Ask HN: How to politely decline an NDA? - <AUTHOR> I am a freelancer. A prospective client wants me to sign an NDA before doing some work for him. I know that ideas are a dime a dozen, and it's the execution that actually matters. I don't know if he thinks us programmers are just sitting around thinking, "Man, if only I had something cool to build I could put all this algorithm stuff to work on!" but of course as everyone here knows, we don't need to steal people's ideas we don't even have enough time to implement all of our own ideas that we think are great.
How best to decline signing the NDA in a way that will leave me with the best chance of getting the job?  (Assuming the guy is just misguided/ignorant about the value of NDAs from his attorney but is otherwise a nice guy to do work for, which I think is the case)
We did discuss things at a "high level" (I told him to avoid any specifics that might make him uncomfortable), and I learned enough about the project to know that, of course, nothing is new under the sun and there's definitely nothing about this project that is worth protecting with a legal document.  It's just a mobile game thingy. <comment><USER2> I've started charging for them. I don't decline, ever, I just make it really expensive...and I make it slow down the process. (Get up from the table, "okay I'll take this to my lawyer and get back to you in the next few weeks").

Almost everyone will say "oh, I didn't want to derail the project, let's just move on without it". Some people would rather pay, and I'll gladly take their money.

<comment><USER3> I tried this today mixed with some other comments. Here are my results and where I currently stand. Any feedback would be great.

Me: Sends preliminary project proposal based off of vague details to my referral.

Referral: Sends me NDA and introduces me to the potential client.

Me: "The 5 year NDA length is longer than I will agree to. Is there a reason for the excessive length? I will agree to a 1 year term." After doing this I did more research on what to do.

Potential Client: Nice to meet you. The NDA of 5 years is very standard stuff. All of our partners do sign this agreement. Hope you can too. Thanks. I would like to discuss the estimate so that I do understand all. Thanks again. I would look forward to working with you.

Me: "Why do you specifically need the NDA? I'm worried that it's written broadly and will restrict my creativity.

I'm going to have my lawyer take a look at it and get back to you in the next few weeks."

Me: Sent another message after thinking a little more. "I want my lawyer to make modifications based on the specific needs. I may require additional compensation to sign, especially a 5 year contract.

Please let me know your additional questions for the proposal. We can setup a time to talk tomorrow afternoon or I could answer the questions in more detail over email."

Potential Client: Thanks for your feedback. We are in very preliminary stages on this. I wouldn't go any further until we have had more internal meetings and have a chance to to provide more specifics. Thanks for your time.

<comment><USER2> Oy vey. It seems like you're using many strategies at once, so I'm not sure what results I'd expect. For me, this kind of conversation needs to take place in-person, and needs to be framed as a "yes I'll do it, but..." not a "no I won't do it unless..."

I think, big picture, if you want to salvage this client (who seems to be moving on) you might wanna just get in the same room as them and start saying yes a lot. And you want to have this conversation _last_ , after they're already super excited about the project and ready to get started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you received a copy of NDA for review? Instead of outright declining NDA, I will suggest you review the NDA, identify the clauses that you have concerns about, let the client know your concerns and request to modify/remove the relevant clauses. Most of the time client will either modify the clauses or let you know the reasons for having those clauses in NDA.

Recently, I requested a client to sign an Indemnification and hold harmless agreement. The client came back expressing their concerns about couple of clauses and requested to remove them. I replied with details on what is the purpose of those clauses and how they protect both parties. I also suggested to the client that they are welcome to suggest modifications that achieve similar objective and situations as original clauses and also address their concerns.

Once client understood the reasons for those clauses, they signed the agreement without requesting any changes or removal of those clauses.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the issues with executing a basic NDA. Assuming it is a basic NDA, where it is just saying you will not disclose copyrighted, or otherwise protected data from the client to third parties. We will sign NDA's (we also have one we provide for that purpose) if someone is serious, but not just for a basic conversation, and our MSA/RSA once signed states that it replaces all prior signed instruments and has its own NDA terms in there. It also allows us to disclose client name, basic work we did etc, just we can't share code, trade secrets etc. Also, we limit the time period in which we will agree to any NDA, e.g. 12 months is about the max.

If the NDA is also a non-compete then no way in hell, but if it is a simple don't disclose my information to third parties, I don't see the harm. No one can prevent you from using knowledge, hence an NDA doesn't stop you from telling your next client hey I know how to do X because I have done it on 3 projects now.

What is the concern? Am I misunderstanding or missing something?

<comment><USER6> A well drafted NDA is appropriate between sophisticated parties [with regard to what constitutes a well drafted NDA]. In this case, it appears that the potential client may lack the domain knowledge necessary for sophistication [in the limited sense], and this [and perhaps a concern over their own sophistication] is a cause for concern for the freelancer.

Some projects and tasks are worth the investment of educating the client. But trying to convince an untrusting individual to trust you over their attorney is one that should only be undertaken by the optimistic with time to burn.

In the end signing or not signing an NDA is a business decision and if it doesn't fit the freelancer's business model then it shouldn't be signed. That's just business.

<comment><USER5> Yea, I can see your points, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Find out why he wants the NDA. Sometimes it is because they don't want it publicly known that they hired a freelancer to do the work. He might not want you shouting from the rooftops, "hey, I was the one who built this!"

If that's the case you can word the NDA so that it gives them what they want and you don't give up anything you don't want to give up.

It could also be that in order to implement the game (or whatever) you could require access to business strategy information (like pricing, upgrade dates...) that they want to keep secret. You can word the NDA to cover this but not the technical stuff.

Or if none of this applies then you can point out that NDAs don't cover information that is available publicly so any "ideas" typically won't be covered once they are publicly available.

And as others have pointed out always have your own template to start from.

</comment><comment><USER8> Adding to what was already stated by others I have to share with you my strong disbelief in client's attorneys and any documents that are produced or approved by the lawyers.

My opinion and experience is that attorneys and law firms are there just in order to prove their usefulness - nothing more. And they are not useful at all. It happend SO many times that an agreement (not necessarily NDA) was kept by the "lawyers" for 3 weeks and then returned with some realy idiotic comments, exposing genuine iqnorane of the project we were working on.

Often, after the lawyer's review, they don't even put project leader's names, dates, bank account numbers, payment time, currency, phone numbers or other details in the agreement and such papers are later signed by CEOs (I wish I could one day show you these documents).

It seems to me that very often clients keep the documents for weeks, delaying the project launch, supposedly scrutinising and reviewing the paperwork, but are returned without being read at all.

We are now trying to sell our product to a minor supermarket chain and they asked us to give them source code to our software platform. When we told them it was impossible, they said that they get the source for every piece of software they use. That's nonsense, we replied and asked if Microsoft gave them the source code for Windows.

The same goes with NDAs - they think that their systems or business processes are so important and require special protection as if it was some kind of serious secret although it's just some simple intranet or knowledge base portal that we build for them.

Clients, negotiators, buyers, lawyers are incredibly ignorant when it comes to technical stuff.

* - (I'm not saying that agreements or legal advisors are wrong in general, just that very often the protection measures and suspiciousness are blown out of proportion)

</comment><comment><USER9> Last time I declined, I simply cited the impact on job searches and offered to sign for a much shorter term, or keep the discussion relevant enough to qualify whatever business was on the table.

There are perfectly honest reasons to decline and or modify an agreement. Simply state them and offer your earnest intent to make it work for everybody.

<comment><USER10> Better to decline. Many NDAs are written in such a way that if you do something even remotely similar for a different client in five years time, they can still sue you.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. Shorter term is a fall back for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not just have your own NDA? You need to protect your intellectual property which is embodied in the work that you perform for them. Your NDA can effectively claim protection for your methodology, coding conventions, documentation, etc. In many jurisdictions you own the copyright unless you explicitly assign it to the client.

