Ask HN: How to learn programming? - <AUTHOR>

First time poster, long time reader.
I have been a Product Manager for quite some time now generally overseeing strategy and execution for web (Flash/HTML) and client (C++) products.  I'd like to learn programming but I have trouble finding the right starting place.
What language should I pick up if I am interested in creating a dynamic website?  How can one get started learning something like Python or JQuery? <comment><USER2> _I'd like to learn programming but I have trouble finding the right starting place._

There is no _right_ starting place. There are lots of good starting places though. What have you looked at so far? Have you tried anything yet?

 _What language should I pick up if I am interested in creating a dynamic website?_

Expect at least one "use X" answer from fanbois of every language "X" in existence. Ultimately you can use Java, Python, Groovy, Scala, Ruby, Clojure, Haskell, Erlang, Fortran, or COBOL; whatever floats your boat. But if you're looking for a recommendation for a language that's particularly good for "Getting started," I'll throw out Groovy, Python and Ruby as good choices, especially if your interest is in building web-apps. You'll also want to learn some Javascript in either case.

 _How can one get started learning something like Python or JQuery?_

Buy a book titled something like "Learning Python" or "JQuery in Action." Google "Python tutorial" or "JQuery tutorial." Go to the python.org website and/or the jquery.org website and browse the docs... look for links like "tutorial" or "Getting started." Start writing code. Get stuck, Google for answers... get really stuck, post questions on Stackoverflow or on relevant mailing lists. Pick a project to build and start building it... iterate over those last few steps. Find a user's group for the language you pick in your area. Attend the meetings and "hack nights" (if they do something like that.) Write more code. Look for interesting videos on youtube, watch those. The Google Tech Talks series offers all sorts of stuff. Write up a blog post when you learn something cool or implement something interesting. Fork interesting projects on Github and play around with them. Make some minor improvement or add some new feature. Release an open-source project on Github.

If you get that far, you should be good to go. Never stop learning though.

Edit:

Also, read this: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>

You might also want to browse through some of pg's essays, if you haven't already:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know Python so I can't speak directly to that.

As for JavaScript and jQuery I would say start by trying to implement something that scratches a personal itch. If you are a todo list person then write a simple todo list web app. It's more than simple enough that you'll make headway at an encouraging rate while learning. The jQuery docs are a decent place to start for that lib and as for JavaScript, give this StackOverflow question a look:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11246/best-resources- to-l...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11246/best-resources-to-learn- javascript)

Best wishes in your endeavour!

</comment><comment><USER4> I am in a similar situation and I decided to begin with JavaScript and Python simultaneously. The resources I have found the most helpful are Zed Shaw's <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index>, MIT's OpenCourseWare CompSci classes using Python, and <http://eloquentjavascript.net/> by Marijn Haverbeke.</comment>


cold fusion deja vu? "Radio frequencies can ignite saltwater, making it a potential fuel" - <AUTHOR> http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/1570

<comment><USER2> How could this have a positive EROI? You start with H2O, radio energy then breaks the bonds and gives you 2H2 + 02, and the H2 burns and gives you back H20 + heat. But since you start with the same substance you end with, the amount of energy released as heat must be less than amount of energy added by the radio waves, right? Unless the salt is somehow involved...

Am I missing anything? Hydrocarbons have a positive EROI because the end products (CO2 and H20) have lower energy than the original fuel, and so the excess can be harnessed to do work. But electrolysis/fuel cells have only been proposed for energy _storage_ (and portability) because you can't get out more energy than you put in...

<comment><USER3> That's the one thing I wanted to see mentioned in the article - how much energy they managed to get out relative to how much they put in.

Looking forward to the discussion about this on slashdot. :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> it's rubbish. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is no exception to the third law of TD known and boy have people looked. novel force previously unknown to physics vs investment scam... hhhmmm which should i choose? oh how can i possibly decide?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My opinion: it should have been observed in nature if it really exists.</comment>


Show HN: I built a 3D rotatable iframe pane demo with Famo.us - <AUTHOR> http://beta.mindcast.com/famous/

<comment><AUTHOR> It works in Chrome/Safari/IE, but not in Firefox.

You could update the viewing angle by dragging the background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correction: It's working fine in Firefox. I was just testing with an old version of the browser without realizing it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you learn another spoken language? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The simplest way is to sign up for in-person lessons, do your homework and keep attending until you are fluent.

In addition or even as an alternative, there are a few things you can study on your own:

1\. Phonology. Learn the International Phonetic Alphabet and use it to understand how the pronunciation of your target language differs from your mother tongue. I like using Wikipedia's help pages of the form [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Any_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Any_Language) for that.

2\. Vocabulary. In the beginning, it's probably most efficient to learn new words ordered by decreasing frequency. Once you can read simple texts with the help of a dictionary, learn words you had to look up repeatedly.

3\. Practice. Use a spaced repetition program like Anki ( [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) ) and make your own flashcards. Pre-made decks are unlikely to take you in exactly the direction you want to go.

3\. Listening. Even before you're able to understand anything, you can get a feeling for the language by watching subtitled shows. ( [https://www.viki.com/](https://www.viki.com/) has a decent selection in East Asian languages.) Later you can turn off subtitles (or switch them to the target language) to avoid overly relying on them.

4\. Reading. Find something you can enjoy and read a little of it every day. In the beginning, that might just be a single sentence; you'll naturally end up reading more as your skill improves.

5\. Speaking. This is the hardest to do on your own, and you definitely need a solid base vocabulary before you can have an intelligent conversation. To speed up the process, you can try finding a partner who'll be willing to listen to you babbling as long as you do the same for them. You need to make sure not to fall back to your mother tongue too easily, though.

6\. Form a habit. If you have some fixed amount of time dedicated to learning every day, you're not as likely to procrastinate on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm an ESL. I started learning English at school, then I started reading English novels (I remember reading the last Harry Potter book a few months before it was translated). And then a lot of time spent on the English- speaking parts of Internet.</comment>


Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57447316-93/facebook-boring-1-in-3-users-are-tuning-it-out/ <comment><USER2> 66% of users are tuning in? That's great!

Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it."

And that's _okay._ But I want to point out to my fellow HN-goers why facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and doesn't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that you see the utility.

To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is _astronomical._

Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters. Facebook is not far off.

Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on.

If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or not), I can go on facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated.

I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page).

These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all.

Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it.

<comment><comment>

Okay that's off my chest.

Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it.

[1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear.

[2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, _directly_ impinge on the utility of the platform. But thats a separate topic

<comment><USER3> > These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making > a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) > scarcely made or not made at all.

Or with Geocities? FB hardly invented the concept of a page on the internet where events are listed. I'm sure it provides some nice functionality around calendaring and networking, but we didn't go from xeroxed fliers to Facebook with nothing in between.

Personally, I didn't delete my FB account because of privacy issues, I deleted it to make FB less useful to people who know me. Using the site was a constant exercise in using the site, rather than gaining utility out of it -- hiding apps, hiding people, keeping up with baby photos. Now that I don't have an account, nobody tries to message me or expects me to see something they posted; the social obligation's gone. I don't have to wade through 50 Farmville clone updates to get to an important message someone sent me. It's in my email now.

<comment><USER4> > I don't have to wade through 50 Farmville clone updates to get to an > important message someone sent me. It's in my email now.

And no offense, but you suck at Facebook then. Blocking apps is a two click operation. Sending a message to your friends/relatives along the lines of "Don't send me game requests" isn't difficult either.

<comment><USER3> > And no offense, but you suck at Facebook then.

None taken, but this is exactly my point. I don't want to be "good at Facebook," I just want to know what's going on. Constantly having to complete "two click operations" to hide new games in order to find the one piece of information I actually care about sucks; I don't want to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the original source, without the blogspammed ads:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/net-us-facebook- su...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/net-us-facebook-survey- idUSBRE85400C20120605)

</comment><comment><USER6> The metric that continues to really impress me about Facebook: 58% of users log in each day (that's 526mm DAU out of 901mm MAU, according to its SEC filing). That's roughly the same percentage as it was in 2007, when I first heard that kind of stat.

I love customer surveys, but I don't think people are good at estimating how they actually spend their time or how frequently they do things.

<comment><USER7> What does this DAU indicate, actually - are these pageviews on a facebook.com website that are associated with potential advertising?

Or are they related to the numerous and growing uses of FB as an identity provider?

<comment><USER8> Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users

<comment><USER9> He's not asking what the acronymn stands for; he's asking whether it counts as a 'use' if you use Facebook to login to a third party site, or hit a like button, but you don't visit Facebook itself that day.

I'd like to know as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My status updates have gone from about 1/day a couple of years ago, to about 1/week now. Even though I've blocked all apps, etc., I find FB to be too noisy. The only thing I like about FB is that I can keep track of friends' events, like babies, marriages, breakups, trips, etc.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Facebook has turned into a stream of blabber and pictures of people's kids (no offence).

