Ask HN: Why do such strong opinions exist in our industry? - <AUTHOR> Namely, why do opinions tend to completely trump evidence for technical decisions? E.g. choosing new trending frameworks, a language that _wasnt_ used on a previous project that failed, choosing a cloud provider based on gut-feeling etc. etc.<p>Is this because it's so easy to get started with new tech? I'd be interested to know what people's experiences are like. <comment><USER2> Because this isn't an engineering discipline, there's no science, it's all pop culture. Alan Kay:

 _Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture._

Basically everyone roots for their favorite team.

<comment><USER3> In my experience a lot of people who post on hn have a shallow view of how technology relates to a diversity of people who use it. Most are coders for a company who make web apps, or business applications or have been in coding long enough to develop esoteric affectations for LISP. Every time I see an incredibly strong worded opinion I get the impression they've never stepped outside working with a computer company driven by a 'demand' for a 'product'.

Just look at the comments of this thread right now. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672051)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I was just reading that and thinking the exact same thing. Lately I've been thinking 'man, Elixir has been getting some traction' until I realised I'd only really read that on HN in the comments sections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Software developement is an unconstrained field. Computers can do almost anything you dream up. You don't need expensive tools, space, raw materials, or lots of people to make it. Contrast with building a car, where strength of materials, wear and tear, safety requirements, etc. make the design space kind of small.

In other words, there are fewer decisions that can be resolved by "option A is the _only_ way to meet constraints x, y, and z simultaneously."

<comment><USER5> It's not true, we have a plenty of constraints: memory, cpu, battery consumption, latency, etc. We also have complexity constraints, i.e. how qualified our teams, which technologies, they know, etc.

IMO, many combinations are just impossible, just like in mechanical engineering, and even worse, complexity is often much higher.

<comment><USER4> I think many programmers work on projects where computer hardware limitations have little impact on the code design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting and may explain the core of many arguments in the developer community (i.e. a lot of hair-splitting!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's too much going on in this industry. _Nobody_ knows everything. When a question comes up (Angular vs React? Lisp vs Haskell? C++ vs Rust?), there are very few people who know both sides really thoroughly, even for a question that only has two sides. So we wind up with opinions, because nobody knows enough to do otherwise.

And if you don't know both sides, you're judging a side that you know less well against a side that you know better. That is, you're judging your _experience_ of X against your _opinion_ of Y. When you're talking to someone who knows Y better than X, you can get fireworks.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, so are you blaming the incompetence of the majority of people in the field?

Also, I can't help but draw parallels to this other discussion [1] where people claim that veterans in the programming community have to "live" with python because beginners adore the syntax.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672051)

<comment><USER9> > Hmm, so are you blaming the incompetence of the majority of people in the > field?

I interpreted it as being an issue that there are so many options that being an expert in the relevant two so you can can make an educated decision is uncommon.

This is probably somewhat unique to programming. There are easily more than 25 programming languages that would be important to know trade-offs between in any given programmer's career. And in each, there are competing libraries and frameworks. Woodworking is the only other profession that comes to mind for having so many competing tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Compared to the constraints of the physical world, the universe of computability is essentially limitless.

On top of that, there are almost zero objective facts in the field. Faster and smaller are about the only factual statements that can be made about computability. Everything else is an opinion. With no physical truth to disprove wrong opinions, people get accustomed to putting forward passionate arguments without every worrying about being proven wrong.

Finally, it usually takes significant effort to even have a few sample cases to compare opinions when it comes to coding. And usually it's not under scientific controlled environment.

There are no two decades long arguments about "does a ball roll down a hill". Noone is taking a strong opinion against. Before it would get that far, someone would just put a ball on a hill and see the end result. You can't do that with software, the problem space is too large and there is no little bearing to an objective way to measure to results, or they often aren't generally applicable.

</comment><comment><USER11> What evidence exists that definitively says JavaScript is better than perl? Or golang is definitively better than python.

There is no definitive evidence.

You can't even prove that rust is definitively better than assembly language.

Hence where no evidence exists, decisions without evidence are made constantly.

You also need to realize that this not baffling. Collecting hard scientific evidence for every freaking detail is incredibally hard and time consuming. It's part of why the medical industry moves so slowly to get medicine out.

In fact any problem with the word design means that you are working on a problem with no definitive evidence pointing to a definitive solution. You are literally designing a possible solution out of thin air. There's a whole segment of people who do this, they are called ux and ui designers and a large portion of the the content they spit out is not evidence based at all.

<comment><USER12> What evidence exists that definitively says JavaScript is better than perl? Or golang is definitively better than python.

do people bother to gather the evidence though? like perhaps performance, number of bugs per coding day, quantity and quality of output etc.

<comment><USER13> Is evidence helpful?

At our workplace, it's clear that Cordova hybrid is worse than maintaining both iOS/Swift and Android/Kotlin, in terms of bugs, development time, hiring/retention cost, user experience. But we still do it.

Sometimes it's just that there's less unknowns involved. A bug in Cordova might take a week to fix. A bug in Android or iOS might take 1-2 days. Statistically it would be a no brainer. But bugs are dreadful things and there's the possibility that it could take much longer than usual or go unnoticed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think its also worth looking at how people usually learn computer science.

In my limited experience, most programmers learn real world software development using the internet.

Some might learn CS theory in formal education, but most real world tools and frameworks are just taught by random people on the internet, or worse, giant corporates that have business interest in promoting the use of X. (Flutter, React, etc.)

Internet cannot possibly provide the scientific temperament and rigour that formal education in say, Physics, is able to provide.

The general consensus among the public seems to be that internet has made CS education highly accessible to the masses. This is of course, very convenient for countries like India, where higher education is often unaffordable and unpractical.

What's not so clear however, is whether this is enough for a real engineering discipline to exist.

<comment><USER14> This makes sense to me, as a dev from India who's currently learning a variety of technologies.

I could never afford college, so I took it upon myself to learn whatever I wanted from the Internet. It is astounding how rich the resources for CS are, if you know where to look on the web.

Going back to the topic at hand, I often find myself being defensive and supportive of stacks I use and learnt about. When I dig deeper, I find myself at a lack of words, regarding why I like React or Python. It mostly boils down to "I like x because I know x". I often don't have reasons backed by technical knowledge.

Many times I've not given a certain language/stack a chance just because I heard/read one guy write something negative about it online.

I see my error and will try not to be blindly biased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Namely, why do opinions tend to completely trump evidence for technical > decisions?

Because evidence that isolates the effect of the technical choices under discussion from all outside effects and is directly and unambiguously applicable to the context in which it needs to be applied basically doesn't exist for most technical decisions in our industry.

The evidence which is clear tends to be on questions which are distant from business value, the questions the get directly at business value tend to have unclear/ambiguous evidence.

</comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps confidence, warranted or not, gets more attention (including upvotes and reshares) than being justifiably cautious about drawing a conclusion? In theory this will both reward confidence and make it appear like most people are doing it.

It seems tough to avoid. You need a system, and we don't really have one yet.

</comment><comment><USER17> The trending frameworks might be because we usually get tired of working with the same technology over and over again. The moment of learning something new is always exciting and once it wears out I guess that starting with "the new thing" recreates that feeling momentarily so we start rationalizing about it. There is also in my opinion the big problem of being able to do the same thing with many different tools, it always generates this kind of conflicts of which one is better, but at the end of the day, any tool can be "the best one" depending on the team.

<comment><USER18> I find the opposite. I would far rather develop in a language / framework that I am familiar with, knowing that I will be making the correct decisions.

I doubt it is only me, but every first attempt with a new language is a fairly crappy effort, as its a learning experience. I prefer to be solving the problem at hand rather than having to google something about the framework every half hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Because it's art moreso than science or engineering, thus much less subject to constraints like physical limitations.

</comment><comment><USER20> We had a term where I used to work - Promotion Oriented Architecture. In most places progress in the engineering org chart is heavily influenced by delivering software for complex usecases. Unfortunately IME most developers correlate complexity in the problem domain to complexity in the solution domain. This becomes a very strong driver for adopting novel solutions, even when a simpler one would have sufficed.

A second factor is the difficulty in measuring success. Once a solution is adopted it is very hard to demonstrate the opportunity cost incurred by not selecting a simpler solution. And the costs themselves may not be evident until long after delivery. And since measurement is hard, the lack of data also makes it difficult to articulate effective counter arguments to gratuitous complexity

<comment><USER21> I like to refer to POA as Resume Driven Development, pairs nicely with TDD IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if it has to do with the CS background of people, but i find it baffling too (physics background). A TON of decisions are given very little thought or justification even though it should not be hard to measure stuff. It borders or being similar to management.

<comment><USER16> Although it's sometimes not hard to measure things, often the measurements don't generalize. Today's measurements may be invalidated by future software upgrades, or just variety in the platforms where the software runs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think you have to follow the money. When people have invested a lot of money into something, and loan payments are due every month, people tend to "make decisions" like "we are going with xyz framework" or "we've always used java so why migrate".

