://gitmacapp.com/download?s=hn

<comment><USER3> Mac-based developers might also like to check out Brotherbard's experimental GitX fork:

<https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx/downloads>

<comment><USER4> I was thankful for GitX in the past, but there are many git clients I would recommend over the ancient and no-longer-evolving GitX (even the venerable brotherbard fork that saved the day when it was needed most--e.g., before there were any good clients competing in the market).

So far I have purchased SourceTree and Tower, both of which are a lot better than GitX, IMO.

I'll be giving Sprout a whirl, too--looks good from a skim of the web page. (And the new name is _much_ better!)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We shared this with HN when we were first starting out[1] (in pre-beta stage) and we just wanted to share the progress we have made and say "thanks" - <USER2> our _awesome_ beta tester userbase was mostly HN readers.

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660200></comment>


How I got the best job, ever.(and resigned 6 months later) - <AUTHOR> http://adrtq.com/how-i-got-the-best-job-ever-and-resigned-6-months-later/

<comment><USER2> Wow, sounds a bit like what I did when I left eBay after only about 2 months.

The primary difference? I did so to go back to my previous employer in a new position.

In your case, you're still young so your responsibilities are less right now, but making that sort of decision and going to start your own company (without a reliable income) can be a pretty tough thing for someone else to do once they have a family that relies upon them.

Good luck with everything!

Also, "Business" there on your homepage seems to be spelled wrong at the moment (it's currently spelled as "Buisness")</comment>


Comparing clojure and node.js for speed - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/comparing-clojure-and-node-js-for-speed/swizec/1593 <comment><USER4> This is totally not the right benchmark for comparison. Node's JS execution is single threaded, and it's well known that it's not the appropriate choice of platform for CPU-bound workloads. Its main selling points are high concurrency in terms of number of network connections, event based design, and JavaScript as a programming environment. While it may be fairly good at doing computation because of V8's strong optimizations (it compiles JS functions to x86 assembly - JVM does similar things) it is not good at also sustaining high concurrency in the process. Those CPU bound operations will block everything else until they're done unless you code your functions to yield and cooperatively multitask.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a poorly implemented benchmark. He's including the startup time of the jvm, he's not warming up the jvm, and he's not type hinting the clojure code.

I don't know node, so I don't know if he's making similar mistakes on that side.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried with type hinting the clojure code, it was slower.

Startup time for the jvm seemed fair, because node has to start up as well. This should count into the overall time imho.

<comment><USER5> you should calculate the time within clojure and node and output it. This will take away the startup time. You should also warm up the jvm.

I may play with the type hints tonight if I get time. It shouldn't make it slower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As soon as he said: "The comparison I chose to go for is hard computation" I knew that node would be shown to be the loser. node isn't going to be great for lots of long computations - even node fans will tell you that.

We are finding node to be quite nice, though, for our real-time web app (which includes chat communication, and game like features). But we don't have any long-running calculations to do. I suspect that if we did we'd have them run in a separate server process... maybe even writing the compute intensive code in C++.

tl;dr: the type of benchmark chosen is stacked against node.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nothing new here.

Node wasn't ever really meant to be used for CPU intensive tasks - <USER2> the ones like this which you can fairly easy parallelize.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, If I were using node and needed to calculate primes I'd probably write some C++ code to handle that part and run it as a server in a separate process that can be called asynchronously from node.

<comment><USER8> Hopefully you'd try another algorithm before you did that ;). Primality tests are one of the most highly understood and well documented areas of CS - <USER3> division has been obsolete since, what, 1640?

<comment><USER9> _... trial division has been obsolete since, what, 1640?_

Longer than that. The sieve of Eratosthenes is attributed to Eratosthenes, who lived from 276 BC to 195 BC.

<comment><USER8> Hah, this exact thing occurred to me lying in bed last night :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I commented with a much better version of your clojure code. I'm still not convinced that this is the best way to calculate primes though. Moreover, I could imagine coming up with a better implementation that uses a lazy seq to just calculate the next prime when it is needed. Here's the code again:

        (defn prime? [n]
         (if (even? n)
          false
          (let [root-plus-one (inc (int (Math/sqrt n)))]
           (every? #(> (mod n %) 0) (range 3 root-plus-one 2)))))

        (defn primes [n]
         (conj (filter prime? (range 3 n)) 2))

As far as I can tell this is also faster on my machine, but as others suggest, I don't know that this is a particularly valuable benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER8> Trial division (your algorithm) _is_ linear time, there exist better than linear time algorithms for this, and they're pretty easy to understand (look for Solovay-Strassen on wikipedia for a simple one).

Furthermore, this isn't a great test. For one, you're specifically testing a performance profile that the JVM does not bother to optimise for (programs that run for less than about 20 seconds). For two, number speeds aren't a great measure - the issues with autoboxing (that I think Clojure does - I'm not a user) and whether the implementation is simply calling libgmp (maybe V8 is? Seems sensible to expect that it would - but I am also not a user of javascript) kind of predecide the outcome.

</comment><comment><USER11> In addition to the other comments, this is not how you would implement the code in node. Since node is single threaded, and the isPrime function is not asynchronous in any way, there is no point to writing it as if it were. Simplifying it shows it running in 2/3 the time.

<https://gist.github.com/908957></comment>


One simple yet crucial thing I learned from YC's StartupSchool - <AUTHOR> https://codarium.substack.com/p/one-simple-yet-crucial-thing-i-learned <comment><USER2> _> So, why don't just go and ask people what is their problem, and how you could solve it? [...] Elasticsearch. It was born when Shay Banon tried to build a tool to search his wife's cooking recipes._

It's a cute anecdote, but I honestly have no idea how you would get from "my wife wants to organise her recipes" to "my wife wants a distributed multi- tenant schema-free json document full text search engine"

<comment><USER3> You're right, the anecdote does not give enough guidance on how to create a successful startup that provides a solution for the users. Even though people face certain problems and challenges on a daily basis, they often don't fully understand these problems and have not been able to envision a solution.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -Henry Ford

<comment> em-bee this quote keeps getting used as an example of not talking to users, but i think the interpretation is wrong.

henry ford seemed to know that people wanted faster transportation.

how did he know that?

the thing is that you are not asking people how they would solve their problems, but instead ask them what the actual problem is.

instead of asking: what would make your work easier? -> faster horses.

ask: what is the biggest problem in your work? -> horses are to slow.

once you understand the actual problem, you may come up with a solution that is beyond what people can imagine.

if people didn't want faster transportation, cars may not have taken off. but i think that kind of problem was pretty obvious, so there wasn't a big need to ask.

<comment><USER3> You're right. The quote should not discourage talking to users, but it should encourage true communication about the challenges that users face. In agreement with you, an important point is that most all of us are unable to articulate the specific problems we face everyday, and therefore we absolutely can't just tell some smart industrialist or software engineer how they can apply their skills to solve our problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been working for 10+ years for the same company. We have kinda of a solid product in the market, and by "solid" I mean "it pays the bills for a bunch of people, consistently".

We're in no way a stellar company, we're more on the "dark side" of SaaS, and the reason as to why we have a selling product is that we cover, on the cheap, a real need from our customers.