What is NOT noisy is:

* Path (just my close friends)

* Pair (just my girlfriend)

* Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)

<comment><USER12> Out of curiousity, what's the value-add of Pair versus just using SMS/MMS? I looked at their website but I didn't "get it".

<comment><USER13> Part of it is certainly the novelty factor. You can only be "paired" with exactly 1 other person.

Part of it (for me), is that communications with my wife are via a separate stack, separate notifications that are easier to manage, and the ability to share more than you can in MMS (a silly sketch, or a map location).

Pair cuts out all the "noise" of other systems and gives you something that makes you feel like communications with that one other person are something more unique and "out of band" than all your other notification streams.

Personally, I haven't figured out if Pair is a product or a feature, but that doesn't really matter to me right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just checked the list of apps I am 'hiding' from my News Feed... It's no wonder people are tuning it out:

Angry Birds Friends, Battle Pirates, Bejeweled Blitz, Bingo Island, Budweiser King Club, Camelot: The Game, CastleVille Daily Horoscope, Family Feud, Games on Mindjolt, Happy Pets, Hidden Chronicles, Hockey Pool, Horoscopes, Light of Nova, Lucky Slots: Reno, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, Miner Speed, Mirrorball Slots, Pet Society, QBet Casino, Quiz Whiz, Quotev, Ravenskye City, Ravenwood Fair, Restaurant City, SCRABBLE, Slotomania - Slot Machines, Treasure Isle, War Commander, Washington Post Social Reader, WeTopia, What is your old lady name?, Zoo World, Zuma Blitz

<comment><USER15> The "Social Reader" applications are the worst. All I end up doing is Googling the article title.

Luckily, I don't think Yahoo! and the Washington Post care an awful lot about the sort of people who log into Facebook at most once a week, and then mainly to use chat.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. Ads are ubiquitous (I just tune them out), but clicking a link and being told "you can't read this unless you give us your personal info and let us tell all of your friends that you read this" is wrong on so many levels.

I think this sort of thing will add to the downfall of facebook. Non-savvy internet users love facebook, but it only takes one learning experience (such as seeing broadcast that you read a highly-embarrassing article) for people to become wary.

<comment><USER17> Social readers are worse than you think. Once you've opted in, even reading a Yahoo! article via a Google search may show up in your news feed. My boss potentially seeing me reading articles about "How to ask for a raise" being the epitome of this. Don't know if he saw or not, but it was a educational experience nonetheless. I was _trying_ to be careful and I still got burned.

<comment><USER16> Ugh. I wouldn't have thought that. And to think ten years ago people were worried about cookies... The bar for privacy on the internet has gotten pretty low.

A friend of mine publicly read "How to improve your sex drive". She's in a relationship....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Always take these surveys with a grain of salt. It's difficult to get accurate information from people self-reporting their behavior. Facebook has become so ingrained in peoples' routines that they don't even realize their actual usage (and in many times are in denial). I'd like to see if Facebook feels their analytics back up this self-reported data - my gut says it would not.

This is also true about the advertising. Many times effective advertising gets into the subconscious - you don't realize it's working on you. The ads have to at least raise awareness of the product.

<comment><USER18> Here is some data to back up this comment <http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/facebooking/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We have a 18yo intern at the office this summer, who keeps saying "Facebook is becoming a ghost-town", when we task him with using FB API.

<comment><USER20> Where are the people in your intern's circle of friends going? I'm honestly curious.

The people in my facebook feed are the usual set of people who post. Nothing has seemed to change of late.

<comment><USER19> He says text and email, and still FB, but not updating as frequently, and mostly updates from apps, like instagram.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> FB seems to get into a negative press spiral lately because of the underperforming IPO...suddenly its all just a fad because people want to read about this new super company failing...

But the truth is, it still has CRAZY numbers in terms of Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active users and average time spent on the site. Its a behemoth and will not fall!

<comment><USER22> Actually, the "Facebook is boring" numbers starting showing up _before_ the IPO. Now they are just getting more attention. The problem is a real one for Facebook, whether it gets in the press and on blogs or not.

<comment><USER23> They hit the ceiling, I would like to know how this little plot will develop over the next 2 quarters:

<http://www.google.com/trends/?q=facebook>

<comment><USER24> The interesting part is the information below the graph: most searches in Turkey, Venezuela, Colombia, Malaysia, Italy, Croatia, Indonesia. Africa nowhere to be seen though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Facebook fascinating? 2 in 3 users actively engaged!

</comment><comment><USER26> I find the idea of Facebook getting boring very interesting. Do people complain about email or gmail getting boring? Their address book? Skype? "Safari is boring these days"? For many people, Facebook is a medium. My girlfriend is busy on the iPad writing stuff in her family's private group. I am just going through the timeline looking for interesting articles just like I do on HN.

Now I wonder what people who consider Facebook "boring" did before they left. Play games or be there just for the novelty of it? Then this is not a loss for existing users.

I can understand the privacy concerns and the "not useful" answer though, with the terrible usability & iOS app.

<comment><USER27> I would say that Facebook positioned themselves as a news outlet, not a generic communications medium. In the beginning, the news was fresh, you were learning all kinds of interesting things about your friends; many of whom you had previously lost touch with. That was exciting and interesting.

After some time passes, you've learned everything you want to know about said people and the information starts to become stale and repetitive. Combined with others feeling the same way and pulling back, a feedback loop emerges where good content starts to dwindle even quicker, worsening the problem.

If I came to HN six months from now and all of the articles were still about the Facebook IPO, I think I would probably say that HN has become boring too. That is where, I believe, the sentiment is coming from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find it boring because it's dominated by power users that post multiple times a day. These people may or may not be close to me, but typically they aren't. My closest friends don't post all that often and when they do they get drowned out.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm logged out of FB at work for productivity reasons. I read FB probably about twice a day. Once in the morning and once at night.

I'm not missing much.

<comment><USER30> You are voluntarily interacting twice a day and feel like you are constraining yourself. Other sites _wish_ they could have such "unengaged" users!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The funny thing is that in the last one year I use hacker news much more than Facebook. The stream of news here is way more interesting and heterogeneous.

<comment><USER32> Similar. I never bought into idea that my social friends are a good source of knowledge on topics that interest me most. For professional questions I use RSS and forums, while many of my old buddies can't tell RSS from SSD. For shopping, I google reviews and check prices online. And for keeping track of lives of some 10-15 people that I care about, facebook is too noisy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I never really got why facebook was considered interesting. I made an account because I was pressured by some female friends into doing so but I never log on it (at least 5 months). I know I'm not the norm but still, I feel like facebook is just a fad and that people will get bored of posting every second of their life onto the internet eventually.

<comment><USER34> Long distant relationships. My family and close friends are mostly in Texas while I'm in the Bay Area. I like keeping track of their lives...

<comment><USER35> I use email to keep in touch with family and close friends. I don't see what Facebook would do to improve on that.

<comment><USER34> The friction of sharing and reacting to life milestones with all your friends and family is an order of magnitude easier on Facebook. For example, try teaching a grandparent or technology inept uncle how to see photos of grandkids/nieces/nephews through email vs checking Facebook...

<comment><USER36> My kids grandparents are more appreciative of a photo in a frame or a drawing on the fridge than an image on a screen. Of course they can pick and choose if I chose to post those photos on Facebook, but I also take pleasure in curating and actually spending money to create a print (if I spend money on something, I'm more likely to do a good job.)

<comment><USER37> What makes you think they are mutually exclusive ?

Because I doubt your grandparents are going to be having hundreds and hundreds of photo frames of your kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I fear for facebook long-term only because I can't imagine the things I said when I was 16 lingering around on my timeline forever. Fad or not, facebook's standing with teenagers today will not be a long-lasting one. High School you will eventually be abandoned by college you and then again by professional you. How will facebook synchronize with rites of passage? Maybe this is why the proponents of facebook are usually 30-somethings...already done morphing and, as such, don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I use Pidgin to connect to their XMPP chat server. In the real facebook page, i connect once in a week. I wonder if they count my XMPP login as a regular login.

</comment><comment><USER39> "more than 1,000 Americans surveyed by Reuters and market research firm Ipsos, 21 percent said that they have no Facebook account, leaving 79 percent to answer questions about their Facebook use."

oh that must be so statistically valid. please base your assumption about 900m userbase from a 1000+ sample out of which 21% dont have an account to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER40> I like facebook for its use in corresponding with people I normally would never contact. It gives me all the window I would ever want into their lives.

For my close friends, FB is essentially useless and actually encourages me to contact them via phone or face to face less than I should because I feel like I am keeping up with them through facebook.

</comment><comment><USER41> The great detox is on. Internet has become too much spying and exhibition(ism). The pendulum is swinging back and people want more privacy and less intrusion. Peak social is ex-post facto. I don't care if the great HN supermoderator doesn't like to hear it.

