_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/ <comment><USER2> Being a non-creator, the quote at the end of the article has hit me so hard, I cannot get it off my head for hours now:

"When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create."

As for the programming is a science or art debate: It is' of course wrong to make such a dichotomy. People who draw a thick boundary between these two, I think, appreciate neither art or science. Programming _is_ a science, it's true, but it also is a thing of beauty, much as a game of Go, or a beautiful mathematical theorem. Any scientific endevour you do passionately is worth to be called an art, I think (and vice versa). Let us not make the mistake that John Keating makes when he says:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play _goes on_ and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

<comment><USER3> I've never read much of _why's work so I don't have much to add to the thread, except that: I did read that quote by _why some months ago and it hasn't gotten off my head since then.

It's like a mantra, and for me it alternates between being inspiring and depressing.

Perhaps I disagree with you. I think programming is a craft, but that's different from art. In any case, though every time we write some code we're creating something, I don't consider the code I write for my day job to be "meaningful" creation (if that was the case every act of labour would be creation and the quote would be meaningless). That's why the quote is depressing sometimes.

<comment> j-g-faustus The entire concept of art is relatively recent (from the Renaissance on), the ancient Greeks considered a sculptor to be a craftsman just like a smith or carpenter.

And the Renaissance artists had to make a living somehow, much of their art we know today was made to order for Church, State or rich merchants.

We may consider "pure art" to be "form without function" and "pure utility" to be "function without form". But fields like industrial design, architecture and engineering (ex. bridges) has room for both: Aesthetically pleasing form that merges well with their function.

If programming is art, it's the form+function sort of art. And just like with bridge building, the form part is optional - if the program works and the bridge does not collapse they are doing their job.

I don't consider the code for my day job to be art either. But I still think art can arise under such conditions, generally because someone with the power to do so goes beyond the call of duty and decides to make their bridge or code not only functional but beautiful as well.

There are plenty of constraints that can stop considerations of form dead in their tracks; like whether the client is willing to pay extra or wait longer for a more aesthetically pleasing result, or how much control you have over the final result - there are limits to how creative you can be if you are a subcontractor for a bridge pillar, or if you are designing an ad that needs to fit within the company's design guidelines and an existing ad series.

Still, I think art can arise in the most unexpected places, it's mostly a matter of spotting the opportunities and deciding that it is worth the bother.

<comment><USER4> "And just like with bridge building, the form part is optional"

Sometimes function is optional as well!:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to software quality in many cases, particularly within teams.

Fundamentally I think my objection is to elevating a slightly odd-ball programmer to messianic status based on a mildly creepy fandom that manifests primarily as people vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments.

<comment><USER6> Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it's pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you'll end with a good _coder_ also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth.

The problem is that most of our industry is not ready to accept this news. There was _no_ so important economic process like IT in the past where creativity and art had the same impact as it is happening with programming. Check the software and the sites you are enjoying every day: are they made by great scientists? The big majority are not.

But at the same time, the reverse is true. If you have good scientists you can create any complex program or system without problems. Look at all the PHDs at google, the result is a wonderful piece of technology, from the search engine itself to the cluster and other stuff they are running. But this is an engineering problem indeed, so it is a perfect fit for them.

But not everything is like that in our field. This is why for instance a big company like Google is not having a big impact in programming itself. If you see the reality most of their products for the masses are not working well, Ruby on Rails was not produced there, and so forth. It's not that I've something against Google but it is the perfect example of "company of scientists".

<comment><USER5> I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget. Are small business accountants "artists"?

Accordingly, programming is not _currently_ a science. However, I think that is a much better position to aspire to than self-aggrandizement and glorifying a skill that is really no different than any other skill that any suitably motivated 12 year can acquire with a couple library books and an internet connection.

With a science of programming, we can aspire to a position where programmers can at least claim to be engineers, and at least have good odds of most programming projects resulting in software of reasonable quality. Face it, there's good art and bad art, and it's subjective which is which. Programs have objective measures we can apply, depending on what the code is used for - developer time, performance, correctness... and a million others. We can argue about which measures are the right ones to use, but at least these measures exist. We can (with current technology) empirically evaluate a piece of code in many different ways. Actually starting to apply this kind of empirical evaluation is the first step towards programming being a science.

[Edit: OK, so the parent to this was heavily edited after I posted this, but I can't be bothered rewriting this accordingly, so please excuse any incongruence between this reply and the post it is replying to]

<comment><USER7> "I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget."

The vision you seem to be espousing is someone tells the programmer exactly what to do, and the programmer does it exactly to that specification. Wiring a house and balancing a budget are solved problems. So you seem to be saying that programming is also a solved problem.

Which is so out of touch with reality I feel that, surely, I must be misunderstanding you. A computer program can do pretty much anything. Depending how you feel about the equivalence of Turing machines and human brains, you can argue that a computer program can potentially do anything a person can do.

With the geometric increase of computing capacity available to us, how is it even conceivable that "programming" is equivalent to balancing a budget or wiring a house? You seem to suffer from an incredible lack of imagination.

"However, I think that is a much better position to aspire to than self- aggrandizement and glorifying a skill that is really no different than any other skill that any suitably motivated 12 year can acquire with a couple library books and an internet connection."

That is the same as saying a 12 year old can write or play a musical instrument. Sure, they can spell words and make sentences, or know the correct fingering for certain notes. But the potential for improvement in those endeavors is also unbounded. The same is true of programming, in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> An electrician is not given absolute exacting directions on what to do and then follows them by wrote. A master electrician is given guidelines (in the form of regulations) and then a list of what the customer wants. They then consolidate the two into a plan for the building (locations of outlets, fuse boxes, etc.). Once the general plan is done (what power is needed where for what) they have to determine where at what type of wires and junction boxes need to be places, working through the design of the building. Once the electrical diagram is completed, it's handed off to a journeyman, who, with other electricians, run the wires as close to the plan as possible, frequently having to deviate slightly due to the differences in reality.

This is the absolute, most common, frequently found, frequently followed process for developing software. There is more "wiggle room" at each step, but it's the same exact process, whether it's one guy doing it and dreaming up the requirements or a team of thousands of developers.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Now the big difference to me is in the _kind_ of programming.

For instance, the people that write papers on new datastructures, computer vision and other state-of-the-art developments. They're not working with 'requirements' other than 'it would be nice if you found a way to solve 'X', come back in three years'. (well, not quite like that, but closely).

That's basic research and a definite amount of artistry is involved at that level.

But after the paper is written up it has solidified and it becomes applicable science, and for the person calling the API that embodies the concept it has become 'mere' bricklaying.

<comment><USER7> "But after the paper is written up it has solidified and it becomes applicable science, and for the person calling the API that embodies the concept it has become 'mere' bricklaying."

I completely disagree.

The art for the person calling the API is often found in "building something people want." Think of the people who frequent this website. Many of them are writing lines of code to make something people want. Surely there is some art to that. There needs to be an idea, building something to show customers, and iteration on that idea taking customer response into account. The customers have input, but the programmer decides what to write.

Just as wealthy people once commissioned portraits and told the artist what to draw, programmers can be employed someplace where the question of what to program is decided by someone else. But there is nothing inherent in art prohibiting painters from deciding what to paint, or in programming prohibiting programmers deciding what to program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work and not taking everything so fucking seriously. We should see our work as art and enjoy every moment of it!

<comment><USER11> > What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work

Non-attachment -- Exactly how? If so why delete your work ? That shows his attachment to it. iirc, there was some discontent over one of his libraries being overtaken by another (nokogiri ?). There were benchmarks that showed his lib to be slower. then he improved his lib. this went on. he did seem a bit annoyed, if i recall.

<comment><USER10> John Resig's post explains _why's non-attachment well: <http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/>

"People get way too caught up in their work. I like to think that he was able to keep the products of his online persona separate from the rest of his life, treating them as completely distinct entities - the perfect, clear-cut, division between personal life, work, and play."