I'm _just_ a developer, and even thought I have a personal relationship with the founders (10 years back it was just 4 of us) it's been increasingly difficult to get them to discuss product development based on "what the client needs". And that is after 8 years of development of a parallel, competing product that got nowhere except eroding our first one.

I think the first question to ask is if the people that can take the decisions are willing to take them.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Talking to your users is your #1 founder's task"

Saved you a click

<comment><USER6> It's so simple. It is by no means easy.

I am a wantrepreneur with 4+ failed side projects. These aren't only solo projects. Two founders: no customers.

What comes first: the first customer or the first iteration of "an idea"?

I yield the time.

<comment><USER7> First customer.

You find ten people in an industry, you ask them what sorts of problems they have, or whether and for what they're using Microsoft Excel. If four or five (or better yet all of 'em) have the same problem, or use Excel for the same purpose, you build software that solves the problem or replaces Excel.

In a vacuum, your ideas are things that you can come up with. Maybe they're problems you have, but those problems might not be problems you're willing to spend money to solve. Often the 'idea' is something you as a founder think will be credible, and you end up with a "sitcom startup" ([http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)), something that might come from a writer's room.

I've never built a startup. I worked at a consulting firm that took money in exchange for building the software that some sitcom startups tried and failed to use, and I've worked at two successful venture-backed startups that followed the pattern of finding a problem and trying to solve it.

<comment> java-man The thing about Excel is actually a rather clever idea. Thank you, Sir!

<comment><USER8> It's also been done to death, which is why it's being thrown around like a meme.

<comment><USER7> The fact that something has been done well repeatedly and created a lot of value is hardly an indictment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And yet the (probably apocryphal) Henry Ford quote "If I had asked what my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses" stands in counterpoint.

Talk to your customers, but leave room for your vision. If the customers knew the answer it wouldn't be a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I think it does not contradict.

Problem --> we want to get faster from point A to point B

So yeah, if you ask them the solution (not the problem) then you might get such response.

That is why YC teaches you to listen to the problem then come up with you solutions.

I would like to have a faster airplane, but probably there is a guy with a teleport somewhere.

<comment><USER10> You got there before me, well said

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Identifying and understanding the core problem from the user might seem trivial for an experienced entrepreneur(who might have got burned couple of times earlier for not doing that).

But, you'd be surprised how common it is for a first time entrepreneur to not care for the problem, but to build something just because 'they can' and later find out that nobody wants it. PG has written an excellent essay on the same[1].

I've been thinking a lot about 'solving the problem of not identifying the core problem' in my work as a startup coach, which lead me to the creation of needgap[2] - A problem validation platform. Of course, creating another platform is not going to magically solve anything; my personal goal with the platform is to understand the 'language of the problems' to differentiate it with the 'ideas'.

So far, I've understood from the platform that - _Identifying the core problem, is much harder than coming up with a solution aka the startup idea_.

[1][http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

[2][https://needgap.com](https://needgap.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this obsessive focus on what the customer wants from the get go causes startups to optimize to the local minima, as opposed to trying to go deep in an area and coming up with a radically new idea/technology that can then find unexpected uses. Reminds me of the quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Not necessarily a bad thing, but it does seem to me there are other ways to start a company.

</comment><comment><USER13> The second thing, and even more important, that you will discover later and YC StartupSchool didn't teach you is _how_ to do this. People lie, are biased & don't know what they want most of they time. You will probably learn this in the hard way or probably never, but you know, it's part of the journey of every entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER14> > In a London apartment, Shay Banon was looking for a job while his wife > attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. In his spare time, he started > building a search engine for her growing list of recipes.

This incidentally is one the big reasons why diversity is so important. Often the best software is written to solve problems we ourselves are having or those close to us. If we write software for people we would otherwise not have any contact with, there are going to be severe mismatches between what is written and what is really necessary to solve the issues. This is why I am happy to see startups and teams in places that are not Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER15> Very important point but it seems like "diversity" is a taboo word on HN. For a community of intellectually curious people, that seems odd.

Diversity isn't just a code word for a political ideology. Its about the ability to encounter other perspectives, ideas and ways of seeing the world. There are so many problem spaces that we've not even begun to explore in much detail because we don't encounter them in meaningful ways.

At some point the balance will have to shift (maybe we've already reached that point). Tech entrepreneurs will have explored all of the obvious and lucrative avenues and the opportunities in the unexplored problems will seem more attractive. Maybe at this point, we'll have a bigger emphasis on discovering problems outside of our own experiences.

Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic in seeing a limit to potential for solving lucrative problems in deeply explored problem spaces. We'll perhaps always be able to create new tech products that solve the same kinds of problems for the same consumers.

Maybe, a shift in focus towards less explored problem spaces would need to be intentional. If that's the case, being open to discussing diversity well as a community surely is a sign of how seriously we're taking problems that are not our own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd add-on that talking to your users/prospective users weekly also means that you are selling weekly.

Is there a way for someone to give you money? Are you attempting to charge people money?

How do you expect your business to work without either of these??

</comment><comment> nick-garfield If you're in the "talking with customers" phase, you should also check out "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick.

http :// momtestbook .com (EDIT: I just noticed this is an http site... breaking up the link into pieces for now. Sill recommend Googling the book)

The tldr; is that as soon as you tell someone about your idea, it's going to bias their subsequent answers. They're going to lie to, try not to hurt your feelings, want to get rid of you, etc. So if you're trying to validate an idea, the most important rule is "Don't talk about your idea".

What "The Mom Test" recommends is to instead ask prospective users about their lives and specifically to recall individual moments when they had the problem your idea will supposedly solve. With this "unbiased" recollection, you (as the entrepreneur) have to put 2 and 2 together to figure out if people 1) really have a problem and 2) are open/looking for a solution.

</comment><comment><USER17> > One-liner

What does this refer to?

<comment><USER18> I presume it refers to a one-line description of what your startup is or does. Being able to succinctly describe this is very valuable if you're trying to convince people to buy, use, invest, be interested, _& c._ You might think this was obvious, but many don't actually do it. Deciding on this helps you focus on what you reckon is important, too, so it helps you to steer aright.

<comment><USER19> Helping PhD candidates prepare to present their research, I was struck not by the frequent inability to give a succinct outreach description - I was kind of expecting that - but by how non-trivial it was to help them create one. And this was _after_ their theses were largely done. So I'm less puzzled now by how often it's not actually done.

<comment><USER20> Correct.

Also writing it down avoids the problems of:

1) somebody thinking they know what they're going to say, then not being able to on cue

2) being non-specific.

Similarities with mission statement or elevator pitch.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikileaks Assange October Suprise Livestream - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=947fP6QTmBo <comment><USER2> I just listened to Infowar discussion in the beginning of this stream and these guys REALLY don't like Hillary Clinton.

Is there a more neutral link to this stream?

</comment><comment><USER3> He's on now - but I have no idea what on earth he's going on about

<comment><USER2> The rumor was that they would release secret assassination orders signed by Hilary on wikileak members and other non-combatants.