Once this decision is made at the top, the middle managers and aspirational employees believe in the upper echelon's dogma because their jobs depend on it, and going against the organization might = getting fired.

Conversely, when you look at self organized teams that are just making a hobby project, they tend to go with "we will do whatever we want to do given the reality of the tech landscape".

</comment><comment><USER23> Wisdom takes time. Effort and time. A certain striving few are willing to maintain.

</comment><comment><USER24> Programming is (in a lot of cases) a "personal endeavour", as generally 1 computer has 1 keyboard for 1 person to use. This typically means it's a _personal_ experience to program software, which can have a stronger impact on you. Some experiences in programming are really good others are really bad...

 _" Strong opinions come from strong experiences."_

</comment><comment><USER25> There are multiple reasons why strong opinions exist.

But at least one of them is quite valid. We have a lot of garbage in our industry. People perceive that correctly and call it out. Simple as that.

</comment><comment><USER26> Strong opinions exist in any industry. However, few industries have as many things going on (and actively vyying for your attention, whether for $$ or mindshare or otherwise) as software.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you go deep in a niche you're going to learn things. Those things may be contrary to the standard thinking. But in turn if you're right they become the standard thinking.

</comment><comment><USER11> Because there is no evidence either way.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's no single source of truth. Experiences are posted on social media and forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER29> Network effects and platform thinking create a high sense of urgency: time to market is considered crucial.

This in combination with a high level of innovation means there is a big risk perceived in taking the time to truely evaluate and test new technologies.

And in the end, because most of this is venture capitalist driven, long term effects are not really important: a road to a rewarding exit (ipo or company purchase) is what really drives most investment decisions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dunning-Kruger effect.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does it cost money to post on online job boards? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious as to why it costs money to post on job boards.  Is it mainly to filter crappy listings?  Or because they know they can make money?
It seems like it would be easy enough to build a website for free with minimal overhead and have very targeted advertising to cover costs / make a profit.
Also -- shameless plug -- if you're a RoR hacker: http://gopollgo.com/about/jobs <comment><USER2> 1\. No website is free.

2\. Building communities is hard and expensive (for both prospects as well as attracting listings).

3\. The alternatives (recruiters) are really expensive (tens of thousands of dollars for some positions), the relatively small fee of these sites is very reasonable for most companies who are serious about hiring a new candidate.

4\. This may sound odd, but companies like to spend money for services. If you have purchasing authority at a company you're more likely to go with a paid alternative even if its only marginally better, bosses are more interested in results than expenses (usually).

</comment><comment><USER3> A business is looking to hire someone because they believe hiring that person will bring them a return on their investment. Therefore, an online job board is helping the company make money. Therefore, the company should pay for that service. You always have to pay for something in time or money. If you are not paying in money, you will have to pay more in time (ala filtering spam/irrelevant replies from Craigslist).

BTW, your posting is a little contradictory. In bold you write, "Nonetheless, you should be ready to make working on GoPollGo the primary focus of your life" but then state "We don't care what hours you work."

</comment><comment><USER4> Job boards are essentially a form of ad arbitrage, they buy traffic and resell it at a higher price. Because job boards can amortize the cost of buying traffic across multiple job adverts, they can afford to buy an audience which an individual company can't.

Because people only look for a new job rarely, it's very hard to build a brand for a job site. Hence job sites have to advertise continuously to sustain traffic levels.

A job site which offered free job adverts couldn't buy traffic and hence would be mostly useless to companies looking to hire.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the larger job boards buy a ton of traffic, but they also spend a lot on branding. Just watch the Super Bowl.

There are also many successful niche job boards that don't buy traffic. I find that most of them rely heavily on organic SEO along with strategic partnernships and even some brand building.

Yes, arbitrage is big in the job board industry (which is why Indeed does so well), but I think that you're overstating its importance.

<comment><USER4> Even for the big branded job boards the majority of traffic is driven through short term advertising and not long term branding. Monster, etc spend a lot on Super Bowl advertising and most of the effect from that comes within a couple of weeks after the advert.

Especially if you're talking about professional jobs, generally most talented professional are rarely actively looking for a new job, so it doesn't matter how powerful your brand is, you still need to be actively pushing them to look for a new job.

There are very few niche players who succeed on organic SEO, certainly in the tech sector, most of the successful non-ad-buying job boards are run by sites which already have targeted organic traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same reason that it costs money to advertise on television. The job board has an audience, and you want to reach it. Attention is expensive.

Building an online talent community isn't easy. I know since I've been doing it for the past 3.5 years. If you can consistently deliver high quality candidates, then you can demand a really high price. This means that you either need to be really big or really targeted. Targeted is better, but most of the big names in the jobs space go for big.

</comment><comment><USER6> My thoughts: * servers aren't free. * charging a little keeps quality up. * free job boards usually suck, so charging helps you look more legitimate. * I'd love to see a job board post stats about how their stats.

<comment><USER4> What sort of stats would you like to see?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ever seen the job boards on Craiglist? They're free, and they really suck. The signal to noise ratio on both sides becomes horrendous.

<comment><USER8> I've seen them and they're not free ($25): <https://post.craigslist.org/sdo/J?guide=yes>

Bigger cities are even more expensive, ie San Fran, NYC. I'll agree that the job postings on craigslist don't look spectacular, but with a few friends who just found jobs and other who are currently jobless, their go to job site is Craigslist. Sure they fill out profiles on Monster and Career Builder, but then they just sit back and wait to be contacted by recruiters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Basic capitalism: Because they can.</comment>


JSCPP: simple C++ interpreter written in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixhao28/JSCPP <comment><USER2> From a very rough point of view, node works by transforming JavaScript into C++ on the fly -- I wonder if we could uses this knowledge to build a direct interpreter for C++ and how this project would compare, with respect to efficiency.</comment>


Solar power from 'the dark side' unlocked by a new formula - <AUTHOR> https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2019/Q4/solar-power-from-the-dark-side-unlocked-by-a-new-formula.html <comment><USER2> The result about semi-transparent solar cells look interesting, but the press release is annoying.

It is not a formula, it's a theoretical model for multiple junction solar cells that has as a result a formula.

It's not 'the dark side'. IIUC they never use the temperature difference or something like that from the dark side. They just have semi transparent solar cells, so the can put another cell in tandem.</comment>


React Concurrent Mode - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1120971795425832961 <comment><USER2> Can someone explain this in terms that are slightly more, let's say, basic?

Like, does this mean React would be a good choice over other frameworks that can't do this, to reduce jankiness?

I am relatively well versed in vanilla JS, but have never made the jump to a framework, as there are just too goddamn many and I never know whether I'm really gaining anything from using one -.-</comment>


Student Debt Lawsuits Are a Lucrative Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/business/dealbook/student-debt-lawsuits.html <comment><USER2> Good Lord. There are two issues with college tuition:

The first problem is people are not shopping around for a college education. There are thousands of incredible colleges around the USA that will give you the same or better education as a pricey school on the coasts.

I did my easiest credits at Bulter County Community, then Wichita State University, before finishing up at Kansas State University. I only took on about $8k of debt for a degree in Information Systems (computer science with an emphasis in business classes) from their engineering school (which is one of 24 schools that has a nuclear reactor on campus). K-State itself was a hoot to go to, it's a great little school in a swanky town isolated by 2 hours of prairie grass.

The second problem is people are paying way too much for a nearly useless degrees that some colleges offer. You can get a degree in "music therapy" or "insurance administration", both of which a motivated individual could also get on-the-job training for.

Somewhere there should be a list of "Degrees you should not get if you're going to pay more than $x for" to help bright-eyed high school kids make good decisions.

<comment><USER3> Shopping around for college education only makes sense if your career path doesn't take the name of the institution into account. Careers are so path dependent that landing in a worse first job can make a huge difference in lifetime earnings.

See, a good engineer I know, who studied in University of Missouri Rolla. Their CS degree is not all that different from a big name, as far as curriculum is concerned, but many HR departments won't recognize the place, especially if it's a company from the coasts. If you don't find a way to break through that social class, the best you can hope for is a Midwest Enterprise company, which will not pay as well, and will not teach as well. Then your resume will be thrown away at many hip companies, because working at such companies is seen as a negative, not as a positive: To climb out of a good education with a bad name to a place that pays top dollar can be a huge struggle. If instead you go to the Right University, you can then move on to the Right Company, and you can keep working at said places, or get venture capital to start your own thing, because you were already in the inside track. That's what you are paying for at the coastal university, not a dramatically superior education.

You are right though, in that there are many degrees that are terrible investments in all but the topmost universities. You'd be surprised by the kind of companies that will interview you anyway if you have an irrelevant degree from Harvard.

<comment><USER4> Heh, I went to that school and I had the same problem: literally everyone would ignore me because I went to a Midwest state school.