Something new will come along. We'll call it Web 4.0 and get excited. Make it happen!

</comment><comment><USER42> I love the fact that CNet had to add a note that they updated the article that Facebook made a comment that they had no comment.

</comment><comment><USER43> and my feed is full of rage faces and memes.

<comment><USER37> Get better friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think facebook should charge 75 cents per month to use it.

This will weed out users who just don't care; it will give more information to advertisers as well.

Oh and what's that? 75 cents per month actually ends up tripling their income! (if they now get $9 per year off the seventy-five cents, plus the same four in ad revenue.)

Anyway if even 75 cents per month is too much, then they can go ahead and make OEM deals etc for a facebook sticker and do like Microsoft did. Or give it away with cans of coke. One in twenty wins a year of facebook.

Or, you know, do what people expect and roll into the price of a cell phone.

Just some thoughts...

<comment><USER45> Sorry but terrible idea. Not even 1% of facebook users would stick around. And before you argue that 1% of the current user base would be great, the usefulness of a social network is greatly diminished if your friends aren't there, making eventually even the last 1% leave.

<comment><USER44> And your objection to the OEM model?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I am definitely one those people. But I know friends/family who spend at least 30 mins per day on fb. May be I am spending too much time on HN and no time for fb anymore :)

</comment><comment><USER46> For me, fb is useful _only_ to keep an eye on what is going on with my family/friends specially for things such as cute pictures of their kids, marriage/birthday events etc. My wife uses her fb time to update me on those. So personally, I hardly login to fb anymore.

<comment><USER47> This is what Facebook's utility for all of us is. Just replace cute photos of their kids with cute photos of your crush (or ex), and replace marriage events with house parties, and you've hit what the twenty-somethings on fb do daily. Anything else is to justify being there.

<comment><USER46> Good point. agreed:)</comment></comment></comment>


Why NASA Redesigned Its Website - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/07/01/nasa-website-redesign/

<comment><USER2> It still looks like crap. Just less crowded crap.</comment>


Ask YC: What makes Twitter so special? - <AUTHOR>

3 Twitter stories in the top 5. Twitter seems to get so much coverage here, and on other similar sites. I can understand that if there really are issues related to scaling such a product, then they would be interesting to address and solve, but Twitter itself seems to have become the story rather than their product.<p>Are people upvoting because they are avid users of twitter, or because the stories of scaling have potential lessons? <comment><USER3> _Are people upvoting because they are avid users of twitter?_

Yes, sometimes.

 _Or because the stories of scaling have potential lessons?_

Yes.

Let me add a few observations of my own:

Are people upvoting because Twitter is a genuinely new and popular service, and hence very fashionable at this moment? Yes.

Are people upvoting because Twitter's design has just been sitting there, right in front of our faces, for _years_ , and yet we plugged away on email and IM and static HTML sites and blogs and Facebook and never even thought of trying something like this, so we're fascinated to discover it in the same way that biologists were fascinated to discover the platypus? Yes.

Are people upvoting because they're still trying to understand what Twitter is, and how to build something like it themselves, but they're confused because it isn't really email, or IM, or a microblog, or Facebook? Yes.

Do half the folks on news.yc look at Twitter and see something that they simultaneously crave (a startup with a viral app) and fear (a startup with a viral app that is pissing off its customers) and envy (because the customers moan, and they complain, but _they don't abandon Twitter for the alternatives_ , at least not yet)? So, try as they might, the entrepreneurs can't possibly look away?

Yes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Twitter articles are popular here, as in other social news sites and blogs, because of selection bias. Who likes twitter? People who always have something to write. Who posts stuff on the web? People who always have something to write. It's the same reason most of the people who apply for a job are idiots, because they just have to do it over and over.

Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A small circle of people dominate the crowd's attention, largely by talking voluminously among themselves. You might be able to learn something new, but you'll have to filter out a lot of noise. And you're probably better served by finding a person or two and having an actual conversation, or writing an essay, or actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.

<comment><USER3> _actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes._

Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is _very very short_ by necessity.

Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent -- we should all stop writing paragraphs and concentrate all our energy on writing decent titles and headlines. Well, Twitter is a _machine for forcing people to write good headlines_ and nothing else. As a result, I find it wastes far less of the reader's time than any other web technology to date.

<comment><USER5> Kind of makes me shudder to think that that is where we're headed. ADHD to the max.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two ways to look at Twitter:

1) Twitter is like any other social network-- its value to you is dependent on which of your friends is on it. For most of us who have lots of friends that aren't 100% plugged-in to the hottest web trends, this severely limits twitter's value. However, the technorati get a lot of value from Twitter in that it's an elite social network (aka mutual backrubbing), and a way of getting to each other's inboxes (via @ and d messages). The electronic equivalent of TED and Davos.

2) Twitter is basically a blog platform in disguise-- where the hordes of wannabes who follow calcanis and ev and scoble really what they're doing is a fancy equivalent of subscribing to their rss feed leaving comments on their blog entries, with the added social bonus of making it seem like you're with the 'in' crowd since you're on twitter leaving @messages for loiclemeur like the big boys do (see 1 above).

<comment><USER7> The point 1) is only partially true. For example, I don't have any friends on Twitter, but I use tweetscan to search twitter, when I want to see most current events about something...for example, I want to buy some newly announced gadget, so I do a search now and then to see links to new reviews, or short ideas from early users about how they like or dislike it.

I think this might by one reason why twitter is so popular - it can be used for many different purposes.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a slightly-more-real-time blog search to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are many things that make Twitter special, but the main ones for me are:

1) The asynchronous nature of Twitter networks models real life quite well - you might be interested in everything a person has to say, but they don't even know/care about you. This works with Twitter, because following is a one-way concept.

2) This makes it hard to get spammers onto Twitter, because the only way for spammers to get their posts listened to is by having people follow them. Also, services like the Twitter Black list exist to help people sort the wheat from the chaff.

3) The best "feature" of Twitter is its tabula rasa attitude to what you post - as long as it fits in 140 characters, Twitter doesn't care. This has allowed people to build fun minigames (@lyricbot), query/response info bots (@weatherbot), and plug Twitter into their external apps (Remember the Milk, Buxfer, etc). This sets Twitter apart from something like Pownce, which had a similar idea (complete with the asynchronous fan/friend model). The difference (IMO) was that Pownce tried to impose some sort of order on its users, which limited the way it could be used.

</comment><comment><USER9> I didn't think Twitter was useful until a few months ago. I started using it and completely changed my mind. I see it like a buffet of interesting comments from people I choose to follow. I get updates from people who are working on interesting stuff, going to conferences I care about, etc.

Unlike a social network, I don't need to be friends with someone to see what they post. I can stop following someone whenever and follow them again later. In short, it has the useful content of a social network without the spammy apps, useless profile information and dubious "friendships". It's a better version of irc.

<comment><USER10> I also didn't get it at all at first, but am now quite addicted.

Twitter feels a bit like a 24/7 cocktail party full of intelligent and interesting people, where you can chose who to listen to. I think they've also evolved (or perhaps resurrected) a cultural norm of openness where you can listen to and engage in conversations with anyone. I think that, along with the asynchrony and discoverability, is what makes it slightly magical.

That being said, it has problems: \- It can definitely be a waste of time.

\- There aren't good tools for filtering, prioritizing, and contextualizing the feed.

\- There's an excessive density of 'professional' social-media types who seem to spend all day twitterring about nothing but Twitter.

\- I don't understand the appeal of the IM-type clients at all. They look pretty, but I can't imagine anything worse than being constantly interrupted by windows popping up all over my screen with random, disconnected tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hype.

Twitter, by definition, appeals most to the people who are somewhat extrovert, like to talk/write a lot about themselves (see Michael Arrington complaining recently that Twitter's downtime denied him from broadcasting, live, his food poisoning. I Am Not Making This Up)

Therefore, these people tend to talk a lot about what they are doing - <USER2> thus talk about Twitter, which makes Twitter more well known _in our circles_ than much bigger websites.

A classic example is Apple's products, in the pre iPod/OS X days. They had a tiny market share, but a very high mindshare. The reason, in my opinion, was that Apple's user base consisted of many creatives - designers, writers, musicians etc. If Apple computers' users were mostly biologists, civil engineers and plumbers, you wouldn't hear about it nearly as much - even if they had the same market share and the same customer loyalty.

Hype seems to be much cheaper now, though. Many Apple products truly had groundbreaking engineering and design. Many Apple users were well known because they were talented and creative. Compare this to to Twitter's technical "challenges" (I mean, seriously - it's very minimal in UI/functionality side, as it should be. They got plenty of money and can attract top talent. If not scaling, what have they been doing for the past year?), and its most well known users...

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the real reason is that Twitter looks so simple, that everyone thinks they can do better. Deep down, most of us think we're in the top 20%.