This is why the far-right media streamed the event, and also why they were so extremely pissed off after the event :)</comment></comment>


Rethinking our human origins in Africa - <AUTHOR> http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/july/the-way-we-think-about-the-first-modern-humans-in-africa.html <comment><USER2> _" Ancient H. sapiens appear to have been even more physically diverse than the world's populations are today, which doesn't fit with the idea that they all started from one small group._"

I believe that the theory they're supposed to be debunking is not that the old (>300,000 yrs) sapiens population descended from a single regional population. The theory is that by 300k ybp there was a divverse sapiens population in and near Africa. They had a wider range of physical appearance than modern humans. Our ancestors descended from a sub-population of archaic sapiens (before mixing with other homo species).

The theory explains why we're so much more homogeneous than very old sapiens who still sometimes exhibited "primitive" (isn't this a truism?) skull shapes and such. We went through a bottleneck at some point.

IE, many flavours of sapiens existed. We descend from one of them. The Morocco & Levant sapiens have no descendants.

</comment><comment><USER3> > A new paper challenges the traditional idea that our species evolved from a > single population in one region of Africa.

every article or paper on this topic in the last 10 years talked about a complicated network of genetic branches instead of a simple linear tree

<comment><USER4> In fairness...

> _a complicated network of genetic branches..._

kind of implies a tree.

I haven't read the other papers, but, at it's root, the paper that is the subject of this posting seems to imply that the root species came much, much earlier than we typically believe. I'd need more access to the genetic data they are basing that conclusion on to know if they are right? But it _sounds_ right. Why could sapiens _not_ have risen in Africa millions of years earlier? (At the same time, we have to be careful. _Sounding_ right is not how we should be evaluating scientific theories.)

<comment><USER5> _> In fairness...

> >a complicated network of genetic branches...

> kind of implies a tree._

Not quite. The implication is that some separate branches that developed distinct (but not incompatible) differences over time due to geographical or social separation later merged into other branches, meaning that there isn't a simple linear sequence from every point in the tree back to the one root.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I have heard the expression "braided stream" be used for this description.

<comment><USER3> Yes! Neanderthals being the most prominent recent example.

Now let's convince linguists that Semitic and PIE languages are related and we have won!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This makes a lot more sense to me. Whenever I see a description of a long period of history as being mainly static, such as humans evolving as a separate group within Africa for a hundred thousand years or more, it sets off alarm bells. It just sounds like historians and archaeologists only have a few reference points to work from so they extrapolate between them in a straight line or a nice smooth curve. Real human history is messy, complicated and often violent.

I'm not getting at the science or it's practitioners, they can't just make up complex changes without evidence, but let's be honest that any such seemingly static periods of history due to limited evidence are probably just placeholder theories for whatever was actually happening.

<comment><USER8> This reminds me of the so-called "dark ages". Bronze age collapse, Middle ages…

Early historians used to call them _dark_ because of just such "limited evidence". Little surviving records, compared to the periods before/after.

But these "periods of silence" may have given us something less tangible but even more lasting than literature and architecture. The fabric of societies was rewoven, new modes of thinking and organization emerged from the chaos. People may not have been into books and stone, but they were certainly not idle!

The inhales and exhales at the scale of humanity are sometimes hard to appreciate, or even tell apart, from our individual level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The observation that humans (originally human females) descended from a woman who lived about 240,000 years ago in Africa was first demonstrated by Allan C. Wilson, who looked at the evolution of mitochondrial DNA sequences, in 1987.

This was a very controversial result, in part because the length of human history was so young (much less than the 1 million years that some fossils suggested), and because the origin was placed in Africa. Shortly after this, I heard Wilson discuss the controversy, and he remarked that he was surprised that there was so much disagreement about the idea that a set of genes in a population could be attributed to a single individual. He pointed out that this was well understood by population biologists in the early 20th century; basically, for any population of individuals at some time in the past, after a long enough time, the descendants of that population will have genes that can be traced back to one individual -- that one individual whose children had children who had children ... Though well established in 1987 (and decades earlier), but it was still argued about (and apparently still is).

Mitochondrial DNA can be traced back to an individual Africa (mitochondrial eve), less than 300,000 years ago.

<comment><USER10> > controversial result, in part because the length

This part doesn't make sense. The controversy must have been a misunderstanding. 'mt-MRCA' is a moving target. It is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of the currently living population. The mt-MRCA for the population earlier in time would be older than the current mt-MRCA. Similarly for Y-MRCA.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands Interesting.

In the early aughts, my TA in University was writing a similar paper for his doctoral degree. All of the professors in the department said it was good enough to be a PhD paper.

His premise was there were several divergent populations not only in Africa, but in Nordic regions and Eastern Europe from where we evolved from.

It's cool to see this shift in the dominant paradigm is finally starting to shift, some 20 years after my TA (and presumably many others) proposed it.

<comment><USER11> Nice to see academic researchers are now trying to utilize a more phenomenological approach in their theorizing. Ideally, _What does the available data strongly suggest?_ should be in the forefront rather than group conformity to some conditioned or ingrained ethnic or anti-ethnic grounded chauvinistic penchants. Time to grow up :)

<comment><USER12> Nah! The problem in the first place is to wonder where to find any data at all and in the last twenty years new data has become available. It's a back and forth, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The summary doesn't seem to mention the idea that there may have been one or more population bottlenecks between the emergence of H. sapiens and now.

</comment><comment><USER14> A neanderthal skull juxtaposed with one from a human shows the more-primitive elongated shape mentioned in the article or primitive human species:

public.media.smithsonianmag.com/legacy_blog/skulls.jpg

To me it is fascinating to imagine what this species was like with their larger brains, but smaller frontal lobes, which are believed to have been more-focused on their senses and athleticism.

<comment><USER15> Just curious, why is this being grey'd?

<comment><USER16> Probably because this talk of skull-shape and less intelligence sounds a lot like phrenology - an old psuedoscience used to determine the latent abilities of a person, based on their skull shape. Which ultimately was related to their race - and used to look down upon different people groups.

Once you believe there is a strong causation between skull shape and intelligence, the racist conclusions write themselves.

I assume good faith on the part of the GP, though.

<comment><USER14> I've read a bit about them and most sources say this, 'they were more encephalized and even in absolute terms had larger brains, but probably were not more intelligent.'

I didn't have any idea anyone would interpret this as racist, wtf?

The discussion on skull evolution I reference here is also mentioned in the OP. How can I be accused of racism and not the OP? That isn't consistent.

<comment><USER17> Ha! Pump your breaks tiger; no one is accusing you of racism, people are makimg the observation that some could make that interpretation, amd such interpretations have a marked history in America.

Don't get hostile or defensive over a misunderstanding, please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know some people who would use this research to try and argue that humans of different races are in fact more separate genetically than is popularly believed. Does this research suggest anything of the sort?

<comment><USER19> No.

<comment><USER20> No. However, I am certain that there will be others that will try. You can count on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're interested in the ancient DNA, I highly recommend "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past" by David Reich.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's been obvious for a while now, that the out of Africa theory was far too simplistic.

Denisovan DNA for instance, of which there is no sign in any African and very few European people...

<comment><USER23> Except the article still says its out of Africa, just not from a single region in Africa.</comment></comment>


Thank Goodness You're Small - <AUTHOR> http://speakhuman.com/ch02_Thank_Goodness_Youre_Small

<comment><AUTHOR> Last year, I wrote a book about marketing for small businesses. In part, it's for all those folks who I see doing great stuff, but struggling to get the word out.