Then you say: "Fine, and you will need to sign my NDA".

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the solution would be to request to modify NDA to be _very specific_ to exact project (include project name + exact precise description + server stack + anything, etc. - as as whole), so that it would be literally impossible to violate NDA working on a very similar project with minor differences.

If potential client will continue insisting on vague language - scrap him.

</comment><comment><USER12> I prefer to agree to NDA's but insist that it be mutual. Both sides get equal protection/risk.

</comment><comment><USER13> just a note - NDAs are not enforceable. trade secrets are. sign the nda if it gets you payed. im seeing a lot of "ideas" being wrapped up into an nda and thus a development contract - when none of the trade secrets, working knowledge, or prototypes have been developed yet. your in the green, just do it.</comment>


Ask HN: Will JavaScript take over the world of programming? - <AUTHOR> I'm Nawaz and I work with CloudBoost.io We have SDK's for JS, Android, iOS and more. We see more than 82% of our API consumption is with the JS SDK, 11% on Android and 6.8% on iOS and less than 0.2% on REST.<p>JS can now be used on the server (with Node), on mobile (with ReactNative / Ionic / etc), on the embedded (with CylonJS). Do you think there will be one language in the future which will make lives of dev's a lot easier? <comment><USER2> Even with improvements, there are often much better options than JavaScript. If you aren't going web or had a limited talent pool/codebase to economize in a mobile app or server (React Native/Node), why would you choose JS? Why not C# (windows, games) or a nice functional language (Wall Street) or Python (ML)? In fact, from all I've experienced so far (as a researcher at MSR and now at HARC), it seems like JavaScript is either the only option, or not an option at all. The choice is pretty clear, especially as you move away from web and web-like mobile applications where JavaScript otherwise dominates or at least is viable.

There will never be one language, and honestly, learning languages is never really the bottleneck anyways (rather learning the domain and applicable libraries are). A single language to rule them all might boost industry productivity by .1 or .2%, maybe, but I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Short intro about me: I've been developing systems mainly in Javascript, PHP (I am ZCE and I dropped PHP 6 years ago), Java (OCMJD), and Python for the last 13 years, and for a few projects I have used TypeScript, Dart, C, and C++. A bit of Ruby.

That's an absolute fantasy that JavaScript will be the one language that will be used as a single option in the future.

Not even taking into account that often languages and frameworks are chosen on the basis of the problem you are solving (and you just happen to work in the field where JS is more popular/viable choice) - it is extremely poorly designed language (and probably only PHP is worse at this) and I always question the sanity of the people that choose to use it on server-side (but there are good reasons to use it there - they are just rare).

JavaScript is plagued with problems like: \- No static typing support by default \- Before ES6 the class support was a mess \- No Standard Library! \- NPM and the whole dependency system is hell

There is a reason why people keep writing languages like Dart, Elm, CoffeeScript, and TypeScript.

TypeScript and Dart deserve some special attention - the problems with JS were (and still are) so big and annoying that big companies like Google and Microsoft spend thousands of man-hours developing things like Static-typing support, Standard Libraries, and, most importantly, tooling.

And we haven't yet scratched the "real enterprise systems" where transactionally support is a must. JavaScript has yet to go through so much shit to develop frameworks like JMS, Hibernate, and Spring that enable you to do all the fancy transactional stuff just with annotations. However, I do not see anybody developing something like JavaScriptSpring because JS fundamentals are broken and nobody will build big software in such a language because it is just not feasible.

I guess that's enough for now - it's already too ranty.

</comment><comment><USER4> It already has.

And you forgot on your list that JS makes your SmartTV, STB, Xbox, PS, Wii, and many more platforms work. An example, Netflix for all those platforms is made with JS. You've also got react native and Cordova for mobile.

The future is either JS or very specific systems languages (C/C++/Rust).

</comment><comment><USER5> To a large extent it already has, although there are a lot of people fighting a rear-guard effort against it (myself included).

Web assembly may level the playing fields for other languages eventually but it will probably be too late, so javascript will continue to be the native imperative browser language and, in as much as developers care about "one imperative language everywhere" it will be the most obvious option.

My effort (intercooler.js) is to use HTML as the main client side language: it's native and declarative, and lets you take advantage of REST/HATEOAS naturally in a way javascript SPA frameworks don't. By minimizing client side javascript, and since you are always going to be dealing with HTML anyway on the web, you can pick whatever backend technology you like (I like rails) without adding in a new language to the cognitive load of your app.

</comment><comment><USER6> Languages all have strengths and weaknesses, I don't see why I would suddenly throw that away and only use JS.

</comment><comment><USER7> It already has, but it is at or near its peak. Javascript is a decent language, but the primary reason it is used everywhere is because, at the end of the day, it's the only language browsers support. WebAssembly will soon change that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cobol will. /s

</comment><comment><USER9> No.

</comment><comment><USER10> It will/has, but not in the vanilla flavour. Clojurescript, for example, makes most of the anti-JS arguments silly, although a lot of people think they look smart bashing JS. C# is better than JavaScript? No f way. C# isn't even better than Java, which a lot of high profile developers disgust more than JS.

<comment><USER11> C# is certainly better than JavaScript in many ways. That's why tons of JavaScript developers and popular projects have now switched to TypeScript, the C# of the web.

Meanwhile...next to nobody uses Clojurescript.

<comment><USER10> > That's why tons of JavaScript developers and popular projects have now > switched to TypeScript, the C# of the web.

Give me ONE great example. Angular/2/4 is crappy and can't stand against React, much less Reagent/Om (cljs).

Did you already use typescript? Because that is a really shit tech. Thanks god I don't have to use Enterprise bullshitness to sell software.

<comment><USER11> Well, I don't know where you get the idea that C#/TypeScript/Java/etc are only used in bullshit enterprise projects but you couldn't be more wrong about that. There are plenty of games, mobile apps, hobby projects and other fun things written with these. Take a look around. Twitch.tv has a number of Windows/C#/TypeScript devs that work on games.

Anyway, have you heard of VSCode at all? That's written in TypeScript. So is Ionic 2 and Ionic Native. Those along with Angular 2/4 are all complete _platforms_ written in TypeScript...

So, what have you got besides _Reagent /Om_? Because those aren't even half as large, popular or even _alive_ as the ones I've mentioned (and React isn't built with Clojure either).

<comment><USER10> Do you use angular2 with typescript? How would you describe your experience for you in the last weeks/months and releases? Do you use angular-cli?

The only thing I'm going saying is that it is reaching the 4.0 version with the stability and concisiness of a 0.3 alpha.

<comment><USER11> Are you asking me or are you telling me? I feel like no matter what I say, you are just going to shoot it down anyway because it seems like this particular avenue of thought is completely closed off to you. What do you think I'm going to say? That I don't use them? Not sure what kind of response you are expecting here.

<comment><USER10> I'm asking. If you say that you don't use the tools, I'll not give your previous opinion too much credit. If you say that you use, and that the recent updates of angular2/4/X didn't messed with your apps, I'd ask more about what have you done. Angular is completely imature, with a huge bad tasty for conventions (If someone says that RxJS is also good software, I'll first ask if they really have used it).

I see no problem in this way of arguing, do you? You have to back up your strong words in favor of something that I, as a user, have a lot of bad things to say about.

<comment><USER11> You're not answering any of my questions; you completely ignored them which was kind of rude in my opinion. Where are these great Clojurescript projects?

