Jason Calacanis responds to Aaron from SEO Book - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2010/01/25/my-thank-you-email-to-aaronwall-for-the-free-seo-advice-great-seo-great-guy/

<comment><USER2> "We can't tell whether Jason is misleading us about the proportion of scrape- generated pages on Mahalo without access to any Mahalo page statistics."

Well, when doing a site search in Google for site:mahalo.com "Links Powered by Google" there are 553,000 pages ___indexed in Google_ __which are using scraped search result content (with optimized page titles) to help pull in traffic.[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powe...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powered+by+Google)

and keep in mind that is just links from Google...there are also chunks of content from Google blog search, Twitter, and other sources (images, videos, news) on those pages

he is full of ____ if he is trying to get anyone to buy that doing the above is responsible for less than 1% of their traffic when Compete.com shows their search referral traffic as being ~ 60% of their referrals

It is not just a few (thousand) 100% auto-generated (experiment/stub/zebra/spam) pages that have scraped content on them...the above search shows Google estimates over a half million pages in their index contain content from their own search index...total regurgitation of 3rd party content :D

And lets not forget that 1.) he is using people's optimized page titles as content on his pages 2.) search traffic monetizes better via ads than other traffic forms...especially the search traffic that lands on a page for some random longtail keyword made up by arbitrarily combining chunks of 3rd party content mixed together and re-aggregated. 3.) in addition, there is a $0 editorial cost to scraping these millions and millions of content snippets and re-displaying them. 4.) he is making at least 5 figures a day from that content scraping...with 100% certainty.

his 1% remark is just another form of misinformation. nothing new there!

<comment><USER3> precisely, I think this is a perfect page for what he is doing:

<http://www.mahalo.com/card-games>

SEVEN powered by Google areas.

<comment><USER4> Our pages are built by our community, so the quality will vary. That page doesn't have a "vertical manager" yet, but it will. Then we would build out the content a little more.

It's not a perfect system, people can't put multiple search boxes in there.

However, that page will never rank well in a search engine (unless by a fluke). In order to rank well you really need to have 500+ original words.

We're in the process of moving all pages to that standard. It's really a self- regulating thing: if our contributors make short pages they never rank and never make money. They get frustrated and we teach them how to make longer pages and some day they may rank.

... it's really not a problem, and the truth is we rank for three things well:

1\. video game walkthroughs (typically 2-10,000 words!) 2\. how to articles (typically 800 to 5,000 words) 3\. question & answer pages (typically 300 to 10,000 words),

Isn't this basic SEO (and i'm not expert): build original content and you might rank. Build short pages, you don't rank.

All pages start short (just like wikipedia stubs do), and over time we make them longer. that's the normal process.

<comment><USER5> Why has Jason's comment has been downvoted? People don't consider it relevant? Amazing.

<comment><USER6> It is relevant, but I believe the downvotes are a response to the lack of an option to otherwise flag a comment as complete bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uh, that's not a response to Aaron's article. That's Jason acting naive and oblivious to dodge the accusations, and taking on this whole 'aww shucks, can you help me out a bit?' attitude to shift the discussion and get on Aaron's good side. If you had a case against what you were accused of doing, you would've published a well thought-out article, much like some of the articles you've written that have been on subjects you're clearly confident and well- versed in. But you have nothing this time.

Also, stating that such pages only amount to less than 1% of your revenue is in no way a justification of the content theft you're committing. You're cowardly sidestepping the issue. What have you got to say about the actual content theft, rebranding of such content as Mahalo's, and knocking down the original authors of that content by skipping on the credits and outranking them?

You got caught, dude.

<comment><USER8> Have to agree, this is a non-response. That only validates that a real response would not be a good thing for the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Semi-unrelated to the actual content of this particular post: (I apologize about that, by the way)

Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis?

He's often propped up as some sort of guru/authority/etc. of start-ups and the Web in general, and I just don't see it at all. I've never read any words of his and felt like a smarter or more knowledgeable person afterward; I only ever see rather mundane platitudes.

Perhaps I just haven't read the right pieces of his? If anyone believes this might the case, please consider responding to this post with a link or two. I'm seriously very baffled by his image (and to be honest, I don't think highly of Mahalo as a concept, for many various reasons I won't detail here unless someone is interested in them).

<comment><USER10> > Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis?

One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears.

That said, I get a bad vibe too: why is everything he is associated with seemingly "Jason's this" or "Jason's that". Generally, a startup is known first and foremost as the company, not as "Alexis Ohanian's Reddit" or "Sergey Brin's Google", but you _always_ find that guy's name in the same phrase as Mahalo. I can't quite place my finger on why this bugs me, but perhaps it's something to do with building something up as a free standing entity versus lending your famous name to something.

<comment><USER9> >One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears.

You know, despite being a total noob here, I still thought I had that one checked off on my list of things to watch for...until of course Jason himself showed up on the board (assuming it's really him, of course). I really did not see that coming. But what can I do now other than apologize and hope he wasn't offended? Sorry, Jason. :) No real defamation intended, just wanted to open a discussion on the validity of the opinions you propagate.

<comment><USER10> I think it's still quite possible to say negative things to/about people, but it really helps to imagine saying them directly to the person in question.

<comment><USER9> Right, of course. I didn't mean to imply that I thought it a mistake to be critical, just regretted and apologized for the manner in which I criticized.

Thanks again, David.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jason is full of it. Playing stupid and meek because he got caught.

The original SEO book post and HN discussion are here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723>

EDITED: Added correct link (thanks icey!)

<comment><USER12> Your link is weird for me - it takes me to page 2 of the listings instead of a specific posting.

I think this is what you meant to link to: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "we accidentally took that off when we moved to Mahalo 3.0 i think." Jason is the last person who would accidentally make a move like that. Its all planed.

<comment><USER4> It's actually true... we can make mistakes.

... the truth is having short content pages indexed works against you--that's why i no indexed them to being with.

Again, I'm not as big of an expert on SEO as Aaron, but I think there is something called "page rank sculpting" in which you push your sites page rank to high-quality pages and no-index the ones that are shorter in terms of original content. We did that because one of our people read about it on a blog.

We're probably holding ourselves back having removed this and we are putting it back on because we didn't realize it was off.

That is why I thanked Aaron.

Is the page rank sculpting thing not a good idea? I thought this was a fairly certain thing: only index the best pages.

<comment><USER13> Thats fair. Theres no denying Jason is good at what he does and understands the web business better than most. I feel like this is an opportunity for those on HN to learn the way he rolls and manages his business.

Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1% .. I think this is more Google's issue than Mahalo's.

<comment><USER14> "Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1%"

Huh? I'm not sure which way I stand on this whole mess, but the fact that he makes up a tiny portion of the "spam" doesn't seem relevant? Is a petty thief less bad because he accounts for less than .00001% of theft in the world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Regardless of who is right/wrong here this strikes me as a very glib response to quite a serious accusation levelled at his business practices.

To me it doesn't seem to help his credibility.

</comment><comment><USER16> If Jason really wants advice, here's two things:

1) "Spreading our PageRank" is BS. More pages == more total PageRank. Wikipedia's summary isn't half bad: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>

2) Remove the nofollow's from the attribution links to content you've scraped. Anything else is just plain rude.

<comment><USER4> but we don't scrape content. our search results do have abstracts but they are smaller than Google's, and in some cases they actually are google's.

so, i think you have the issue confused.

Also, on #1 I think most SEOs would say your wrong. More pages does NOT equal more page rank. It's the EXACT opposite.

MORE QUALITY PAGES and more QUALITY links = bette SEO from what the top SEOs have told me. I hope this helps with your site.

all the best,

Jason

<comment><USER16> Jason, I'm quite sure I'm not confused.

1) _"MORE QUALITY PAGES and more QUALITY links = bette SEO from what the top SEOs have told me. "_

For this purpose, indexed by Google counts as "quality." Please read the PageRank paper, and you'll quickly see that more pages in the index == more PageRank.

That doesn't always mean putting crap pages into Google is a good idea, but strictly speaking, it will raise the total amount of PageRank your site has. Seriously, read the paper yourself.