The message is, in my mind, a very important one--particularly given how much has changed as a result of the web and social media. So far reviews have been very positive. That being said, I want to spread the word further.

As a result, I'm giving away a chapter of this book for free, every couple of weeks. The link above is to Chapter Two. You can find the full Table of Contents here: <http://gu.nu/2jr>

There's no gimmick or trick here. Just give it a read. If you like it, I simply ask you to share the link with any other small business owners/marketers who might find it helpful.

Thanks!</comment>


Seabirds that eat just a little plastic have major health problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/seabirds-eat-plastic-major-health-effects/ <comment><USER2> I could have told you that without a study, this was wasted money.

<comment><USER3> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>


If Steve Jobs Still Ran Apple - <AUTHOR> http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 <comment><USER2> I can't agree. The design of old was hideous and didn't age well. It would look incredibly dated today.

<comment><AUTHOR> You only say that because Apple didn't update the look of its skeumorphic icons. And because you are so used to the white backgrounds that shine in your face: Go here and tell me which screenshot looks better: [http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54bb4cfce4b045585ada36...](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7/t/55237b30e4b0291ca6392810/1428388659194/jitkoff.png?format=750w)

The answer is obvious.

Now go here and tell me which row looks better: [http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/7/fall-of-the- designer-...](http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/7/fall-of-the-designer- part-i-fashionable-nonsense)

Many would say the first row, with the darker stitched background. It doesn't shine in your face. The icons are all beautiful and not clown-like, plus the background is darker and easier to look at, just like on Android.

But the worst part is the usability nightmare slowing down users and weighing them down with cognitive baggage in every app because of the removal of essential affordances. And I'm saying this according to Apple's own guidelines for 30+ years based on _actual_ human usability guidelines: [http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples- legacy/](http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Thumbsup – Quickly summarize GitHub issues and Stack Overflow questions - <AUTHOR> https://thumbsup.bugout.dev <comment><USER2> Nice, will be good to share this as a link to summarize the set of issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just added the ability to hit the /summary endpoint with a GET request. If you want to make a shareable link, use:

[https://thumbsup.bugout.dev/summary?url=<issue](https://thumbsup.bugout.dev/summary?url=<issue) or question url>

For example: [https://thumbsup.bugout.dev/summary?url=https://github.com/a...](https://thumbsup.bugout.dev/summary?url=https://github.com/aws/aws- cli/issues/3553)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea to rank GitHub comments by reaction. Really helps with very active issues - especially when you're just looking for a bugfix.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work, have you thought about making it a browser extension? I would use it literally everyday!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! :)

Which browser do you use?

<comment><USER4> Awesome!

Yeah Chrome is what I use, but the browser extension API is fairly standard these days, so it's relatively easy to make it cross-browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet. I already have a Chrome extension for my search engine, Bugout: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bugout/pmfkjbfklik...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bugout/pmfkjbfklikglkoeldojcmpaedeghcee)

Will probably add summarization functionality directly to that extension.

Thanks for the suggestion :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an idea I have been waiting for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice!</comment>


WebM for Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf <comment><USER2> How old is this project? That's the old download page from Google, and the old YouTube design. And an old version of Windows.

<comment><USER3> The installer has this timestamp: 1373509356 (Thu, 11 Jul 2013 02:22:36 UTC). So the last version probably isn't too old. (The timestamp of course is not necessarily correct)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, but ... webm needs to get hardware support (ie so it can be played from smartphones, tablets, raspberrypi etc), until then it's doomed to irrelevance.

<comment><USER5> Most of the newer Arm chips have hardware WebM support. [http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/arm- socs](http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/arm-socs) .

<comment><USER6> Just curious: is it possible for the same hardware to support _both_ WebM and H.264?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does it support VP9 and Opus yet?

</comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't a software decoder be written in Javascript/HTML5? Then no plugin needed - which also means Metro mode support - and it should be passable for most desktops. And if it is choppy then hey, Chrome has built-in support...

<comment><USER9> A laptop becoming noisy and a webpage that will suddenly become unresponsive? Who is his right mind would implement this on his own webpage? It would only be attributed to your "shitty, slow" site, users don't care what video codec their browser supports..

That said, i had so high hopes for ONE standardized video codec in HTML5, but the w3c/whatwg just fucked it up (or better yet MS, Apple and Co. who couldn't agree on one standard just for profit-reasons).

<comment><USER10> > or better yet MS, Apple and Co. who couldn't agree on one standard just for > profit-reasons

Odd that the two companies you explicitly mention were just fine using h264 and didn't really stand to make money off the decision.

<comment><USER11> Actually Apple was on record as being against patented tech in W3C standards and reached reportedly reached out to the patent holders to see if they would licence H.264 baseline royalty free and they refused.

Apple also once held up the release of a new version of QuickTime until the Mpeg-LA backed down from the crazy royalty structure they planned for AAC.

But they failed this time, so Apple supporters pretend everything is fine with the current royalty system, and Apple opponents pretend they never even tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Makes me wonder how many HN readers are in China.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just give it time - it will get discontinued like every other google project.

<comment><USER14> Off OP's topic but I find this post on every HN post about Google launching something and frankly this post adds little value to the discussion.

Google Reader is dead and it's not coming back. Reader usage was extremely low and it made no business sense for Google to run it. If Reader actually had enough users, Google wouldn't have shut it down. Many entrepreneurs, including me in the past, have had to take this decision to shut our services because they did not have enough traction. Failure is part of taking a risk and you should be more appreciative of the risk.

I was angry at the Reader shutdown too as I was an avid Reader user. I was quick to switch to Feedly but lately I find myself being infrequent checking my RSS feed. I seem to be getting more and more of my news from techmeme and hacker news. When I talk to tech friends about this, it seems the they were already doing this. The rest of the world had already moved on and I was just late to realize this.

Was I angry at first? Yes. Am I still angry? No.

PS: I'm an engineer at Google right now.

<comment><USER13> The comment was not just about Reader - it is about fact: [http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/](http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/)

<comment><USER15> What fact? The fact that out of hundreds of services, they shut down 12? Even 37signals shut down some of their products and they have very few. Also, this list features google maps api v2 and v1, come on, this is ridiculous. I also see plenty of stuff no one used or that were replaced by services that everyone enjoy (google video by youtube).

<comment><USER16> They have shut down (among others) Code Search, Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Listen, Google Reader, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, Google Spell, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Google Search API, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary.

<comment><USER17> Half of those were replaced with better products, and most of the rest were things nobody actually used.

The "Google kills all their products" whisper only started with Reader because it's awfully hard to get anyone mad about the shutdown of Sidewiki or audio ads.

<comment><USER16> Funnily enough, I actually originally compiled that list long before Reader got shut down: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666) I just added a few more recent things to it since then. So some of us at least were pointing out what was going on long before Reader.

As far as I remember the translate API was the first of the recent closures that really caused a storm.

<comment><USER18> You should at least do some basic searches on these before asserting them. After said "storm", the Translate API was not shut down as originally announced. It became a paid API[1]

[1] [https://developers.google.com/translate/](https://developers.google.com/translate/)

<comment><USER16> I'm well aware of what happened. Making it paid was as good as closing it for a lot of the free services that were using it.