"Seeing the complete deletion of his online persona doesn't terribly surprise me. Back in 2007 _why closed his main blog (RedHanded). That event truly shocked me, but it helped me to better understand him as a person. The blog, even though he had put years of work into it and people strongly identified him with it, was immaterial. It didn't feel like the right place to talk anymore so he moved on to another place, abandoning the old site."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It was a sad day when _why left programming. I always thought he was one of the most creative people currently working in any medium, and we were lucky to have him choose code to express his ideas.

Does anyone have any idea what he's been doing since?

<comment><USER13> > Does anyone have any idea what he's been doing since?

Basically, the Ruby community decided that if his wish was to be gone, we'd respect that wish. Nothing has been heard since his disappearance.

<comment><USER14> I think that any tendencies to find out stuff about him tend to lean in two directions:

* The _why that we knew would not be averse to setting up a puzzle of this sort. * We simply want to make sure that he didn't kill himself or anything like that.

<comment><USER13> Oh, absolutely. I didn't mean to say that anyone looking for him was being a jerk. I myself, as the maintainer of one of his projects, wish he was still around... the world needs more _why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think I brought it up on HN yet, because they haven't updated rubysoc.org, but Hackety did get accepted as a Summer of Code project this year: [http://librelist.com/browser//hacketyhack/2010/4/21/ruby- sum...](http://librelist.com/browser//hacketyhack/2010/4/21/ruby-summer-of- code/#baa434cbae791e0f233946596ab914ae)

I'm really excited!

</comment><comment><USER15> He was sort of like a contemporary one-man open source Beagle Bros. Unfortunately there is no place in current programming culture for people like this. Programming is not art. It is certainly not whimsical. It is fun, but only fun like preparing for a rocket launch or hostile takeover is fun. Programming is science, it's engineering, it's methodology, it is bureaucracy. More importantly it is Serious Business. Programmers like to imagine themselves as simultaneously being as potentially intellectually important as Einstein and as rich as a Rockefeller. There is no place in that world for cat cartoons and goofing off.

<comment><USER16> Surely there must be more hackers that think like _why, even if they are not as high-profile. Maybe someone should start a (loosely knit) network of such people. Or maybe it already exists. I for one would definitely be interested in joining. :-)

<comment><USER17> It, to some degree, already exists in the guise of the Ruby community.

Which is, not coincidently, why _why's detractors tend to feel the need to throw in a comment about how much they dislike Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There really, really needs to be a leading underscore in the title. (The article linked to gets this right. The submitter seems to be reasonably clueful, so I wonder: did he get it right and the HN software screw it up?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Smashing Magazine's title lacks the underscore, but the in-page title has one. HN's submitter bookmarklet copies the title tag's contents, and I neglected to fix it...

update: there, fixed it. thanks :)

<comment><USER19> the w shouldn't be capitalized, either.

<comment><USER9> _why really is a brand then.

<comment><USER20> Why do you say that JackM?

<comment><USER9> Because nobody here would care if I would write 'zerogravitas' or 'ZeroGravitas' to indicate you.

It's just a moniker, a handle. As soon as you start to assign great weight to the spelling and the special look ("It has to have an _") of a nickname then you're definitely in branding territory.

Just like "The artist formerly called Prince" is a brand, so is "_why, they lucky stiff".

<comment><USER18> Some people care about the difference between "_why" and "Why". (Probably including the man himself.)

Some people care about similar variations in brands.

So far, so good. What's not clear (to me, at any rate) is how you get from these to "Therefore, _why's name is a brand". That would be reasonable if no one cared about details for any reason other than branding, but that's obviously false.

Compare: "... then you're definitely in programming-language territory." (Almost all implementations of almost all programming languages care very much indeed about the difference between "Why" and "_why".)

Or: "... then you're definitely in religious territory." (Some Orthodox Jews care very much about the difference between "G-d" and "God" even though the former is just a lightly modified version of the latter.)

Or: "... then you're definitely in music territory." (In a musical score, adding or removing dots, little lines, funny characters, etc., can completely change the meaning.)

Or: "... then you're definitely in vanity territory." (Some people just care a lot about appearances.)

So ... why "branding", specifically?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It was a sad day when he disappeared. _Why inspired me to learn ruby, and reminded me that software can be beautiful (and humorous!).

</comment><comment><USER22> _why's view on messy code is drastically under-appreciated.

One can imagine how much energy is wasted revising commits and over-massaging code just to make the author look smarter.

I'd love it if the culture were more accepting of ugly code... It has its purpose too.

<comment><USER23> I have a completely different feeling. It's ok if you depend on such code as long as it's actively supported by the creator himself. As soon as you need to modify it for your needs, or adopt the whole project, because it was dropped -- you start to appreciate clean and consistent code. If the code is too messy, you just end up rewriting most of it, in order to understand it. There would be no reason to do that if the original was clean and documented.

<comment><USER24> There are different kinds of cleanliness though, I think. I've often found it easier to modify idiosyncratic code than code written in the Standard way, though things vary in both kinds. I do agree documentation is rather important; well-commented idiosyncratic code that explains the author's mental model is light-years easier than idiosyncratic code without any explanation.

But, I do find that code written in sort of industry-standard style often is hugely over-architected, with a lot of boilerplate and cruft, and not all that easy to modify if I want to adapt it to my personal ends; i.e. my use-case is a single programmer wanting to put in 5-10 hours to make a small to moderate change. You end up in a maze of Factories and Interfaces trying to figure out where anything is actually _done_. The idiosyncratic code often just does away with all that architecture, which can sometimes be easier to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Heartwarming... One of the first programs I ever wrote, on a PET-2001, was a crude running elephant. Later I made it controllable with the arrow keys.

Why did this enigmatic guy disappear from the nets?

<comment><USER26> With his level of passion, I can't believe that he doesn't _want_ to come back. I think he's just giving us all a time-out from playing his wonderful game, to teach us to be good.

Although, if he now distrusts the Ruby community too badly, he might be waiting for a new language espousing "programmer enjoyment" to sprout up...

<comment><USER27> _Why had an abnormal personality. He had a busy internal dialogue. He acted for his own reasons, and I don't think we will guess at them.

Humans understand new things by comparison to what they already know, so fresh souls are often misunderstood and misclassified.

<comment><USER28> I think you nailed it.

I'll add to that though. often, when people die (and _why did in a sense die), people view everything they did through rose colored lenses. I'm with the majority in HNers in this thread so far, still in awe of _why, however, let's not forget the tough lessons his disappearance taught us.

While I greatly appreciated everything _why did for the community and think he truly was an amazing person, it's clear in my mind that the way he left the community, without notice that he would take down his sites and code, was irresponsible. He had the right to do what he did, but that doesn't make it ok.

I'm not angry at _why, more sad. I assume, given his eccentricities, that there was no malicious intent behind it, which is why I find it merely tragic. However, his leaving was a powerful reminder of the responsibilities open source software authors have. If you make code free, you should make sure it stays available within reason, and if you use free software, you should take _why's disappearance as an object lesson.

<comment><USER13> It was also lucky that the Ruby community had adopted git so thoroughly; the only reason we still have his works is due to DVCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I still can't figure why _why had to disappear just because his real name was discovered. So what's wrong with that?

And why hide your real name in the first place ? Considering that he gave presentations and made appearances, it was only a matter of time.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting debate on whether programming is an art or science. Fwiw, programming isn't the first field which has undergone this argument. Even Bobby Fischer complained that chess had lost its artistry to a trend of mechanized memorization:

 _"Fischer Random was designed to remove the importance of opening book memorization. Fischer complained in a 2006 phoned-in call with a television interviewer that talented celebrity players from long ago, if brought back from the dead to play today, would no longer be competitive, because of the progress in memorization of opening books. 'Some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get an opening advantage against Capablanca', he said, merely because of opening-book memorization, which Fischer disdained. 'Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorization and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.'[336]"_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#Fischer_Random_Ch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#Fischer_Random_Chess)

<comment><USER30> I never view mechanization as a bad thing. It just makes the game more intense at the higher levels. If you're chasing the thrill, and chess can't handle improvements in play style, maybe we should find another game that can (for instance, go).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I keep waiting for a group of people to someday come out and say that _why was actually a hoax. That there was actually a group of people secretly signing their works with the same name with the goal of starting a new _programming movement_.