2) _"but we don't scrape content. our search results do have abstracts but they are smaller than Google's, and in some cases they actually are google's."_

Perhaps scrape is the wrong term. But you absolutely do include other people's content and nofollow it, for example all of the images on this page:

<http://www.mahalo.com/chupacabra>

NoFollow is meant for links to content which you don't want to "vouch" for. If you've included their content in your page, I think you can vouch for it.

Maybe an honest oversight, maybe not. Either way, you know about it now, so fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jason's sweeping "it's less than <1%" comments are getting tired.

Mahalo is a great money printing machine, but come on, those are pages designed to do one thing - rip content quickly, monetize, and SPAM google.

<comment><USER18> _Jason's sweeping "it's less than <1%" comments are getting tired._

We can't tell whether Jason is misleading us about the proportion of scrape- generated pages on Mahalo without access to any Mahalo page statistics.

I'm not for or against Jason on this matter, I'm just saying that we have no data on which to base any conclusions. It's _possible_ he's telling the truth.

It would be interesting for someone to take up the challenge of creating a small web app that finds all Mahalo URLs, heuristically examines them for spamminess and generates some statistics.

Not that such an app would be of any particular long term use, but it might be interesting nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google, any comment?

</comment><comment><USER20> To be honest it was quite a dignified response, I was expecting something with more 'fire' when I clicked the link.

<comment><USER17> I think that the overly "I love you man" tone of his response indicates to me that he's thumbing his nose at the situation and just being a bit of an ass.

<comment><USER21> The passive-aggressive bromance is a classic deflection trick.</comment></comment></comment>


PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS: THE POWER BEHIND NEXT-GEN MARKETING - <AUTHOR> http://www.skura.com/blog/archives/357

<comment><USER2> zomg capitals! Seems just to be yet another discussion about how awesome "big data" really is.</comment>


No idea what to do with my Rasberry Pi, what did you do? - <AUTHOR> http://wiseprogrammer.com/2017/07/02/rasberry-pi-brainfreeze/ <comment><USER2> Hi Greg,

I have several Pi that I hack on and one that I use as a dev box.

I've used mine to play with things like a magnetometer feeding data into an HTML5 animation of a compass, making a chat app using web sockets, learning how to install and use CouchDB, and building software from source code of all kinds just to see if I can do it.

I want to do some automated gardening and make an automated chicken coop door. There are quite a few examples of both of those to draw from and I'll get it to it soon but I ponder over all kinds of things I'd like to do.

Not long ago I got a WDLabs hard drive and case and set my dev box up to boot from the hard drive instead of the SD card. It's a 350GB drive and runs silent as can be and the case routes all the cables out the back which is really sweet. I think I spent around $65-$75 on the drive, case, cables, and power supply. That's a sweet deal.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What have you guys done with your PI ?</comment>


What I Learned from 50+ Mock Interviews - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jobfully.com/2012/01/what-i-learned-from-50-mock-interviews/ <comment><USER2> "However, if you are in danger of becoming management, make sure you stay technical. Write code."

Interestingly enough, 3 reviews back I was offered the choice of going into management. I had been leading a product line with up to 5 engineers at a given time reporting to me, spent maybe 1/3 of my productive day coding, the rest in meetings, responding to emails/phone calls, and just walking around talking to people. It didn't dawn on me that as a 'lead engineer' I had essentially become management.

Something didn't sit right about that experience. On the one hand it was a promotion of sorts, right? I was doing a good job getting that product out the door and this meant I could move on to other bigger, more important products. On the other hand (esp. where I work), no more coding. I felt a deep pain in my gut. Something had been bothering me for quite awhile... every place I'd been hired into was a company with less than 100 people, I always loved working on whatever was thrown at me, and here I was being asked to go into management at a company with 15,000 people, a company I was at due to result of an acquisition from 4 years earlier. It was like I had slowly been stripped of my dignity and never had taken the time to look around and realize it.

Within a week I read a book called the Passionate Programmer, then the Pragmatic Programmer, a few Head-First books (I liked the child-like presentation, thought is was fitting haha) then eventually began working on SICP, worked through K&R C, and so on. On Christmas break one year read through Godel, Escher, Bach. Found Hacker News, mostly as a lurker.

I'm still working at that job, but I turned down the offer, instead requesting to to work on difficult problems. The following year I got a promotion to a principal engineer. I am a little surprised when I mention things like Ruby on Rails and have trouble actually finding someone I work with who has even heard of it. Then I just remember that was me a few years ago. And I work with some sharp people, they're just isolated in what they do, tend to average in the 40s with families. 'This' has now become my main hobby. You can't ask anyone to do this, they have to choose it for themselves. They have to experience that pain in the gut feeling and act on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something about the last bit of advice (Find your Center) rubs me the wrong way.

It appears that I'm expected to be excited about either one particular programming language, or hard computing problems.

At this point in my career, it seems naive to be excited about a programming language. In my experience, the programming language has mattered far far less than other factors in the success of a company. What are sales people expected to be excited about? I hope it's not Excel... I am equally suspicious of those excited by hard computing problems. Debugging memory leaks is a hard problem. Deducing the cause of periodic load spikes on ec2 instances in the middle of the night is a hard problem. I must admit, however, that these tasks does not excite me.

The potential to succeed excites me. Seeing a product I've worked on loved by the public is exciting and satisfying.

It just seems like the OP thinks that his candidates should find the making of sausage enjoyable and pleasant.

<comment><USER4> > _I am equally suspicious of those excited by hard computing problems. > Debugging memory leaks is a hard problem. Deducing the cause of periodic > load spikes on ec2 instances in the middle of the night is a hard problem. I > must admit, however, that these tasks does not excite me._

Those are not hard _computing_ problems. They're just hard problems. Solving hard computing problems involves developing new algorithms and heuristics, building elegant solutions to complex issues, working around hard constraints, optimizing for massive scale, etc. Creating a system that quickly sorts and ranks flights by different criteria could be a hard computing problem. Figuring out why that system crashes on Tuesday mornings at 2:37am is just a hard problem.

Very little of what most software engineers do on a daily basis is actually about solving hard computing problems. It's mostly just work, which is why we get paid. The hard computing problems are generally fun. The rest is what earns a living.

<comment><USER5> Pretty much agree with you. I would classify between tedious and hard (where both would take the same amount of effort). Beyond that, some borderline tedious/hard problems can be fun (and you can/will get paid for it.) For example, I've to date spent untold hours of my own time trying to squeeze as much performance as possible from a concurrent pipelined noSQL driver. The tedious part is the trial and error of trying n different variations, running effective benchmarks, etc. The thrill :) is in seeing throughput increase 3 fold. It is a rush.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work for a large organization. What I've learned from interviewing people is that you should beg, borrow, and steal in order to experience being the interviewer.

First, it really will boost your ego if you're competent at all. Second, you'll realize how ridiculously difficult it is to hire quality people in a large company. Third, you'll learn what answers you are giving in interviews that are identical to 97% of the rest of the candidates.

And finally, you'll get good at picturing people by reading resumes. In most cases, I can read your resume and know exactly how your interview will go. There are always surprises, but if you read enough resumes, you will know a bit better what yours says about you.

</comment><comment><USER7> Management is not programming, these are simply different skill sets. If you are asking senior managers to write college graduate programming solutions, you are being an asshole. If someone has moved up to people management, ask them people management questions.

<comment><USER8> I agree management is not programming. But do you feel confident working for an engineering manager who does not understand what you are doing, even at a high level? Can you talk about design and cost with him or her? Look, managers who are not technical can still be great people managers.

The first job of a people manager is to set the vision, and inspire you to do your best, none of which requires technical skills. I believe this was even supported by empirical research Google did a year or so ago (I can't find it right now). Still, to lead an engineering org, I believe managers have to understand technology, too, otherwise they will make uninformed decisions which will end up hurting the product.

I'll give you an example: I interviewed someone a couple of days ago who had shipped large-scale real-time trading systems for a bank. He couldn't write a for loop. Fine. But I expected him to be able to do design an ETL pipeline. Couldn't do that either. How about basic functional design? Nope. At some point, I started questioning what value this person would add to the org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > You are a senior software development lead at an A-list firm. I ask you to > solve a fairly basic coding problem which takes a college grad 15 minutes, > but you get stuck on it for an hour. You stumble your way through various > possibilities, write atrocious code and then mumble an apology about how you > "don't have the opportunity to write code these days". You would have been > red-flagged in a real interview in the first 5 minutes.