I've thought about how I would have made Twitter, but the truth is that the Twitter problem is probably not something that is easily fixed. The people at Twitter have had a lot of real world experience and have more data to base their development on.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a lot of noise around the subject, but if you boil it down I don't think it's much of mystery: Twitter represents an important new way to communicate. People like communicating. Some people also like tech/startups, so for them it's double the fun.

</comment><comment><USER14> For one reason or another, people have an emotional investment in Twitter. Maybe it's just the cutesy vocabulary and artwork, but I like to think that people are invested in the promise of Twitter (that is, Twitter as a product with attractive features).

That, and also how the spectators and critics are investing in themselves by how much they complain and speculate about how each little thing is being mismanaged. It is Twitter, after all.

</comment><comment><USER15> I see twitter as my window out of the office. It's that place where everybody is working, together, but not in the same room.

It's a social thing and I love it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Mandatory penny arcade link : <http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Blogs = the paparazzi Twitter = Britney Spears

They fester off each other. We're seeing a relatively new phenomenon in terms of coverage because people inherently love talking about nose dives. It wont' last...nobody talks about Friendster anymore.

</comment><comment><USER18> 1- The name sounds cool to people. 2- Evan Williams. 3- Technology problems with an unproven but popular Web 2.0-ish (2nd Wave, if you prefer) add drama. 4- It has a clever, if undeveloped, idea.</comment>


Ask HN: Need help dealing with imposter syndrome - <AUTHOR> I am a sys-admin first then / infrastructure / network / network security engineer and feel like a jack of all trades and a master of none.
despite having a near 100% success rate in all projects/contracts/jobs I find myself extremely concerned about failure in every situation especially when its 'new'. when I say 'new' I mean something along the lines of doing something I have already done but with a new vendor, the reality is I know most of what I'm doing but often find myself in a new short term contract having to 'pretend' I am an expert on a new vendor when I have little experience and I find it really frustrating.
looking for help in addressing this fear of failing.
in case anyone needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome <comment><USER2> How many years have you been working? I find that feeling goes away with time. I've felt this way for most of my 13-year software engineer career, but in more recent years I've felt it a lot less. Perhaps the impostor syndrome itself doesn't go away, it's more just that I no longer really care if people/coworkers look at me and think I'm dumb. That may just come with age, or it could also be because I started a family and now care more about the well being of my family than how coworkers think of me ("The need to be special or the best" has gone away).

<comment><USER3> Yes, I was going to say, OP, after 10 or 20 years you won't feel like that. I've heard a variety of people say they feel this after moving into a new field, usually impressive people. I guess it's the other extreme from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Asking around is a good idea, you'll learn how common that is. People put a lot of effort into looking more skilled, confident, competent, secure, intelligent, etc than they are. Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that you expect:

1\. You should not fail at anything.

2\. You should not feel unfamiliar at anything.

3\. It is your faults that you could not provide best answer for your clients.

But I think you will agree these ideas are unrealistic.

You will find out things that you know nothing about, and that is fine. Maybe next time when you are in the situation where you have to deal with uncertainty, just admit that you will not have the best answer, but you will have a good enough answer that is based on your experience and knowledge.

Book suggestions:

1\. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

2\. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Both books teach me how to recognize those unrealistic standards I set for myself. I think they can help you too.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you'll let me play devil's advocate for a second: are you sure it's the impostor syndrome? Is there any chance that you're (with the best of intentions) misrepresenting your knowledge of the vendor to the client? That would certainly induce a fear of failure and being 'found out'. Do you feel your clients understand that while you have a great track record and are knowledgeable in the problem domain, you don't have experience with their specific vendor? If not, maybe explaining that and framing it as a project risk would help with the fear?

</comment><comment><USER6> You either know something or you don't.

When you are in a position where you don't know something, then either it is expected of you to know that thing or it is not expected of you to know it.

If you are expected to know something that you don't know, you can either be upfront about it or not. Your choice here really depends on the environment you are in.

No one is expected to know everything all the time. Any basic competency that should be expected of you as a must have is the responsibility of the hiring team at your firm. So the fact that you're there already means you know what you need to know, and if you don't know something then it's okay not to know it but you may eventually have to learn it on the job.

That is, of course, if your firm hires people properly, and if not, then you're essentially a false positive hire, however this is not your fault, but rather the fault of a faulty "successful potential employee competency model" with a non-zero false positive rate.

In which case, this is also not your fault, however at this point your employer needs to determine whether they are better off letting you go and having another go at it (usually in most cases a bad/unproductive decision) or letting you pick up the necessary skill on the job, which in most cases is probably the better option.

On another note, self-confidence is important, and that come what may, believe in yourself and your skills to the point that you can whether whatever comes your way. This doesn't mean that you need to know everything immediately, but that you are confident enough in your learning/adaptive abilities that you can learn whatever it is you will need to be successful in your role.

</comment><comment><USER7> > having to 'pretend' I am an expert Experts don't pretend to know everything, > because it's impossible for anyone to know everything.

When some one asks me something I don't know, I tell them ill find out the answer then I do, this way i'm always right.

Most people wont do this, they just say "I dunno" and look dumb. Some people will make up something, sometimes it works and they look like they know what they are talking about, some times it doesn't and they look dumb.</comment>


Antibody Neutralizes 91% of HIV Strains, Strong Step Towards a Vaccine - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/07/22/antibody-neutralizes-91-of-hiv-strains-strong-step-towards-a-vaccine/

<comment><USER2> Earlier thread with some good discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498224></comment>


Facebook donates emergency reserve of 720k masks - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-facebook-masks/facebook-donates-emergency-reserve-of-720000-masks-due-to-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN21911E <comment><USER2> To all who are wondering why Facebook had masks -

"To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires continued,"

<comment><USER3> Which is enough for 14 days for ~50,000 people at 1/day. It seems like huge overkill when stated as a single number, but two weeks is a reasonable amount to plan for, especially for reserves at a time when the supply chain is stressed.

I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid.

<comment><USER4> It truly is insane how quickly the severity of the crisis ramped up. Monday co-workers on slack were messaging how the flu was more of a worry, after Wednesday it was mandatory work from home. And it truly feels like medical authorities were as caught off guard as the rest of us. Who was on guard duty? Was no one monitoring the situation? No one thought to increase production of PPE or RNA tests?

<comment><USER3> I think this single news story is the best answer to your question:

[https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump- coronavirus-n...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus- national-security-council-149285)

My other comment on this was flagged, which had far more links. I'm not 100% sure why it was flagged other than the voting revealed it to be very controversial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano It seems many companies, prudently, had stocks of masks for their employees. Mastercard donated 25k masks and Goldman Sachs 20k[1].

My question is why the US government didn't have a bigger stockpile of them? We treat national security products with such deference, but yet defense against pandemics has been an afterthought.

[1][https://www.wsj.com/articles/financial-institutions-share- st...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/financial-institutions-share-stockpiles- of-face-masks-with-nyc-hospitals-11584479352)

<comment><USER5> They were used up for swine flu and never restocked.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/face-masks- in-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/face-masks-in-national- stockpile-have-not-been-substantially-replenished- since-2009/2020/03/10/57e57316-60c9-11ea-8baf-519cedb6ccd9_story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an Australian the only reason I had masks was because of the fires as well. I think it is still not a part of our culture like in other countries to wear them.

</comment><comment> tedk-42 Nice. Our company also had bought masks for the bushfires here in NSW Australia which they handed out.

Sadly there weren't enough for everyone, even before this hoarding craze began.

</comment><comment><USER7> Trump's trade war also shot America in the foot.

It made it harder for hospitals to buy the N95 masks and other equipment from China.

So to the Americans that voted in Trump to wage his disastrous trade war against China, then this is partially your fault too.

</comment><comment><USER8> A note for those critical about donations not coming sooner:

It is important to understand hospitals and doctors could not legally use industrial N95 masks. No hospital could accept them without exposing themselves to massive litigation. I know this sounds stupid from outside the US. Sadly, this is part of our reality.

The key that unlocked donations was President Trump. Upon learning of this restriction he quickly put into place a release of liability for medical use of industrial N95 masks. This will be in force until at least 2024.

Because of this companies, contractors, suppliers and individuals came forward to donate masks. Apple donated a couple million units. I believe this might easily unlock tens of millions of masks as companies evaluate their inventories and continue to donate.

Commentary:

It is important to realize that the US healthcare system does not have an insurance problem. Politicians would have you think this is the case. It is not. The root cause of our high cost of healthcare, among other things, has to do with the underlying and hidden costs of doing business. This issue of masks is a simple example.

Hospitals, medical professionals and medical suppliers live in fear of greedy attorneys going after them for anything from masks to more complex equipment. This leads to major losses and costs and even legislation. And all of it increases the costs of doing business.