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://www.scribd.com/documents/8545174/Whys-Poignant- Guide-...](http://www.scribd.com/documents/8545174/Whys-Poignant-Guide-to- Ruby)

</comment><comment><USER33> I remember reading a comment a while back (I think on HN) about some running joke in one of his books about a cat (or maybe it was a dog?) and how _why had actually created this whole blog to keep the joke running outside of his book. It was hilarious and impressive, but I can't find it - anyone know what I'm referring to?

<comment><USER34> yes, the story is told by shack_a_nerd: <http://shack-a- nerd.livejournal.com/70594.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've sent Andrew Looney an email suggesting he do a game based on Kaxxt. Here's hoping!

</comment><comment><USER36> Do as I say, not as I do... but.... I love this

When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.

— Why the Lucky Stiff

</comment><comment><USER37> Funny how a guy who decides to pull out of the open source community and pull the plug on essential projects used by the community without so much as a line of warning is depicted as a hero. Self-centered jerk is more appropriate in this case, but it seems that the more excentric the behaviour, the more genius you are, regardless of the fact that there are vast numbers of developers who contribute daily, monthly, yearly, countless hours of their lives selflessly to others, without whom we couldn't be typing all these comments right now. But no, those aren't artists, it's this guy that pulls the rug out from under everyone that gets the adoration. Human nature is soooo lame.

<comment><USER38> Yes, it was a bit of a dick move to simply take the content offline, but the fact is that he created this content in the first place. If he hadn't done something very valuable, nobody would have cared when it was gone. Does one inconsiderate act counteract all of his contributions? Even with all of his stuff deleted, his contribution to the community was still bigger than yours or mine, so I'm going to say no.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley's Keystone Problem: A Monoculture of Thought - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/technology/silicon-valleys-keystone-problem-a-monoculture-of-thought.html <comment><USER3> > engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture

Gee, a company who's business is data is obsessed with engineering and data? Color me shocked.

Snark aside, technology is hard. If you've worked in consulting for any amount of time you've probably realized that outside of a few pockets (SF, NYC, Austin, etc) most of the world is really, really bad at technology. Many of the biggest, most important institutions in the world really have no idea what they're doing. The biggest problem in my mind is that technical know-how is not distributed evenly. I don't know why that is, but I don't think diversity has very much to do with it.

<comment><USER4> > If you've worked in consulting for any amount of time you've probably > realized that outside of a few pockets (SF, NYC, Austin, etc) most of the > world is really, really bad at technology.

You mean outside of Tokyo, Calgary, Tampere (points if you can locate it on a map without names), Geneva, the Ruhr area, Milan, Shenzen and a thousand other places?

The 'world' is a lot larger than the USA and there are many places where people are _really_ good at technology.

They may not be able to address a large unified market and they may not have access to enormous amounts of dumb money to chase the latest social media fads but that doesn't mean you need to ignore their existence, unless it was your idea to underscore the point of the article.

<comment><USER5> I mean, even in other countries, there tends to be one or two cities that are major tech hubs and the rest of the country is not. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing or just a normal thing. There are many industries or specialties that are concentrated in certain areas (or have been historically), like autos in Detroit (although that's changing), finance in NY, movies & fashion in LA, etc.

<comment><USER6> LA is not a fashion capital: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_capital](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_capital).

<comment><USER7> Is it not #14 on the 2017 list given there? (Was #4 on the 2016 list)

<comment><USER6> > The cities considered the global "Big Four" fashion capitals of the 21st > century are Milan, London, New York and Paris.

It does have fashion, but it's not the biggest by any stretch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Broadly, Ms. Powell suggests that many of Silicon Valley's problems can be laid at the feet of an engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture that invites little input from people outside the bubble._

Zoning has a lot to do with this: [https://www.livablecity.org/rethinking- rh](https://www.livablecity.org/rethinking-rh). Zoning lets cities dramatically restrict the supply of housing, thus favoring incumbent owners; by now, the only people who will move to SF / SV are those who want to start a startup (or "play the startup lottery" if you prefer a different set of emotional valences). The city almost can't help become a monoculture, because everyone else has been priced out.

Unfortunately, Farhad Manjoo, the author, does not seem good at attending to alternate hypotheses: [https://jakeseliger.com/2015/07/03/why-you-really-cant- trust...](https://jakeseliger.com/2015/07/03/why-you-really-cant-trust-the- media-claire-cain-miller-and-farhad-manjoo-get-things-wrong-in-the-new-york- times).

<comment><USER9> I don't know man?

Everyone's been priced WAY out of Manhattan too, but I don't know that I would call it a "monoculture". (Tribeca/Greenwich Village area is very different than the Upper East Side for instance. Very different cultures. But only 0.0001% of Americans could ever really afford to live in either place.)

That's why I'm not sure that the affordability of housing is what's causing the monoculture?

In fact, I'd wager that with greater affordability in SF, the only thing you would really buy yourself is MORE monoculture. I don't think there is a massive wave of NON-tech people waiting to move into SF.

<comment><USER8> Reasonable points.

The NYC comparison is useful because there are some similar dynamics going on. That said, some rents have been falling for a while: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/pick-a- ne...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/pick-a-new-york- city-borough-rents-are-falling-there-and-fast) or [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/12/13/rents_are_fal...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/12/13/rents_are_falling_in_new_york_city_is_this_a_crash.html), as NYC's supply response, while inadequate, has still been better than SF's.

In addition, living without a car in NYC is common and normal, while cars cost $8,500/year TCO on average: [https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what- does-it-cost-to...](https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what-does-it-cost- to-own-and-operate-a-car), and, while SF / SV is making some progress in the mass-transit area, it's still much harder to be without a car.

And NYC's absolute market rent levels appear to be lower than SF's.

<comment><USER9> > _And NYC 's absolute market rent levels appear to be lower than SF's...._

That's NYC, not Manhattan.

Manhattan is _worse_ than SF, (and _certainly_ worse than any other place in SV). And yet, it's not a monoculture. That's the point I'm making. It strongly suggests that the issue in SF is less about affordable housing, and more about the fact that SF/SV is simply popular with a certain type of person.

<comment><USER8> This data: [https://farm1.staticflickr.com/915/28341255697_1dbd87422e_o....](https://farm1.staticflickr.com/915/28341255697_1dbd87422e_o.jpg) claims median rent in SF is $450/mo more in SF than Manhattan.

Zillow rent index: [https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home- values/](https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/) has SF at $4100/month. And it has Manhattan: [https://www.zillow.com/manhattan-ny/home- values/](https://www.zillow.com/manhattan-ny/home-values/) at $3879.

And, as noted in the original post, in Manhattan it is very easy and typical to live without a car; in SF, less so, further increasing the cost disparity.

It is wise to cite your sources prior to posting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'In short, Silicon Valley's problem is sameness, stupid — and in Ms. Powell's telling, we are not going to get a better, more responsible tech industry until we get a more intellectually diverse one.'

Can't argue with that. Pretty concerned about the impact of the tsunami of Chinese venture money that is going to take this thinking globally, I suspect SV is still kinder and gentler than the rest despite shortcomings... [https://www.ft.com/content/71ad7cda-6ef4-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92...](https://www.ft.com/content/71ad7cda-6ef4-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914) SoftBank: inside the 'Wild West' $100bn fund shaking up the tech world (The Vision Fund is changing the rules for investing but will its whirlwind decision-making lead to bad bets?)

<comment><USER11> I'm no expert, but you're calling SoftBank money Chinese - aren't they a Japanese firm mostly funded by Saudi oil money?