I went and did my own thing so my story is fine. But I wonder about how much good talent is ignored just on the basis of where one went to college.

<comment><USER5> I went to KU. Living in KS and making just as much as those in the coastal rat race, without the crazy housing prices. If you know your shit, you'll do fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is remarkable that you cannot declare bankruptcy from student debt. We have essentially decoupled the price of college from the expected return.

<comment><USER7> If we didn't prevent it, then you'd be stupid to not go to college take out $120k in loans and then declare bankruptcy at 22 prior to taking a job (you'd have no income and no assets). You'd be 29 by the time the bankruptcy fell off your credit report, meaning credit might be tight in those years to buy a car or house, but you'd be debt free - something many people in their 20s and 30s would gladly do if they were given the option. Since a degree is not tangible, there is nothing to secure it with, they can't foreclose on your education like they can a piece of property. Without anything to secure it, there would be 0 market for college loans except for the privileged who can pay out of pocket for their education. IMO the only way to solve it is to put the school on the hook for part of the $$ if the default rate exceeds X%. Then it forces the school to look at costs, as well as expected outcomes of the program. At the end of the day, maybe giving an 18 year old 120k to study underwater basket weaving for 4 years is not the best investment of money?

<comment><USER8> The bank should be entirely at fault here. If they looked at a student's request for a loan that said _I 'm taking a basket-weaving class at Cornell and I need $120k to attend_ then it's the bank's prerogative to look into the student's past performance, the rate of return for basket weavers, and the bias to which Cornell would prompt higher or lower returns in this area.

Just like any area of lending, it's on the bank to assess the risk of lending.

(And as an aside and I say down below: This is why I feel banks shouldn't be in this position.)

<comment><USER9> I agree that our student loans are junk and need a revamp, but if banks only loaned for the rate of return of a job, we'd have engineers and no one else. There is something to said for having artists and philosophers are "useless" as their degrees are perceived to be.

<comment><USER10> > if banks only loaned for the rate of return of a job, we'd have engineers > and no one else.

But is it really worse than the current situation - where people borrow to study something enlightening but economically questionable, and then struggle for decades as they can't pay the debts nor declare bankruptcy?

I agree that studying arts is worthwhile, both for the individual and society as a whole. But there has to be someone to tell the 18-year-olds that they can't borrow $100k for it, or they are making things worse for themselves.

Perhaps if banks adjusted loan amounts to potential future income, then arts faculties will be forced to lower tuition fees. And some students will correctly see that they just can't afford it - better to discover that before starting instead of after graduation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >In Miami, a law firm working for Transworld brought a lawsuit last year against Antonio Fuentes, seeking payment on a $13,356 student loan. With interest and fees, Mr. Fuentes now owed $25,322.31, according to the complaint.

>"Many judges take the attitude: 'I paid my student loans. You ought to pay yours. Don't give me this nonsense about technicalities.'"

That judges are even allowed to do this is awful. Why should this person have to go through the arduous and expensive appeals process just to get justice administered correctly?

<comment><USER12> Because there isn't enough skin in the game. Judges don't get punished for bad decisions and Transworld was allowed to mislead the courts for too long.

<comment><USER13> I don't think judges should necessarily be punished for bad decisions. The judiciary is a mechanism for allowing society to get along peacefully with one another (ie you can take your grievance to a judge instead of to the mob). I don't really want judges having to worry about punishment when doing their job.

On the other hand. Incompetent and corrupt judges have no place in the judiciary because it's basically an attack on the citizenry's ability to live peacefully. Now you need money, power, or violence to live security and that doesn't go well. Incompetent results in dismissal forever (sorry I don't have a good test for this). Corruption results in loss of past, present, and future benefits and significant jail time.

Third parties abusing the judiciary to abuse the citizenry is just as bad as a corrupt judge. Their end should be in a jail cell.

<comment><USER14> You forgot lazy. What do you do with the judges that simply can't be arsed to read the filings or briefs, and arbitrarily rule against those that seem to be making the most work for them? They want a light calendar, so they can spend more time doing literally anything else. So what do you do with those who will only do their job half-assed?

<comment><USER15> Vote them out in the next election?

<comment><USER14> I think I'd be willing to move to wherever place it is you may be thinking about where that actually works.

I _always_ vote "do not retain" in every election that allows the public to vote for judges, on the off chance that someone else that knows something I don't may need the help in removing a bad judge, and none of those judges ever failed to remain on the bench.

But most places that I have lived don't even vote on judicial retention. The only reliable way to get rid of a judge is to get them appointed to a more prestigious circuit, which would be a pyrrhic victory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm rarely one to advocate for legislating solutions to problems but forcing schools be responsible for more of the communication with student/customer/debtor when it comes to loaning money, collecting payments and handling defaults would really cut down on the number of student loans that aren't paid back on schedule.

If the school is responsible for the overhead cost of that communication they will have a strong incentive to make their students capable of paying back their loans or accessing the various deferment/income based repayment options in order to avoid the cost of collections.

A work study student who hates their minimum wage job will be a lot more helpful to a debtor who received a payment due and is calling the 1-800 number on it because they are confused than some random person in a call center that's an Nth level subcontractor for some bank that owns the debt.

A work study student who hates their minimum wage job will be a infinity more helpful to a debtor who is in default and is calling the 1-800 number on it because they are confused than some random person in a call center who makes a commission based on how they handle the account in question.

If the school was responsible for the cost of communicating with the debtor a lot fewer loans would make it into default in the first place.

<comment><USER17> Given the benefits schools receive from being able to raise prices year after year with such limited downside, your idea makes a lot of sense.

It might be some way to impose some kind of responsibility onto the schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I suspect these guys are not the only debt collectors operating this way, but the whole thing is shameful. Talk about an industry crying out for more stringent regulation.

<comment><USER19> Is it more shameful than the colleges and universities that push students to taking out these loans (calling them "financial aid") knowing full well what waits them on the other side?

<comment><USER20> No way to discharge these loans besides leaving the country and going native elsewhere, or paying them off entirely. Essentially, if your gamble doesn't pay off, you get a life long debilitating STD known as student loans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is another situation where you can look at the models in the UK, Europe, other similar countries to find solutions.

If I grew up in the US and could have managed it, you can study in Germany as a foreigner for free. Other countries like Aus have a system where your loan is interest free and indexed with inflation, and you start paying it off after you make about $35k per year as a percent of income.

<comment><USER22> Here in America we gain interest while we are in school and have to start paying it off 6mo after we graduate. For context, that is the average time it takes a student to get a job (right when they are also paying moving costs and such). Payment used to initiate after 9mo after graduation.

<comment><USER23> Not all loans accumulate interest while attending school. Look at unsubsidized vs subsidized federal loans.

<comment><USER24> Not all students qualify for such subsidations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just had an idea this morning for how to fund universities that I think could solve many of the issues associated with student loans. The idea is that instead of students paying tuition, they would sign contracts to pay a fraction of their income for several years after graduation, e.g. 1% of income for 15 years (perhaps with a cap). Enforcement could be difficult, but this would _much_ better align incentives with the desired result, i.e. to educate! It would also incentivise universities to help alumni get and hold high paying jobs.

Starting such a university would require a lot of startup capital, but it would become self sustaining in less than a decade.

</comment><comment><USER26> Imagine a world without ever inflating funny money, where people only buy what they need instead of junk.

<comment><USER27> The funny thing is that inflation would actually be among the easiest ways to get out of such debt.

<comment><USER26> You're right, but why cure the symptoms? Take care of the disease instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Slavery is illegal.

Letting people enslave themselves however is not.

An indentured servant or indentured laborer is an employee (indenturee) within a system of unfree labor who is bound by a signed or forced contract (indenture) to work for a particular employer for a fixed time. The contract often lets the employer sell the labor of an indenturee to a third party. Indenturees usually enter into an indenture for a specific payment or other benefit, or to meet a legal obligation, such as debt bondage. On completion of the contract, indentured servants were given their freedom, and occasionally plots of land. In many countries, systems of indentured labor have now been outlawed.

When you are enslaved by the monetary system... well... You made that choice

<comment><USER29> That's a terrible argument. Even in the 1600s where indentured servitude was commonplace, the system was essentially slavery, with comparable death rates. Hell America had a rebellion because of white slavery - Bacon's rebellion.

We got rid of slavery because of the social impact and also because of the moral implications. There's no reason to bring it back in another form.

<comment><USER28> Its not an argument. Its an observation of the existing monetary system.

When you borrow on your future earnings you are essentially putting yourself in indentured servitude to the banks.... and this is your choice.