Anyhow, I use Ionic 2 (which is built on Angular 2) with TypeScript build mobile apps and they are absolutely fantastic to work with. What exactly are you going to ask me about this that is going to change your opinion? You've obviously made up your mind. So, what's the point of talking to you? You're not going to argue, you are just going to keep giving out your opinion which, so far, seems highly caustic and ill-informed.

Sorry that next to nobody is using your favorite language. It's not my problem. TypeScript and Angular definitely have a future and no amount of whining is going to stop it.

<comment><USER10> I also think that is useless to argue as you also have already made your mind. A lot of people would said the same about angular1 and here we are, stuck with an angular2 that breaks your app every release, the last one was angular cli.

<comment><USER11> I don't update for every single release like you do I guess. So maybe I have not had any problems that you've had. Ionic does not update right away when angular changes either.

My opinion doesn't really matter though. I use what is popular so that I have plenty of help getting my work done. The only opinion that I've given you of Clojurescript so far is that I don't think it's as popular. Other than that, nobody has told me what is so great about it in this thread or anywhere. So I really don't think that you have any basis to say that _my_ mind is made up about how great that is. You're not selling it at all and you didn't even answer my question about it.

<comment><USER10> You misunderstood my point since the beginning. I never said clojurescript is currently the best option to software development, but it do fixes the architectural problems of JavaScript. As it is javascript, it improves the platform/ecossystem as a whole.

If you wanna a good example: [https://github.com/mozilla/mentat](https://github.com/mozilla/mentat)

<comment><USER11> Riiiiight. That's why you made the argument about React/Reagent/Om when I pressed you about that point. Nice try though!

Anyway, I think I pointed out how wrong you are on just about every other point you made in this thread. Anybody who reads this will certainly see that. So, my work is done here :)

Enjoy that last word if you want!

<comment><USER10> Let me highlight were your desillusion started:

> Clojurescript, for example, makes most of the anti-JS arguments silly, > although a lot of people think they look smart bashing JS

Cljs has types (spec), great concurrency and is a very concise language, created by a very smart architect, Rich Rickey.

But ok, you won, man!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> peter-m80 My vote goes to Dart

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes. I have been sucked into the JavaScript vortex.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope that with the advent of WebAssembly, Javascript can be thrown in the dustbin of history. Isomorphism, with a better language to do it in, sounds like a lot of fun.

Some days, I like to imagine a world where browsers had Python embedded as their scripting language.

<comment><USER14> For this Brython is often close enough.</comment></comment>


I trained a robot to play The Witness - <AUTHOR> https://www.wandb.com/articles/i-trained-a-robot-to-play-the-witness <comment><USER2> Project creator here, this was an experiment inspired by the WitnessIRL thread on reddit to find puzzle patterns from the Witness anywhere. I'm also an experienced web engineer but pretty new to deep learning, so it was an opportunity to learn the concepts while applying to a meaningful problem.</comment>


Why designers can't stop reinventing the subway map - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/09/why-designers-cant-stop-reinventing-the-subway-map/ <comment><USER2> My favorite subway map redesign is Art Lebedev's take on the Mosco Metro[1]. It's both better-looking _and_ more usable than the current map, and the current map isn't bad. (It's certainly better than the official New York subway map linked in the article.)

They wrote a fascinating article about how they designed the map[2] and how they came to many of their design decisions. It's a great look on how much attention to detail goes into a design like this. And it's just cool to see all the different approaches they tried.

The second version of their map, and its accompanying explanation, are also worth a look[3].

[1]: [http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/metro/map/](http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/metro/map/)

[2]: [http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/metro/map/process/](http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/metro/map/process/)

[3]: [http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/metro/map2/](http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/metro/map2/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Subway maps improved _hugely_ when designers realised that they're not actually geographic maps - (generally speaking) users don't really care where things are when they're using a subway but rather they're interested in which points connect to which other points. A subway map is actually a graph.

EDIT: Fixed topological mistake.

<comment><USER4> Surely that means they _are_ topological maps?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you're right. Commenting before coffee is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why graphic designers should be kept as far away from projects that create things that must be _used_ by other people and not just admired for their beauty. The current subway map is a good map because it was basically designed by sociologists. Sociologists should be doing much more designing than what we ask of them today. This is one of the reasons the current map shows some but not all curves along a train line- the sociologists figured out that if a curve can be felt onboard a train then it is best to try to reflect the curve on the map. To not do so makes people feel uneasy. If I need beautiful or creative content for my art gallery, graphic designers are invited. If I need to create something useful then they are not.

<comment><USER6> > This is why graphic designers should be kept as far away from projects that > create things that must be used by other people and not just admired for > their beauty.

> If I need beautiful or creative content for my art gallery, graphic > designers are invited.

You're confusing design with art or decoration.

It doesn't make sense, at all, to say that designers should be _kept away_ if you don't even have a correct working definition of design. I'd suggest you do a little bit of research before establishing such a position. You wouldn't dismiss, e.g., an economical model without at least some knowledge about it, right?

<comment><USER7> Many designers confuse design with art and decoration.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the same way many "software developers" confuse software development with mashing up copy & pasted code without a clear picture of how it works. I'd argue that those aren't software developers, just like the designers" you refer to aren't designers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mixed Integer Programming has been used to automatically create metro maps:

[http://i11www.iti.uni-karlsruhe.de/extra/publications/nw- dlh...](http://i11www.iti.uni-karlsruhe.de/extra/publications/nw-dlhqm-10.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> "And I think that's the great thing about trains. We are all using this common system together, and it's very kind of leveling. We all want it to be better. And we want it to run more frequently, more smoothly, with less problems. We have a love-hate relationship, and an enormous desire for it to work better."

I respect what designers do but the NYC MTA, at least, has way, way bigger problems than the way its system is visualized.

</comment><comment><USER10> The moment you have anything other than utility in mind, you are off into lala land...

<comment><USER11> You can't consider utility _and_ aesthetic?

It'd be a pretty boring world if every problem was approached like this.</comment></comment>


Minneapolis City Council looking into disbanding police department - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1267891869691850754.html <comment><USER2> > We can totally reimagine what public safety means, what skills we're > recruiting for, what tools we do and don't need. We can invest in cultural > competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict > resolution.

I applaud this approach. As a nation of concerned and affected states and cities, we owe it to ourselves to embark on new experiments, designed from the start to fit the current environment.

You want a public safety concern that is geared toward a desired outcome? Design it and refine it. We cannot bring forward a carbon copy of the past and expect to transcend its worst parts at the same time.

> We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a > weapon, or pulling out handcuffs.

> The whole world is watching, and we can declare policing as we know it a > thing of the past, and create a compassionate, non-violent future. It will > be hard. But so is managing a dysfunctional relationship with an > unaccountable armed force in our city.

This is so on point. From what I have read so far, it also syncs with relevant and current research into policing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that this worked quite well for Camden, NJ: [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to- crim...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crime-in- camden/549542/)

It's not calling for no police, just starting from scratch imagining what a police force could be. In the Camden case most of the officers were re-hired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for sharing that article! When I posted this I was really hoping someone might be able to point to a parallel. Steve Fletcher from the OP is my councilmember so I'll pass this on to make sure Camden is looked at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting, it is the important parts about local government we don't usually see (RIP real local news). It would be a really good experiment to try other ways of policing. Police have a lot of levers to push government Discussed in the thread, and other things like union bloc voting, etc. Balancing power in government would produce better outcomes for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, that won't work.

Something has to change, but any solution is still going to need cops. It's not realistic to think otherwise.</comment>


Image classification with Hadoop Streaming - <AUTHOR> http://developers.500px.com/2015/02/01/image-classification-with-hadoop-streaming.html

<comment><USER2> Really nice work!</comment>


Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain - <AUTHOR> http://www.princeton.edu:80/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

<comment><USER2> I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats, the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy.