<comment><USER10> Yes you're right - I typed Chinese meaning Japanese

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the outside (Portland, OR) looking in, it seems like SV not only has a diversity of race issue (which I DO believe can drive different thoughts, look at a map of where most black Americans live -- spoiler alert: it's the south, I wonder how many folks in SV grew up in the south) but also a diversity of industry problem.

I grew up in New York, which has a pretty big tech sector, but also has fashion, finance, publishing as major industries as well. There are folks who work for the big tech companies in New York who have also worked on Wall Street and I think that helps to prevent monoculture from growing out of control.

<comment><USER13> Kind of funny that the Portlander mentions racial diversity. Portland remains one of the whitest cities in the US. ([https://priceonomics.com/how-diverse- is-your-city/](https://priceonomics.com/how-diverse-is-your-city/)) (NOTE: I'm also a Portland-er.)

The bay area actually is one of the _most_ diverse in the country, which does include San Jose: [https://www.kqed.org/news/10435390/bay-area-cities-among- mos...](https://www.kqed.org/news/10435390/bay-area-cities-among-most-diverse- in-u-s)

The issue isn't racial _diversity_, it's racial _inequality_: the economic gains made in the Bay Area aren't including everyone across the racial spectrum. ([https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-urgency-to-achieve- an...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-urgency-to-achieve-an-inclusive- economy-in-the-bay-area/))

(I do agree about the commercial diversity argument though, but that's mostly my own anecdotal experience.)

<comment><USER12> Totally agree about Portland, I'm aiming my critique more at the institutions that make up "silicon valley" rather than California as a whole though. Maybe that wasn't clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The first time I visited Mountain View, I was absolutely blown away by the "sameness" of the people living there. Racially, it is much more diverse than my hometown of Austin, but I could never escape the feeling, after talking to random people, that I was stuck in a scene from "The Stepford Wives."

<comment><USER15> If everyone is a 20-something graduate of the same handful of universities then of course there will be a monoculture.

<comment><USER16> OK, that's a descriptive explanation. That doesn't mean it should be normative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Silicon Valley culture could use a large dose of empathy. For such a customer- focused industry, folks' unwillingness to 'walk a mile in their shoes' is eye- opening

<comment><USER18> Everyone could use a large dose of empathy. Either you're a Nazi fascist or a spineless socialist. Everyone is so quick to dehumanize each other and have zero tolerance for thoughts outside their circle. This isn't unique to SV, but it's definitely more apparent there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > If you have a hierarchy where engineers are at the very top and the people > who are interfacing with the outside world are a couple rungs below that, > you really miss something when those people don't have an equal voice at the > table.

As an engineer, I've always found that I'm quite far from the top rung, and that my voice is frequently not the loudest at the table.

What may give the illusion that my voice is strong is that I only support ideas that I know I can build or are practical.

I find that the people who make complaints like that are usually the people who don't realize that their voices are just as equal as mine at the table. They just need to work on their credibility in order to make their voice stronger.

Edit: Credibility often comes from knowing what ideas to support, and when to stop pushing an idea. The term "idea person" comes to mind here.

<comment><USER20> That was an especially grating accusation coming from the "director of public relations" who probably had a private office, an assistant, a parking spot, and meaningful equity. Unlike anybody who knows how computers actually work.

<comment><USER19> In all honesty, without context it's hard to know if it's a credible argument or just sour grapes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Ms. Powell smartly recognizes a truth that many in the industry elide: A lack of diversity is not just one of several issues for Silicon Valley to fix, but is instead the keystone problem — the source of much else that ails tech, from its recklessly expansionist zeal to the ways its brightest companies keep stepping in problems of their own making._

This article is working from a presumption that companies should be subject to a standard of political representation; and if they aren't then they don't — and can't — function. Where did this idea come from, I wonder?

It seems at odds both with recent history (many non-representative companies have done a lot of good) and it seems to not admit of any distinction between business institutions and political ones. Even if Google had broader representation of identity-related protected classes, it would not be a representative sample of the US or the world when considering things like education or other life history factors.

What kind of diversity is the author talking about, and what relationship does it have to any legitimate standard of representativeness?

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, that was not well researched.

I suppose if they had titled it Google's Keystone problem it wouldn't have gotten as many clicks./cynicism

Lets take the article though for what it purports to be, a review of Medium's first online book, which happens to be a piece of fiction that pilloried Google's culture because the author felt unheard at a company driven by engineering.

It isn't a surprise that voices go unheard in companies (large and small). If I had to guess, I would say the most common refrain I have heard from any employee who quit their job, it was "I tried to tell them what they were doing was wrong but nobody would listen, now look at where they are."

Does that point to any deep regional insights? No. Does it point out that people running companies are human and have blind spots? Well, yeah it does but that isn't exactly startling news.

My suggestion for folks reading the book and this comment are to take away one thing; "Learning how to communicate with the corporate hive mind is an excellent skill to cultivate." and the more practical corollary, "You can't tell someone anything they are unwilling to hear."

You just can't. Get over it. I have had the experience of telling the CEO of a startup that their blind spot was hiding a train coming at them, and that it would take down the company. They couldn't hear it, they rejected my analysis as fanciful and guesswork. And when the company was destroyed by that very train wreck? They were mad at me! Not the situation, not their inability to hear what they needed to hear. No the messenger was the problem, not the situation.

What I learned was that you can't tell someone something they don't want to hear, and if you force them to hear it and are correct, they can end up hating you for it. It is better to ask gently if they are open to alternate views and if they are not, just stop. Let them learn these lessons in their own way and be supportive of them once they fall down and are working their way back up.

There is a theme in "Bad Blood" where they start falsifying their test results because they believe that they are close to having things working and they just need a bit more time. I am sure more than one person said, "Wait, this isn't the right way to deal with this." But to hear that, you had to accept that maybe the whole test with only a drop of blood was not a practical idea. And to hear _that_ , you had to consider the idea that the whole idea was not going to work. Net result, ignore the 'haters' and move on.

<comment><USER23> > It isn't a surprise that voices go unheard in companies (large and small). > If I had to guess, I would say the most common refrain I have heard from any > employee who quit their job, it was "I tried to tell them what they were > doing was wrong but nobody would listen, now look at where they are."

I'm always struck by how readily people equate "heard and understood" with "agreed with".

It's very possible that a person can be heard, listened to, understood, and then the actions they want not be taken. Just because a person is _heard_ is not the same as that person being _agreed with_.

My advice for people is to take on board the difficult lesson that someone failing to do as you wish isn't the same as them refusing to listen to you. That your wishes or warnings are not acted upon is not the same as them falling on deaf ears.

<comment><USER22> I don't disagree, people contextualize the conversation with relation to themselves, but it is a bit more nuanced than that.

This in particular is incomplete: _It 's very possible that a person can be heard, listened to, understood, and then the actions they want not be taken. Just because a person is heard is not the same as that person being agreed with._

Is half the answer but the important bits it leaves unstated. To _hear_ someone, you should be able to paraphrase their argument such that they agree that you're phrasing, is just as accurate as their original phrasing. And _then_ you have to be able to share your decision process with respect to their argument so that they can see how you reached your choice of directions.

If you do that, whether or not you choose make the change they suggest, they will feel heard by you. Conversely if you can't do that, they have no basis for believing you understood what they said and so they won't feel heard.

<comment><USER23> You're right! The ability to understand, contextualize, and restate someone's point cogently and clearly back to them will leave them feeling they have been heard and understood.

It's possible that my life experience might suggest that this sense of feeling listened to sometimes dissipates when it is not followed by the actions they would have you undertake. The ability to articulate why you have made this choice contrary to their wishes is, as you so correctly point out, critically important for having the other person understand.

More completely, it _can_ be very helpful in leaving another person feeling heard and understood when you choose not to do as they desire you to. It may be possible that not all people are so understanding as to accept that someone who heard and understood them might genuinely come to a different conclusion, even with a clear understanding of their points and lucid explanations of reasoning processes.