After this virus runs its course we would be well served to review a number of things, tort reform being a good idea. The other would be term limits for the House and Senate, I think it is beyond obvious these institutions have gone putrid to the very core.

It might also be rather strange to those outside the US to learn that in this wonderful country doctors and nurses cannot legally provide their services outside of the State where they are licensed. A doctor or nurse licensed in California cannot see patients in, say, Maine. In other words, we are not a country, we are a group of fenced-off kingdoms with some of the most ridiculous rules one could possibly imagine.

Our doctors can travel to Africa and practice medicine, yet they can't go to another State and do the same. How ridiculous is this?

That's just another element of our system that has to change. There's more, a lot more. The onerous and massively expensive drug or medical device approval process is another example.

Insurance is the last item in a very long list of issues we must address in order to bring sanity to our healthcare system.

<comment><USER9> > The key that unlocked donations was President Trump. Upon learning of this > restriction he quickly put into place a release of liability for medical use > of industrial N95 masks.

President Trump did nothing except sign the law when it came to his desk. The provision was in the "Second Coronavirus Package" that originated in the US House of Representatives. It was written by Democratic lawmakers and sponsored by Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat.

Here's the law in question: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th- congress/house-bill/6201...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th- congress/house-bill/6201/text)

This Link should take you directly to the relevant section about industrial masks: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house- bill/6201...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house- bill/6201/text#H4A1FCBAAF09E40FBA7E5CB7B15FA97B7)

Here's the vote in the House: [http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2020/roll102.xml](http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2020/roll102.xml) All 40 "Nays" were Republican.

Here's the Senate vote: [https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=116&session=2&vote=00076#position) all votes against were, once again, Republicans.

It's also unclear what type of masks Facebook had in stock. They might have been of the medical variety for all we know. And even if not, there would not have been liability anyway: it was _manufactures_ that were previously liable when selling the wrong type of mask to health care workers. But in Facebook donating masks, no manufacturer is part of the transaction.

I'll not go through the rest of your half-truths, except to note that if you believe any MD can see patients in "Africa" without going through some sort of accreditation you're wrong.

<comment><USER8> > And even if not, there would not have been liability anyway: it was > manufactures that were previously liable when selling the wrong type of mask > to health care workers. But in Facebook donating masks, no manufacturer is > part of the transaction.

Just noticed this. It's wrong.

Hospitals could not accept donations of industrial masks, or, more accurately, they could not use them. This would expose them to potentially serious legal liability. Simple example: Someone dies. Lawyers discover medical team member were using using industrial masks they accepted from donations. They sue the hospital, every doctor, nurse and practitioner in the hospital and perhaps even whoever donated the masks.

How do I know this?

Well, as I mentioned elsewhere, my wife is a doctor and we have many doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners in our circle. In addition to this, we tried to donate many thousands of N95 masks from our own manufacturing operation's inventory to our local hospitals. They were refused, citing, very specifically "we cannot legally use industrial masks".

Once Trump went against Republicans in the House and Senate and signed the law releasing liability until 2024 we got a call from the hospitals we had contacted asking if the masks were still available. That's when we handed them over.

This, sadly, is how our legal system works. This is reality.

BTW, I do believe it was the White House who asked for the industrial mask exception to be included in the legislation. I don't have the time to go track down this assertion, so take it for what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Off topic: could HN make a rule that any questions that could be easily answered from reading the article will result in a day ban? There are way too many people here who didn't read this article ("why did they have so many masks?") and half the comments could be removed if they had!

</comment><comment><USER11> The virus came from China. I don't see how that's wrong to say

<comment><USER12> Of course you do.

<comment><USER13> I also don't see wrong stating the origin of something - French wine, Spanish wine, Chinese virus. I am Bulgarian and on the national TV, everybody calls it "the Chinese virus". There no acts against the many Chinese living in Bulgaria. Even doctors use it - Lyme disease, Marseilles fever, West Nile virus, etc. So, it's a matter of mentality, not how you call the virus. It is the same low-IQ crowd, which discriminate Americns from Chinese ancestry due to some name!

<comment><USER12> I see President Trump's tweet from 7:19 AM - Mar 27, 2020 after chatting to President Xi now refers to "the CoronaVirus" and "the Virus".

[I am not sure about all the capitalisation - we aren't speaking German (yet).]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish they would have done this a little bit sooner, but glad they are doing it and no time like the present!

<comment><USER15> [https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks- ont...](https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ontario/amp/)

Ontario just found 55m yesterday. Finding stuff you don't use often in warehouses is difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the fact that rich people doesn't hesitate on helping ang sharing what they have during the pandemic. If I am rich I will probably help as well. Let us continue on praying for the world and people healing.

</comment><comment><USER17> The fact that they have emergency reserves of masks is in itself pretty wild.

<comment><USER13> More like pretty irresponsible to keep them until up until the government said they are gonna confiscate them.

<comment><USER18> Source on "the government said they are gonna confiscate them"?

<comment><USER13> Just watch their update from today. Their said: "If you have a stash of masks, we'll be knocking on your door."

<comment><USER9> Google: No results found for "If you have a stash of masks, we'll be knocking on your door." The query without quotes also doesn't show any relevant hits on the first two pages.

Also: the Facebook story is from Sunday. It's not very likely that it is a reaction to a press conference on Monday, is it?

You and all the other Trump supporters should stop making stuff up and/or learn to link to sources at least after being asked repeatedly to provide them.

<comment><USER13> I feel already damaged listening to Trump for over one hour. Watch the update yourself and you will hear it 1:1. I do not want to go thru that torture again! All his "update" could be compressed in one short paragraph.

Maybe one day I will propose a Trump compression algorithm as his vocabulary is very limited and he keeps repeating the same nonsense a million times hoping on inducing some hypnotonic effect in his low-IQ fans...

<comment><USER11> Low-IQ is not a choice. Mocking people for having a lower IQ is the same as mocking someone born without an arm or a leg or any other sort of genetic or birth defect that one has no control over. Those who suffer from mental retardation have low IQ. Should they not be spoken to in a way they can understand? Trump recognizes that everyone in the country has vastly different levels of intelligence, and speaks in a way that everyone can understand. I'm not sure why that's a point of criticism other than someone who thinks their natural intelligence somehow makes them better than others.

<comment><USER13> You clearly understand I was not referring to people with medical conditions. He doesn't say anything meaningful and definitely does not do it so that people with disabilities can get him. If that was his strategy, he would speak slowly, and not go in circles and confuse everybody, and force his people to publish clarifications after all the confusion he brings us with his TV appearances!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some guy in accounting, "I forgot we bought all these masks last year, someone tell our leader". Timing seems a little odd with the media clearly talking about the shortage of masks for weeks and this comes out today.

</comment><comment><USER20> For a comparison of scale, consider the (rare) healthcare worker [who does not work just for money (and therefore does not actually need the day's or month's wage) who still goes into work to help the sick during this time] to _the Facebook_ who has built its wealth via very questionable means and is now donating supplies it otherwise did not need.

Forgive my pessimism here, but I'm not impressed. Good that they did it, but countless individuals of minimal means regularly give everything they can to help their fellows without credit or reward.

<comment><USER21> When someone does something good, I don't think it should be an impulse to point out that others have done better. Donating supplies is useful. Facebook should be lauded for that.

<comment><USER20> In isolation of actions, sure. But in the scope of Facebook's normal actions...?

Are we so easily distracted by the sparkly costless action that they now take that we forget the several known (and who knows how many unknown) deceptive and harmful actions they have intentionally taken against us in pursuit of money?

I'm not trashing them for doing something good. But just as I don't bow to the guy on the street that puts his candy wrapper in the rubbish bin instead of throwing it on the ground, I don't admire FB for giving out something they already possessed and were not having a planned use of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why was Facebook stashing so many masks? Anyway, if they didn't donate them, the Goverment said they are gonna confiscate them, and this was already clear.

<comment><USER22> > Anyway, if they didn't donate them, the Goverment said they are gonna > confiscate them, and this was already clear.

There are going to be lawsuits going on for a decade because of the government ordering things that they are not allowed to do.

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity) (Sovereign immunity)

<comment><USER22> I know the concept. Schiff just tried to apply it to not having to reveal his subpoenas.

But "Qualified" immunity is an adjunct concept.

<comment><USER23> Just pointing out it's a steep hill to climb.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Secret's collapse shows the traditional VC funding model is broken - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/23/4-lessons-from-secrets-collapse-the-traditional-vc-funding-model-is-broken/ <comment><USER2> "We need to question why most VC firms intervene in company decision-making in the first place, when their original decision to fund these startups was presumably based on how effectively the founders had been handling decision- making up to that point."

I don't think they were basing it on how effective the founders were. Many VCs don't trust their money with inexperienced business owners. I sure wouldn't. They see an idea that could possibly make money combined with desperate founders. After making a deal for majority control, they move their own experienced people in to run the company.