No one forces you to do this.</comment></comment></comment>


Weebly Valued at $455M Amid Website-Building Boom - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/22/weebly-valued-at-455-million-amid-website-building-boom/ <comment><USER2> hey everyone, happy to answer any questions you have! worth pointing out that we've also launched a new home page (check out the video, pretty fun), we have a pretty kick-ass new eCommerce platform we launched last Nov, and we're also launching some pretty awesome new themes this week -- you can see two previews here:

[http://purplehazetheme.weebly.com/](http://purplehazetheme.weebly.com/) [http://collectiontheme.weebly.com/](http://collectiontheme.weebly.com/)

<comment><USER3> Hey, just a small point: the link to your "Plans & Pricing" page from Google (search for Weebly) just goes to your homepage. I'm interested in that information before I sign up.

<comment><USER4> In new theme pricing and options seems to be hidden for non-registered users... To bad.

<comment><USER2> We're fixing that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting how some internet startup concepts seem to keep coming back. Website building tools have gone through a number of generations, but are still relevant now. Similarly Facebook was the second wave of social networking sites. I recently saw a "pets.com" clone launching in South Africa (they got funding from Google's local seed fund)!

Marc Andreessen's aggressive stance is that the dot.com bubble was basically a "mistake". If that's correct, how would one decide that an "old" idea's time has come?

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/11/01/marc- andreess...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/11/01/marc-andreessen- the-dot-com-bust-was-basically-a-mistake/)

<comment><USER6> From the same article:

"All the dot-com ideas were correct," he said. "They were all too early. They are happening now."

The article's title is clickbait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There were and are a lot of web building sites besides Weebly, but weebly is the cleanest for its price by far. When I talk with small business owners I always recommend Weebly (unless I think they can do a lot of e-Commerce, in which case I recommend shopify). Weebly is the least frustrating and out of the box prettiest of the free web options.

<comment><USER8> I created a Weebly site for the first time this week. The website quality per unit-time invested has trumped any other source I've used. After a couple of hours of designing and tweaking, it's beyond minimum-viable status, and will probably persist almost unchanged for months.

Thanks Weebly!

<comment><USER9> > will probably persist almost unchanged for months

The real test of the service will be sites that require constant changing (due to SEO rewards for timely updates as much as upgrades or general content management). When I hear "probably persist almost unchanged for months" I assume you are not in a position to benefit from marketing communication.

<comment><USER10> I update mine on a weekly basis and it works pretty well for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> drusenko was the first speaker during my YC batch. He had one of the more profound startup slides I've seen: an exponential growth curve with minor "blips" that correlated to tech crunch articles, but never affected Weebly's trajectory.

I didn't necessarily "get it" at first, but after 2 years of watching startups of my batch mates and friends succeed or fail, I see any _focus_ on press as a negative signal.

A good team builds a good product. A good product begets success. Success begets news coverage. These things don't work in reverse.

And Weebly is a _great_ product. A few years ago after coding a web app for a non-profit, I considered building a service to do that for small orgs. But then I chanced upon 1 year old weebly, and was like never mind.

Anyway, congrats, and hope to see even more!

</comment><comment><USER12> It's refreshing to see a company like Weebly that is able to be successful and profitable without having to go down the "MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR UNICORN OR BUST" path that seems to be almost mandated by VCs nowadays.

It's something the guys at 37Signals preach as well - Better to be a "lifestyle business" that's profitable, makes millions of dollars in profit per year, and may take a decade or two to reach a $1 billion valuation, than to have a multi-billion dollar valuation a few years in (via large growth funding rounds) but not make a cent of profit for the first decade of your existence, all the while having your ownership of the business reduced down to 5% or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've never used a site like Weebly, Wix, or Shopify, though I have seen Squarespace's interface when someone was building a site one time and my dad used Weebly after I recommended it to him (seemed easy to use).

I'm curious their main sources of customer acquisition. I assume a lot of its word-of-mouth and organic, but I'm curious how much marketing they do. Squarespace has been huge in the podcast space doing advertising and did that big Super Bowl ad splash. Wix seems to have been around for a while so I see many of their out-dated designed sites.

Edit: I did just get retargeted via Facebook ads exchange after visiting Weebly's site, so they are doing at least some advertising :)

<comment><USER14> I have a small, niche website business so I know a little about this (we aren't on the scale of these guys but do low 7-figures).

Wix and Squarespace at least are spending a _ton_ on PPC customer acquisition. One analysis we saw put their AdWords spend at $10-25K per day (though, I'm not sure how accurate that is).

Also, both Wix and Squarespace advertise on terrestrial radio and television. Squarespace had a Super Bowl ad and I regularly see their ads on Shark Tank (ABC). I hear Wix ads quite often on AM radio.

Squarespace was on Inc's 5000 list in 2011 with 2010 revenues of 11.7M.

Wix went public recently. They had 2012 revenues of $43.68M with a loss of $15M [1].

In the "general purpose business website" space, I think all 3 (Wix, SS, Weebly) see it as a "winner take all / own the market" play (it probably is). So, they are all spending as much as possible to acquire customers.

Wix clearly isn't profitable. I doubt SqaureSpace is. I think it's admirable that Weebly is ... but I almost wonder if they need to spend more to compete.

<comment><USER4> afaik SS is claiming it is profitable and it was always breaking even. There was an interview somewhere where the owner said until recent the only outside money was $30K loan from his dad (I think it was one with Alexis Ohanian).

<comment><USER15> Got a link? Wikipedia confirms the $30K loan from dad, but can't find the interview on google.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGPj5SOUrn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGPj5SOUrn8) I think thats the one. Anyways - imo its extremely interesting and worth watching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _...now hosts more than 20 million sites that are seen by 175 million visitors every month._

With all the caveats about average numbers, it seems that on average each site is visited by only 8 visitors per month. Are those numbers correct?

<comment><USER17> It's dangerous to assume an even spread. Numbers are reported like this because the distribution of site visits is usually confidential information. From experience, I'd guess it's something like 1 million sites holding ~70% of the visitors, with the rest spread along the tail.

<comment><USER16> Thanks. I didn't assume they were evenly spread but even if we make it 175M x 70% / 1M we still have only ~120 visitors per month.

<comment><USER4> Remember that probably majority of those sites are either dead, not public and made when some people were learning how to make sites. You can put that number probably down to 10% active/public sites. If visitor number is 175m this might be unique visitors to the platform = one visitor might visit multiple sites.

<comment><USER16> Yes but in this case it would be much better to cite the number of "active sites" and not an almost meaningless 20M figure. Still, it's hard to define "active sites".

<comment><USER4> Then the number would be lower... Its all about marketing. "Unlimited", "hundreds of millions", "probably most of" sounds better than "5% of resources", "20 million active", "there is no data but we think a lot".

<comment><USER17> This

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I built my first website with Weebly, way back in 2010. They are one of the only ones doing it right. The clean templates, drag-and-drop features, and no- nonsense hosting is amazing. When you don't want to code a website and want to build it quick, Weebly is somewhat better than even WordPress, as long as you don't need to use a lot of plugins.

</comment><comment><USER19> We made a basic weebly site for our small home daycare provider. Then she took it over, it was really easy for her and the site looks great. I'm very impressed with weebly.

</comment><comment><USER20> What Weebly understands (that many website builders don't) is that a "blank canvas" is not the correct metaphor for building a website.

Instead a website needs structured sections (such as navigation, logo, footer etc.) as well as "blank canvas" areas (such as the body of the content).

They always seem to nail this tension.

Congratulations to David and Weebly- they consistently ship amazing features!

PS - My background: I've written in-depth reviews of 40+ website builders.

</comment><comment><USER21> Weebly is the best marketing website builder on the planet for non-technical users, not surprised to see it's also growing quickly. I still use Wordpress (WPEngine) for my company, but it's really overkill for your average small or local business, unless the owner is into computers and the internet.

I sometimes do pro bono websites for local businesses I run into. I used to do Google AppEngine sites, but then I switched to Weebly for the last one I did (for my daycare lady). It was super-easy both for me to set up, and then when I handed it off to her, she was able to edit it and make it really what she wanted. Between a Weebly site, and getting the existing customers to leave Yelp reviews, she ended up getting a lot of new kids from the online presence.

<comment><USER22> Awesome story. I did a similar pro-bono job for this sweet old couple that run a music school together, even with their very limited understanding of technology they were able to figure out weebly. If technologically-illiterate people can figure out how to use their interface, there is really no limit to the markets that they can target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really love using Weebly for helping friends and family who are non- technical.

Getting a basic website up is simple. To contrast I tried other website builders and weebly was the most functional and intuitive for me.

Great job David and team!

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone know if there's a way to hire a person or company to build a custom weebly template?

I think weebly offered this service themselves a few years ago but now I can't seem to find the option.

<comment><USER25> Kris from Red Door Designs does this.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's amazing to realize that even a monster success like Weebly (which among other things has made each of its founders vastly wealthy) is basically a roundoff error on Dropbox + Airbnb ($455m/($10b + $10b) = 0.02275).

<comment><USER11> Some things grow (relatively) slow, some things grow faster. The important thing is to _keep growing_ and _not die_.