In my experience doing 50+ real interviews, even good programmers can fail a white board coding question. Experienced candidates tend to fail it harder, since they tend to be more rusty at interviewing than new grads. It's a different experience to real-world programming.

A good analogy is a micro-benchmark. What are you trying to measure here? It's quite possible you end up measuring how a candidate does under pressure rather than actual programming skill.

<comment><USER10> I've only got myself as a single data point, but I'm 100% sure that in my early 20s I could interview much better than I do today when it comes to on- the-spot interview questions like implementing tree insert/walking algorithms, reverse this structure in the least steps possible, etc. Yet as a 38 year old I write far better real-world code today than I ever have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So what it's saying is be knowledgeable about the job you're applying for, keep your skill set sharp, do what you love, and know what you want out of a prospective employer.

Good advice, albeit a bit obvious.

<comment><USER8> @CoughlinJ: isn't it also obvious that we should eat healthier, exercise more, and watch less TV? What I have observed again and again is that many engineers start off with positive qualities but lose them over time. What's obvious to you may not be obvious to someone who has been working at the same company for 20 years and hasn't interviewed in just about as long.

<comment><USER11> I've been in the same position for 6 years, so I know what it feels like to become complacent. I just thought it'd be obvious to anyone gearing up for a change. It's like checking the gas tank indicator in your car before making a trip, and making sure you packed clean skivvies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The last statement kind of bugs me:

"Given a choice, all other things equal, I will always hire someone who truly cares about the product over someone who treats it like a job."

This quote was after a comment about some people who have families and other things going on. If you can find someone who is head first into your product, that's fine. But those interests can and should change after a while.

Someone who has a family and responsibilities can be dependable. An employee that is frenetically brilliant can burn out quickly. A team of balanced, stable, dependable people can be counted on to keep working towards a goal. This is vitally important when your young company is striving to survive and take on/create a market.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why do we force developers to become managers?

IT organizations should hire accountants and/or other professionals to keep track of stuff. (budgets, costs, projects, assets, etc. ) These professionals should have the information organized in a way that the decision makers can use it.

Leading the IT organizations should be the individuals with the best vision, technical knowledge, business knowledge, soft skills, etc. They shouldn't spend their time doing clerical work.

</comment><comment><USER14> > You are a senior software development lead at an A-list firm ... you "don't > have the opportunity to write code these days"

Perhaps, we should revise the list of A-list firms to exclude those where it's impossible to advance without staying technical (i.e., writing code)?

</comment><comment><USER15> What I learned from 50+ mock interviews?

That 50+ is too many mock interviews</comment>


Kid Launches Social Networking Site, Gets 227K Views in 1 hour - <AUTHOR> http://fastgush.com/socialmedia/new-social-networking-site-lets-your-friends-describe-you-in-three-wordsread-why-founder-is-worried.html

<comment><USER2> Somehow I find the use of the word 'kid' a bit out of place here.

<comment><USER3> How so? He's a minor in nearly every state in the US, where he lives. I tried to find the legal age in Boston but "Boston Legal" keeps coming up...

<comment><USER2> The legal age is not what I had in mind. If someone is 17 chronologically but in every other way behaves like a very smart adult would then it feels as though calling them 'kid' is talking down to them. Nothing major, it just seems to not be one of the three words that I would use to describe Mark with :)

<comment><USER4> Like this? [http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20081219/business_week_kevin_rose...](http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20081219/business_week_kevin_rose_270x356.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Right. He was like 30 in that picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "social network"? isn't this just a facebook app?</comment>


For Developers: Favorite editor fonts? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I prefer <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_%28typeface%29>

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently found Inconsolata, which I really enjoy for coding. As a bonus, it's free (as in freedom).

<comment><USER4> That's a great looking font --- elegant, but still LEGIBLE.

I found the download page here:

<http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What is everyone's favorite font for editing code?

My own personal favorite is Triskweline: <http://www.netalive.org/tinkering/triskweline/>

Clean and scannable. What's yours?

<comment><USER5> Nice. I use modd which is very similar. <http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely Monaco (coupled with Carbon Emacs on OS X).

</comment><comment><USER7> Monaco is really nice. It is included in the Mac.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use emacs 23 just for DejaVu Sans Mono.</comment>


The magic button — Make Everything OK - <AUTHOR> http://make-everything-ok.com/

<comment><USER3> This would have been so so so much better if it'd stuck at 99%

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a great example of why you _should_ use platform UI, and _shouldn't_ try to re-invent them:

1\. Click the mouse and hold. The button doesn't depress (huh?)

2\. Release the mouse button. Now it depresses (wtf). And actives.

3\. Hover the mouse over it, it doesn't highlight.

4\. Click the mouse and hold, then drag the mouse outside the button area. Release the mouse button. It depresses (ugh) and actives.

5\. Click the disabled button while the progress dialog box is on screen. The progress box vanishes and the button actives

6\. Attempt to active the button using the keyboard.

7\. Attempt to make the button the focus for keyboard action by right-clicking or middle-clicking it (or click and drag out of it, but we already know that doesn't work). [This is a GTK feature]

</rant>

</comment><comment><USER5> The button and blur effect are both very beautiful, so at first I was excited to see how they were done in code. But it turned out to be just plain images, no fancy CSS. In fact the entire popup dialog is an image, complete with the close button. Ah well...

<comment><USER6> It doesn't have to be a fancy CSS hack. It has to look nice. And it does. Simplest solutions are often good enough :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would be nice if it linked to Ze Frank's Chillout Song: <http://www.zefrank.com/chillout/>

<comment><USER6> Story behind this song is amazing and inspiring. Thank you for linking to that :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it just me or did anyone else feel more relaxed after that? It's good to know that there is something out there that will make everything ok.

<comment><USER9> No, this is complete bullshit. And the fact that it has gotten so many votes is ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> You sound unhappy. Maybe you should click the button-- it makes everything OK.

<comment><USER9> Fuck off wanker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ha! This is a flashier and more philosophical cousin of ...

 _The Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything_

<http://www.pixelscapes.com/spatulacity/button.htm>

<comment><USER12> But that doesn't "doesn't do anything"--it reloads the page.

<comment><USER11> Someone should tell the author, I guess ;)

But, if a page reloads and is exactly the same, did anything really happen?

<comment><USER13> The answer is yes, HTTP requests and caches at work, quite a lot is going on.

<comment><USER11> As someone on HN, I understand that. I was just being philosophical.

I guess, thinking whether anything happened depends on one's level of perception, and one's definition of what it means for something to "happen". (That is, whether you are looking only at the final result of a process, or at everything that happens during the process, irrespective of the final outcome).

If my Internet-newbie father clicked that button repeatedly, I'm sure he would think that "nothing is happening", and at his level of perception, that statement would be correct.

EDIT: Elaboration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice, simple, beautiful and funny. It might be cool if they tied the donate button into a charity or NPO and play off the fact that clicking it would actually help make things okay for someone.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't want to be a curmudgeon, but why would anyone donate to that? Especially with no info about who is behind the site and why they did it.

<comment><USER6> Because it is fun, thought-provoking a little bit, and just made me smile :).

<comment><USER15> Yeah, and I agree to an extent. It just seems weird to me, as a donation usually goes towards something that you believe in and want to help flourish. There's not even an indication of what the donations would be used for.

I certainly don't want to make a crusade out of it, but it just felt a little misplaced to me.

<comment><USER16> Some people believe in art and want to help it flourish.

<comment><USER6> I believe in creative thoughts which not harm, but which do something good, even if it's just making someone smile. And I definitely want them to flourish. Art is, of course, one of the types of those creative thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ah, the Internet: connecting together everyone with Too Much Free Time since 1991.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice and funny.

Being at OK buttons, the Donate button, is not OK

Raising money for a joke? Come on!

<comment><USER6> I don't see a problem with that. It's completely unobtrusive and doesn't distract at all. I spotted it by accident. I don't thing they're raising money, they're just allowing people who want to to show appreciation for their work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm seriously considering pointing people coming to me with a generic "it doesn't work" to this page to have it fixed.

Thanks for this post!