Many founders like to play the buyout game where they don't really care about making money from a product. They try to get as much investments as possible, get paid in the process, and hope for a buyout from a larger company that can take the assets and users and eventually monetize them.

"Secret has proved this to be a bad strategy, clearly demonstrating that if the founders' buttons are pushed hard enough, they may decide to simply walk, allowing the house of cards to come tumbling down. As we know, when this happens, everyone loses."

What was the original 'vision of the company'? A business is there to make money and an ROI for the investors. This is the #1 goal as soon as you take any investments.</comment>


What the hell is Ember.K? - <AUTHOR> http://ember.zone/what-the-hell-is-ember-k/

<comment><USER2> More about K combinator in JavaScript: [https://github.com/raganwald/Katy](https://github.com/raganwald/Katy)

Raganwald has a few books and many articles about functional JS and combinatorial logic (in JS), go check these out if you're curious what can it be useful for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reminding me about these.</comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi Arcade Coffee Table - <AUTHOR> http://www.instructables.com/id/Coffee-Table-Pi/?ALLSTEPS <comment><AUTHOR> Another similar project with a cheap IKEA table [http://www.ikeahackers.net/2013/01/lack-arcade-coffee- table....](http://www.ikeahackers.net/2013/01/lack-arcade-coffee-table.html)</comment>


LiteSpeed's Free Anti-DDoS Proxy Service Returns to Operation - <AUTHOR> http://www.litespeedtech.com/latest/litespeed-s-free-anti-ddos-proxy-service-returns-to-operation.html

<comment><USER2> It's a bit of a quest to find information on how it actually works.</comment>


Never heard of this law firm, but there's some stellar startup guides/PDFs - <AUTHOR> http://www.fenwick.com/publications/

<comment><USER2> Fenwick is a very well established tech law firm. They host a number of events at their Mountain View headquarters every month, see <http://www.fenwick.com/fenwickfocus/1.6.0.asp>

Fred Greguras, author of the 2007 Corporation Starting Guide runs multiple workshops and bootcamps every year on the topic, normally in conjunction with a non-profit association.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe they're releasing these to draw in clients? Here are two of the gems I found so far:

[http://www.fenwick.com/docstore/Publications/Corporate/2007_...](http://www.fenwick.com/docstore/Publications/Corporate/2007_Guide_Starting_Corp.pdf)

[http://www.fenwick.com/docstore/Publications/Corporate/Corpo...](http://www.fenwick.com/docstore/Publications/Corporate/Corporate_Governance_Guide.pdf)

Covering initial capital structure, the makeup of early startup boards, etc. Really good stuff.

I've seen nothing of this quality for free out there. Here's an example note from the 2007 Guide to Starting a Corporation:

"The per share value at the time of founding is determined by the cash purchases of stock and the number of shares issued. For example, if one founder buys stock in exchange for technology and the other founder buys a 50% interest for cash, the value of the technology and the fair market value per share is dictated by the cash purchase since its monetary value is certain."</comment>


Google addresses Huawei ban and warns customers not to sideload apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/21/21147919/google-addresses-huawei-services-ban-android-trump-sideload-apps <comment><USER2> Every Huawei customer who doesn't sideload Google apps is one more customer that Google loses.

The Chinese market alone is larger than all of the West.

First Rule in Business: "Never turn away a paying customer."</comment>


Sotheby's Selling Original Steve Jobs Note on Atari Circuit Improvements - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/25/sweating-the-small-stuff-sothebys-selling-original-steve-jobs-note-about-atari-circuit-improvements/ <comment><USER2> i couldn't help myself -- i clicked through to sotheby's site to see this note at full scale and was sort of blown away.

think about it: here you have a highly detailed bug report by a twentysomething kid who's just a step above being an intern at a tech startup of the day.

my first take away lesson was that steve jobs paid his dues and got his hand dirty in the early days. yes of course you can read about this, but seeing a detailed bug report makes it real...</comment>


Zerodium expects iOS exploit prices to drop as it announces surplus - <AUTHOR> https://www.securityweek.com/zerodium-expects-ios-exploit-prices-drop-it-announces-surplus <comment><USER2> How about another theory...

The kind of organisations that use these exploits rarely want to use the same one twice. That would link the two uses, which could reveal who was attacking who or why.

However, anti-rooting protections on iOS devices are such that the vast majority of organisations don't have any kind of logging or analysis infrastructure set up which could trace which devices have a specific exploit run against them.

The exploit is probably delivered by an encrypted channel, so even if you did full traffic logging from all employee devices to the internet, you still wouldn't have enough info to know which devices were infected, since the attacker will surely use a different server each time to deliver the exploit.

That suddenly makes it much safer to reuse exploits, so there isn't such a big market for a new exploit for every covert operation.

The same isn't true of Android - there are plenty of apps which will trace syscalls, dump logs, send suspicious files for analysis, etc. That makes reusing an exploit a risky business for three letter agencies, especially if you're attacking another three letter agency who probably has their own custom anti-malware type software just waiting for you to trip a tripwire.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what is the reason for that? I doubt Apple code quality dropped significantly. Is it simply because more people started to look for vulnerabilities? Or was it because better tools to discover the bugs became available?

<comment><USER4> _I doubt Apple code quality dropped significantly._

I'm not sure that's a safe bet. iOS updates have become notorious for things breaking, sometimes in very obvious ways. I have an iPhone and a recent update caused some _very_ obvious degradation of battery lifetime between charges, for example. Given that I have an unmodified phone running almost nothing but the standard Apple software, and the tiny number of apps I do have installed haven't been used since before that update, there isn't much excuse for this.

Meanwhile, I currently have email disabled on my phone pending a fix for a known security vulnerability that is reportedly going to be included in a firmware update delivered several _weeks_ after the vulnerability was out in the wild and doing the rounds on tech sites.

Neither of these is reassuring when it comes to the current state of iOS robustness and security, and five minutes with Google will show that my experience is not unusual among iPhone users in recent times.

<comment><USER5> There's been widespread claims of dropping quality in iOS updates nearly as long as iOS has been around. I don't doubt that there's been issues with software quality (that'll be true in any organization), but I suspect there's a great deal of recency bias with these claims.

<comment><USER4> I've used iOS devices of one kind or another since around the 2nd and 3rd generations, and seen some of those devices through years of major updates. Anecdotally, I have never seen things as bad as they have been in the past couple of years, other than Apple's seemingly arbitrary policy on abandoning support for older (but not necessarily old by most standards) devices entirely.

The really sad thing is that iOS devices still seem to be relatively robust compared to either Windows 10 or macOS on the desktop. It feels like Apple and Microsoft have both decided they are so dominant now that quality control doesn't need to be a business priority, and as a result we've left behind the "golden age" up to the mid-2010s when your OS mostly Just Worked(TM) and entered a new age where the most basic reliability of our essential IT systems is in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the business model of this company? Are they selling such exploits to whoever is willing to pay the most?

And does this mean Android is more secure?

<comment><USER7> If you take the press release at face value, it means Android has fewer newly- discovered vulnerabilities on the open market right now. That's probably good news for Android, but there are alternative explanations too: maybe Google is paying more for their exploits to keep them hidden, for example. Or maybe Zerodium is trying to get Apple to sign a new/bigger contract and applying pressure.

This is all, indeed, a pretty shady business. I don't think there's anything authoritative we can say from the outside.

<comment><USER8> or maybe being closed source didnt help apple in the long run

<comment><USER9> Too simplistic of an answer, though it could be part of it.

I think we wrap ourselves in a bit of false security when we say something is open source and think that automatically makes it more secure. We assume _someone_ has looked at the source. But has anyone really? And those with the most incentive to look into these things might not be inclined to share the vulnerabilities back to the community for safety's sake, given the princely sums being offered by companies like Zerodium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> seems like a guerrilla marketing campaign to make researchers know sandbox is broken but they are still shopping for persistence.

<comment><USER11> The price has been downgraded before: [https://www.wired.com/story/android- zero-day-more-than-ios-z...](https://www.wired.com/story/android-zero-day- more-than-ios-zerodium/)

And going back further: [https://twitter.com/cBekrar/status/1128702955555713024](https://twitter.com/cBekrar/status/1128702955555713024)

Pretty sure it's not marketing

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I made a few guesses on a previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170237)</comment>


Exploding Software Engineering Myths (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/news.aspx?post=/en-us/news/features/nagappan-100609.aspx <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286433)

</comment><comment><USER3> Several of these are on my list of methods with empirical evidence. Geography wasn't. Good to see even more validation. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> > Although TDD adherents claim the practice produces better design and higher > quality code, no one had carried out an empirical substantiation of this at > Microsoft.