It may also be worth considering how these techniques can, in some scenarios, interact with complex human systems. The techniques you wisely describe can be _incredibly effective_ on a personal level! Yet, they perhaps can function less well when subject to an intermediating system. In such a scenario, some people might opt to interpret people choosing not to act as they suggest as a failure to hear and understand their points. In an organization, giving each individual the personal attention and explanation required to satisfy them and help them feel listened to can very easily become time-prohibitive.

You're absolutely, completely, 100% right. It's just perhaps possible that there might be some further room for subtlety.

<comment><USER22> > It's just perhaps possible that there might be some further room for > subtlety.

Always, it is humans we're talking about after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This refers to an awful "novel" IMHO - I read a few chapters before I started to cut myself. I'm confident that if the author didn't have a magic Google resume entry, it wouldn't have been published, much less hyped in the NYT as a Great Statement.

</comment><comment><USER25> Everyone loves to talk about the problems Silicon Valley has but I honestly want to know what harm is Silicon Valley causing to the world? It's not like it caused a global financial crisis like Wall Street. Yes, there are the whole privacy issues with companies who's main business is selling ads but that's the nature of their business. If Silicon Valley was more diverse or if those companies were located in a different city, would there be any difference?

<comment><USER26> It's less about what problems Silicon Valley is causing the world, and more, that problems that Silicon Valley cant solve because of its own ideological limitations.

Though I'd suggest that Social Media is causing some very real problems - <USER2> I don't see an easy answer that doesn't involve changing the fundamental constructs of social media.

<comment><USER27> Could you please detail specific examples of what these ideological limitations are?

I see different kinds of limitations that are driven by blindly chasing profit, attempting externalize everything that doesn't affect the bottom line, and insistent refusal to accept even partial responsibility for creating tools when said tools are misused until public opinion is overwhelming against them. I don't think that the limitations that I listed are ideological though.

<comment><USER28> I guess one example would be the ideological push for dense urbanization. It makes sense from the perspective of a city jammed between mountains or packed on an island, but not so much for a prairie city that could survive quite well with low density development if it's competent enough at managing its sprawl.

<comment><USER29> Odd. I've definitely noticed this ideological push, but it has always felt somewhat external to me; it feels like it is mostly pushed by transplants, especially temporary transplants to SF, who think everyone should live in dense walkable cities.

FWIW I do think SF and the peninsula need dense urbanization, but this is due to the geography of the bay and the fact that demand seems to be overwhelmingly outstripping supply, and I'd rather increase density than rip up the green space along the peninsula. I don't think this is necessary for most cities though, or even necessary around San Jose for that matter (since it has less narrow growth constraints due to geography). I get the impression the majority of locals / immigrants in the Bay Area who support denser urbanization have a similar viewpoint, and don't consider it an ideological necessity for the rest of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's so funny/interesting only a decade ago no one would listen to the engineers and the business types would just screw up everything and do whatever they want. Now the engineers built billion/trillion dollar companies and those types are crying that they've lost the power. Sometimes trying to regain it through political games.

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh, the irony. Silicon Valley is the way it is in large part because the media keeps a close eye on everything that it does. Naturally, groups of people are going to behave in whatever way allows them to best survive under prevailing conditions. If the media, including NYT, hadn't spend the last 10+ years both salivating over and strongly critiquing Silicon Valley, there wouldn't be so much of a need for conformity.

Just do a Google search and you'll find opinion pieces, as well as ones published by the New York Times, about how Silicon Valley is misogynist, racist, and homophobic. Why would it be any surprise that people in the industry are paranoid of not being perceived as ultra liberal and diverse? A strong monoculture is a survival mechanism from environmental pressure.

<comment><USER32> Hah, that explains why I get the impression that they've sworn fealty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of this classic article from the 90s: [http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the- californian-i...](http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian- ideology-2/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Tech needs to accept accountability and transparency, but these jealous attacks from old-media has-beens are no less tedious for being so unpredictable.

</comment><comment><USER35> This kind of stuff annoys me to no end. I think everyone realizes that Silicon Valley and the overall tech world has a diversity problem. There are aspects of our society that systematically under-develop and discourage minorities and women from following the path to becoming an engineer. It's a problem and it's one that our entire society needs to address.

But do we have an "engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture" problem? Hell no! We've got a whiny, non-tech contingent that is frustrated that engineers aren't willing to be high-level abstractions on top of computers problem, which is only a problem for those people who are shut out of guiding the direction of the tech industry by their lack of ability to actually do the things the tech industry does. The notion that we'd magically arrive at better decisions if we allowed more non-tech people to make those decisions is ludicrous and insulting. There's no reason to think that without the benefit of hindsight, those people would have made better decisions than were actually made. It's the same specious thinking that leads non-tech "idea" people to approach tech people and generously offer 5% of their sure-to-succeed company in exchange for the mere trifle of actually building it.

Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Execution beats opinions every time. People who are actually capable of doing the work don't give seats at the table just because "diversity." There's no reason to allow a PR person, like the one discussed in this article, to have outsized influence at a tech company. Engineers seek out engineering-focused cultures because they want a greater degree of autonomy in their work and they want to have a larger influence on the success of their company. Changing that would just mean that the best engineers would choose to work elsewhere, even starting their own companies if need be. That's why we have engineering-focused cultures...because these companies need people that can actually do the work. They've proven that it's not hard to find the non-technical talent, so there's no need to put as much emphasis on that when it comes to the culture and leadership of the company.

The one exception to that that proves the point is the current demand for enterprise tech salespeople. We're reaching a point where that talent is in just as high a demand as technical people. And to the companies that need enterprise tech sales, the cultures are adapting to value those employees alongside engineers. But when I read articles like this one from the NYT, it just feels naive and entitled. If you want to be involved in determining the direction of the tech industry, provide a reason and a value proposition based in reality or your going to be ignored.

</comment><comment><USER36> No way! That's the New York Times' keystone problem as well!

</comment><comment><USER37> It is orthogonal to the Times article, but George Gilder's recent book "Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy" [1] offers a valuable perspective. His recent interview at the Stanford Hoover Institute [2] is compelling.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072NYKG2G/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072NYKG2G/) [2] [https://www.hoover.org/research/george-gilder-forget- cloud-c...](https://www.hoover.org/research/george-gilder-forget-cloud- computing-blockchain-future)

<comment><USER38> Cloud computing continues to boom, and blockchain continues to go nowhere. So far, he's wrong.

<comment> village-idiot Blockchain has got to be the biggest hype and no-show that I've seen since the original AI winter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sounds like Anahata could do with Includio! And so could Sillicon Valley if there is a lot of truth behind the book. Looking forward to reading it!

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the comments here, at least the popular ones, kind of reinforce the article's point about the existence of a monoculture. Or herd-like thinking.

Just a quick, back of the envelope, tally of the responses here shows a real tendency to focus on, let's call them "familiar" subjects. Vast majority of people are talking about left-right politics for instance. Or sex, race, sexual orientation type things. Or inequality. (ie-Housing affordability.) But none of these really contribute in any real way to the lack of diversity of ideas present when brainstorming, say, new uses for nanotech.

We do have a monoculture of beliefs. Everyone believes, for instance, that diversity only means political diversity. Or gender diversity. Or religious diversity. Etc. And so, that becomes the center of our focus. But political diversity, for example, is not even terribly valuable when brainstorming solutions. Gather some Stanford/Berkeley grads along with some impoverished, but clever Africans and Asians, and I'd bet you'd be able to hit on more innovative solutions to more problems than you ever would with a room full of political liberals and conservatives parroting their respective dogma.

Diversity of thought like that is difficult to achieve because, ironically, of our belief that diversity of thought means diversity of political thought. Or diversity of race. Or diversity of gender. Etc. (All of which are next to useless. Especially since all of that diversity is coming from the same overall culture and socioeconomic class in most cases.)