<comment><USER6> Just pointed my boss - "Use this if something goes wrong". ;).

EDIT: And she replied that "everything is now OK" :). Yey, it works!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not one to do this, but really, how does this belong on Hacker News? Is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER9> It isn't. Stupid noise that appeals to the +1-ing social media sharing neophytes all over HN these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> hmmm - "try checking your settings of perception of objective reality." - <USER2> bit geeky and out of touch I think ...

I would have said: "remember, you're alive, now take a deep breath, count your blessings, and make the best out of today and every day"

but everything's ok :)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is great, but the final sentence could be happier, more colorful or something.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me, or is it broken in Google Chrome? In Firefox it works fine for me, but in Chrome, I initially see the "Everything is OK now" sign and can't click on anything...

<comment><USER24> Why would you want to click anything if everything is ok now?

(Works for me in Chrome 12 on Windows 7.)

<comment><USER25> Just because things are OK doesnt mean you wont be doing anything

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> +1 made me smile. Just what i needed right now

</comment><comment><USER27> multiple clicks break it</comment>


What Is Going to Happen in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2019/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> People said this exact same thing about trump in 2017 except with the impeachment date being 2018 instead of 2019. I would be willing to take the opposite side of that bet. The odds of impeachment are slim based on the rarity of past occurrences, and House democrats have expressed reservations about impeachment. Even if impeached, that does not mean he will leave office. China;s GDP has been slowing for over a decade. This is expected given how fast it was growing in the early and mid 2000's.

<comment><USER3> I came here to say exactly the same thing. I'd be happy to stick money down on Trump still being in power by the end of 2019. And probably by the end of 2024 as well.

I think it's an example of a Silicon Valley filter bubble.

<comment><USER4> Here's your chance

[https://www.predictit.org](https://www.predictit.org)

<comment><USER5> Specifically, [https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3352/Will-Donald- Tr...](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3352/Will-Donald-Trump-be- president-at-year-end-2019)

Currently about 73% yes

<comment><USER6> What's the overhead of trading on predictit because the impeachment[1] "yes" of 37% is way too close to the currently 30% "no" of him being in office; I think the odds of him ending the year as president _if impeached_ is at least 50%, so there should be some way to arbitrage this.

[edit] I suppose there is the chance of him pulling a Nixon and resigning before impeachment, as well as the chance of him dying. I consider both of those to be less likely; he is to confrontational to back down from just the _threat_ of impeachment of a house with an opposition majority; if anything being impeached by a partisan vote would be fodder for his conservative base.

1: [https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/4319/Will-Donald- Tr...](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/4319/Will-Donald-Trump-be- impeached-by-year-end-2019)

<comment><USER5> 10% on gains, plus 5% on withdrawals: [https://predictit.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5...](https://predictit.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000516383-what- are-your-fees-)

The volume may be too low to do much arbitrage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >China's GDP has been slowing in recent years as it achieved relative parity with the US and the Eurozone:

This is misleading; the relevant metric for measuring development is GDP per capita, which is only around $8,500 in China, compared to $59,000 for the US and and $33,000 for the EU ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\)_per_capita)). The average person in China is much poorer than the average person in America or Europe; a significant portion are still subsistence farmers, the only reason absolute GDP is comparable with the US and Europe is that China's population is way bigger. One would only expect growth to slow when China's per-person GDP approaches that of a developed country, not it's total GDP.

<comment><USER8> "THE relevant statistic" (emphasis mine) is also misleading. Lots of different things measure development.

It's not surprising that China is seeing some slowdown in growth, as they climb that curve. Jumping from $50 to $100 is easier than jumping from $5000 to $10,000. Or another way, a 10% growth rate at $1000 requires increasing revenue by $100. At $10,000, it means increasing by $1000.

On top of that, China is an export-driven economy, and it's tangling with slowdowns among its customers (who aren't growing nearly as fast anyway), and a trade war with the US.

edit: Rather than just measuring China vs "developed world", measure China vs China. The per capita GDP of China has increased a hundredfold in the past 50 years. To sustain that rate for another 50 years, per capita GDP would have to reach over $800,000 (in constant dollars). That seems... unlikely.

<comment><USER9> Agree with your comments.

Adding few other points:

* China's new infrastructures are good and modern. (+)

* Education system is reasonable - produce large number of engineers, college educated young people. (+)

* Entrepreneurial spirits/activities are very high in a lot of cities. (+)

* The new roads system are mostly build/own with private money and adding non-trivial cost to the normal business when they need to transport goods. As compare to the highway system in the US. (-)

* The society is NOT govern by the rule of law. It is govern by the will of the Party and who ever is in power. As shown recently by the some famous actors, actress go fine massive amount because of tax issues. The new rules show up one day can cause the majority movie industry disappear in a few weeks. (-)

* The housing bubble is a big issue similar to what happen to Japan 20+ years ago. (-)

* The debt in private industries and local government are BIG issue. (-)

* The central government has recently created new much stricter rules about people (local/business ) taking the money out of China. It looks good on the surface for majority of population when present as rich people's issue. But imagine a bank allow for deposit but only allow for redraw of $100 per day. With that kind of policy, no business would trust a country enough to do new or continue investments.

      * The old reformer (DengXiaoPeng)'s believe:  It doesn't matter if it is a black cat or a white cat, if it can catch a mouse, it is a good cat.

      * The new believe:   Those black/write cats who turn into fat cats have served their purposes.    It is harvest time.....

      * Overall, it don't look good for China in near/long term.

<comment><USER7> >As shown recently by the some famous actors, actress go fine massive amount because of tax issues.

To be fair, she only got a fine and detention for a few months. US actor Wesley Snipes was jailed for 3 years for tax evasion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The eurozone is about to go through the most significant change in decades > with some sort of departure of the UK from the EU (Brexit).

The UK may be leaving the EU, but that's not a change to the Eurozone, which is a monetary union among a subset of EU members, of which the UK has never been a part.

<comment><USER11> There still could be impact on trade, especially if we have a no-deal brexit.

<comment><USER12> It will have impact on trade, but that's still more an issue for the EU as a whole rather than the Eurozone specifically.

I consider it a typo; the author clearly meant the EU, but wrote Eurozone for some reason. I can't entirely blame them; the many European treaties are a complicated mess.

<comment><USER13> Wikipedia has this handy overview: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bodies- en.svg)

Unfortunately as a citizen of one of the founding members of the EU, I don't even recognise half the flags in the diagram.

<comment><USER14> Top right quarter of that image... I can name maybe two flags and that's only from European sports, the rest are actually a mystery.

Give me the names and i'm sure i would know them, ask me to point them out on a blank map and we're straying back in to embarrassing territory again.

<comment><USER15> I assume you mean the BSEG section is included?

Off the top of my head Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Moldova, Turkey, Georgia, Northern Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Belarus, Romania and Bulgaria are all there anyway.

I think I've still missed a handful but I'm pretty happy with my European flag knowledge apparently from that.

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank the Eurovision Song Competition apparently for my education

<comment><USER14> That is the section yes along with CEFTA which i assume is whatever happened after Yugosalavia broke up. I can only pull Greece, Russia and turkey from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> VCs are going to talk up things that they've invested in, but his emphasis on crypto as meaningful in any way beyond a temporary buzzword and a sink for suckers' money is pretty indicative of the amount of trust one should put in his predictions. Skimming his recent articles, including the look back at 2018, it's clear he sees crypto as a hedge against political and economic instability, but the irony is that crypto's primary use case is in _facilitating_ the destabilization of existing economic infrastructure. That's its explicit goal! So it's weird that someone so heavily invested in it thinks it'll be a savior of society. But then again the author operates in a different economy than the rest of us... he'll probably be just fine.

<comment><USER17> While I agree there is a lot of BS in the crypto world I think we are dealing with a classic case of overestimating in the short run and underestimating in the long run.

Instead of starting with decentralization in your thinking and then trying to find value through that, start instead with de-institutionalization. The potential of crypto is not the individual currency but the network of currencies.

Our parents/grandparents invented the internet but didn't find ways to turn it into what it is today. Our generation invented the blockchain but it will be our kids who will end up turning it into valuable infrastructure. They will not be limited to understanding and applying it like we do but be able to think about it from a "born blockchain" perspective.