<comment><USER26> > The important thing is to _keep growing_ and _not die_.

This statement only applies to the founders, employees, and customers of the company. My point is that it _doesn 't_ apply to the investors: from an investor perspective, it doesn't matter if almost every company dies as long as the Droboxes and Airbnbs survive and grow. Almost all the returns come from a tiny number of outrageous successes, to the point where even a big hit like Weebly is a drop in the bucket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am trying to build a CMS which focuses on data architecture and powerful page generation using javascript on the server [http://getsimplesite.com/](http://getsimplesite.com/) . It's still in beta though.</comment>


"Only Connect…" the Goals of a Liberal Education (1998) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Only_Connect.pdf

<comment><USER2> Good read. Liberal education meaning one based on liberty, freedom, and personal growth. From TFA:

 _How does one recognize liberally educated people?

1\. They listen and they hear.

2\. They read and they understand.

3\. They can talk with anyone.

4\. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.

5\. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.

6\. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.

7\. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.

8\. They understand how to get things done in the world.

9\. They nurture and empower the people around them.

10\. They follow E. M. Forster's injunction from Howards End: "Only connect..."_

All good things, IMHO. (Full disclosure, I'm a liberally educated physics major - went to a small liberal arts school with a very strong science faculty.)</comment>


Eating Mindfully: How to Pay Attention to What You Eat and Stop Just Before You're Full - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121062985377986351.html?mod=rss_Today

<comment><USER2> One of the most useful diet-related facts I've learned is that it takes about 15 minutes for the "I'm full" signal to propagate from your stomach to your brain. Of course, I'm not so consistent at putting this knowledge into practice....

<comment><USER3> That's one of the reasons it's great to eat with others. You'll have great conversations, and if you're as talkative as me, the latency is more than kept at bay. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Eating is kind of funny. A big reason to eat something is because you like the taste of it. So you would think you would want to eat slowly and keep it in your mouth for as long as possible since that's where you taste it.

Instead, the instinct (presumably evolution based) is to eat a lot of it quickly. So besides the nice taste, we are also wired to derive satisfaction from swallowing the food. If this link between tasting and swallowing as the atomic satisfaction producer could be broken, it seems like it could be helpful for people who eat too much.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have two kids, one who is definitely a fast eater, and the other who eats at a glacial pace. It's not hard to figure out who has the potential for weight problems. At least he's into outdoor activities ... and I've limited TV, and put off getting a Wii.

But I have to say, for Ms. Glacial, I do have to push her sometimes to eat faster, especially in the morning. I feel terrible about it, but the bus and school can't wait for her 45-minute breakfasts ... unless I start making everyone get up 30 minutes earlier.

</comment><comment><USER6> I literally 'inhale' Zebra Cakes much to my wife's dismay.

I'm skinny as a rail though (I worry more about sugar intake than weight) so feel free to hate me.

<comment><USER7> My brother used to live on Zebra Cakes and Mountain Dew, and he was always super thin. Alas, as he approaches thirty, the Zebra Cakes are starting to show. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was recovering from elective gum surgery, I could only safely chew with the teeth on one side of my mouth. And for the first time, I had to chew and eat slow. It's harder now that I no longer need to do that but chewing using one side of your mouth can dramatically slow your intake rate.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've always just been a slow eater. In effect, it's the same thing. I feel full "sooner" since the food has time to reach my stomach and most of the time, I don't even finish out the entire meal.

</comment><comment><USER10> I need to learn this; so when I have kids it can be taught from early on although in public school its constantly under attack with 30 min lunches (25 of those being in line).

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great advice, but I've never been able to do anything like this while working.

I know, I know, you're supposed to get away from your terminal and eat in the other room. But I never do.

I either a. eat a meal while surfing or b. munch on something while coding. It's the munching while coding that I've never been able to do "mindfully".

The best coding munchies are almost always the worst things to eat, like microwave popcorn, chips, cookies, and soda. When you're 4 levels deep into a nested routine, who notices that the munchies are gone? I suppose I could eat fresh fruit or something like that, but honestly, has anyone ever gotten into the "coding zone" eating grapes?

<comment><USER12> Grapes, bags of spinach, you name it. The trick is to not stock munchies that you don't want yourself to code on. If you don't have it, you can't eat it. The other trick is to not cut out all snacking but stock up on snacks that fill the void without expanding the void, so to speak.

And drink a tall glass of water three minutes before you feel like snacking. It'll keep you hydrated, which is good, and you'll snack less on average. A lot of the munchies is actually dehydration (like late night snacking).

Also, if you have peanuts or something and you're just watching TV rather than coding try eating them with chopsticks to slow you down so you notice when you're full. Once you get good at that, try peanuts with a fork or do the toss and catch or something ;-)</comment></comment>


Doug Engelbart has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.html <comment><USER3> Many years ago, before the creation of the Web, a small group of us used to meet at a little wooden church just off the Stanford campus to discuss a little-known idea called nanotechnology. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, a couple of Stanford post-docs and a few others met just to talk.

At some point, Eric and his then-wife Christine decided that the message was getting out too slowly, so they created the Foresight Institute and had a conference. So few people showed up that we held it in the same little church. We thought, given the implications for such things as life extension, that it was pretty funny to have the speakers literally preaching from the pulpit with the listeners sitting in the church pews. Christine was in the church kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was the conference lunch banquet. A PBJ, a banana, and a napkin in a paper bag.

I picked up my brown bag and walked into the small inner courtyard to sit. An older gentleman on a bench beckoned to me to join him. We chatted about the amazing implications of nanotechnology to change everything about human life. I expressed amazement that so few seemed to care. He told me that big ideas could take a surprisingly long time to become part of real life, something he'd seen again and again.

I kept thinking that he looked familiar. I introduced myself. He stuck out his hand: "I'm Doug."

<comment><USER4> Excellent, thanks for posting. I shall use this tomorrow with students

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that what most inspires me about Dr. Engelbart was not so much the physical manifestations of his work, although these were incredible, decades ahead of their time, and in some ways still not matched, but rather the philosophy that he used to guide his work.

It was his goal of greatly increasing the abilities of an individual human, as well as increasing the ability of groups of people to work together towards a goal that will remain timeless and inspirational long after everything he created has entered the realm of the pedestrian.

Ultimately, most of the problems we face on the planet are of human origin, and even for those that aren't the solution will need to be created by us as well. As a meta-machine, a machine that can embody and or imitate almost all other mediums, the computer offers a unique opportunity to augment and enhance the reach of humanity.

As the last few weeks have shown us, this reach can be extended in a negative fashion, and can be used to complicate the problems we already face.

But Doug Engelbart saw the other side of the coin, that the computer can be used to free and uplift us, and help us come together like never before. He saw this earlier than most and he pursued it further than most. And so we can follow along in his wake and add our efforts to his, and to the greater goal of extending humanity in a positive direction.

I'll finish by encouraging everyone reading this to take a few minutes now, and perhaps every few days from here on out to think about what efforts we can each make towards furthering Dr. Engelbart's ultimate goals. Not in the spirit of guilt or of shame, but instead as an inspiration. If one man, guided by a vision of using the computer to positively affect the course of human development, can accomplish this much in a few decades, how much further could we get with each of us working as well? I hope to do what I can, and I thank Douglas Engelbart for his efforts to help guide my way.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you've never watched the retrospectively-named "Mother of All Demos", it's an extraordinary document of current-day technology that was somehow done in 1968. There are parts that just seem "wrong" — as seemingly-anachronistic as if Don Draper used a PowerPoint. Yet, there it is. [http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...](http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect)

Edit: link had been to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) but a user below posted this archive.org link which is better. Thanks, mxfh!

<comment><USER7> In the demo video, there are some noises in the background, I'm assuming from his workstation -- rather pleasant and atmospheric. Anyone know what they are? Is it a transmission artifact? Feedback intended for the user (maybe related to the chorded keyboard)?

I've read several accounts of this presentation ( one is in _What the Dormouse Said_ ), but don't recall an explanation.

<comment><USER8> The account in _What the Dormouse Said_ says the sound was intentional audio feedback:

"Engelbart referred to the on-screen cursor as a "bug" or a "tracking spot," and there were occasionally odd buzzing sounds in the background as he executed commands at the keyboard. The group had been experimenting with using the computer to generate different tones depending upon what was being executed, as a way of creating auditory feedback."

Looks like a pretty uniform buzz, too

[http://i.imgur.com/BbaGsCu.png](http://i.imgur.com/BbaGsCu.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He predicted 'The Cloud' in 1976 and we're just catching up now, "Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976. Several of his researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client- server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and social: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon." ( Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart) )

<comment><USER10> Heh - I think the younger programmers were right on that one.

<comment><USER11> They were both right. The web brought them together. We didn't have to choose after all.

I have a fabulously powerful personal workstation on my desk, a slimmer, more modest one in my bag, a thin client in my pocket, and a bunch of upstream data centers that provide amazing services.