About a year ago I figured it out and have systematically gone about trying to eliminate HFCS from almost everything I eat, which is easier said than done. In the U.S. at least, it seems to be in almost _everything_ from Soda to Bread to Ketchup. I also notice that when I travel overseas, I can eat with relative abandon and not suffer any of the typical ill effects I have from HFCS loaded food in the States.

I noticed within a week of doing this that I could actually get hungry again without getting "sick" and go thus go longer between meals. In the last year, I've lost about 15-20 pounds by just eliminating HFCS from my diet but not making any conscious effort to change my diet or exercise habits.

<comment><USER3> It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient: whatever you cooked.

I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously surprised by the amount of people I see at work saying "I can never lose weight" - then I see them in the break room at lunch nuking a pakaged frozen dinner. Just stop, ask yourself "did my grandma eat this?" If the answer is no, then don't eat it. This is actually a great question to ask because it doesn't matter what culture you are from. People two generations ago didn't have access to food made in factories. It was all fresh from a farm, and it was good for us.

<comment><USER2> I actually saw raw Chicken breast in the grocery the other day that had HFCS in it. I have no idea why they felt the need to put that in the meat.

I agree with you about whole foods. Getting the time to do that though is usually the problem. I get up at 6am and usually don't get back home till 9pm where I then have to do a bunch of other stuff (pay bills, do school work, etc.). I don't even know what I would do if I had kids. My wife shares a similar schedule.

So getting time to cook stuff from scratch, which I love to do, is typically not possible. As a sad result, I find myself eating so many processed foods it's really rather sad.

The good news is that I can still find a surprising number of processed food vendors that sell stuff that typically doesn't have HFCS in it, like Kashi.

However, when I have slow stretches at work, I really enjoy cooking full meals and sitting out on my deck, enjoying the sun shine and a nice glass of wine with some roast duck, or home-made Shepherd's pie. And I feel better about life in general if I get to do that 2-3 times a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at <http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/>

It seems that Princeton's press release greatly overstated the results of the study. It also seems that there are some valid questions about the methodology of the study.

<comment><USER5> Reddit had a really great comment from someone who had actually read the study that seemed to point at some serious flaws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One interesting part is that they used _fewer calories_ of HFCS than sugar in the trial, yet it still prompted more weight gain.

<comment><USER7> This would make more sense if I had a better understanding of biochemistry. It's only a matter of time before an awesome explanation is posted. (Yes....!)

<comment><USER8> <http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717>

For what it's worth, I'm in my second semester of biochemistry, and we've studied almost every one of the pathways he talks about in our class, in detail. Dr. Lustig is dead on about the science behind obesity.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link. That's a great lecture. Have more on this topic?

Few points he talks about:

\- In processed/fast food foods, fiber is often taken out to make shipping easier and cooking faster. This is the only reason fiber isn't seen as an essential nutrient in this country. Without the fiber, the appetite doesn't get quenched as quickly (as the food doesn't go through you as quickly) and so you eat more.

\- Stress increases appetite.

\- Sugar, fructose, and high fructose corn syrup do not suppress the appetite either. Also, drinking/eating soda/juice/sugary foods with a meal delays the satiety signal. This means you don't feel the fullness as quickly when sweetness is in your food/drink and so you eat more.

\- Adding sugar to a salty food (and vice versa) neutralizes the salty/sweetness on your tongue. Companies often make use of this fact. For example, Coke has come out with new formulas where the only change is increased sodium and increased sugar/high fructose corn syrup to counterbalance.

\- High Fructose Corn Syrup was created in Japan. HFCS is so widely used because it is so super super cheap compared to other sweeteners. He jokes that Japan sent it to the US as revenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon.

If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.

<comment><USER11> That doesn't explain why HFCS should be worse that sucrose. It contains about the same about of fructose and according to Dr. Lustig the bound is very easy for the body to break.

Regarding "The Bitter Truth", it's amazing to me that the fact that fructose is processed by the liver is not widely known. How could the medical community not know this for so long?

<comment><USER12> Table sugar is sucrose.

First off to turn sucrose into its component molecules, it must first undergo a reaction with a sucrase enzyme. So there is at least one metabolic step left out there. Studies are being done to test if Sucrase is actively regulated by the body or not. In either case, this metabolic step must occur, and can only occur so fast (limited by the amount of sucrase in your body), no matter how much sucrose you ingest. This means slower absorption of sucrose over HFCS as you get this with the whole load of glucose in HFCS instantly, but only see the sucrose's glucose released over time.

Secondly, fructose has many forms. In sucrose, the fructose is often of the fructose-5 variety. In HFCS, it completely depends on the application, as any heat applied to a fructose-5 molecule upon separation from the glucose turns it into fructose-6.

Fructose-6 is notably less sweet than Sucrose This means when used in heat processed goods, you use quite a bit more HFCS (including all baked goods, etc) then the equivalent amount of sucrose. This means more calories.

Secondly, there are all different kids of HFCS. Notably, there is one with 38% less fructose than sucrose (HFCS 42), one with 22% more fructose than sucrose (HFCS 55) and one with 800% more fructose than table sugar (HFCS 90, often seen in diet foods I might add). They are all used for differing applications, but HFCS is not a single product, and most of the forms are likely metabolically worse in any amount of a single dose than the equivalent sweetness worth of sucrose. It is important you calculate your fractions correctly when realizing the differing amounts of fructose, as they're larger then they appear at first.

One could say a steak and the meal in your small intestines are "about the same thing" but I doubt you'd want to eat it then, and you'd be as accurate as saying table sugar is basically HFCS 55

(all percentages are in terms of "per molecule of glucose", which is what appears to be important as per the evolving science of satiation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising. A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the same category as candy.

<comment><USER14> Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus resistant).

<comment><USER8> Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be replicated from grafts.

However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)

<comment><USER14> I guess I was surprised by the example, as the modern commonplace banana (in the western world at least) is very static.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Um, wasn't that kind of the point of corn subsidies?

It really wasn't that long ago when the biggest problem in the lower class wasn't being too fat, but rather being too thin.

Certainly this is a cause for concern, but keep in mind that there are worse things than having too much fat and too much leisure time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue to prop up the corn farmers.

<comment><USER8> What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter _or_ Paul.)

The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.

<comment><USER17> I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program.

Irony.

<comment><USER8> Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix?

There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)

<comment><USER17> The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more.

I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."

<comment><USER8> You need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a decade.

Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab!

The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory.

(I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Who else paid immediate attention to the overly-staged photo?

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up your claims with at the very least strong personal anecdotal evidence, e.g., "I feel extremely happy and energetic, yet I eat tons of meat and cheese." I'm reading a book that suggests that cooking food results in the denaturing of proteins, digestive enzymes, and other nutrients, and that makes a lot of sense to me. My primary goal is to improve energy levels.

<comment><USER8> I've been eating mostly raw food for about a year, and I love it.

My diet so far has consisted of blue-rare steak (all you need to do to be safe is to sear the edges and sides to kill E. coli that has gotten onto the meat during butchering. I learned this in my microbiology class!) [You have to watch out about things like steak sauce - read the labels, and you'll find out that almost all of them have sugar in them. So I never use steak sauce, ketchup, or any of that shit - just salt+pepper.]

Salads are great, as long as you make your own dressing (so that you can keep it low-sugar.) Just a little salt, vinegar, and a nice lettuce mix, and just a little feta cheese...