We keep trying to think how we can use it for things we already have solutions for which is of course not really going to do much. Instead we have to think about things that we don't have solutions for and which can't be done easily.

CryptoKitties is one of the best examples of how this can be used and if you think that is silly then you are right so are many other ideas that end up turning into amazing businesses.

So I say, let a million cryptocurrencies bloom it's the network itself that's the utility not the individual currency.

<comment><USER18> >Our parents/grandparents invented the internet but didn't find ways to turn it into what it is today.

Repeating this over and over again doesn't make it true. Google, Amazon, and Ebay we're established in the first year of the eternal September, and immediately started changing people's lives. We're 10 years after Bitcoin, and still with nothing to show for it but money laundering and pump and dump schemes.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't make it false either.

The blockchain is a protocol, not a company.

The TCP/IP protocol was decades old before it became useful to build companies on top of exactly because it required A LOT of networked connectivity, people to make various investments and critical mass from users.

Give it time.

<comment><USER18> In the early days of TCPIP, you needed a university membership to get access, and network-capable computers were even more rare. So you're saying that there aren't enough networked computers for blockchain to be viable?

We're currently sitting at around 8 networked devices for every human being, how many more do we need? 15? 20? What is holding blockchain back, since it is definitely not university membership?

<comment><USER17> No.

I am saying that there aren't enough cryptocurrencies and thus the network is not pervasive enough to become infrastructure plus it's still mostly academic and you need to understand it conceptually to start making sense of it.

Most people don't even most of those who are involved in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Same author's predictions from 2018: [https://avc.com/2018/01/what-is-going- to-happen-in-2018/](https://avc.com/2018/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2018/)

<comment><USER20> Written just vague enough on almost all the points to seem credible without actually saying anything. Guy above gets it right, this 2019 post is SV Tech Bubble at its finest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> My prediction is a lot of people's predictions for 2019 will be wrong. Look how many people were wrong about crypto currency in 2018. Or about the stock market.

</comment><comment><USER21> My takeaway from this is most people are going to have a fearful 2019

my other takeaway - Be greedy when others are fearful, fearful when others are greedy"

</comment><comment><USER22> > The eurozone is about to go through the most significant change in decades > with some sort of departure of the UK from the EU (Brexit). It remains > unclear exactly how this will happen, which in and of itself is creating a > lot of uncertainty on the Continent. I don't expect most businesses in > Europe to do anything but play defense in 2019.

Of all the things said in the post this stands out to me as the only overly pessimistic point. First of all: The UK always had a very special relationship to and within EU. Now this relationship is going to be different - but not earth-shakingly different.

Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty right now, and I agree with Fred Wilson here that we can expect a messy Brexit, but I don't expect this state of affairs to drag on through the whole of 2019. At some point we will have clarity and this will hopefully be beneficial for the economy.

The most important point though is that a messy Brexit is expected on both sides of the Channel preparations for it are already proceeding.

<comment><USER23> > I don't expect this state of affairs to drag on through the whole of 2019

Seriously?? The exit is so incredibly complex I can foresee the ramifications dragging into decades. The border problems alone are going to be a political quagmire, to view this sort of thing is a 12 month trifle is short-sighted to say the least.

The exit will split the country in half, how on earth can you have 'clarity' when there is basically zero bi-partisan agreement politically and socially?

<comment><USER22> Fred Wilson was speaking about the Continent and my point of view is from the Continent too. I seriously believe that when we will have clarity about the general new relationship countries like France, Germany, Spain, Italy and even the stable smaller ones will execute their pre-planned scenarios and just move on. I don't feel qualified to give an opinion how all of this will pan out for the UK but I hope it will not be as dark as you described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This dramatically over-estimates the impact that a Trump impeachment would have - just like analysts in 2016 predicted that the economy would crash if Trump won. [1]

In reality, the markets would likely respond to a Pence presidency with positivity. His reputation is far more "boring and dependable" than Trump's ever has been.

1\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/business/dealbook/what- ha...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/business/dealbook/what-happens-to- the-markets-if-donald-trump-wins.html)

<comment><USER25> just like the Bush/Cheney relationship, it pays to watch Pence rather than Trump, who is arguably just a distraction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So many people and content sites put out menaingless predictions that there is no consequence of being wrong on. Unless the author has sufficient skin in the game, for example they take a short position on the S&P to back up the predicted drop we as readers should not put much credence in "prediction listicles."

</comment><comment><USER27> Ctrl-f "climate" Ctrl-f "carbon" Ctrl-f "green"

Nothing of interest. Ctrl-W.

<comment><USER28> The _only_ thing that could be of interest is the climate? That seems rather narrow-minded.

Also, this is a list of predictions. It is therefore predicting that there will be not much action on the climate in 2019. That seems... plausible.

<comment><USER27> Yes, I agree that there is likely to be not much action. I'm interested in the political predictions as well, although I really don't find the arguments about what is going to come out of the Mueller investigation to be very compelling; I just don't think either R's or D's have enough political will to stop going along to get along. It's not that I don't think President 45 has committed many, many white-collar crimes; I just don't think anyone is going to hold him accountable, and I don't believe Mueller will actually indict the president.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just FYI: lots of images in this article don't show on my end.

</comment><comment><USER30> predictit has trump getting impeached by end of 2019 at 36 cents for yes. If mueller finds any "collusion" it is guaranteed impeachment. Old crimes possibly not.

So predictit at least disagrees that mueller finds collusion.

And as always if you are absolutely certain that mueller will find collusion, you can make some money. Put your money where your mouth is.

</comment><comment><USER31> Trump will not resign the Presidency. And Congress certainly won't remove him.

2019 and 2020 will see the country better learning to work around a President who acts on whims instead of information.

</comment><comment><USER32> There is very little evidence that markets care much at all about what happens in Washington. If Trump resigns or doesn't it is very unlikely to have a lasting effect on equity prices. There's lots of evidence to back this up. When JFK was assassinated for example, equity prices rose in the weeks after. This does not suggest that the equity markets didn't like JFK necessarily, but rather that equity markets were primed to move higher and even extreme uncertainty around the presidency wasn't enough to alter their course. Prices are going to go where they are going to go. It makes some people happy to imagine markets disliking Trump, but the truth is they don't really care who is president, they only care about whether earnings are going to go up or down in the future, and the president just doesn't have much control over that save for tax rates which have already been accounted for in this administration.

The Fed is far more likely to impact equity markets, but I think far too many (Wilson included) are too focused on the trend in rates without any consideration at all for the relative level of rates historically. It is true that a rising trend in rates is usually bearish for stocks, BUT it's very important to understand the trend in a broader context. Rates are still extremely low in a historical context and if the Fed pauses in 2019 and employment and consumer spending remain strong, stocks aren't likely to drop much more simply because 3% is not a satisfactory return for most people unless you are nearing retirement. So where else are you going to park your money? Probably stocks. Also, a company like Apple isn't going to be drastically effected by marginally higher rates when they were already close to zero. Sure, their cost of capital might go up by a quarter a percent. Is that really going to move the needle on their earnings significantly? Other companies that aren't profitable and heavily reliant on debt probably will be hurt, though.

Here's what I believe is happening: the Fed did a very poor job of communicating its position and intent in late 2018 (probably because they themselves didn't know what they were going to do) and spooked the markets by saying they were going to hike several times in 2019. They then walked this back but the markets are still a bit uneasy. Sentiment always follows price, and now that prices have fallen and volatility has spiked, what are the pundits doing? Predicting price declines and higher volatility! Well, that's already happened so if you are selling stocks now and paying up for VIX calls, you're probably late to the party. In early 2018, most pundits were saying to buy stocks.

</comment><comment><USER33> Impeachment will never happen. If you study recent history, an impeachment attempt on Trump will go down just like it did on Clinton - - strictly along party lines. The Clinton vote was razor accurate along party lines when it happened. No majority means no impeachment.

<comment><USER34> Clinton was impeached.

<comment><USER35> ..by the Republican majority House of Representatives. It can be roughly equated to being charged with a crime. The Senate held a trial and voted for acquittal and therefore no action was taken. Two thirds of the Senate must vote to remove a President from office.