Some people might hanker for a completely decentralized P2P model of the Internet, and BitTorrent shows this is still hugely relevant. But practical issues of bandwidth mean that there will always be a place for locality- exploiting concentrations of CPU and storage in data centres.

<comment><USER10> I meant the part about centralized power being highly suspect. We have certainly seen all too well recently that that part is true.

<comment><USER11> True enough. I guess every generation needs their reminder.

Still, the meta-point holds: centralized power lacks robustness (e.g. to corruption and/or the stupidity of a relative few), but has big advantages over widely distributed systems in terms of communication latency and bandwidth that enable efficiency. We're sloshing around dynamically trying combinations, but we should expect to always see some centralized (opportunities for efficiency) and some distributed (opportunities for robustness) stuff going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm just going to imagine that he's running in the background with no terminal attached.

<comment><USER13> love it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone who works in interactive computing should be familiar with Doug Engelbart's work.

Years ago, at one of the first conferences on interactive computer, after people spent all day presenting their new work, Andy van Dam--builder of the first hypertext system with Ted Nelson who named it--stood up and said "you should all be ashamed that you don't know your history. Doug Engelbart invented almost everything presented here years ago." And he was right.

I hope a lot of you are watching The Mother of All Demos [http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...](http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect). But it's worth reading and understanding the reasons why Doug was working on all of this.

Doug and his crew at SRI had the goal of "human augmentation". Everyone else at the forefront of the computer industry thought we'd have general AI by the 1970s. They instead believed that GAI wasn't within reach. They believed that the things we wanted to build and accomplish as a society weren't doable with the communication tools we had.

They had the idea that computers could be tools to help individuals work. Since computers were multi-million dollar calculating machines, the idea that people would have a computer at their desk and that they'd help us to communicate and manage information was beyond-out-there.

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html)

But after leaving Engelbart's group at SRI, lots of his team joined PARC and built the modern GUI and networking.

For a history of the details, I highly recommend reading Markoff's What the Dormouse Said [http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture- Pers...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture- Personal/dp/0143036769)

[Bonus: If you like Engelbart's MOAD, also watch Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad Demo.]

I only tend to comment about once-a-year on HN, but it would be impossible not to say something about Doug and the impact he's had on our world.

Edit: Sutherland's Sketchpad [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA)

</comment><comment><USER15> Doug was the Albert Einstein of our field.

Oral history for people who want to learn more about him:

[http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...](http://www- sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/engfmst1-ntb.html)

<comment><USER16> [http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...](http://www- sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/main1-ntb.html) (just the content framed in the bottom corner ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Engelbart was perhaps the most important influence in realizing the computer as an _interactive medium_.

Around 1960, most were still thinking of the computer as a sophisticated calculator. You give it a problem, it spits out an answer. Even the idea of artificial intelligence was framed this way.

Engelbart realized the potential of the computer to _augment_ human intelligence. High bandwidth, continuous interaction between human and computer allows the computer to be an extension of the mind. Chasing this vision led him and his team to naturally invent the mouse, bitmapped screens, hypertext, networked computers, etc.

IMO, more important than these individual inventions is Engelbart's foundational principle that technologies change what the mind is capable of thinking. And by augmenting our thinking, we enable ourselves to create new technologies. Mind and technology co-evolve. This is "bootstrapping" in the purest sense and the source of that profound feeling many of us have experienced while augmenting our minds through programming and other rich, creative interactions with computers.

</comment><comment><USER18> I believe a black bar at the top of Hacker News is in order.

<comment><USER19> The best recommendation in the thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A long time ago, 1995 or 1996, I fooled around with software that was written by one of Engelbart's team.

It promised to augment the person running the program, to do for their brain what word-processing did for text.

It was darn nifty, but a bit beyond me at the time. Couldn't get my boss interested, and I moved on.

Does anyone have a clue what that could have been called?

Edit: HyPerform, by N. Dean Meyer. I never thought I could google that, today of all days.

<comment><USER21> I just read whatever I could about this, but do you have any further information? I'm fascinated.

<comment><USER20> All I've got is what I wrote, and what's on NDMA's site about it.

I wish I'd kept that floppy. It was a full working copy, and the printed instruction manual. I have no idea how I acquired it, at this late date.

Perhaps it was sitting around in the server 'room' where I was working: lots of engineers there (including my boss) and it seems like the kind of thing he'd have been interested in.

<comment><USER21> It sounds very interesting. I just emailed NDMA to see if I can somehow acquire a copy. I'd be more than happy to pay for it.

Big ideas definitely take time to catch on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at SRI, > theirs was a group that did much to create the open and collaborative tone > of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural, but > were unusual in those days.

Sadly, _the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we 've come to consider as automatic and natural_ is becoming less and less automatic and natural as people put things in walled gardens using weird non-standard rapidly-changing protocols and close access to anyone not using The Official Client.

</comment><comment><USER23> For anyone who is not sure who he was check this out

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

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs)

</comment><comment><USER24> There was a book written on Engelbart's work and his philosophies which I enjoyed reading many years ago:

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing [http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution- Pe...](http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Personal- Computing/dp/0804738718)

<comment><USER25> I think this is a better book on him. Less history, more ideas: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs- Dougl...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-dialogs- Douglas/dp/0615308902/ref=sr_sp- atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372918552&sr=8-1&keywords=engelbart)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Email here: [http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.h...](http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ietf/current/msg80472.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> Can we get independent verification of this? I've looked at all of my usual primary sources and I can't find third party confirmation.

<comment><USER28> There's an email from Christina (his daughter) on classiccmp cctalk, so I'd be inclined to believe it.

(edited to add that Christina is his daughter, and if you can find a cctalk archive, or subscribe and just missed it, its dated 6:31 and AEK forwarded it onto the list this morning.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do people not read the links they upmod?

This source doesn't state that he's died. This just seems to be completely unsubstantiated at this point, especially as there's no mention of this anywhere else.

<comment><USER29> When I posted this comment the link was to a completely unrelated page that made no mention of his death. As of right now the link has changed twice.

For whatever reason HN had a snafu and didn't delete it when I hit the delete button. Now the comment is completely incorrect, undeletable, and uncorrectable!

<comment><AUTHOR> Link submitter here (first time, too): My apologies, I saw the news via the Computer History Museum's twitter feed ( [https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/35248540097302118...](https://twitter.com/ComputerHistory/status/352485400973021186) ) , and they linked to that page. I googled around for a better link but couldn't find anything, but felt it was worth mentioning as a story to allow for discussion?

<comment><USER29> It just seemed like an elaborate troll and an unsubstantiated rumor at first because that link didn't mention his death, and as you said, there was nothing else mentioned about his death anywhere!

Your link makes a lot more sense now, but I'm still confused why so many people upvoted it before it was corrected to a better link that corroborated the title!

> first time, too

Welcome! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Like others on here have posted. Doug's true worth was not in the innovations he procured or the things he built, but rather what he saw as the future of computing, humanity, and technology. The way he was able to reach into the future and pull out the best bits, and then execute was something that not many innovators can claim to. The ideas that were built at SRI are nothing short of legendary, and the core principles still carry on.

It may be a bit sad to think that so many don't know his name, blindly believing the mouse was invented by Xerox, that the Internet was invented by Tim-Berners Lee, but in the end, does it really matter? To Doug, all that mattered was being visionary and helping people. It would do good for all of us here at HN to follow his example. Humans only get one shot, and Dr. Doug Engelbart nailed it.

P.S., thanks PG for the black topbar. A fitting sign of respect for a very great man.

</comment><comment><USER31> I hope this gets a few more articles: Doug Englebart is far more of an influence on modern computing than Steve Jobs ever was, even if he's less known.

<comment><USER4> In each field, there are the pioneers, then the entrepreneurs who _make_ the market, then the commodity suppliers. In my opinion, you need all three to get where we are now, walking about with supercomputers in our pockets/handbags.

I'm planning to project the MOAD at College tomorrow. And trying to persuade digital galleries and hacker spaces to do likewise.

Moggridge's book on design _Designing Interactions_ has a good section on Englebart and the activities of his students. Example: in this text box, I have a _caret_ that fits in the space _between_ the characters I am typing. I can insert text wherever I place that caret with my _mouse_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> He was one of the keynotes at a conference I attended out in the Valley in the early nineties. Tremendously inspiring guy and a much better speaker than a lot of tech people.

What I remember from that day was that he was very, very humble with a great sense of humor.

He was truly one of those Xerox Parc giants upon whose shoulders our entire industry rests upon.

<comment><USER33> Don't think he was ever actually a member of PARC, although his ideas and collaborators certainly inhabited the place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Doug Engelbart has been a huge inspiration to me even though I never met him. I'm amazed at how much his group at SRI was able to accomplish. I think his vision - augmenting human intellect to help solve the world's complex problems - is still a vision worth sharing. Doug did help change the world, and I'll remember him for it.