If you want the benefits that diversity of thought conveys, you can't look for comfortable substitutes for it, like religion, race, politics, sexual orientation, or gender. Going to find a religiously diverse team, which inevitably thinks like you, or a politically diverse team, which is even worse in terms of sameness, won't work. You have to go all the way. Not only should their thoughts be diverse, the fundamental way they _think_ should be diverse if that makes sense? (I once gave a presentation at Halliburton, and I can tell you, having someone around who thought about logistics in terms of donkeys was extremely helpful in terms of solution finding and problem solving.) If you're not willing to go all the way with diversity of thought, you're not going to get the benefits of diversity of thought.

You can hire more women, or conservatives, or muslims, or hispanics, but it won't really get you anywhere. You need people who think fundamentally differently than other team members. And you might even need people who think fundamentally differently to even _identify_ people who think fundamentally differently. You don't _FILL_ the team with those people, (you have to be able to get work done), but you should make sure a few of them are at the table if you want to reap those benefits.

<comment><USER40> I agree. You can force diversity in gender and race (eg. require 1 woman on your board), but they can all still think the same.

When I asked a few tech friends about launching my business, it was this: create a minimum viable product (MVP), apply to a start-up accelerator, get funding, eat ramen, do things that scale, do things that don't scale, move fast break things. That is "the way".

The instant my wife (business partner, computer illiterate, masters degree in marketing) heard of the MVP idea, she went on a mini-rant: "huh? what? Advertising is sooo expensive. No way are we spending all that money at launch to bring in people to see a minimum product. When customers come to our website, we'll have 5 seconds to hook them, so we better have all the features right in their face. If they don't see what they like, they're never coming back"...

Her perspective is so far from the tech scene that this happens repeatedly. Tech guys repeat what they read in some blog which then boggles my wife's mind.

In a different HN discussion regarding MBA degrees, it was stated a couple times that you could just read 2 books and get the MBA curriculum. They don't realize all the different perspectives that you get from business school discussions. It's not about the hard skills. In business school we spent a lot of time doing Harvard Business Cases and hearing from a diversity of opinions.

<comment><USER29> I agree that the prevalent culture tends to result in poorly fleshed out products, and your wife is right on this. I should note though, that technically, such a product is not actually an MVP. If customers come to the website and don't get hooked, it means it doesn't have enough features to be Viable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The New York Times is unable to write the truth here for fear of offending their readers: The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people. This is so obviously the case and they are going so far out of their way here to not mention it one can only conclude that they are attempting to mislead deliberately.

The reason the New York Times can't say "Silicon Valley is completely 100% liberal and that is a serious problem" is because most Liberal people genuinely believe they are the disruptive punk rockers who are fighting against the evil forces of darkness. In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal.

But if you write that down as the Times, you immediately become a target for political attack. So they take the easy road here which is vaguely mentioning some foggy, abstract term "monoculture."

We know what monoculture means. It isn't a conservative republican monoculture.

I work in this industry, 90% of my coworkers and colleagues universally agree and emphatically support diversity of all types. They talk about it all the time, hold diversity workshops etc. nothing much has changed.

So get out of here with this fake monoculture Orwellian nonsense.

<comment><USER42> some americans have really weird meanings for some words.

such as left to mean center-right, and liberal to mean companies employing dozens of lobbyists trying to influence a very strong State.

oh! and "decadent" as a praise for chocolate. that is the worst.

<comment><USER43> _some americans have really weird meanings for some words._

 _such as left to mean center-right_

Political Compass put me at center-left. Some people in the Bay Area have tried to call me a Republican. Differing Points of View can be weird. That's what Diversity is all about.

<comment><USER44> Come to Europe to get a different perpective. I would guess Bay Area liberals would be placed somewhere slightly left / liberal of center over here. And neo-cons in terms on capatalism. I can only guess what I would be called in the US. Perspective is everything I guess.

<comment><USER43> The Political Compass test I took was European.

<comment><USER44> Ok, that is strange. There is, it seems, more than one political axis. What kind of test did you take? Now I'm curious to find out what I'm classified as.

<comment><USER43> _Ok, that is strange. There is, it seems, more than one political axis._

Nowadays, the authoritarian/anti-authoritarian axis is the most important one.

<comment><USER44> There is nothing to say against that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does it feel like 1999? - <AUTHOR> In the late '90s, dot-com era, every day was a party on Wall Street. The market was up 4 days out of 5. In the first week of 1999, AMZN popped 49.4%, and the NASDAQ finished the year +77.1%.
I'm getting that same, strange sensation of 'giddy dread' that I had that year, like I'm having a fantastic time at a great party that I know is about to end with constables and handcuffs.
Anyone else? <comment><USER2> Wikipedia - Irrational Exuberance

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance)

</comment><comment><USER3> i was too young to tell but it seems most people are expecting a market correction/crash. Usually when you're expecting, people hold their grounds which becomes a full-filling prophecy, ultimately triggering the correction/crisis. But it's not happening... What's going on!?

<comment><USER4> In investing it's usually when the crowd starts believing the bull run that it's at its end.</comment></comment>


Markup Macro Processor - <AUTHOR> https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/markup-macro-processor/ <comment> crooked-v 'Not many people use markup' seems to overlook Wikipedia, which is probably the great mass use of markup by ordinary people today. It's a shame that it's so gross to work with, though.

</comment><comment><USER2> "Markup? Who uses markup?

Not many people any more, Markdown being a small exception. Although you can also count Latex with its macros as a kind of markup."

yeah there's this weird old thing called Hyper Text Markup Language that I hear isn't used for anything anymore.

<comment><USER3> "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> TLDR: Author's disregard of the history of markup languages leads him to design his own for unconvincing reasons.

        Originally, markup seemed like a great idea.

Originally and currently, markup languages represent documents very well.

        However those days are gone.

No, all that's gone are the late 1990's / early 2000's irrational overreach and misapplication of markup languages to RPC (e.g. SOAP), build configuration (e.g. ant), etc.

        The main reason that Good Old Fashioned Markup (GOFM)
        has been abandoned is that traditional systems have
        no abstraction mechanism.

Established markup languages have not been abandoned for representing documents.

        There's nothing corresponding to functions (in a
        functional language) or methods (in an OO language).

Descriptive markup languages (e.g. XML, HTML, etc) have no such functional or procedural abstraction mechanism by design. Procedural markup languages (e.g. PostScript, troff, TeX, etc) do, but the article offers no clear statement regarding how _Markup Macro Processor (MPP)_ improves on existing mechanisms.

Absent in general are any explanation of where MPP fits in this space and any justification of why MPP merits consideration presently.

        There's XSLT and other proposals but they're so complex
        they're not suitable for non-techies, in my opinion.

XSLT is wonderfully powerful for transforming XML but was never intended to be "suitable for non-techies."

        [...]

The article goes on to describe a templating system for the author's non- standard markup language that appears to blend JavaScript, CSS, and DOM manipulation. No attempt is made to describe its advantages over React's JSX -- JSX isn't even mentioned.

At this point, I moved on (and regretted the little consideration already given). A new markup language has a high hurdle to clear to justify consideration in 2020. I see nothing new and nothing of value here over existing, official or de facto standard markup languages or templating systems.</comment>


[video]Paper prototypes transformed magically into editable digital wireframe - <AUTHOR> http://uxpinapp.com UXPin app let designers and developers start their work on paper and move it smoothly into wireframing App.<p>Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ynJoeoF4AU <comment><USER2> Signed up 10 seconds in to the video, looking forward to trying it out.</comment>


Twitter / venturehacks - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/venturehacks <comment><USER2> Why is this posted on HN? It's a link to a Twitter account.</comment>


Show HN: Ruby gem turned into SaaS product to speed up tests in an optimal way - <AUTHOR> https://knapsackpro.com/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=Show_HN&utm_campaign=knapsackpro <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I turned my open source ruby gem knapsack into indie SaaS product. I was inspired by sidekiq gem. Here is the short story:

In 2014 I had a problem with large test suite in my customer Ruby on Rails project. I developed the open source gem knapsack to split tests among CI nodes in parallel.

In 2015 I had an idea to turn it into small SaaS product and by the end of the year, I had a first early adopter Buildkite team.