<comment><USER34> Correct. But the OP was stating that impeachment would never happen and pointing to what happened with Clinton. But impeachment is exactly what happened with Clinton. And the prediction does not state that he will be removed from office by the Senate, but that he will resign after impeachment to avoid prosecution. This is an entirely reasonable prediction based upon current and historical events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You have to wonder how much someone who doesn't understand the difference between the EU and the Eurozone can confidently make predictions about either.

</comment><comment><USER37> As a European I hope Trump will be impeached or he will renounce. It's the only way the US will regain any trust from other countries. For the average citizen Trump is the only image of the US they get on the news which is not very flattering.

<comment><USER38> I hope it's proved that Trump didn't do anything substantially wrong. Then - instead of the world having to have overcome some terrible problem - I would only have to overcome the shame of having made a mistake. And I've been mistaken many times.

<comment><USER37> I recommend everyone to watch the documentary "Active Measures".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WnYi3T78Ag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WnYi3T78Ag)

Trump has been having business with the Russian mafia for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Guessing the direction of interest rates and speculation about supposed crimes the president did (for which at this point there has been no evidence of) is a pretty poor foundation to build predictions upon since there's a good chance rates stay flat in 2019 and Mueller comes up empty. In that scenario, the stock market still has downward pressure because of the insane valuations, but the storm clouds outlined here fade away for the most part.

One 2019 prediction I have is a resurgence of interest in VR with the release of Oculus Quest. A lot of people have been quietly building for 5 years waiting for this.

On politics I'll go out on a limb here and say that the FBI/DOJ will conclude a number of (under reported, multi-year) investigations and bring indictments for a large number of well-known politicians of both parties.

<comment><USER8> Actually, there's a lot of evidence for "supposed crimes of the president". Some of his closest advisors (Cohen, Flynn, Manafort) have been convicted of felonies. All of them have cooperated to some degree with Mueller. The fact that Mueller asked for no prison for Flynn says a great deal about how valuable Flynn's testimony has been. Who else would Flynn be testifying against that's so important to Mueller that he'd pay for it with a no-prison plea bargain? Don't let political bias blind to you the evidence.

That said, I'm not at all convinced this will lead to impeachment, although it may lead to resignation. The House isn't going to impeach without a reasonable chance of success in the Senate, and I don't see twenty of McConnell's Republicans voting to destroy Trump, no matter what he did or what he's charged with doing.

<comment><USER40> It's not unthinkable that a decent number of Republicans would flip, but a precondition of that would probably need to be a plummeting approval rating for Trump, which hasn't borne out so far - despite all the controversy, he still seems to have a 35-40% floor.

One interesting thing about Trump is that he has some of the most stable (albeit somewhat low) approval ratings of any president that there's reliable data for. But he's gone from "historically unpopular" to "about as popular as Reagan, Ford or Clinton" at this point in his presidency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> >> I believe that we will have a different President of the United States by the end of 2019. The catalyst for this change will be a devastating report issued by Robert Mueller that outlines a history of illegal activities by our President going back decades, including in his campaign for President.

I will only give weight-age to Mr.Wilson's prediction on this if he discloses whom he cast his Vote in 2016 and its not Hillary Clinton.

Also, if you have an annual tradition of forecasting the upcoming year, please also make it a tradition of evaluating your previous year's prediction.

Edit: Here are his predictions for 2018. Some he got right, but on lot of stuff he played it both ways and honestly expressed his lack of clarity.

[https://avc.com/2018/01/what-is-going-to-happen- in-2018/](https://avc.com/2018/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2018/)

<comment><USER42> > I will only give weight-age to Mr.Wilson's prediction on this if he > discloses whom he cast his Vote in 2016 and its not Hillary Clinton.

That basically amounts to saying that you don't believe a Clinton voter can be objective. That's evidence of bias on your part, not his.

<comment><USER41> That is my heuristic, is it sound? perhaps not. I have said "I will give weightage" not you should not take his prediction seriously.

I am biased and flawed, and I agree with your assessment.</comment></comment></comment>


1.5M Packages a Day: The Internet Brings Chaos to N.Y. Streets - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-delivery.html <comment><USER2> Duplicate with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369007)

Looks like the HN duplication algorithm doesn't recognize [http://](http://) vs [https://www](https://www).

</comment><comment><USER3> I would love to see the city propose some radical ideas to help solve these traffic problems. Such as closing more or most cross streets to through traffic, as was done recently with 14th Street. Or eliminating all on street parking. Or increasing car ownership taxes.</comment>


Is it possible to port ios on HP touchpad? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious, Why people are only working on android port and not on IOS5 port? <comment><USER2> Because there's at least some source code for android, which is not the case with IOS, perhaps?

It's not trivial to port something you don't have the sources (nor the required permissions) for.</comment>


Ask HN: Any recommendations for books about rationality / scientific thinking? - <AUTHOR>

My father is 60 and brainwashed himself over years into esoteric thinking. He thinks that his "way of thinking" is superior to everyone else. He is convinced that he discovered the truth about reality. It's all kind of bullshit he talks about, which I'd sum up as "cognitive biases" he fails to see (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases), while blaming everyone else to be incapable of understand his world view.
Tthe older he gets, the less flexible he becomes in his thinking, and the more arrogant he becomes. He has a deeply flawed understanding of what science is and how it works and – like many esoterics – he'd abuse some scientific concepts to explain his world view, but reject other concepts if they don't fit the world view. E. g. Quantum Theory as a wishy-washy explanation for "supernatural phenomenons", if you know what I mean.
I know, it's impossible to change someone, if he isn't willing to do change himself. But maybe a good book could show him some flaws in his thinking and act as a trigger to at least reconsider some of his world views.
Does anyone have recommendations for books that teach basic rational thinking and core scientific concepts? Or any other tips for a situation like that when you find a family member detached from reality? <comment><USER2> Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a series of "sequences" with the goal of creating a book on rationality.

[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences)

If your dad thrives on "smarter than you" arrogance, then a more subtle and crafty introduction might be, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," also by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

[http://hpmor.com/](http://hpmor.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, will check out both. Not sure if he like the Harry Potter universe though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon- Haunted_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World)

<comment><AUTHOR> Many many thanks, from the description, it sounds exactly like the book I was looking for.</comment></comment>


Generation UX – How to make websites age-friendly - <AUTHOR> http://whatusersdo.com/blog/make-websites-age-friendly/ <comment><USER2> As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX. Clicking the link, I'm not only met by a social sharing bar that uses 1/6th of the screen and screws scrolling up (because for some reason it should follow through my scrolling but somehow only be visible when scrolling upwards), but a faux-chat window overlaying the content where a Tom is asking me how he can help me. Not at all, thank you. At least being so up-front about how absolutely terrible your website is means I didn't stay long enough for a modal asking me to subscribe to their newsletter to pop up.

Does anyone actually believe that this crap leads to a better user experience? Are UX concepts and standards so inbred that the people involved just can't separate chocolate pudding from excrement anymore?

<comment><USER3> As a UX designer I have seen a lot of this stuff over the years and I always find it funny. DesignerNews.com, which is an imitation of this site, is chock full of articles like this.

The big thing to understand is a lot of people in The Blogosphere(TM) who post articles about UX don't really give a rip about anything other than the pageviews whether it's for ad revenue, establishing themselves as a thought leader, or trying to market their company. Even worse, there are some people who don't even ACTUALLY know much about UX, they just want to post an article about it to spread around LinkedIn and seem relevant by harping about the importance of UX, etc.

Having said all that, if you sift through all the garbage there are some great resources. Some of the big players in the space tend to do it well. InVision's blog, for example. UXPin are pretty good. There are lots of little ones like UXPowerTools' content marketing emails that are starting to do a good job as well.

At this point as someone who is always trying to improve as a UX designer, I have become accustomed to vetting the 100:1 ratio of garbage articles to bad ones.