The point was that a lot of people were upset about it when the closure was announced, and thus we can see that people have been getting annoyed at Google for closing things down since well before Reader was shut. This is counter to the claim of the Google employee above that everybody loved it when Google canned products before Reader.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Protection Mistakes to Avoid for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://blog.digitalogy.co/data-protection-mistakes-to-avoid-for-startups/ <comment><AUTHOR> In particular, small business owners that are operating at 100 miles an hour to get their business off the ground, tend to forget about the importance of data protection. So, if you're a startup and you haven't put much thought into your data protection yet, it's always a good idea to get a strong system in place right from the very start.</comment>


Was It a Facebook Election? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50779766 <comment><USER2> It's rich for this to be coming from the BBC. I'm no BBC basher but when it comes to peddling lies from the tories, the BBC were willing and ready.

Was this the Facebook Election? No. It was the Deception Election.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In Australia political ads are regulated and need to include the phrase "Autorised by FirstName LastName, City".

This applies to Television as well as all print ads. The reason for this requirement is to hold all political paid advertising accountable to an identified local citizen even if they represent a large political party.

Facebook ads currently do not align with this criteria and I've read other articles where the Electoral Commisison May take weeks corresponding with Facebook to have a bad actors post taken down while in the mean time the bad actor is able to spin up many more pages under a different name with no visablity or accountability.

I'm separating general take posts and contents here from paid advertising. For example in Australia the Palmer United party spent $40 million on Facebook ads and achieved roughly 3% of the vote nationally that on preferences went to our conservatives who needed a 2% swing and this alone helped them gain power. To give you an idea the Palmer party candidates didn't even bother to put up street posters of themselves or attend public forums like other candidates locally.

I see this as a open backdoor in winning democratic elections.

How do we address this as democratic citizens where Facebook is prevalent in our countries?

In Australia we still have a Electoral Commission that is fairly well regarded. I'm thinking out loud, a possible solution could be if the Electral Commisison required anyone wanting to undertake paid political advertising to register with them and then this authorisation/authentication was required to be linked up when creating online political ads on major platforms. Later when there's a complaint the Electoral Commission could after investigation withdrawal authority and on all major social platforms their ads having losts permissions could come down all at once.

This would need local regulation/legislation to inact but do you think if it was it would be effective?

What solutions can you see?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only other idea I have is to open source a public whack-a-mole and encourage user submission by concerned milenialls who hunt bad ads and lodge complaints. But I've not thought this out more.</comment></comment>


HealthCare.gov Progress Report Final [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/188325546/HealthCare-gov-Progress-Report-Final

<comment><USER2> My comments from a post-embargoed version, from another discussion ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824061)):

400 bug fixes ~= 200 new bugs inserted? (Well, at least initially.)

Page 5, hardware upgrades: "Deployed 12 large, dedicated servers; upgraded storage unit", with a resulting ">3x Database Throughput" Don't like reading that, although maybe it's not the critical path slowdown now. "upgraded storage unit" sounds like they're using a SAN, NAS, what have you, not the ideal recommended cluster architecture for MarkLogic (the main database, chosen by CMS to the dislike of the contractors). I wonder if they've got enough IOPs....

Ah, reading this: [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230333290...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303332904579228413800602836) confirms what we've been hearing about it running on VMs on machines shared with other Medicare services, vs. the dedicated hardware now.

System stability is bad at 95.1% exclusive of scheduled maintenance. Per this table [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation) that's a bit over 8 hours a week of unplanned downtime.

Hmmm, maybe not a total disaster now. And the fix-it czar said his highest priority was (correctly) to stop sending garbage to insurance companies. We'll see ... especially since they evidently haven't started working on the really hard problem of paying the companies....

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting to see the monitoring tools in place... New Relic, Mixpanel and Chartbeat. Would like to have seen more detail included from these, seem to be focused on backend. Where's the real user monitoring data or front-end performance via tools like [http://www.webpagetest.org/](http://www.webpagetest.org/) or [http://speedcurve.com/demo/](http://speedcurve.com/demo/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Uptime is consistently surpassing 90%!

Well, I guess it's progress. :)</comment>


Yelp Files For $100 Million IPO - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/17/yelp-files-for-100-million-ipo/ <comment><USER2> Yelp's motto: 'Let's legalize extortion!'

Built a review site? Fine, but leave the reviews alone. All of them. No, it is not "OK" to close users' accounts with no warning, thereby demolishing all of their reviews. No, it's not OK to "hide" some reviews or to take down reviews when your blackmail tactics actually work. No, Yelp: it's not acceptable to solicit and harass people and businesses who have explicitly posted "no soliciting" signs on their establishments.

Show investors your business model transparently, let's see it. How is this supposed to work legally? Is this really going to be sustainable or build value in the long-term?

If Yelp's public offering gives them anything substantial, we have a lot to worry about. If the IPO market says it's OK for companies to make money by extorting the little guy and stifling the small voices, we are in a world of trouble.

<comment><USER3> If these businesses learn anything (Yelp and Groupon I'm looking at you!), it should be that quickly growing a _sales force_ that is paid on incentives is difficult and should be closely managed.

Otherwise the newly minted hundred(s) person salesforce, most whom have less than 1 year with the company, will sacrifice the long term success of the business for the short term success of commissions. Translation: cut ethical corners.

I cannot even imagine how difficult it is to recruit, lead, and manage a salesforce of hundreds of people that are all brought together in a period of _months_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are all these recent tech companies that have gone through an IPO not able to turn a profit? Groupon, Pandora, LinkedIn, and now Yelp are all valued so highly yet they are not making money off of their services. If you have been in business for over 5 years and don't make a profit when are you expecting to?

<comment><USER5> It makes no sense to shoot for profitability when you are growing rapidly. Yelp has only just started expanding outside the US. It's cash is much better spent on growth than sitting in the bank.

<comment><USER4> How do you know that your rapid growth isn't a result of your service being unprofitable? Wasn't that the lesson that we were supposed to learn with pets.com and kozmo? Also I believe that profitability and rapid growth are not mutually exclusive. I understand the theory of operating at a loss, but it leaves very little room for uncertainty in the marketplace. If you have new competition, capital dries up, or you make any sort of mistake, the company could go belly up. I wouldn't want to invest in any company unless it could show a clear path to becoming profitable.

<comment><USER6> Accounting profit is not generally a great test of the long-term profitability of a business, because much depends on how revenue from customers comes in, how costs are timed, etc.

Generally, if you have a business where there is a significant growth opportunity / market opportunity, the right strategy is to run at an accounting loss to grow faster. What matters is the cash situation, not the accrual accounting situation (and they are not that closely tied to each other.) Growing slower so that you show an accounting profit would be the wrong thing to do and the market would not consider it a positive indicator for a company coming to IPO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I knew there was some people viewed Yelp negatively, but judging from the comments here, Yelp has a credibility problem more serious than I realize.

The thing that I've found Yelp most useful for nowadways is little tidbits of useful information like store hours and the key combinations to Starbuck's restrooms (I hate having to ask to go the restroom like a 4 year old).

<comment><USER8> For better and for worse, we are not representative of the population at large. My wife... has never heard of Yelp, so I suppose that's not the most positive sign for them either... but she certainly doesn't hate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So I glanced through the S-1 real quick. They want to raise $100 million, and so far this year their revenue is about $55 million?