This year I released a new solution to dynamically split RSpec tests among CI nodes and I tested it with a few companies like Pivotal, VTS, Namely.

On one hand would be great to live in a world with small and fast test suites but on the other hand, we know how it is in the reality. There are large projects with dozen minutes or several hours test suite time execution.

I also wrote the article inspired by work we've done with one of my customers: [http://docs.knapsackpro.com/2017/auto-balancing-7-hours- test...](http://docs.knapsackpro.com/2017/auto-balancing-7-hours-tests- between-100-parallel-jobs-on-ci-buildkite-example)

I'm curious if there are similar problems with getting optimal time execution for large test suite across multiple CI nodes in projects done in other languages than Ruby. Have you experienced that problem? I'm thinking about building my tool in a different language and would be nice to test solution on the real project.

I'd love to hear your story about working with big test suites and what languages & tools you use. :)</comment>


Categories or Tags or both? - <AUTHOR>

HubPages.com, the startup where I work, has recently added three-level categories in addition to tags.  This goes against the much of the current thinking in web design right now (for example gmail).
We found in our experience that tags are not enough.  We believe that adding categories in addition to tags will increase search engine traffic and make it easier to navigate between "hubs" (our term for articles published on HubPages).
What do you think?  Do categories have a place in web sites or are tags enough?  So far, the response to HubPages has been mostly positive (see blog.hubpages.com). <comment><USER2> I've struggled with this, too, both in my web work and work for clients. What I've come to is, yes, you can use both, but only if the categories are tightly controlled.

For example, a site could have main categories that describe the _type_ of content (essay, photograph, video) and then use tags to describe what the content is about. That way, the content is sortable by type (ie category) and content (ie tag).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. If you I understand you correctly, you are saying that a category should be a higher level of abstraction than a tag.</comment></comment>


Canada Needs Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.financialpost.com/executive/story.html?id=3067469

<comment><USER2> Meh. Kind of a content-free article. And it repeats the old saw about entrepreneurs being risk-takers. The evolving wisdom seems to be that successful entrepreneurs are actually risk-averse. They just happen to be people who can effectively analyze, manage and minize risk.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, but it points out one thing by glaring omission: while Canada may well need entrepreneurs, why would entrepreneurs need Canada?

More specifically entrepreneurs need a good environment in which to do their thing and as this article mentions, but only a bit, Canada just doesn't provide that environment.

Heck, I had no idea until it was reversed that foreign startup investment was impractical due to needless red tape. That fact and Canada's long delay in fixing it tells you rather a lot.

Also telling are the three suggestions for improvement which are all top-down, governmental sort of things.

BTW, how many top universities in Canada are private vs. public?</comment></comment>


"Politics is showbiz for ugly people" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw4SGsZZaYA# Bob Geldof, activist und rock star, speaks in this video about euro crisis, the lack of good politics and investment opportunities in Africa."Growth rates in Africa are even higher than in india oder china", says Geldof. <comment><USER2> Great. Didn't know that much about the situation in Africa. Sound like a paradise for entrepreneurship.</comment>


Why is my adwords bounce rate almost 100% - <AUTHOR>

www.ServiceVines.com
The google ads are targeted to people looking for landscaping or lawn care bids.   My normal bounce rate is around 40%
Is it the design?  Suggestions welcome <comment><USER2> Landing page relevance. It looks great, but its not obviously relevant. If one of the keywords you are bidding on is: lawn care bids, for example, then you should display that phrase somewhere in the middle of the site, instead of : "Companies want your business Let them compete for it " Say: "Get cheap lawn care bids. Complete your landscaping for less! Post a job now to get the lowest priced bids in town from professionals."

</comment><comment><USER3> It might be the keywords you are bidding on.</comment>


We Could Be Denmark - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/denmark-nordic-welfare-universal-social-democracy-workers-solidarity-race/ <comment><USER2> Ethnic homogeneity isn't the only reason comparing the US to Denmark doesn't make much sense, it's also due to population. Denmark is a tiny country with a population of 5.7 million people. That's about the population of Wisconsin.

The United States is a federation of self-governing states within which there are open borders and free trade...just like the European Union. The United States has a population of 320 million people, while the EU has a population of a similar order of magnitude: around 500 million. To many voters, the idea of enacting broad social welfare programs in the United States sounds just as infeasible as enacting similar programs in the whole European Union. California is different from Ohio, both of which are different from Georgia.

If we want to use Denmark and the Nordic countries as examples for our policies, we should move towards the republican (small r) idea of decentralization so that the states can enact such systems. Today, I pay roughly 30% of my income in taxes to the federal government, and 10% of my income in taxes to the state government. This should be the other way around - 10% to the Federal government and maybe 30% to my state. Maybe Wisconsin can have a single payer healthcare system, California can have a universal multi- payer system (like Germany), and Texas can have a universal multi-payer system like that in Switzerland.

TL;DR - We could be more like the European Union.

<comment><USER3> The EU has actual laws about things like paid time off, wages, and health-care though. Oh, and privacy, and human rights. And it has parliamentary systems that represent people more than the current American system.

I agree with the article that we ought to be able to impose some useful minimums in the USA, just like in the EU.

<comment><USER4> "...it has parliamentary systems that represent people more than the current American system."

The EU is composed of seven major institutions, only one of which has direct representation by voters (the EU parliament), and the number of representatives of each country is roughly proportional to their size, so any given voter of a small EU country has effectively zero representation (not good). Not defending America where our unelected bureaucrats often have more control over citizen's lives than elected officials, but the EU is very far from a democratic, representative system.

<comment><USER5> Note the U.S. has survived 240 yrs including the existential crisis of the civil war as well as many lesser challenges. It's proven.

The EU has been around for a much shorter time but it is in crisis now as much as it would like to deny it.

<comment><USER6> The US and the EU were founded on very very different principals.

The EU started as a trade agreement and when the EU was officially founded one of the founding principals was that it would never attempt to supersede or replace national sovereignty, which has clearly not been the case for the past decade if not longer.

The EU also has fundamental flaws in it's institution and probably the worse monetary institution currently in existence which is the ECB.

The EU needs to either scale back and go back to it's trade agreement roots or stop pretending it's not a quasi federation and just go on with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dane here.

Our health insurance - an important part of our welfare system - started out as a guild benefit for workers, then it were a part of unions and finally something on a national level (I skipped a few steps).

The absolutely must have part is "solidarity". What does that even mean? It means you feel part of something tight where you owe the others, in that "something", your help and compassion, even financially.

Ethnic homogeneity isn't needed, but solidarity is. It is a feeling nurtured and grown over many years and it is easily broken if abused. It requires eternal vigilance, to keep that feeling of "we owe each other" alive despite all the distrust.

It is a constant battle against unpleasant emotions and real abuse, and you need to pick the fight in a way that ensures that you can win it. Denmark is almost too big to keep that alive.

<comment><USER8> Yep, there are many good articles that cover this: the working and living conditions in Europe and the US diverged thanks to the gutting of the big unions in the 70s, while they stayed strong in places like Germany. There are several metrics that correlate to support this idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty convinced that there are critical upper bounds to population size and national surface area that guarantee that approaches that work great for small, tractable nations just cannot scale.

So step 0: Reduce the population of the US to the population of the metro Atlanta area (5.7 million in 2010).

Step 1: reduce the area of the US to the state of Maine (roughly).

<comment><USER10> So you mean we can do it on a state level and it'll work?

<comment><USER9> To some extent. Ever visited Vermont?

<comment><USER2> Were states to implement such systems at the state level, I fully expect the smaller states to consolidate and form alliances of their welfare systems so as to achieve economies of scale faster.

<comment><USER9> Hey, that's almost like an _exchange_ of some kind...

<comment><USER2> My hypothetical was for them to socialize it with a shared single-payer system. Think about it this way: all of the small states in New England decide to create a government run insurance (like Denmark) by pooling all of their taxpayers.