<comment><USER4> I literally know nothing about UX, but I have to say a visit to UXPin's website instantly turned me off. First, they put this great big demand for my email front and center when I barely even know what their site is (and a single line explaining it is not enough to get me to sign up). The entire website is covered over with "modal grey" with no X box or anything else showing me I can close it, just some links at the top that are not obviously clickable because of the grey modal. Turns out it isn't a modal at all you can just scroll down (no indication of that) and that the small links are clickable. Once I was past that, it was fine and dandy, but if I were actually interested in being a customer rather than a curious person trying to figure out what I was missing, I probably would have just left.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the product isn't great. To the point about UX blogs though, theirs is pretty solid [https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/](https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/). It isn't bogged down by social sharing widgets, scroll jacking, or pop ups (last I checked)

<comment><USER5> besides the floating header that eats-up my precious vertical screen real- estate, the blog content seems great...

thanks for the link

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now if only the Google maps (mobile version) devs would read this. On Android anyway, no matter how much you zoom the text labels on things like street and highway numbers will not enlarge. 5 years ago that wasn't the case.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, it makes sense that Google Maps would have distinct concepts for "zooming in to the map" that would be separate from "resizing font".

The inverse problem exists on the browser, though - there's no way to resize the viewport on mobile.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but I think the font should be (to some extent) scaled proportionally to the map area or perhaps some other way of making the text larger. A typical use case for me is zooming in on a highway to see what exit number a particular ramp is. Today that info is basically unreadable on either platform.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, I don't want to see giant a 'D' over where I live because on a far out zoom level it happens to say 'UNITED KINGDOM', and someone wanted to zoom in to see the font.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Noted is the distraction from automatically changing carousels. I've found this a major area of concern -- not just carousels but any autoplay content, automatic slides, and text marquees. And beyond distraction, these elements assume a specific pace of reading and require the user to build UI understanding to get back to interesting content they glimpsed in passing. If the content is compelling enough to display, it's compelling enough to present well.

<comment><USER11> Yet inevitably every middle manager thinks carousels are a great idea.

I'm convinced 9 times out of 10 carousels are installed because the customer got sick of looking at their own site.

<comment><USER12> I'll give you 5 times out of 10. The other 5 is the designer's solution to trying to fit 10 different stakeholder's crap "above the fold."

<comment><USER13> We once built a site (for a major consumer brand) where the client insisted on so many carousel slides that they started duplicating slides in the lineup because it had been too long since they'd been seen.

(Our recommendation was to avoid a carousel, but the client had to have it!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Today's really broken web site - Bank of America online banking. I'm running Firefox 53 (latest version), with Ghostery and Privacy Badger, on Ubuntu Linux. BofA's site had worked well for years. Then they added some new features. Not good ones.

BofA's site now complains I'm using an "unsupported browser", even though they claim to support Firefox. About half the time, login just hangs. Refreshing the page shows a logged-in state.

When transferring funds from one account to another, sometimes the transfer process hangs. The "Approve transfer" button darkens, but the page is not refreshed. Sometimes the transfer has taken place, and sometimes it hasn't.

Yesterday, I did a transfer between accounts, and reached this situation. I looked at the account status and didn't see the outgoing transfer listed. So I re-did the transfer, and then saw the outgoing transfer listed. I printed the account transaction history.

Today I get a warning that an account is overdrawn. Checking account status, I find that there are now two identical transfers between the accounts, resulting in one being overdrawn and the other being overpaid. An hour of phone calls, mostly on hold, was required to fix this mess.

BofA's web site is using TouchCommerce ("Engage with your customers the way they want to engage") Adobe Audience Manager ("Build audience profiles that you can use anywhere"), and Tealium ("a single approach to connecting data across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real time"). They've added ads for "special offers". They use these even on live transaction pages, which is a possible security flaw. Code from those sources produces huge numbers of browser errors (the obsolete "star property hack" for IE6 causes many of them) indicating sloppy code.

Sigh. May be time to change banks.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Congratulations, here's your first set of glasses" \- the present I got when I turned 50.

While the site focuses on seniors, a lot of the suggestions are good ones in any case - fonts larger than legalese and with good contrast will make your page more easily approachable and less likely to lose viewers who get frustrated because they can't read what you're trying to say.

<comment><USER16> Honestly, I've worn glasses all my life, and it's never occurred to me that, when I'm not wearing my glasses, the websites are the one's at fault for not making themselves more readable.

I think "web developers should make things more readable" is addressing the symptom and not the problem. The solution is simple when it comes to readability: wear corrective lenses.

<comment><USER17> As you get older, a few things happen.

First, as your eyes lose the ability to focus (which is a gradual process, not a step change), you find that over time you need more and more lenses: one for objects at 18 inches (your laptop), one for objects at 24 inches (your monitor), etc. You don't always have the proper lenses at hand when you need them.

Second, all the transparent bits of the eyes slowly become less transparent with time. Some problems (cataracts for instance) can be fixed with surgery; others would require replacing the entire eyeball.

Third, a number of unlucky people develop problems with their retinas, which may or may not be fixable, and the fixes rarely leave the retina in as good a shape as it was when it was younger.

So "wear corrective lenses" is not a bad suggestion, but if web designers are targeting older people, they need to assume the the reader's eyes are not what they once were, and that there may not be much that the reader can do about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think something mentioned in the article that's usually not mentioned is the loss of motor skills as you age. I find that for myself, a 20-something year old web developer, it's easy to fall into the 'Everyone on the internet is like me' mindset. However I try to maintain perspective by observing my grandparents as they browse the internet on their iPads. The loss of motor skills is easily one of the most frustrating parts of web browsing for them. If they have to try more than twice to click your small hamburger menu that you put conveniently right next to the 'Log out' button, they'll simply give up and move on to the next thing.

An example of what I feel is an elegant solution - They used to have the hardest time playing/pausing YouTube videos when they would rely only on the buttons. However, once I showed them how to play/pause by clicking the entire video, they were relieved and much more appreciative of the technology. I think that this approach is more sound; instead of simply making everything larger, or having larger clickboxes, simply create multiple ways to interact with the content that doesn't interfere with other users. Nobody is upset that you can play/pause videos by clicking on them, but I imagine they would be if the play/pause buttons were 5x larger than they are now.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here I foolishly hoped for some evidence of true understanding of the aged. Unfortunately the tl;dr is: 1) News flash, old people are out there, they have money, and some of them even know how to go online. 2) We need a term for this new species... I know, how about 'digiboomers!' 3) An old person is basically a collection of disabilities you need to plan around. 4) In light of 3) when an old person abandons a task it's probably because they're bewildered, not because your game is weak. (Not a word on how to address deficiencies in your content, that their lifetime of experience will enable them to pick up instantly. Or their experience and subsequent impatience with scams, marketing and bullshit. Or the higher level of quality and depth they're seeking in all arenas. Or for that matter, what they're like or what's important to them.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Translation: Stop getting creative. Make functional websites, not art projects.

<comment><USER21> OMG yes, to your last sentence at least.

I like an attractive web site, but only as long as I can read it instantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Something that should have been explicit on the vision topic: Disabling pinch- zoom guarantees some fraction of people with vision issues (of all ages) are just going to disengage.

<comment><USER23> Agreed, I wish the browser would just not allow this to be disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article focuses on over 55s who have money to spend online. I liked the part that spoke to how 40 year olds and up are less likely to explore a website and more likely to abandon a task.

I run into this a lot when I watch how my older users interact with our site. They act like they are about to hit the nuke button when performing some actions on the site, and I am sitting there thinking it is totally fine, even if you mess up you can just go back. But there is so much anxiety around accidentally messing something up that they would rather abandon the task than do it.

I hope that I can continue to improve my skill in UI/UX because it is so critical as a web developer.

<comment><USER25> Suggestion - have a reasonably prominent button that restores defaults (or whatever the analogue is). This is often a headache when dealing with systems - easy to get into a situation where not obvious how to get back - e.g. window minimized and can't find it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Things you can do to make your website easier to use include making sure > that clickable links and buttons have a decent clickable area, and that > pages can be navigated using just the keyboard

Hah. I don't know why this receives mention - while I'd love it if it were common practice, nobody actually thinks about this and it's unlikely to change. And it's not just web sites: let's not forget the slew of Electron apps where keyboard integration is nonexistent, partial, or an afterthought.

</comment><comment><USER27> The UX world has gone so far backwards, regardless of age, in the last five years it's hard to know where to begin: flat design, washed out colors, thin fonts, buttons that look like badges that look like input boxes that look like borders, modals that take over the entire screen with only a faint x in the upper right corner to indicate what is going on, input fields with internal labels that disappear as soon as anything is entered, and on and on.