</comment><comment><USER35> From the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs:

>>>Two other occasional visitors were high school students Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who hung out at SAIL [Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory], with an older friend, Allen Baum, who was working at the laboratory during the fall of 1970. Jobs later said that the "vibrations" he felt at SAIL would stay with him his entire life. The bewitched Wozniak rode his bike up to the laboratory from his home in Los Altos, and he later said that his experiences there contributed to his hunger for his own computer.

SAIL was one of the core places of the computing revolution, from which The Mother of All Demos by Doug Engelbart was spawned. That demo happened in 1968, when Jobs was twelve or thirteen, and influenced everything that came afterwards in computing.

</comment><comment><USER36> Doug - The energy and light of your vision and inspiration still burns bright, still ignites, still guides...

[http://Collaborapologist.com/](http://Collaborapologist.com/) [http://CommunityOfImpact.info](http://CommunityOfImpact.info)

Thanks, Doug

A friend - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER37> Nothing sad about well liked person, who accomplished a lot, dying at age 88. He won. RIP Doug Engelbart.

</comment><comment><USER38> I had the chance to meet Doug as a student a couple of times. He showed me and my friend the NLS system and thought us basic typing on the chord keyboard. He was the grandpa I never had who's wisdom extends to the technology of the future. I hold him in very fond memories.

</comment><comment><USER33> Engelbart not only had amazing vision, he had the ability to turn it into working demos. And he was able to inspire others (at PARC most notably) to work in the same way. His mouse is now everywhere of course, but his more important ideas, eg for tools to support collaborative thinking, still remain to be realized.

The history of Engelbart's approach to HCI (Augmentation of the Intellect, or IA) and its more-or-less friendly rivalry with AI is quite interesting. AI got more of the research money back in the day, but IA seems to have been more generally successful, although not under that rubric. And nowadays, the borders between them are blurring as humans and computation get more closely connected.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's amazing that he was working on augmentation already in 1962.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV Interview... amazing stuff [http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011](http://archive.org/details/nerdtv011)

</comment><comment><USER41> Sad to hear he is gone. I got to talk him at one of the Computer History Fellow awards ceremonies and was struck by how clearly he thought about things. He will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER42> Obligatory link to 'The Mother of All Demos': [http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs](http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs)

<comment><USER7> Better quality, full: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Mother of All Demos: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) ... It is really amazing how he conceived all these in 1968 (45 years ago!). If you think about it, what we have today is just putting on a pretty UI on top of all these concepts. We hardly moved for those innovation breakthroughs that he demoed.

</comment><comment><USER44> One thing that strikes me really odd from the demo of the mouse, is how nervous and worried he looks. I mean I can understand the concept of computers were so foreign until people got use to it. I think he was really intimidated by the culture of people being close minded to things they don't understand.(I thing progress was more of a liability.)

</comment><comment><USER45> To my embarrassment, I didn't really know much about Doug Engelbart until Brett Victor brought him up in one of his excellent talks (Inventing on Principle). I quite like his eulogy: [http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/](http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/)

</comment><comment><USER46> Without Douglas Engelbart, none of the personal computing tech we have today would have been even this remotely far ahead. He was the first person to believe in the Personal Computer.

He got to pass on after seeing his vision come to life. It must have been an amazing experience for him.

</comment><comment><USER47> He lived a life worth living and died accomplishing so much, this should be a motivation to us all to pursue our dreams and goals and make the most of it because this just proves how short life is no matter how great you are, death is the destination we all share.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you are an IxD or UX guy, you really owe it to yourself to read "Designing interactions" by Bill Moggridge. In it, Doug Engelbart is interviewed for an entire chapter regarding how he and some other guys designed the mouse. Very interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER49> From Wikipedia article: "...after 1976 ... Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer."

Go figure! A true visionary... He will be missed for sure.

</comment><comment><USER50> Black bar ?

</comment><comment><USER51> Waiting for Google to have a doodle about him tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER52> What a remarkable life!

</comment><comment><USER53> R.I.P. Mr. Engelbart.

</comment><comment><USER54> .

</comment><comment><USER55> Click.</comment>


Fuzzy string search - <AUTHOR> http://ntz-develop.blogspot.com/2011/03/fuzzy-string-search.html

<comment><USER2> Another area where fuzzy string search is really useful is computational biology. You often have a particular DNA or RNA sequence and you want to figure out what it is. However, the version on file can be different by a few mutations. For this sort of search where the database can be quite large, there are specialized algorithms like BLAST that index by n-grams.

Just thought I'd mention it because if you find it interesting, computational biology is a real growth area right now - the cost of sequencing genomes has been dropping faster than Moore's law, and it's quite possible that within our lifetimes we will be using this sort of technology to genetically engineer people.

<comment><USER3> Yes, its useful for alignment. However, I've noticed that such alignment techniques are quite slow (since many of them resort to brute force on O(n^2) on sufficiently large strings - a few thousand maybe).

I've found that a better way to approach this problem is to use suffix arrays to generate the best overlaps (ranges) from the reference and then perform a "range compression" (not of the audible kind) to coalesce adjacent ranges that differ by very little and insert/delete the offending characters.

I'm using a similar technique for genome compression against a reference and am able to get a 700x compression on 2 Korean genomes and 130x compression on hg18(build 36.1) and another build/assembly(number 36.3) of the human reference genome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been working on a Ternary Search Trie implementation for Python on and off for a while. This is definitely a good read for some other methods for fuzzy string search. The benefits of the TST (versus other Trie formulations) is summarized on my blog.[1] I think I will do a follow up post covering their characteristics in comparison to the methods Nikita covered in this post.

The author mentions at the end that he didn't consider Tries. However, I think they are valuable data structure.

[1] [http://blog.hackthology.com/ternary-search-tries-for-fast- fl...](http://blog.hackthology.com/ternary-search-tries-for-fast-flexible- string)

</comment><comment><USER5> REF: <http://code.google.com/p/fuzzy-search-tools/>

For those that don't make it all the way through the article, the author has implemented all the algorithms in Java and is available at his project page (above).

</comment><comment><USER6> i've used Damerau–Levenshtein + Jaro-Winkler for database record matching/customer dedupe. these things _work magic_. found 2x as many matches vs exact comparison.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm currently using a Patricia trie in an open source project I'm working on, still pretty new to trees / tries but now that I have begun to use them I can see how widely used they are in a lot of modern software products

</comment><comment><USER8> I have implemented TST (ternary search tree) in C to create fast dictionary (histogram) for counting words in Wikipedia. It is fast and memory efficient.

<comment><USER9> Any intentions of open-sourcing it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We use aho-corasick to extract keywords from terabyte size corpus. Works really well but you have to build your matching tree before.</comment>


Someone broke a Skype spam bot using JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/Zj65I <comment><USER2> I like how the scripts look like a regular expression run in reverse!</comment>


Mabl emerges from stealth with AI-powered testing solution – SD Times - <AUTHOR> https://sdtimes.com/qa/mabl-emerges-stealth-ai-powered-testing-solution/?utm_content=buffere5f40&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> > Mabl is a machine learning test automation service that learns how > applications work, identify bugs, and provides context on what causes errors > so they can be fixed.

> The solution is designed to enable users to easily create automated tests > using a Chrome plugin. It uses machine learning to automatically fix tests > when the application changes, and aims to reduce the time spent maintaining > tests as applications evolve.

It seems like it's focused on automated code-free testing on the front end of web apps, especially for teams that deploy frequently (CD) without necessarily having tests in place. Sounds interesting enough.

I combed through their blog for a few good posts:

Original post from the team - [https://www.mabl.com/blog/meet-the-mabl- team](https://www.mabl.com/blog/meet-the-mabl-team)

How it works - [https://www.mabl.com/blog/maintenance-free-automated- functio...](https://www.mabl.com/blog/maintenance-free-automated-functional- testing-with-auto-healing-tests)

Getting started guide - [https://www.mabl.com/blog/how-to-create-test-scripts- without...](https://www.mabl.com/blog/how-to-create-test-scripts-without-code- using-mabl)

<comment><USER3> High-profile testing consultant and angry man James Bach watched the video and decided the product was bullshit. He didn't try it. [http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/1768](http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/1768)</comment></comment>


How Products Are Made - <AUTHOR> http://www.madehow.com/ <comment><USER2> [shamelessplug] I run a factory tours meetup group in the Bay Area. We've been to machine shops, injection molders, foundries (metal not semiconductor), among others: [http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Factory- Tours/](http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Factory-Tours/)

Another one just started in Boston: [http://www.meetup.com/New-England- Factory-Tours-Meetup/](http://www.meetup.com/New-England-Factory-Tours- Meetup/)

Attendance is free--just sign up to the tours you're interested in.

Let me know if you want to spin one up in your area/if you have an idea for a tour. [/shamelessplug]

<comment><USER3> How did you start it? It would be great to have one in the Puget sound.