Berries can be great if you need something sweet; they have enough fiber to keep you from getting an insulin spike if you're on my diet. [Be careful to not do this too much - they're expensive, and you can overdo it by gorging on several boxes every day! Many of your needs for vitamins are met with meat and leafy greens.]

At any rate, what I've described is probably called a paleo diet (maybe?) Meat is such an essential part of my life! I'm pretty healthy, and I've lost a lot of fat eating this way. (I used to be 215 lbs, now I'm at 171; I'm 6'1".)

One more thing - I used to drink sugary soda and fruit juices - these are both terrible things to put into your body. Cut that out alone, and you'll be doing yourself a huge favor.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.

<comment><USER8> How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)?

I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats).

But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the surfaces of the steak (which can get there from fecal contamination during butchering), and doing more than that is a waste.

The outsides of the steaks I make are crispy, but about .5 cm below the surface, it's nice and red. (I don't eat cuts with huge veins and the like inside them.)

<comment><USER19> Cattle rancher here. You can get tapeworms by eating uncooked beef. Thankfully it's usually easily, albeit unpleasantly, cured. However, you need to know you have them first, which can take some time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What problems do you have that could be solved using software? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> People keep asking this question. Why are you asking it? Is it an attempt to start a business? If so, I suggest going to [https://stackingthebricks.com/](https://stackingthebricks.com/) and reading everything. You'll do much better than asking random people on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> A statistics tool for dummies that always responds live to any input/change and holds your hand to avoid pitfalls and suggest what's possible. Beyond other things it should enable this:

\- choose what you roughly want to display (e.g. values over time)

\- throw some data at it

\- it auto-detects file format, dates, values, table headers

\- it shows a live parsing preview, maybe even a rough plot

\- you can tweak the selection, but more interactively than with regex and with a live preview by highlighting within a few example rows of your data

\- plot some nice, live tweakable graphs, starting from presets

\- guide through some basic transformations to do (like filtering)

\- enable to update the source data

\- export images or html

\- for more exessive logs I'd whish to have quick filtering. If I log and tag every click of a user on my website I might for example want to select behaviours within the first week of registering (account created at XY, active within XY etc, clicks on the settings menu, sort by most clicked and display "button label")

</comment><comment><USER4> I ask this question a lot and have put together a few resources.

daily newsletter:

[http://www.oppsdaily.com](http://www.oppsdaily.com)

and archive:

[https://www.oppslist.com](https://www.oppslist.com)

Plus here are a few:

1\. "I am a research assistant in a clinical science laboratory. Coordinating and communicating with lab members and collaborators. It would be nice if there were a secure way of sharing documents in unusual formats (like .pzf) and messages in real-time and that they could be stored on a group server/secure cloud that everyone could see and edit in concert with maybe a admin managing editing and sharing permissions. It would have to be very secure as the nature of the material shared would be extremely sensitive. An embarrassingly large amount of money. Average lab software for a single user license is $100-$500 USD for a year. If there were a group rate for under $3,000 base, with a lesser yearly cost for security updates, that would be worth it."

2\. "Being a long term unemployed person over 50 , I feel the biggest obstacle to completing online applications is the constant re-keying my job history to every single website I go to to apply for work. I feel an app or program that a person will enter the data one time then populate that part of the online application, from the app. This will help greatly and help reduce the discouraging and redundant task of having to do this repeatedlly.

This should be free to the job seeker and maybe $100. or less to a company. This would be a text file so not alot of graphics involved.

Thanks."

3\. "Project Manager in Healthcare. Project plan that could be shared with a large audience. Turn a MS Project plan into an editable and readable format for a large audience that doesn't have access to MS Project. Yes, $1,000 per month."

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a few across different needs of mine and suitable for different business models:

1) Give me a native Linux clone of Arq Backup, complete with deduplication and client-side (E2E) encryption, with polished UI. I'm spoiled by Arq on Mac but my daily driver is Linux and I have Duplicity, Duplicati, rclone, etc.

It needs to support AWS S3/Glacier, GCP Nearline/Coldline, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Dropbox and Box. Azure and OneDrive on the Microsoft would also be nice. Text and email alerts (Twilio API or local SMTP server), granular scheduling, frequent validation and dry run/budgeting features would be awesome.

Probably a business model like Arq's - you buy a license for a major point version instead of a SaaS subscription. I'm really looking for something that takes minutes to set up with sane, fast and secure defaults.

2) Give me a piece of software that automates the process of finding product recommendations online. For example, I really enjoy coffee. I frequently go to a subreddit relevant to the hobby and search through it to get qualified opinions. This is how I found my current bean grinder, French press, milk steamer, electric kettle, etc. This would also work well for running, watches, or other hobbies that include purchasing items.

I'm envisioning a website similar to Product Hunt or MassDrop, where users sign up and select their interests (Coffee, Running, whatever). Then you have an algorithm that uses the Reddit API to automatically map these user interests to specific subreddits, then classify, rank and sort product recommendations from the subreddit wiki and relevant threads. One step further: for each product once it's sorted, use NLP to automatically classify its most common positive and negative feedback. Then present this list to a user to automate lists of product suggestions in tandem with crowdsourced user reviews. Monetize the website with affiliate links, and eventually expand to Twitter.

I'd use that! If I had the time I'd work on it myself :)

3) Mailing lists! I subscribe to a bunch of cryptography, security-announce, tech newsletter and other mailing lists. Do for mailing lists what Slack did to IRC. Develop a platform for centralizing mailing lists, such that I can visit your website, sign up and subscribe to or unsubscribe from all of my mailing lists in one unified interface.

On the server side, what you'll do is automatically subscribe to and crawl every single mailing list you can find (mailing lists won't need to opt in), then return each mailing list in the web application frontend with robust caching and load balancing. Users can browse all mailing lists on the website without logging in and search all of them historically. If they want them delivered to email, they'll sign up and choose which ones they're interested in to subscribe. The value add for users is one location for list discovery, one feed for reading list subscriptions, one interface for searching across all lists (with advanced features, naturally), and one pleasant interface for unsubscribing from any mailing list with authentication that doesn't require email confirmation.

Once you've got this down, start adding new features the way Slack did for IRC. These features could add productivity to mailing list discussion; for example: VCS issues, bug tracking or pull requests could be integrated to pop up in a sidepane for threads. Then introduce a pricing structure. I suppose the ultimate goal would be an acquisition by a company like Slack.

4) I have terabytes and terabytes of data that I need to efficiently find insights in. All the tools exist for me to e.g. find correlations in timeseries, but the management and setup process is slow. Devise a way for me to rapidly test hypotheses in a framework designed specifically for this use case. On the storage side, kdb is the gold standard but it's nose bleed expensive. If you can develop a robust alternative, you can sell it for quite a lot. On the analysis side, I need to automate the process of normalizing data from disparate sources, across batch and stream processing, and load it into a backtesting harness. I need to know quickly if there is a link between seemingly unconnected data.

Ideally what I'd like is a way to store a massive amount of cleaned data from different formats and sources, take a slice of each one for a specific period and performantly run a correlation "fuzzer" that rapidly brute forces signals in unrelated data.

</comment><comment><USER6> Similar features (and stability ) in SAP with much much cheaper price.</comment>


The Cost of Developers - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2018/the-cost-of-developers/ <comment><USER2> Great analysis, although I don't completely agree with this statement: _" GitHub, a company that, having raised $350 million in venture capital, was not going to make it as an independent entity."_

If it is referring to the fact that, in the crazy VC spiral of the startups world, once you have received such a big investment, a sale to a big corp is the only choice, then I sadly agree. But GitHub could have been an independent entity with a sustainable business, if they had not fallen into VC's startups trap. I have to agree with DHH here: [https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1003611913924894720](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1003611913924894720). We need more independent software companies instead of only having 5 big players.