Those numbers seem off to me.

Also they are only pulling in 50 odd million a year? Seems really low.

Did anyone else have to put in a CAPTCHA in the S-1 to read the potential negatives???

<comment><USER10> What seems off about the numbers?

I think the IPO is more about an exit for founders/investors than the actual 100 million amount. That's just the float that they're putting out (not a valuation). 100 million is a credible number they can say they need this amount to grow/reach breakeven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do people think they can turn it around, i.e., make profit? Yelp has been around since 2004, that is a good seven years to show that they can generate at least minimal profit, and if Yelp is not profitable yet, there is a decent chance they never will be. Yelp is not Amazon, they are a crowd-sourced review site. Growth is great, but operating in the black is better.

That's just my opinion though. So feel free to criticize.

<comment><USER12> No criticism here, it's purely to sell it on to someone else, it's bull all the way until someone realizes they're still not making profits!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yelp is an awesome service, but I am surprised to see that they are still not profitable. Considering an annual revenue run rate of approx. $70m, I am wondering what costs them $70m a year to run the site - with most online businesses salaries and marketing are the biggest expenses and considering Yelp's amazing organic rankings, I doubt they are buying a lot of traffic. Any idea what the other big costs are? Sales teams, perhaps?

<comment> mkr-hn Probably paying people to go out and try places to review. Organic traffic (and ad revenue) comes from having content, so it's a good investment.

<comment><USER14> I doubt they would pay people to review, unless it's a well kept secret. What they do have are Community Managers. They are located in each major city prompting Yelp, providing support for the yelpers in that city and so on. They probably spend a lot on their sales team as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> $100 million is less than I would have expected.

<comment><USER16> They want to _raise_ $100M. They are seeking a valuation of $1 - 2B.

<comment><USER15> Ah, thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot more sense. (I should have RTFA more carefully.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yelp is 1 of 3 apps on my Android that I actually use. They have the best mobile experiences for reviews about a restaurant before you eat there. They have built a strong brand and I hope they do more with it. I for one, am really excited about their IPO.

</comment><comment><USER18> they are too dependent on Google, which is why they were silly to walk away from their offer.

<comment><USER19> I love how everyone becomes armchair experts on the decisions tech companies made when they try to IPO.

<comment><USER20> I don't disagree with your diagnosis of the prevalence of armchair CEOing around here, but Yelp is indeed concerned about Google.

Yelp and a couple other companies forced in Google to a Congressional hearing where senators attacked Google over having too much power over other sites. Yelp gets a SIGNIFICANT amount of its traffic from google searches. So if Google arbitrarily decided to promote its own restaurant reviews from Zagat after a user search, this would crush Yelp's traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure I'd want to invest in a company that rings a bell every time they close a sale [1]. Unless of course it's 7-figure enterprise sales. I'd rather put my money into things that ring up sales non-stop.

[1]See the 8:00 mark at [http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/03/dogs-unicorns-and- mysteriou...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/03/dogs-unicorns-and-mysterious- gongs-inside-yelps-5-star-pad/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Yelp seems like another business that would have worked much better for the users as a nonprofit ala craigslist (I know craigslist isn't a nonprofit but it's more or less run as one.) See the sporadic bursts of drama about businesses being forced to buy ads on yelp to influence reviews [1:3]. You have to wonder what they're going to do to get enough revenue to support their desired $1-$2B valuation.

[1] [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42744374/inside- yelps...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42744374/inside-yelps- blackmail-lawsuit-ceo-stoppelman-seems-to-hate-his- advertisers/?tag=bnetdomain)

[2] [http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/yelp-extortion- allega...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/yelp-extortion-allegations- stack-up/Content?oid=1176984&showFullText=true)

[3] [http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-03-20/news/27059507_1_y...](http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-03-20/news/27059507_1_yelp- small-business-extortion)

<comment><USER23> But you're forgetting that this time it's different. With social networks, you don't need a business model. Because of the network effects, and increasing number of mobile devices, they will be able to leverage the cloud and produce real-time location-based analytics. So, as you see, Yelp doesn't require a conventional business model to have a multi-billion dollar valuation.

<comment><USER24> I think I count 15 buzzwords

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this mean self-absorbed hipsters cum wannabe food critics are worth something? The end is near.

Yelp does a great service though. But half the reviewers are just intolerable attention whores. Found this hilarious explication: [http://www.freddiew.com/2009/05/22/yelp-is-great-i-just- hate...](http://www.freddiew.com/2009/05/22/yelp-is-great-i-just-hate-the- people/)

The other sites, like City Search and Google reviews, don't attract this element, probably because they don't allow for elaborate "profiles" and don't cultivate a "community."</comment>


How to write stuff that gets on the front page of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-write-stuff-that-gets-on-the-front-page-of-hacker-news/ <comment><USER2> Was hoping the post would be a single sentence like "Do cool shit and tell us about it."

<comment><USER3> I think her point is that's not sufficient, and perhaps not even necessary.

But (like you I guess) those are the ones that typically get my clicks. But see: both of us clicked on her link!

<comment><USER2> Only to be able to write a snarky comment about it, but yeah, I admit that proves her point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How meta: the advice of getting a bit drunk to be able to write great stuff is controversial in itself ;-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for posting this! This definitely goes under the category of "helpful", especially for any content writers/marketer.

It's interesting, This writer states that drinking wine helps her write, and she makes a great case for it. She's not the only one: Stevie Yeggie's infamous blog is titled/subtitled "Drunken blog rants"

</comment><comment><USER6> Tldr:

Be controversial with data or be helpful (with or without data).

I have submitted a lot to hn and based on my own posts, I have to agree with this. Not that I have anywhere near her success rate.

I might also add "be interesting in a niche off the wall way" as a third path, but these are much more like lightning strikes. Things like a list of the moons or a pointer to composting info (both of which I did).

But if you are content marketing for a tech business, the tips from the article are solid. It also probably helps to post about something intensely interesting to many people in the community (like jobs). Would be interested to see analysis of other less general topics and see if the same rules hold.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just put Bayesian and Rust in the title. :)

<comment><USER8> What about blockchain? Oops, this is not reddit.

<comment><USER9> That's /g/ jargon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great stuff!</comment>


Human cell becomes living laser with jellyfish protein. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110612/full/news.2011.365.html

<comment><USER2> Science Fiction: The article mentions cells that can "self lase" may eventually be developed. If they are, I wonder how well they'd work for neural interface. On the brain side, these cells could be used for output, with photo-diodes accepting computer input. For data transmission in the reverse direction, electronic lasers could be used to agonize photo-receptors in the brain.

<comment><USER3> Optogenetics:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SLdSbp6VjM>

<comment><USER4> Hah, I just went to a talk by Karl Deisseroth last week. <http://www.stanford.edu/group/dlab/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me a little of a Mycon podship:

<http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Podship>

</comment><comment><USER6> This immediately makes me think of David Brin's _Sundiver_.

Or X-men's Cyclops.

</comment><comment><USER7> Man, I want some of these in my fingertips. Cut me off in traffic? Point my finger and POW!</comment>


Building a Blockchain in Go (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> https://jeiwan.cc/posts/building-blockchain-in-go-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Nice. In general, I think cryptocurrency and blockchains are pretty over- hyped, but they are a good example of a non-trivial but still simple application to show off a programming language.