I've been saying that for years.</comment>


CoffeeScript: The beautiful way to write JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/post/19612

<comment><USER2> I can't shake the feeling that people that like CoffeeScript are those that don't "get" JavaScript (e.g. CoffeeScript's notion of a class, whereas JavaScript has none -- let go an embrace the prototypal object model). Further, most (if not all) of the examples of the problems with JavaScript are null and void. A language that combines paradigms? Most do. Sure, the name sucks, but that's hardly an issue.

I understand that syntax may be more convenient for some, but this is indirection, and is a source of complexity that may impede collaboration from other devs more familiar with JavaScript.

<comment><USER3> I have to say that by using cs I learned a lot more about js. Maybe for old js cats it doesnt matter, but I only used js occasionally before, and now it became one of my favorite languages (I use with node, and I write all my node stuff in cs).

One particular example that changed everything for me was the natural and simple way I could build the typical callback constructs with -> and => , so they almost look like blocks in ruby, and feel way more natural as a control construct, and I didnt have to stack lots of })}); and so on.

If you're rather new to something, the ease of use and the simplicity and readability speeden up the learning process extremely.

That being said, there are also a couple of things in cs that are kind of silly.. like using 'for i in my_array', but 'for k of my_dict', and stuff like that, that are really hard to debug.

Although, in terms of debugging, the fact that it gets compiled and possible errors are early detected and a canonical js is generated also saved me lot of time, in particular with IE ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> To explain the reason for the "in/of" distinction...

"for item in list" vs "for key, value of object" is an unfortunate necessary evil. It would be great to use the same keyword, "in", for both types of loop, but I'm afraid there's no way for us to know at compile time if "list" or "object" is really an array, or really an object.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious, why do you need to make a distinction? Is there some other feature of CS that depends on it? Certainly 'for key, value of array' could be implemented with numerical keys. If using just 'for value of dict' is allowed that would also work fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> We need to make a distinction because we want to have arrays be iterated over with:

        for (var i = 0, l = list.length; i < l; i++) { ... }

And objects iterated over with:

        for (var key in object) { ... }

Using a "for-in" loop over a JS array isn't acceptable, for performance and semantics reasons, and neither is sniffing at runtime to determine whether the object passed is an array, or an object.

Ideally, JavaScript would have supported a single iteration protocol for both arrays and objects from the get-go, but alas...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't agree more.

The biggest problem with CoffeeScript adoption is the administrative overhead required for novices to get it running. This means that most CoffeeScript projects are usually larger -- it just doesn't get used in small one-off things.

My company's product is a hosted CMS and we just tackled this problem (<http://www.gethifi.com/blog/hosted-cms-coffeescript-support>) by completely eliminating the workflow issue. You can use Coffee or JS and the system takes care of the rest for you.

I've found this to be a big help when working on smaller client sites. Often I just need to write a couple dozens lines of JS and it just isn't worth the hassle to do it in Coffee -- now it's gravy.

<comment><USER6> I started toying with CoffeeScript a while back for my own entertainment and found the administrative overhead was _much_ less than I anticipated. I went from a clean slate to being up and running in like five minutes. Once I had node and CoffeeScript installed, it was just a single command-line to start a watch on my .coffee file and then I was back to "refresh browser window to see my changes" mode just like regular JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is almost copy of CoffeeScript manual (plus some old jokes about Javascript)

Read original here, <http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I've done my fair share of web programming. But JavaScript (for me) has always been to add the flash, not to write the app. In the past couple of months, I dove into Backbone.js, Sammy.js, etc. and while my JavaScript worked, it wasn't "the JavaScript way".

When I found CoffeeScript, I was very happy. But I've been moving back to more JavaScript recently because I've spent hours looking through the generated JavaScript and learned quite a bit from it. I did the same with my C compiler and x86 Assembly :) It's nice to read what the experts think the final product should look like.

So write some CoffeeScript, compile it, and learn some JavaScript from it.

<comment><USER9> If you can't debug in CoffeeScript, you can't take it seriously. Even meta-CSS frameworks suffer from this problem when there's errors you have to back-track through a whole layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love CS, but this article doesn't seem to have much useful content that isn't arleady in the CS docs: <http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/>

<comment><USER11> Nope, but I read this article and then read the CS docs -- which I wouldn't have done if this article wasn't posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Out of curiosity:

What's with today's obsession over beautiful syntax? Shouldn't we strive for beautiful semantics, instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, but the idea here is a bit different. JavaScript is a language that we're stuck with for the entire foreseeable future of the web, for better or for worse ... and CoffeeScript is a conscious attempt to try and work within that limitation. Unless you're willing to take the significant performance hit of running an interpreter on top of JavaScript, you have to stick fairly close to JavaScript semantics.

That said, we certainly try to improve upon JS semantics, where it's possible to do so without a performance hit. Things like auto-lexical scoping, bound functions, chained comparisons and, most importantly, "everything is an expression", are all examples of this.

<comment><USER13> No, you aren't trying to "improve JS semantics", you are trying to 'Rubyify' Javascript. You've created a language that is NOT javascript. Sorry, but no matter how hard you try to sell it as === javascript, it still will never be javascript. It's a Ruby syntax wrapped around javascript with some bells and whistles. It isn't a solution for javascript programmers, but it might be a solution for Ruby programmers.

<comment><USER14> It might also be a solution for programmers who don't tend to label themselves "LanguageX programmers".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've had trouble learning CoffeeScript due to the compiler not providing any help whatsoever when you make a mistake.

I was writing a web server that just wouldn't compile, looked the code over several times and eventually gave up and did it in javascript instead. Later found out that Gedit was displaying a tab that vim showed as just being a space. Never tested if that was the only problem or not.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. The compiler definitely isn't as helpful as it could be in giving information about errors. On the other hand, a lot of the errors it hits at compile-time are things you wouldn't have noticed until run-time if you were writing JavaScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to see javascript turn into assembly language. Google has already done with with GWT with great improvements in productivity.

One question I had while reading this. Was there a technical reason why he didn't make a gem or toolkit in pure Ruby or Python that would then spit out Javascript?

I think this is closer to how GWT did it where you can write pure Java, and of course it then wouldn't require people to learn a new language.

<comment><USER18> The issue is Ruby/Python/Java's semantics don't map perfectly to JavaScript. As it says in the documentation, the golden rule of CoffeeScript is "It's just JavaScript".

For people who know JavaScript, it's not a new language-- just some syntactic sugar and a few bonus features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if it's feasible to hack the javascript engines (v8, spidermonkey, ...) to support languages CoffeeScript? In case the answer is positive how come nobody's doing that?

</comment><comment><USER20> I really wanted to like CoffeeScript but that it can't be metaprogrammed and serialized (easily) is a huge problem for a scripting language. I guess scripting was never the point of CoffeeScript, but a lot of what makes JavaScript so flexible is lost when you add a compile stage.

<comment><USER21> I'm struggling to think of something I can do in Javascript, but not CoffeeScript. Can you give an example?

<comment><USER20> Because of whitespace and line break sensitivity you can't dynamically generate serialized CoffeeScript (unless delicately handled) because it won't compile.

<comment><USER22> Why would you even do that? You could just dynamically generate serialized JS and load it with CoffeeScript.

<comment><USER20> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_%28computer_science%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_%28computer_science%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ugh, there is nothing wrong with JavaScript, please let's all just forget that CoffeeScript even exists. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't find an overly naive use of recursion that leads to an exponential time algorithm to be beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER25> aka "How not to implement Fibonacci sequence"

<comment><USER26> Y U no cache the results?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to explain why I left a job? - <AUTHOR>

I left programming job abruptly about a year ago without giving notice due to personal problem (anxiety)...I did not handle it the right way and subsequently do not have a reference from that job. What is the best way to explain this if asked by potential future employers why I left/have no reference? <comment><USER2> \- I'll say career change. That's just me.</comment>


Myspace lets you hijack any account just by knowing the person's birthday - happy-go-lucky https://leigh-annegalloway.com/myspace/ <comment><AUTHOR> Myspace was an XSS playground. You could embed javascript into anyone's profile, by leaving a flash applet (or for that matter a java applet) in a comment, and having it do an openurl to a javascript: url, which would execute in the context of the user viewing it.

I had fun replacing people's profile pictures after the page loaded, or stopping all of that annoying background music.

It was also possible to capture someone's document.cookie, as late as 2008.

Good times...

<comment><USER2> A Norwegian social site back in the days called Nettby ("net-city") also allowed some html, but did it by just removing unallowed tags. I realised I could write <scr<script>ipt>, and after it did the removal of the first script tag I still had one.

This trick still works on surprisingly many sites. Allowing custom html is _hard_ , so think long before rolling your own.

<comment><USER3> Honestly if it's comments, just use Markdown or something. No reason for your users to have access to HTML.

<comment><USER4> And then this happens: [https://github.com/ChALkeR/notes/blob/master/Improper- markup...](https://github.com/ChALkeR/notes/blob/master/Improper-markup- sanitization.md)

<comment><USER5> I think it's funny that JIRA knows how to prioritize the best of all the list.