<comment><USER3> Correct, github sold out to investors, which then owned them, which then sold them out to get an exit when it turned out the company was in no shape for an IPO which is the only reasonable other exit if you are looking for a 10x ROI on a company that burned through hundreds of millions. Investors were in this for a huge exit and they just got it. In fairness, MS bought a valuable social network of essentially the entire OSS and developer community.

As an independent entity, Github would have had to evolve in a very different way and gone more aggressively after making money, fixing their cost structure, like most of their competitors like Atlassian, Gitlab, and other companies selling developer tools as a SAAS service. So, even though these are comparable companies with comparable offerings, the value proposition is very different. There is no way in hell Gitlab is worth anywhere near what MS just paid for Github.

Being based in silicon valley means Github paid a premium for being there and burned through loads of cash paying for expensive developers, fancy office space, etc. Much cheaper if you are based elsewhere, have less emphasis on wanting to have every OSS project on your platform and more emphasis on selling tools to corporations. This is in a nutshell the strategy for Atlassian and Gitlab. Both also offer freemium layers for OSS but mostly their deal is upselling to their paid offerings. Growth that way is much slower. Though, I would say, Gitlab is now pretty well positioned to succeed where Github struggled.

<comment><USER4> At where I work we use Github Enterprise, which costs way more than Gitlab Enterprise, is not scalable, and barely cares about enterprise customers like ourselves. Gitlab on the other hand is much cheaper, is highly scalable, runs in AWS, and is responsive to requests. Ultimately to make it as a business you need to provide what the customer wants and is willing to pay. Github never did.

<comment><USER5> We switched from GitHub Enterprise to BitBucket Server several years ago and are pretty (80%) happy with the decision. Saved an absolute truck load of money.

The only issue with BitBucket Server is that it (inexplicably) does not have a commit compare view.

[https://jira.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/BSER...](https://jira.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/BSERV-2550)

This is such a massive oversight I have to conclude Atlassian themselves don't use this product.

It annoys us but not enough to pay GH.

We don't like GitLab as it was slow when we tested it and the UI wasn't designed as nicely as the other two (tbh it looks like it was designed by programmers). Something about GitLab feels off and I don't really know what it is.

If MS changes the cost structure of GH Enterprise we'd probably switch back (haven't looked into how well it integrates with Jira etc recently).

<comment><USER6> There are many things I find frustrating about BitBucket Server (it's super slow, for one, it's insistence on clobbering commit strings during merges is the biggest), but I've never wanted a commit compare view; I don't even know what that is.

Care to explain what you would use it for?

<comment><USER7> I'd be interested to hear about the slow behavior you're seeing. There are some tips and tricks for improving that.

<comment><USER6> Generally speaking, I have found Atlassian's tools don't scale well to megacorp usage. When there are thousands to tens of thousands of users connecting at peak times, stuff just gets extremely slow. Noticeably slower than when we all put up our own team-level Phabricator instances, although I'm obviously not adjusting for Phabricator downtime when inevitably the unofficial team sysadmin went on vacation and the server fell over.

I'm sure people involved in infrastructure are working on making this better, but I don't have any visibility into that layer.

<comment><USER7> From a speed standpoint, I'll say the obvious thing, "it's architecture dependent".

For thousands to tens of thousands of users, most folks need data center with 1+n nodes (w/ larger diminishing returns at 8 nodes). There's a few tips and tricks with that, like pointing CI/CD tools to a smart mirror instead of the primary instance and only mirroring specific build projects. Putting smart mirrors in the same physical location as a primary instance could also help reduce the impact of CPU-intensive requests like git fetch or clone.

Another common issue is apps/plugins. Bitbucket 5.9 added a way to get app diagnostics so infra folks can see if there's a long-running process or other weirdness. Vanilla Bitbucket needs about a 1gb heap (java) and with apps, you want around 4gb (give or take).

If you want a longer read to share, this still has some good info despite being 2~ years old: [https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/12/how-we- built-bi...](https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/12/how-we-built- bitbucket-data-center-to-scale/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers

Is there any platform with _higher_ barriers to entry than the App Store? iOS development requires a proprietary toolchain only available on Apple hardware, programming languages hardly used elsewhere, not to mention the $99/year developer fee and the litany of vague and arbitrarily enforced rules and content guidelines for App Store release.

<comment><USER9> stratechery wrote: _" the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers"_

To which you replied: _" Is there any platform with higher barriers to entry than the App Store? [...] , not to mention the $99/year developer fee"_

His _baseline_ for "lowered barriers" was _retail channel distribution_.[1] Think of shrinkwrapped packaged software like Quicken on the shelves of CompUSA, OfficeDepot, Costco, and boxes of videogames at GameStop.

Yes, $99 is a barrier but it's much less than the _millions of dollars_ in capital required to get retail stores to carry your boxed software.

[1] if you click on the url link behind _" lowered the barriers"_, you'll be directed to this page illustrating _retail distribution_ : [https://stratechery.com/2013/friction/](https://stratechery.com/2013/friction/)

<comment><USER10> Interesting. In hindsight, the retail store distribution model of software lasted far longer (and still does) than it ever should have.

<comment><USER11> I think you are underestimating how much easier high speed internet enabled downloading of software over buying a CD

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I very clearly remember a "the sky is falling" sentiment when Steam launched a download only version of Half-Life 2.

Or take Netflix, very few thought that would be the streaming juggernaut that it is into today. Alas poor Blockbuster, we knew you well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> MS paid $7.5 Billion for Github, along with its 28 Million users - it's in the first paragraph of the announcement (1)

That's around $268 per Github user.

Now MS could have probably made a site comparable to Github for 0.1% of that cost - e.g. revive codeplex, pump a few million into the design, backend, git support and user interactions.

But it wouldn't have 28M users. That's what they're paying for. That's the hard part.

1) [https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to- acquire-g...](https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire- github-for-7-5-billion/)

<comment><USER14> > That's around $268 per Github user.

That seems like a decent deal for MS... Assume on average a user is an active engineer for 5 years (of course this is back-of-the-envelope and not even taking into account the growth of the field, and new engineers are likely to use Github for it's network effects).

Is the value of owning the central platform of an individual engineer worth more than $50 / year? Even if all you did was run basic ads I'd say yes - although I'd expect more services including edging in on Atlassian's turf as an upsell opportunity for MS.

All this, not even counting future value... If Slashdot is still around and somewhat valuable, Github will probably also still be around and somewhat valuable at least a decade from now.

<comment><USER13> > That seems like a decent deal for MS..

Indeed, as cost of acquisition of an active developer, it doesn't seem either absurdly high or absurdly low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are times when I really like the thoughtful analysis on Stratechery and there are other times when I think it's a complete pile of detached-from- reality horsesh!t. Today is of the 2nd kind.

 _What it also has is a potentially fatal weakness: no platform with user- based leverage._

Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is.

 _This, by the way, is precisely why Microsoft is the best possible acquirer for GitHub, a company that, having raised $350 million in venture capital, was not going to make it as an independent entity._

Seriously? GitHub could have easily gone out for more VC. They could have IPOed. "Not going to make it as an independent entity" is so far detached from reality, what was he thinking when writing that?

<comment><USER16> Github would have had trouble getting more VC investment. According to Bloomberg, there are ~21M software developers in the world, and Github has ~24M user accounts. There's little userbase growth possible there; they would have had to start increasing revenue per user rapidly to be interesting for another VC round.