For example, compare this to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14439789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14439789)

for a simple blockchain implementation in Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER3> Super simple ! Looking forward for the part 2. Just reminded me this video [https://anders.com/blockchain/?__s=vorsda25neenhsdtsbey](https://anders.com/blockchain/?__s=vorsda25neenhsdtsbey)

<comment><USER4> All 6 parts have already been written/published - [https://jeiwan.cc/](https://jeiwan.cc/)</comment></comment>


Good to Great Python reads - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/good-to-great-python-reads/

<comment><USER2> I picked some links from IBM developerworks:

1\. Functional Programming in Python 1,2,3:

      * part1: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-prog/index.html ,
      * part2: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-prog2/index.html
      * part3: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-prog3/index.html

2\. Decorators make magic easy: [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cpdecor/in...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cpdecor/index.html)

3\. Writing plugins pattern: [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au- cli_plugins...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-cli_plugins/)

</comment><comment><USER2> And some interesting links from my bookmarks:

* Intermediate and Advanced Software Carpentry in Python:<http://ivory.idyll.org/articles/advanced-swc/>

* Beej's Guide to Network Programming:<http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html>

* How To Use Linux epoll with Python:<http://scotdoyle.com/python-epoll-howto.html>

* 6.006: Introduction to Algorithms, using Python:<http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.006/spring11/notes.shtml>

* Python beginner's mistakes:<http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/beginners_mistakes.html>

* Python Gotchas:[http://pythonconquerstheuniverse.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/py...](http://pythonconquerstheuniverse.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/python-gotchas/)

* Python Conquers The Universe 1\. Command-line syntax, some basic concepts:<http://bit.ly/r07qvK> 2\. Unicode for dummies:<http://bit.ly/oMFvd8> 3\. debugging in Python:<http://bit.ly/rmEQiK>

* Pypy \- Tutorial: Writing an Interpreter with PyPy, Part 1 : [http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/04/tutorial-writing-interp...](http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/04/tutorial-writing-interpreter-with-pypy.html) \- Global Interpreter Lock, or how to kill it:[http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-interpreter-lock...](http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-interpreter-lock-or-how-to-kill.html)

* Be careful with exec and eval in Python: <http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/2/1/exec-in-python/>

* Guido van Rossum:Interfaces or Abstract Base Classes? <http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=92662>

<comment><USER3> Added, thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Feel free to give me more suggestions!

<comment><USER4> Raymond's semi-recent writings on super: [http://rhettinger.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/super- considered-...](http://rhettinger.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/super-considered- super/)

<comment><USER3> added!</comment></comment></comment>


Study links U.S. polarization to TV news deregulation - <AUTHOR> https://news.wsu.edu/2015/09/24/study-links-u-s-polarization-to-tv-news-deregulation <comment><USER2> Let's say that political polarization is in fact increasing since 1996. But there's this little thing called the Internet that went mainstream that year -- and had a far bigger impact on yet another cable TV station (that was not even available in major markets in 1996).

Also I can think of plenty of other causes that are equally or more plausible than the ones cited by the authors:

* MSNBC launched in 1996.

* 1996 presidential election, hotly contested because Democrats wanted to take back the House from the GOP (did not succeed) and Second Amendment advocates were alarmed because of 1993 and 1995 anti-gun legislation. There was the 1996 FBI white house files controversy, Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, etc.

* Drudge Report launched in 1996 (followed by Lewinsky scandal in 1998).

Though I think greater access to alternative media via the Internet, no matter what your political persuasion, is the most likely cause of greater polarization. You no longer had only ABC|NBC|CBS and your local newspaper and radio station. Republicans now had Drudge, Democrats had MSNBC.com, socialists had wsws.org, libertarians had Cato.org or Reason.com, etc.

<comment><USER3> Is US politics particularly polarised now, though? More polarised than 1968? More polarised than 1852? More polarised than 1983, when Reagan was President and all the left could talk about was how much they hated Reagan? (Not old enough to remember it, just going off the music and film from the period.)

<comment><USER4> It is more polarized than 1983, which I am old enough to remember. E.g. Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House through the end of 1986, was willing to work with Reagan.

I came of political age in the '70s, watched Watergate unfold, can still remember where I was when we learned Nixon resigned; the Left's hatred of him was implacable, I've read that was true since around 1948-50. But things weren't quite so bad after he left the scene. We loathed Slick Willie with a passion (now, not so much...), but we could at times work with him.

The 2000 election, though, that really polarized things, protesting the legitimacy of an election _at the highest levels_ is utterly dangerous (one of the greatest things about our sorts of systems is solving the succession problem, one set of people running the nation replacing another), and Obama hasn't helped.

<comment><USER5> Speaker Tip O'Neill shut down the government 7 times under President Reagan and 5 under President Carter. Thinking that Speaker O'Neill was willing to work with President Reagan about budget matters isn't historically accurate. It was his way or the highway, and the news did not demonize him for it.

<comment><USER4> All I can say is that I watched both in real time and stand by my opinions of just how severe these various periods were. Note, for example, O'Neil _allowing_ the passage of Reagan's tax rate cuts. Sure, he was about as utterly vicious a class warrior as we've ever seen on the modern political stage (e.g. [https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/336185/good- ol-t...](https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/336185/good-ol-tip)), but he could have totally shut down Reagan's agenda if he was willing to pay the political cost, the House leadership has near absolute control over the agenda, which wasn't true for the Senate in modern times until Harry Reid.

Although you do have a point about how the MSM treats budget conflicts for a Democratic vs. a Republican Congress. One complicating factor is that the Republicans did not control both houses during the period 1955-1993.

<comment><USER5> If you look at Speaker O'Neil's history, the Democrats did not control both houses during some of those shutdowns. He did shutdown big parts of Reagan's agenda in the first years of Reagan's presidency.

The difference today is other people have audiences. So, instead of becoming the bastions of accuracy and fact checking, the NY Times, ABC, NBC, etc. have continued to be pundits. Washington hasn't changed one bit since the 1800 election, its the fourth estate that tries to influence instead of inform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd probably attribute it more to the rise of cable TV, period. My family still didn't have cable in 1988. They got it sometime after that when I was no longer in the house.

I would also say that the 2000 gerrymandering was the worst ever due to the fact that cheap compute power allowed the politicians to carve up the electorate _very_ precisely. Safe and majority districts skyrocketed--which shifted the electoral fights to primaries--which moved the politicians further toward the edges.

<comment><USER4> Computerized gerrymandering is very likely a culprit here. As far as I know it started in earnest after the 1980 "Burton-mander" of California, which alerted everyone to its potential.

Akin to the U.K. rotten and borough problem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's an interesting theory, but one of the confounding variables may be the emergence of the internet as a dominant news medium during the same period. The ability to choose your online sources of political information (e.g., Drudge Report vs. Huffington Post, etc.) would presumably trigger the same mechanism of action for polarization.

It's also important to note that, even if it's true that deregulation originally contributed to polarization, that's not necessarily a strong argument for re-regulating these industries. Access to specialized content is an inevitable, technologically driven market trend, because people prefer experiences that are tailored to their tastes.