Just going back to bootstrap 2, for all its problems, would be a step forward at this point.

<comment><USER28> I think simple flat design and simple color schemes was a good change, personally. The rest I don't really disagree with.

<comment><USER29> But you probably "grew up" with the prior, more easily discoverable interface versions. (Remember that when Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, he had to explain the "flick to scroll" gesture, because it was so new - previously, you'd have to touch a tiny triangle in the corner of the scroll view, with a stylus, to scroll... :-)

When I gave my mom an iPad, which already came with the fancy new thin flat iOS design, I had to first switch to a larger, fatter font _(thanks, Apple, for making this possible in the Accessibility settings!),_ and then spend quite some time explaining things, as many controls ("yes mom, that word is actually a button you can press") and gestures were not easily discoverable.

The fat 3D buttons were much easier to discern. (Note that Apple also has a "Button Shapes" settings in Accessibility to re-enable them, though not as "3D". Maybe they could have a global "beginner" or "senior" setting that would switch these settings over from pretty to functional and discoverable...)

<comment><USER30> iOS 6 was the pinnacle of iOS UI discoverability. I'm still baffled at some of their decisions. That slide-to-unlock element was _perfection_. It _never_ needed to change because you almost certainly _can 't do any better_ (OK, sure, using the home button to trigger unlock now is better, but as far as _on the screen_ unlock initiators, that's _it_ ). Any kid or oldster immediately understood it. And 3d-ish buttons are a thing _for a reason_. It's gotten a little better since the WTF-is-this-shit days of iOS7, but not much.

It went from "what should my grandma use? Definitely an iPad, no question" to "what should my grandma use? Ugh, god, a Chromebook I guess?"

Now force-touch, and new gestures, and crap sliding from the top and bottom of the screen, on top of everything else. It's much easier to get lost in for someone who's half-terrified of computers, which is still _lots of people_ , and I'm not sure it's much better for the rest of us, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Accessible site design is the default state! It is only ruined by what "designers" (pointlessly) _add_ to pages. The "how", therefore, is easy: stop screwing with things.

Nobody asked your site to mess with my preferred font sizes or colors. Nobody asked you to break or poorly reinvent the standard system controls, especially since (at least on Macs) normal controls have strong accessibility support built in.

</comment><comment><USER32> Related rant: Can apps please stop making the back/play/forward buttons microscopic and as close to each other as possible?

</comment><comment><USER33> also, when iOS started out, most apps responded to double-tap by expanding the screen to near zero margin and enlarging the text; this no longer seems to work the same way in both applications or on many web sites. PIA.

</comment><comment><USER34> Much of the issues in the article are solvable with basic ADA compliance and structured information architecture.

Strange how a world of tech can easily forget its ability to spread to users who need it most.

</comment><comment><USER35> WTH is this trend where people splice garbage stock photos into text? It's gotten considerably worse these past few years

</comment><comment><USER36> We did Bank4elder

[https://www.diginventa.it/i-progetti.html](https://www.diginventa.it/i-progetti.html)

[http://www.aal-europe.eu/projects/bank4older/](http://www.aal- europe.eu/projects/bank4older/)</comment>


Network Monitor, now in Firefox Developer Tools - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/06/network-monitor-now-in-firefox-beta/

<comment><USER2> Worth mentioning that Firefox Nightly has a few nifty improvements, and in a few days, the ability to replay and edit requests.</comment>


A Fast PostgreSQL Database Client Library for Python/asyncio - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg <comment><USER2> Pool does not seem to handle re-initializing connections that are closed by the PostgreSQL database itself (restarts, bad connections, etc.). Am I missing something?</comment>


Oatmeal, IndieGogo, National Wildlife Federation & American Cancer Society sued - <AUTHOR> http://www.popehat.com/2012/06/17/the-oatmeal-v-funnyjunk-part-iv-charles-carreon-sues-everybody/

<comment><USER2> This is the most bizarre series of events I have ever witnessed unfold in the legal system.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Looks like oatmeal and funnyjunk is doing this deliberately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "a man who is his own lawyer, has a fool for a client", doubly so in this case.

</comment><comment><USER3> This all episode is going more funnier than entire oatmeal comics ( I am a fan of these comics )

<http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk2>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is just a pathetic waste of resources.

</comment><comment><USER6> wow. suddenly the term "literal 'net" pops up in my head.

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=literal%20net></comment>


Innisfil Ontario saves $8M yearly using Uber as alternative to public transit - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/innisfil-uber-public-transit-1.4577331 <comment><USER2> This is a very good idea. It works quite well for Innisfil, and may well be the real future of Uber in many places?</comment>


Internet of Elephants #HackForWildlife Nov 14-15 - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetofelephants.com/events/ <comment><AUTHOR> You are all invited. 100+ registered tech and wildlife leaders participants already! Nov 14-15 2015 in Chicago. This #HackForWildlife is going to be a blast. For prospective participants: [http://www.internetofelephants.com/events/](http://www.internetofelephants.com/events/) or help us trend! For Press: www.internetofelephants.com/press</comment>


What do you enjoy about the process of your work? - <AUTHOR>

I'm finishing up my bachelors in computer science, and I've started to wonder what I found so fun initially about giving instructions to computers.
When I ask people why they enjoy their work, I'm often given an answer related to the outcome of the work. A common one is "changing the world" and "making the world a better place." Or for finance types, "Providing liquidity to markets."
So I'm wondering, what do you enjoy about the minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour experience of your work?
Perhaps it's foolish to expect pleasure every minute, but I've been wondering if I can feel the same way doing math and programming as I do when drawing or writing music.
Thank you for your candid responses. <comment><USER2> \- Solving logical problems

\- Sorting things out

\- Gaining understanding in things

\- Working together with others, as a coordinated team

Both are not limited to certain industry or area.

For me is rather simple, but it took me a lot of time to realize it. I am almost 31y when writing this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regardless of if I'm working on code or a new project on a very visceral level I'm driven by the desire to create structure from chaos. Even if it is something small like organizing notes, I'm very satisfied by creating order.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like thinking and solving problems. My earliest memories are of solving problems, taking things apart with screwdrivers, etc. 45 years later, and it is still the same.</comment>


Hall's Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/03/08/halls-law-the-nineteenth-century-prequel-to-moores-law/ <comment><USER2> Incidentally, I highly recommend reading about early industrialists. It's useful to anyone as a corrective to the mostly political history one gets taught in school. But I recommend it particularly to startup founders. The first thing you notice is how much is still the same. And the lessons may be clearer when they're seen from a distance.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any reading recommendations for that topic?

<comment><USER4> _Study in Power_ by Allan Nevins is a great biography of Rockefeller.

 _E.H. Harriman_ by George Kennan is very good. It's also available on Google books (<http://books.google.com/books?id=4fcZAAAAYAAJ>).

If you haven't heard of Harriman, I encourage you to read about him. He is the epitome of the the 19th century industrialist. When he's not taking over railroads, he's out on scientific expeditions to Alaska, or squeezing shorts on the stock market, or hunting, or boxing, or playing pranks on his overly cocky Wall Street friends.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to figure out if your stock options are worth exercising? - <AUTHOR> What are some of the indicators that you use to evaluate your current company and see if it's worth exercising your vested stock options? <comment><USER2> That's a question without an easy answer IMO, at least without having a bunch more data points about the company and your intentions.

Firstly, you need to know where the company is at on the funding chain, and understand the key financials as it stands today. If the company is late series stages you should have many more options, including potentially a private exchange after you exercise. Also the larger % you hold gives you more options as well, someone holding < 1% really isn't in the same position to negotiate as someone holding 10%.

If the company is at the seed stage and hasn't raised their Series A then exercising the options will almost never pay off. As a general rule, after the series A the reason to exercise gets stronger with each successive round, which should be obvious. But outside of that it is hard to generalize IMO.

Maybe someone else has some generic rules to follow, but I feel it takes a lot of details to be able to formulate a reasonable decision here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. Sorry, I didn't add more details. The company has completed a Series C funding. Revenue growth is over 50% yoy. But I fear competition eating away the revenue in future. We just don't seem to have that hockey stick growth.

Also, my main issue is that the exercise price is around $1.00, and I have around 30K options, so I might be spending a good chunk of money.</comment></comment>