Equally, on their $200M revenue (or whatever it was), they would struggle to get a multiple that would be interesting for their VC backers. Their market cap at IPO wouldn't have been much more than $1B (absent some growth story).

It's a great problem to have, to be sure, but the MS purchase is a great deal for Github investors.

<comment><USER15> They could have easily become a formidable competitor to Atlassian if they extended their offering beyond just code hosting. Competing with Atlassian is actually not that hard considering how _bad_ Atlassian is at times (I'm a customer myself). Atlassian today has a market cap of 15B.

There's a lot of growth opportunities if you have >20m users.

<comment><USER17> Agree. There are some easy project management wins for Github. It's flabbergasting that they've ignored them. Issue complexity and time estimates. Burn downs. Github is only part way there, why not get all the way?

<comment><USER18> Sometimes it's worth it to stick to what you're good at.

If Github burnt a ton of cash to try and compete with Jira, ended up making a product that didn't attract enough people over at the same time as ignoring problems that users were already grumbling about, this could have led to them being in a worse state and easier for MS to pick up on the cheap.

<comment><USER17> If it cost a ton of cash, that would be ridiculous. It is adding some fields and charts. Do you think Zenhub has or had a ton of cash?

<comment><USER19> If it was so easy to make a decent project management tool, there would be one...

<comment><USER17> There are many. We built one in Google Sheets. Zenhub layers over Github. We love it too. But I am sure it didn't require tens of millions of dollars to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Solid analysis as always.

As a Windows user, I'm finding it increasingly harder to justify using the OS. Pretty much every single software I use to get my work done works in my browser.

The only software that runs natively is Ableton, which works perhaps even better on Mac. If I haven't switched, it's simply because of laziness: it would be too much of a hassle to copy all my samples to another device and reinstall all my plugins

<comment> Mary-Jane The bigger challenge, if you're a long time Windows user, will be overcoming your own muscle memory. Apple's keyboard layout and shortcuts are similar but different enough to cause problems. It can be quite distracting for instance if you're in the zone and hit the shortcut to replace some text, and then suddenly every window on your desktop disappears!

<comment><USER21> Biggest problem I have with a mac is the " mark. On a PC (GB keyboard) it's shift-2, on a mac shift-2 is @, and " is shift-'

<comment><USER22> You can customize your key mappings. I found a dvorak keyboard with esperanto key bindings on the internet. If that exists, I'm sure anything else can be done (assuming you touch type).

<comment><USER21> Sure, but if you work from machine to machine to machine customisation is fairly terrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The author talks about leverage an OS provides to the vendor: iOS for Apple (and its App Store) and Windows for Microsoft. It is only logical that when your leverage fades, you should find an alternative means for growth.

Microsoft has been betting on the cloud for some time now. Part of that strategy is shifting enterprise from premise to Azure. In parallel investing in developers. VS Code, .NET Core and now GitHub are good examples of those investments.

What I haven't seen are non-enterprise developers, even hobbyists, using Azure as their cloud. When I talk to fellow devs, they have experience with AWS not Azure. My impression is that the Linux/CLI environment is much more familiar that Azure cloud portal with buttons à la Windows. Less black box. Curious to know if my impression is right.

<comment><USER24> The hobbyiest/ side project angle of this is the most interesting to me.

Most side projects end up in github at some point (especially if Microsoft makes private repos free - very likely). Azure's PaaS offering is actually pretty good so having a simple deploy to azure button when creating the project could be a huge boost.

<comment><USER25> That's my expectation, too: they don't change anything except that there'll be a super easy path to deploy on Azure and probably some nice CI tools, etc. with great VSCode integration. ("You have a Dockerfile. Click here to deploy on Azure free tier.")

Simply making sure they're considered along with AWS would be big, especially since experience on small or side projects factors into many business decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty Apple-oriented article.

Sure, Apple has created a platform, but at which cost? You are obliged to develop for iOS, OSX only having an Apple computer. The platform has no escape rooms.

Windows has extended the .Net to run even on Linux and you can build Windows applications from other OSes as well. The flexibility is in the tooling and MS knows it - see how dramatically improved Visual Studio in latest releases and now compare it with Xcode: what's new in Xcode 10? The Dark mode, what else?

The author still forgets that actually the ultimate gaming platform is still a PC with Windows. Mobile gaming has improved, but the best gaming experience (VR and not) runs on bare metal PCs.

Apple just decided to ditch OpenGL and OpenCL in favour of Metal - this will backfire in the near future, because developers look for easy tooling which allow them to use fewer but high quality APIs and not three thousands (e.g. Vulkan, UWP).

</comment><comment><USER27> The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.

<comment><USER28> Which MS acquisition did make sense? Skype? Nokia? LI? Yammer?

<comment><USER29> Xamarin

<comment><USER30> I have literally had a mobile team threaten to quit if we adopted Xamarin after they built a small app in it lol.

<comment><USER31> Xamarin can be pretty tough if you don't have a good appreciation of Xcode, iOS and UWP development and tooling, and underlying differences.

<comment><USER30> Oh, they understood it, top tier mobile devs, they just thought it was trash. Drastically preferred to do native. I went to bat for them, and we shipped a beautiful app on time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand the last sentence:

"That, though, is exactly why Microsoft had to pay so much: buying in directly is a whole lot more expensive than using leverage, which can produce equivalent — or better! — returns for much less investment."

<comment><USER33> I think his point was that Apple has leverage over developers (you have to go through the app store to access iOS users) and therefore doesn't have to care about investing in a good developer experience. Microsoft doesn't have equivalent leverage to get developers to develop for Windows or Azure so they have to instead invest more in winning developers over by offering them better tools and services, hence the expensive GitHub acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My experience is that developers are hardcore in their opinion on Microsoft: they are either all in or have no interest in dealing with them.

I don't see Microsoft being able to move developers with this purchase.

<comment><USER35> I'd imagine there are a significant number of developers using VS Code and no other Microsoft products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I thought Azure is the platform that Microsoft is planning to pull developers into?

Step 1: Buy github

Step 2: Integrate Azure and Visual Studio

Step 3: Profit

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting to see Microsoft playing nice with vendors. I've seen many play less than nice. (ISVs who host on Azure and badmouth Microsoft products)

<comment><USER38> Woah I had no idea that when you use Azure, you're morally obligated to like the company too.

<comment><USER37> If you're in a partnership with them that both of you use as Marketing on your websites, you shouldn't badmouth each other.</comment></comment></comment>


Why My 11-Year Old Stopped Coding Then Switched to Python - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/why-my-11-year-old-stopped-coding-then-started-again-ccc259f2f1a5 <comment><USER2> If you're looking at a way to teach a basic AI for beginners (yes, even teens), you could just try Markov chains.

You can make an easy garbage text generator / automatic text-completion (à la text messages) with markov chains, they are quite intuitive to understand and easy to implement. You can even easily make an artificial player that beats you at rock-scissors-paper, in less than 100 lines of code, using only maps and the good old random function. Teens are both surprised, proud and angry when their own code beats them, especially at a game that looks so random ("hey! my own code can detect patterns I'm not even aware of in my playing!")

Although that is not for beginners (it is using go), here is a good explanation of what I mean: [https://golang.org/doc/codewalk/markov/](https://golang.org/doc/codewalk/markov/).

Naive Bayes (and how it can detect spams) is a good second step: it is still rather intuitive and is a real, industry-tested ML algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER3> Getting kids engaged by showing them how to dig into a website's HTML and JavaScript was fantastic back in the day. But now it's basically asking kids to reverse engineer assembly because of transpilation, minification, etc.

When I do this with my kids it will be with python and some Lego or lego-like robotics components. Basically, extend their Lego experience the way redstone extends a child's Minecraft experience when they're ready for it.