In a sense, the polarization we see may have been lurking within us all along, masked by the limited choices available for expressing political or cultural preferences when choosing which media content to intellectually consume. Once we are able to act on those preferences, the previously subtle differences become self reinforcing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nate Silver has made similar observations about the previous two elections. Essentially, that you can choose which news that you want to see, and it may not be the reflective aggregate of reality.

Although, I don't think he's ever tied this behavior to a particular event. It is interesting to think that news polarization has evolved over time, and hasn't always necessarily been the way that it is now.

</comment><comment><USER9> Without restricting speech too much or engaging in substantial censorship perhaps it would be a good thing to start discussing what exactly differentiates news from entertainment and start saying who can call what what. Many countries do similar things with foods, in terms of defining exactly what, say, cheese is and must contain. Perhaps labelling laws for entertainment might be helpful in preventing people from consuming too much entertainment disguised as what most people would consider to be news. Of course, you can imagine how difficult it will be to implement but just because something is hard doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it.

<comment><USER10> > what exactly differentiates news from entertainment

It's probably worth pointing out that many channels _already_ label their shows that people think of as "news" as part of their entertainment offerings. Last time I checked (several years ago), the only show that Fox (FNC) called "news" was the brief 30min (or was it 60min?) segment in a terrible mid- morning (~10:30AM) time slot.

While most of the cable "news" channels are similar (to varying degrees), this distinction was a core element of how Fox would push their propaganda memes ("taking points").

The "real news" show in the morning would make a vague report that technically stated some of the facts of the story, but generally left it vague. This was done so the afternoon pundits could make wild claims (the propaganda) that blatantly misrepresents the story, by drawing self-serving inferences from the earlier story. This was disguised by claiming "Sources say ...", conveniently leaving out that _the same people_ often were those "sources". The evening entertainment-show-with-a-news-like-name now had multiple "sources" to draw from, continuing the reinforcement.

<comment><USER11> The only source I can find to up this claim is [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/28/1103852/-Breaking-M...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/28/1103852/-Breaking- Murdoch-splits-empire-places-Fox-News-in-Entertainment-Division) \- and it talks not about the time slot but the classification of the company.

I dislike fox news more than the next guy, but you talk about sources without providing any, that's not cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The big reason for polarization is a voting system that directly causes it. Single winner elections, where the candidate with the plurality of votes wins, will automatically cause polarization (see "Duverger's Law"). All the more so as candidates and their campaigns get more scientific about how to win. Because smart candidates will try to avoid having their vote split, plurality elections have two sweet spots, "middle right" and "middle left." Anywhere else is generally a no-man's land.

Some things about TV and deregulation might contribute to it, but there are enough channels and enough other options for consuming news that I am not convinced that is a big part of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have my own theory over the root of polarization in US politics:

Newt Gingrich & the "Contact with America"

Gingrich & GOP party thinkers (not the politicians themselves) were tired of losing the congress for so many years (and it was a very long period) and made a "war plan" to take it.

This consisted of rallying the troops, and being ruthless with anyone who strayed. Up to that point, Dem & GOP were actually civil to one another. Gingrich made it known that his side of the aisle was not to talk to - I mean that literally - was not to talk to Dems or socialize, bargain, anything at all. The party would deal with that. No personal relationships would be tolerated.

"You just don't get it". Remember that phrase? That was Gingrich's way of saying, "you believe what we say, or you aren't one of us". He made it clear there was no free-thinking, no wiggle room. This wasn't about good governance. This was about rallying the troops to win the Congress and White House.

This was, IMHO, the start of the no negotiating, complete polarization period. This was taught not just to the GOP politicians, but to the party followers. There would be no more compromise; this was a war, with only one winner.

This simply deteriorated into what we have today. The media did nothing other than pick up the blood scent and run with it; they never drove any of it, and none of it came from personal thoughts of the average American.

</comment><comment><USER14> Internet news has always been unregulated. So people who mostly use online news are even more polarized? My far right wing coworker only reads Drudge Report and Real Clear Politics, and honestly the awful shit they cherrypick would make me hate the Dems too.

<comment><USER15> Exactly, and with the amount of niche corners you can find an echo chamber that fits you perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think there is also a political dynamic in the US, where the inconsistencies in moderate politics have to be resolved one way or another, and people resolve them by choosing extreme views.

By inconsistencies, I mean that anyone who is moderately left-wing with regard to Israel, will be called a crazy anti-semite (as Rand Paul is) unless they are to the _far_ left on domestic politics. Similarly anyone who is on the moderate right on domestic politics is expected to be far right with regard to Israel and the Middle East.

Anyone with moderate, consistent views would be called anti-Semitic by the right, and racist by the left.

</comment><comment><USER17> > The telecommunications act sought to open markets to competition, but the > result was consolidation.

Is it generally so that deregulation causes consolidation? And is this the opposite of what lawmakers were trying to achieve?

<comment><USER18> I would wager the trend is based on capital to enter market. If i want to start a restaurant or convenience store, i need real estate. Infrastructure businesses (cell, tv, internet, electricity, etc) require considerably more capital to enter or sustain.

In many cases, we see this manifested in local monopolies for services like internet. In the case of television, deregulation has allowed big players to more easily buy up smaller shops, given the sheer cost of operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't seem to access the full text. How did they control for the coincident rise in popularity of the web?

</comment><comment><USER20> Something else that happened in 1996 is the internet was just getting started. With that came the dethroning of traditional information sources who then moved more towards sensationalism rather than news to keep viewers interested and advertising dollars flowing in.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Study links TV news regulation to uniformity of political views, tovarich"

<comment><USER4> "There is no isvestia (news) in _Pravda_ , and no pravda (truth) in Isvestia."

(And what does it say that I can correctly spell those two Russian words? (Well, it says I'm a child of the Cold War.))

Seriously, between the set of regulations this paper is discussing, the "Fairness Doctrine" I've discussed elsewhere, the near uniformity of the big newspapers (aside from editorial page of _The Wall Street Journal_ ), and the same for the big national magazines (aside from _US News and World Report_ and _Reader 's Digest_), it's perhaps a surprise we didn't turn into a one party state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In other words, it's all Drudge and Fox's fault.

This "study" is utter nonsense.

<comment><USER18> The study suggests that deregulation added more divisive programming. It then claims this ideologically pointed reporting is partially to blame for political polarization.

If that is the case, the internet would only exacerbate the problem. So it sounds like you're spot on.</comment></comment>


Learning Agile Software Development Using Tetris - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/heavysixer/agile-tetrisdaggett

<comment><USER2> Before I click this, I thought it was about using tetris as example implementation project for agile development methodology. Turns out it was just a metaphor.

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked this - it was a clever but simple way to get the point across.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think that this is aimed at on older generation. Maybe a younger generation can lean software development using super smash brothers. But seriously, maybe I missed out on the "life lessons" learned from Tetris, but the similarities described here seems like a bit of a stretch.</comment>


Google San Jose HQ Plans Expanded - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/google-expands-plans-for-second-hq-in-san-jose.html <comment><USER2> I hope this encourages more tech companies to locate in San Jose. San Francisco is getting worse over time as a place to live, but there are plenty of nicer spots around the bay.</comment>