<comment><USER4> I'm hoping that was sarcasm...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I took the habit of feeding fake random information to all websites asking too noisey questions and keeping track of them in case I need them for recovery. A website doesn't need my exact date of birth, at most it may need my approximate age. It doesn't need my real name either, even if it wants to deliver something to me, the address should be all it takes. It doesn't need my real email address, all it needs is some email alias that I can delete. Good practice for privacy, spam management and security since it is harder to guess this information and to reuse it when leaked.

<comment><USER7> So much this. I've never saw the need to do give information out like that. As far as every website is concerned my DOB is 01/01/1990.

<comment><USER8> I always use 1/1/1911 to shave off a few more of those precious microseconds

<comment><USER9> If so, did you then just compromise yourself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who owns MySpace now and why does the author's screenshots have varying typos? The "email found" prompt changes from "...Please remeber [sic] update your email address after you log in" to "Please remember to update your email address after you log in."

Also, the real MySpace.com's account recovery for "I don't have access to my email" is now taking you to a myspace.desk.com ticketing frontend and a screen that looks nothing like the author's post.

Suspicious.

<comment><USER11> It's another Murdoch 'asset' I believe.

<comment><USER12> Rupert Murdoch bought it for $580 million in 2005 and then sold it to Justin Timberlake and Specific Media Group a few years later for $35 million. According to their Wikipedia page Timberlake & Co sold it in 2016 to Time Inc.

[http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/time-inc-myspace- viant-...](http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/time-inc-myspace- viant-1201703860/)

<comment><USER13> The last trade is a shame. I saw the demo of MySpace around 2014 and found it almost exciting. It was at the time when they were trying to make it all about media consumption with transparent handover between devices and TVs / computers. The tech looked quite fun. Looks like they couldn't get enough interest to pull it off :-(

For some reason they were trying to get geeks at local meetups excited about it. I got a can of MySpace-branded energy drink which was one of the weirdest gifts...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember a time where you could embed js and css in the forums. I never want farther than seeing if I could steal my own login cookie (being new to js I was sure I just _had_ to have overlooked something) and change posts of a user without that user seeing that change haha (test user also being myself, in some god forsaken part of the forum nobody used), then backed off that stuff for fear of being banned and made little "utilities" like expanding text boxes, and pretty stylesheets of course. There was just nooooobody paying attention, I can absolutely vouch for that.

<comment><USER15> I remember being able to get higher rates as a web developer/designer in high school by being able to make special myspace pages that covered up the UI for businesses.

<comment><USER16> Some of my first gigs/job were setting up new myspace layouts for indie bands. Company I worked for had a custom player built and everything. I remember finding some awesome hacks to make stuff work when myspace rolled out their own player and tried to force it on everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In [https://help.myspace.com/hc/en- us/articles/201989404-Forgot-...](https://help.myspace.com/hc/en- us/articles/201989404-Forgot-Email-) they even spell "myspace.com" wrong...

<comment><USER18> Where? If you're referring to the capitalization, I think it's always been "Myspace."

<comment><USER17> It might have been removed/changed, but there was a wrong link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does MySpace still exists?

<comment><USER20> Don't expect there to be anything there from back when you actually used it. They deleted all of your wall and private messages years ago.

<comment><USER21> I have mine in a zip file somewhere... They had an option to download it for a while.

<comment><USER22> Yea I think I have mine somewhere as well. I really hate they removed all that historical data though. They could have probably banked on a trickle of logins simply from people looking for the nostalgia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I attempted recovering my ancient Myspace account just now claiming I'd lost the email. I was directed to a Zendesk form that looked different from the one shown in the screenshots. So looks like they might have changed the process now?

</comment><comment><USER24> That's brilliant. :)

Apologies if snarky, but perhaps $15 on this would be well advised: (Humble Bundle deal also on FP today) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791255)

Just bought the bundle; looking forward to learning more about security myself. I would like to think I know the obvious things, but will probably find big gaps if I get through all of it..

</comment><comment><USER25> Are birthdays part of the 360 million user account breach?

</comment><comment><USER26> Also the amount of poor/broken English on that form and the dialogs makes me suspect outsourcing.

</comment><comment><USER27> Oh no, I hope my Digg and Hotmail accounts are still safe.

</comment><comment><USER28> No less secure than most people's bank accounts.

</comment><comment><USER29> Myspace still exists?

</comment><comment><USER30> What's MySpace?</comment>


China may have prevented 95% of virus cases if whistleblower not silenced - <AUTHOR> https://www.hongkongfp.com/2020/03/14/china-may-prevented-95-virus-cases-acted-silenced-whistleblowers-warning/ <comment><USER2> After the crisis, his death should be investigated by an international group.

And those responsible for rebuffing assistance, including those at the CDC or other US agencies that rejected test kits, should be investigated.

Everyone just throws their hands up and says "incompetence" but in the real- world, a huge majority seem to believe in sinister motives. This is based on anecdotal experiences from mostly wealthy/successful people I've talked to. I'm a skeptic but way more people are conspiratorial than the media acknowledges.

How the US didn't have tests in January when people were sounding the alarm, or how we don't have general Coronavirus tests from decades or years ago is quite confounding.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever worked in a bureaucracy? It's not hard to believe that this is all an admixture of hubris, incompetence, and political small-ball.

<comment><USER2> You describe a great motive for one to start an international organized crime ring and incorporate it by an Act of Congress.

<comment><USER3> You make me want to buy aluminum futures for all the tinfoil you've got under your hat friend.

<comment><USER2> I was just making what I thought was a clever counter to your endless argument. I have friends who are implicated in conspiracy theories and know well it's a flawed philosophical system that sustains incompetence.

But set your Google search to 1970-1988, and read the old coronavirus test related papers. Ones of humans, cattle and cats. Then in ~2004 talking about coronavirus testing for SARS.

It seems like they're at least could be a general test or indicator for all coronaviruses. Even if not, we've been fearing mutant coronaviruses for decades, why wouldn't we get the tests started in November?

Poker players were betting 3-weeks+ ago that WSOP would be shut down and now the world is-

[https://twitter.com/dougpolkpoker/status/1233041607131357185...](https://twitter.com/dougpolkpoker/status/1233041607131357185?s=21)

[https://twitter.com/mikemcdonald89/status/123310948568372429...](https://twitter.com/mikemcdonald89/status/1233109485683724290?s=21)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While the world now praises the Chinese government's response (they shouldn't) to the Wuhan Corona Virus outbreak, please remember why it spread at first. Also, I doubt if the situation is actually controlled in China. Have we ever known how China counted the patients? In more than one case, the new infections in a city exceeds that of its province.

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1237852245359644675?s=20](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1237852245359644675?s=20)

<comment> Engineering-MD I couldn't find any evidence in the link about new cases in a city exceeding that for a province. Do you have any source for that? Or any other evidence that numbers may be misleading in China? Given their past record it does seem likely, but I suspect their social distancing measures have been at least partly successful.

<comment><USER4> The related news I could find were all in Chinese I'm afraid. You'll need to translate it.

[1] Story behind the sudden spike of confirmed cases in Hubei Province.

[https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad/chinese- news-51485553](https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad/chinese-news-51485553)

[2] Official amendment of the numbers in Hubei Province. The day before, the newly confirmed cases reported in the Hubei Province was 349, while that of Wuhan city was 615 (Wuhan is a city in Hubei).

[http://m.news.cctv.com/2020/02/21/ARTI5BVxbRm6O6rOBnUVpaMB20...](http://m.news.cctv.com/2020/02/21/ARTI5BVxbRm6O6rOBnUVpaMB200221.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has it even been ruled out that this pandemic has not been _engineered?_

Is there any way to even check if a virus has been artificially created/modified?

What prevents an organization inspired by current events from engineering something even more "effective"?

This seems to be a common conspiracy theory with the person on the street. I've actually seen people suggesting that the U.S. infected China.

<comment> Engineering-MD As far as I am aware it is incredibly unlikely to have been engineered. The virus is very similar to those in animals already, and there are no tell tale signs of CRISPR being used (off site effects where unintentional areas are also targeted). While it is possible it could have been perfectly engineered from a very similar virus in a way to avoid leaving signs of engineering (which I think is pretty unlikely), there is no motivation. If you wanted to do this, surely you would immunise your own people against it first to reduce local damage? And for saying the USA planted it in China.... it's just stupid. I mean, the USA is managing this terribly. If they had planned it surely they would have stockpiled enough masks or medication to make this work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even after Italy and other countries had known the risks, they really did not take drastic measures to contain it until it was too late. There is a pattern here - governments don't move fast when there is this level of uncertainty. China deserves blame for lack of free speech, but rest of their efforts were pretty effective. Don't expect either of these to happen in a democracy.</comment>