<comment><USER2> Would be happy to talk more about setting one up around there. Please email me and we can go over it in more detail. jmcalvay at gmail dot com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Armin Maiwald produced hundreds of educational shorts, so called _Sachgeschichten_ for the german TV show _Sendung mit der Maus_ [1] with a target audience of 4 to 8 year olds.

Here is one from 1999 that explains the Internet, including dial-up and DNS- lookup: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLz4ufCuKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLz4ufCuKk)

\---

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus#Educat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus#Educational_film_shorts)

inofficial youtube playlist [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1875415EEB9204AC](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1875415EEB9204AC)

official page at WDR [german]: [http://www.wdrmaus.de/sachgeschichten/filme.php5](http://www.wdrmaus.de/sachgeschichten/filme.php5)

official page to order DVDs [german]: [http://www.bibliothek-der- sachgeschichten.de/](http://www.bibliothek-der-sachgeschichten.de/)

<comment><USER5> There's an analogous Japanese program called "The Making". The entire series, 300 episodes of 15 minutes each, is available on Japan Science and Technology Agency's (their version of DARPA, minus the black projects) youtube channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps_X1TqiJZQ&list=PLOEDIkStOh...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps_X1TqiJZQ&list=PLOEDIkStOhJftis3UgRt3_v6VezLwxKod&index=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not exactly sure but this looks like this is made by a company called Advameg, Inc. They've quite a few other sites that might be of interest to HN readers:

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

<comment><USER7> Dear lord, that is a lot of wonderful reference material.

I'm not certain I get how they can afford so much (seemingly?) original material, yet be low-key enough that I haven't come across them before.

<comment><USER8> Some companies buy up the rights to old/out of print books that created this original material. Then they cut it up and automatically digitise it. There was a post on HN quite some time back about somebody describing his process to do exactly this for a repair-your-car book - and how he used it to make money via ads through SEO hits.

<comment><USER9> Do you remember about when this was? I've been searching for the post on HN and can't find anything.

<comment><USER8> I'm afraid not. I've been searching as well and couldn't find it. I recall his process to be

1\. secure the rights to the book (he knew the author personally/through family)

2\. cut the book open and run it through a high resolution scanner

3\. use imagemagick to preprocess images

4\. run OCR on the pages and convert them to markdown

5\. have a compiler convert his markdown and images to HTML

EDIT: FOUND THE LINK: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for tracking that down! Very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. I had expected a series of youtube videos showing short sequences of machinery, but I was positively surprised. The explanations are really well written and quite detailed. Thanks for the link!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great for kids, too (might need some filtering, though).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This would be an excellent site to archive in book form to assist in recovering from some sort of catastrophic societal collapse. If I could take one thing back in time to the 1500s, it might be a paper copy of this site.

<comment><USER12> Just taking printed paper to the 1500s would be an achievement. Make sure you land around Florence, there's this guy called Leonardo that has some great ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's often not too difficult to find resources on how a piece of software works and is made. While you may not find line by line code of Google Search, you can find resources that explain most of fundamentals of a search engine and how to build a search engine.

But, if you want to figure out how a pice of hardware (e.g. Falcon 9, Oculus and a microchip) works and is made, it's not so easy. Hardware industry is not as collaborative or as open as software counterparts. The only resources to understand hardware are specialised books that only people in respective domains would have heard of. (Book discovery is another issue, e.g. it's taking me an awful lot of time to find a book on how digital electrical switches work)

Having a great resource like this to understand how a piece of hardware is made and how it works is incredibly valuable and reduces the barrier to understanding hardware a notch down, I look forward to more and better accessibility to understanding hardware.

</comment><comment><USER14> The George Eastman House just released a informative and well produced series on photographic processes that might also be mentioned here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5ke7agyOw&list=PL4F918844C...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5ke7agyOw&list=PL4F918844C147182A)

</comment><comment><USER15> I was hoping for a bit more depth. Here's what it has to say about camera shutters:

"The shutter functions like a curtain that opens and closes. It must operate exactly to expose the film for the correct length of time and to coordinate with other operations such as the flash. The shutter is made of different materials depending on the type of camera and manufacturer."

That's it. No diagram. Nothing at all about manufacturing processes. Nothing about cloth vs. metal, focal-plane vs. lens-mounted, etc. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has 2700 words on camera shutters: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_%28photography%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_%28photography%29)

What were other people seeing on this site that was actually good?

</comment><comment><USER16> Always wanted to know this one: [http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html](http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html)

Sadly, it's hard to grasp the mechanisms without pictures...

<comment><USER17> This video gives a good mechanical view of how the seat belt locking device works [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCm4e10mG7A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCm4e10mG7A)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. There is a book along these lines (more how things work vs how they are made) and of course there is something like 10 seasons of 'How its Made' which the discovery channel runs.

</comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology series. Excellent series for young minds.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish this was more specific. Take for example the page on stainless steel. I want to be told an exact recipe for how to make steel. Not a hand wavy general explanation.

<comment><USER21> Yes.

The balance here is what is accessible. Wanting to understand the making of steel itself is great, but it will also take a considerable investment by anyone to actualize.

Many things presented there have a lower bar.

My guess anyway...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Similar to [http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/](http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> How in the world did I never come across this all these years?! Amazingly informative. Got lost in it for hours.

</comment><comment><USER24> someone should write a bot to merge this into wikipedia.

<comment><USER25> according to the top and bottom of this page, some of it comes from wikipedia [http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html](http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html)</comment></comment>


Google's Datacenters on Punch Cards - <AUTHOR> http://what-if.xkcd.com/63/

<comment><USER2> > There's something pleasing about that. Google has created what might be the > most sophisticated information-gathering apparatus in the history of the > Earth ... and the only people with information about them are the pizza > delivery drivers.

I vaguely remember something about news channels watching the Whitehouse, and when lots of pizzas were delivered one night they knew the next big step was going to happen in Iraq. That was Bush. Or maybe it's from earlier.</comment>


Show HN: Tool helps elderly determine costs of care and ways to pay - <AUTHOR> http://remainathomeseniorcare.com/long-term-care-calculator/

<comment><AUTHOR> Built this as a philanthropic/learning project for our small home health company. Have a lot of additional ideas to help families navigate the incredibly complex senior care market. Feedback welcome!</comment>


What It Is Actually Like to Be in the Engine Room of the Startup Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/books/review/chaos-monkeys-by-antonio-garcia-martinez.html <comment><USER2> Author here, for all your trolling needs.</comment>


Sign That Chinese Hackers Have Become Professional: They Take Weekends Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/25/chinese-hackers_n_2756914.html <comment><USER2> Does Monday to Friday really mean that the attacks are state sponsored? When I work on my start-up, even before I had a job, I did most of my work during the week, and though I would work on weekends, I'd work less because other people weren't working and there was more going on.

Not saying that China is hacking systems around the world, I suspect all countries are. It's the new spy network, but I'm not sure this metric is proof.</comment>


Another Financing Risk - <AUTHOR> http://daslee.me/financing-risk

<comment><USER2> Interesting post but my position is that new companies should be matching the estimated risk of their business with the risk appetite of the investors during the first "party round". They should not be planning for failure by taking an unnecessarily low valuation with higher odds of reinvestment upon failure.

Assuming that NewCo is basing their 12 month cash burn-rate on some production milestone or profit goal, when it comes to an additional round the company should be saying "Hey, we met % of our planned goals (production/break-even) and we need additional financing". Instead, NewCo needs more cash for "X or Y to happen" because I am assuming they did not meet their planned % of goals. Ie. They are failing. Of course, executing a business plan is difficult and really never pans out as expected but NewCo should always be prepared to justify reinvestment based on (A) current position in relation to the Seed/VC pitched plan and (B) explanations for deviations from the plan.

The investor can "protect" or "defend" when NewCo becomes a going concern. ie. The investor can sink additional funds without promise of the previously estimated returns. But as you said, the investors are rightfully reluctant. In this I do not think that it is always correct to initially take a lower valuation because that specific investor has more disposable capital and is more willing to take a gamble on you. In the end, the risk/reward/financing calculation is all the same in terms of shares lost and cash received. The only difference is it will require greater effort to raise capital when you are not meeting your goals. If deep down you know the pitched plan is unrealistic that is a separate problem in and of itself and is often made worse by the need to impress investors.

High-risk appetite investors are generally more hands-on as opposed to portfolio investors, so in some respects seeing this as a benefit can be a fallacy. It depends on the investor's direct contributions in terms of knowledge capital and network. If the investor is overstating their value- added, the investor is really just trying to make sure they hit their homerun.

TLDR: Match the risk of your endeavor with the risk appetite of investors. This is difficult because it involves taking a more realistic approach when planning your goals and pitching your plan. Don't take a super low valuation so your investor is willing to blindly reinvest. Always be prepared to justify reinvestment, even if you are not meeting goals</comment>