<comment><USER4> Honest question: once a kid is old enough to have mastered/outgrown Legos, why not get them using real tools? I loved using Legos late into my childhood, but in retrospect as I got older it was probably closer to art than building. Art is of course fine, and art overlaps with building sometimes, but they are different.

<comment><USER5> I always had real tools as a child, and wasn't particularly interested in Lego. I think there aren't that many transferable skills between Lego and making things more generally. Frankly, I don't even think there are that many transferable skills between different mediums, or even between processes in the same medium.

Forging steel with a hammer and anvil, for example, teaches you a lot about fire management, temper, and so on - but teaches you absolutely nothing about accurate machining of steel parts. The attitude isn't even the same. If you go into a wood workshop after six months of working with metal, you're going to break things, destroy finishes, and waste work.

There are some general principles that apply to a lot of mediums, but I think they're the exception, not the rule. For instance, sticking stuff together generally relies on the surfaces being very clean - and that's true if you're using glue or welding. On the whole, however, I think the reason why distinct processes, finishes and materials exist is because they offer different possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So far none of my kids have really cared about coding at all. We've got python books, js books, ruby books, scratch, Lego Mindstorms, arduinos... they aren't interested. Definitely wouldn't pick it up unless prompted.

We home educate, so they have access and time to explore.

Nope.

Our oldest picked it up after a 6 month stint making sandwiches when they were 17.

"Dad, can I still learn to code?"

I miss the days when "tell turtle forward 50" was amazing.

<comment><USER7> I and my wife discuss programming matters in front of our kids. And my kids listen to the discussions and want to be part of it.

Then I start teaching the basics, they are a bit more willing to hear.

Here the incentive for them is to be part of the club where interesting things are happening.

We laugh at coding jokes which kids don't appear to understand which leaves them confused.

So, it seems they are aware they lack some understanding because of which they are unable to understand us.

The same idea has worked for math, playing musical instruments like keyboard/ukelele, physical exercises like skipping ropes or air pushups.

If I simply give them a computer or ukelele, they won't be interested as they don't know how to hold a ukulele or have no one to tell them how to hold it right and how to fuse a chord progression with the strumming pattern. These things are not obvious by just watching or hits and trials on a guitar/ukelele.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having the right subject matter makes a difference. Baseball has a ton of data that they collect about each game. I wanted to learn R and took an online class where the professor was a Sabermetrics guru. Made the learning of R fun while also learning more about "inside baseball". I turned that into a small AI project on what players would be / should be traded as the season came to an end. (Teams that are out of the running will trade top players away to teams that are in the running to win their divisions. ) It was fun, because the subject is interesting.

Trying to teach programming with a dry subject matter is very hard to do (Calculate area under a curve for your second programming assignment anyone?)

Congrats on the son keeping up with it

</comment><comment><USER9> there's nothing out there like BASIC anymore (except maybe lua or moonscript/python)

also why would a child want to code a website, I learned BASIC because i wanted to make games.

<comment><USER10> > why would a child want to code a website

Noticed this a lot when engineers try to teach their children coding, far too much time spent trying to teach what they view as the correct way to do things or correct thing to learn. e.g seen several articles that opened on trying to teach them to set up git and a command line environment.

I think there is more value in trying to teach them to make something that is more understandable to their world and allows for creativity and therefore a self-learning reinforcement loop to begin. This is why more interactive things like games work so well for this.

It's a huge achievement that an 11 year old could complete the courses detailed in the article, but I'm interested if they can go on to take those learnings and initiate their own project. Which is something you definitely see from kids who learnt to code through the likes of Flash or game engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR - "No more Javascript?" He asked.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone comment on the quality of these DataCamp courses?</comment>


Improve Security by Unit Testing Your Code - <AUTHOR> http://wontlistentoreason.com/2015/01/19/improve-security-with-unit-testing/

<comment><USER2> I didn't see security mentioned in that essay. What I saw was using a unit test framework to manage regression tests. Regression tests date back to at least Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month", and aren't necessarily due to a unit which needs testing.</comment>


An ipad that fits your pocket: introducing a roll-up tablet with flexible screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.hml.queensu.ca/magicscroll <comment><USER2> Minor quibble: can we not call Android/OtherOS tablets 'iPads'?

The amount of use/productivity I get out of iOS vs. any other mobile OS is absurd.

Unless it can run GarageBand or iMovie, it's not an iPad.

This tablet is absolutely useless to me as a media content producer, and especially with the full Photoshop coming to iPad later this year, the disparity is only growing larger.</comment>


Nokia's Skype-based end run around its operator partners - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Furious-UK-Operators-Want-paidcontent-14495285.html

<comment><USER3>
      UK operators O2 and Orange are reportedly "furious" with Nokia (NYSE: NOK - News) over
      the Finnish handset makers plans to pre-load Skype, the VoiP provider that lets
      consumers make free calls, on to its upcoming flagship device, the N97

And I can see Nokia execs answering: "Well, you betrayed us to _first_ just to catch on the iPhone fad making it now our biggest threat. You forced us into this new era. Live with it."

</comment><comment><USER4> Ah Nokia, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

"Nokia have tried several ways to own the customer over the years and operators have had to say no."

I really wish these guys would wake up and realise you dont ever "own" your customers. Customers aren't slaves, and alternatives spring up to what you do, sooner or later. But hey that's the arrogance of the operators - <USER2> innovation for the last however many years, so they could "own" the customer.

Good luck with that guys!

<comment><USER5> I think you skipped a sentence:

      Apparently, the operators are "venting their anger" at
      high-level executive meetings with Nokia, whom they
      believe are trying to wrest away control of their
      customers and offering easy access to an app that could
      potentially hurt call revenues.

Nokia is trying to control the platform and therefore the customers' user experience TO THE CUSTOMERS' BENEFIT and yet, you act like that is a bad thing. Clearly, Nokia does not believe the service provider's intentions have the customers' interest at heart, so they are trying to OWN the customer, rather than the service provider so that they can provide them with what they (the customers') want (ie. Skype). Nokia is trying to do what few other companies are and you are calling their attitude to their customers as "stifling innovation"? Wow.

<comment><USER4> No, my comments were aimed at the operators, not Nokia. Nokia is stuck in the hard place where they understand the need and want to innovate, but their biggest direct customers (the operators) really dont want them to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe they should just make their own network.

Anyway, if it's possible to install Skype on these phones, even if it doesn't come preinstalled it won't matter much, people will do it anyway.

<comment><USER7> When VOIP is pervasive on phones, I think it will start to make the cell network the secondary choice to WiFi (already is for me). The only value the cell network for me is a phone connection. This is providers' moat.

I'd like to see a cell network embrace the fact they are a pipe. Pay line and connection fee (like the current internet). Forget data/voice plans. I imagine manufacturers and software developers for the Android, iPhone (after the 5 year AT&T deal) and Pre would go ape. More subscribers to your network because of new devices and beautiful software. The barrier of entry is much lower.

I kind of see it like the newspaper industry. Which company will gamble first and jettison the print medium? Which company will leave the old cell model behind? My guess is the weak ones...file for bankruptcy, change their model and re-emerge from the ashes. I'm crossing my fingers it is a phoenix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> the whole reason I bought an unlocked nokia e71 is to be free of expensive contracts and its great voip support, unlike the iPhone. if nokia stops doing it, I'm sure someone else will step up.

<comment><USER9> I bought one of those as well, however to my dismay any VOIP calls made through Skype still get charged to my normal call time with them not going through my data access.

Seems like Skype bowed down to the phone companies in this respect.</comment></comment>