An exchange would be more like a multi-payer system rather than a single-payer system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The tradeoffs of homeogeneity and diversity in democracy strikes me as an extremely important topic now, and I was looking forward to the article addressing the most comprehensive study on the issue (that I know of) by Robert Putnam [0].

Unfortunately it seems the author simply acknowledges this as the predominant view, takes a single study on immigration to "prove(!)" the idea wrong, and then credits Nordic success to the "Class struggle" as a mere assertion. But perhaps I missed something.

[0]- [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract)

</comment><comment><USER12> Alternate title: We Could Be Venezuela.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's tempting to think we can mimic the example of a small country, but it's unfortunately quite difficult to know if the policies mattered, or if it has to do with cultural and economic forces that the government doesn't have much influence over.

Imagine you take the US, and you just cut it into small "nations" arbitrarily. Despite having the same laws and policies, you'd see a huge amount of diversity when it comes to crime rates, wealth, income distribution, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe. But identity politics mixed with big welfare surely is a recipe for disaster.

</comment><comment><USER15> While it's true that, a priori, there's no reason that ethnic homogeneity should be a prerequisite for a welfare state, this idea is misleading because it supposes that all ethnic groups contribute to the welfare state equally. I know that it's modern dogma that all groups are equal in all respects, but hear me out: what if they're not?

What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence? This difference will damage the social cohesion necessary for a welfare state to exist. In the real world, we observe huge group differences in productivity, educational attainment, conscientiousness, fecundity, and other characteristics, and in the real world, we see that mixing groups does indeed damage social cohesion. I understand that this observation is unpopular --- but this unpopularity doesn't make it wrong.

I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good.

Others have commented that it's the size of the country that makes welfare impossible --- that it just doesn't work over a certain size. As a practical theory, I think that's true, but I don't think size itself is the root cause. I think that as a country's population increases, the visibility of low- contributing groups increases, and it's this visibility that reduces the will to create a global welfare state.

<comment><USER16> I think this is quite right. But this is even true if the racism is unfounded. The mere illusion that some ethnic groups are low-contributing will weaken the cohesion of society. So in this backwards way, racism becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy.

<comment><USER15> The way out of this trap is to emphasize the shared identity of people in the country instead of encouraging them to think of themselves as members of distinct ethnic groups within that country.

It's for that reason that the identity politics of today's social justice advocates infuriates me. These activists can't see that their divisiveness is actually bringing them further from their goals.

<comment> aaron-lebo It's too bad that you can't voice the opinion that unity is a good thing without getting downvoted or criticized.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please review my startup - Stockyoo.com - <AUTHOR> I've been working hard on this for a few weeks now (around looking after my 3 month old son), and I'm about to do my pre-launch test (likely a few hundred GBP worth of Facebook ads targeted at a young demographic) to see if there is much interest.
I'd love it if you could check out the site and let me know what you think of it (concept, copy, design etc).
One thing I'm interested to know is if it's immediately obvious what the purpose of the site is at this stage, or if I need to make it more obvious.
You can find the site at http://stockyoo.com
Thanks! <comment><USER3> Based solely on the domain name, I assumed your site had to do with financial stocks, rather than stock photos.

If you want a descriptive domain name, it looks like these are available:

* STOCKMOBILEPHOTOS.COM * STOCKCELLPHOTOS.COM * CAMSTOCKPHOTOS.COM

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, I might actually click on a domain called "stockyoo.com" out of curiosity, whereas I would assume something called "camstockphotos.com" is probably a scam site or the poor product of a domain squatter.

Then again, I never buy stock photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I was thinking... I'm looking to build a memorable brand name (more like digg, reddit, google etc) and a domain packed with keywords isn't the best way to achieve that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are types of users you want to attract: buyers and sellers/submitters. It seems like the home page is geared towards the sellers, which makes sense because you need to get a bunch of photos for it to be useful to buyers.

The one thing I would note is that it's not quite obvious what the photos will be used for, which may make it hard to determine what type of pictures you want. I was able to infer that it's for stock photography, but I'm pretty sure I only know what that is because I do web development.

One more tip that's a little off-topic: If this takes off (and hopefully it will) you'll be getting a deluge of photos that will need categorization and moderation. You should check out <http://houdinihq.com/> which offers an easy API for using Mechanical Turk. You can email me at email@example.com and I'll hook you up with the guy who runs it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - looks useful! I'm hoping to get users to do their own tagging after the photo has been approved, but I'll still need to approve tags which would likely become a bit of a bitch after a while - a way of automating will definitely be useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate that initially you need photos and maybe that is why the site is geared as it is, but what you really need to be testing is if you can sell the photos, will people come to you to buy them.

I'd assume the "cell phone generation" is a slightly younger mix, one person telling someone else that they managed to top up their phone credit this month from the money made from selling cell phone pictures is going to be all the advertising you need, could be very viral in that regard.

But marketing those photos to potential buyers is probably where the hard work begins, and in my opinion your site says nothing to point me in the direction of buying photos, what I could use them for etc. iStockPhoto, Getty Images and the like don't target photographers on their homepage, they target people who use photos and you need to do that to.

Awesome idea though, I really like it, I can really see how you can make money from it and how people might find it useful. Being able to geotag and search against that would be amazing too - concerts, riots, natural disasters etc etc. Good luck. (Future feature, let Twitter trends create a list of "Photos we need now" so that when photographers come to your site they know what bloggers might be looking for).

<comment><USER7> I agree that finding buyers will be the big thing here.

I suspect a large, untapped market for this sort of thing for local newspapers as the buyers. Make sure there's good local search.

Photos of a fire in the town, or some store's opening, or any other impromptu news-worthy event will be captured via cameraphone before reporters hit the scene and these photos will be of good worth to the local papers.

<comment><USER8> Why should local papers use your service when they can ask their readers to send them the photos directly? At least here in Switzerland there are already newspapers doing this.

<comment><USER6> News breaks, you write an article and you go to this site and find a photo for your article and post article with photo.

Or you post the article with a message (like BBC does too) saying "Are you there, send photos etc", go back update the article with someones photo etc.

Yes I know readers will automatically send some photos in, but a _live stock library_ is a really good idea to complement readers photos (and whilst I might send a photo to the BBC, my local paper is pretty low down my list - <USER2> appreciate that differs on quality of local though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: <http://stockyoo.com>

</comment><comment><USER9> I had a similar idea a little while ago, but centered around news and event photos. Send in your geo-tagged photos a political demonstration, an accident, a crime or a celebrity fling... Journalists could then search for hot spots around the world with a lot of activity right now... maybe something to think about. Good luck!

<comment><USER10> a french startup is doing that: <http://www.citizenside.com/en> quite successfully

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's pretty hard to break into this market as most of the big players are already over-saturated with photographs in most standard categories. It might make more sense to focus on a specific subset of the market that's under-represented (shots of people doing activities, etc.) or local news events.

Also given your audience you might need to be extra careful with model releases, because if the people in the photographs are minors their parents will have to sign a model release and not the subjects themselves.

The pricing seems off as well, if someones going to pay for a photo they'll probably be willing to pay more than $1. Also if the photographers are only earning $0.50/cents and only a tiny fraction of photos are actually sold, I'm guessing your photographers will get frustrated with not earning money quickly and leave your service.

</comment><comment><USER12> "As long as you can email them to us" - is this the only mechanism for sending the photos? I realise you might have written this to simplify the page, but my first reaction was that I'd rather be able to upload them. Then on the 'Photo Guide' I do read that I can upload them. Perhaps instead of that sentence on the home page it would be better to link to the Photo Guide.

Looks like a pretty good idea though :) Good luck with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to make it easy for people to share the photos straight from their mobile device. I know a lot of phones don't have built in upload facilities (e.g. the iphone) so I wanted to make sure there was a mechanism to these people to get the photos to us. I had considered MMS but decided email would be the best solution in this day and age.

I definitely will allow browser based uploads at some point in the future.

<comment><USER13> iPhone definitely has upload facilities. I share photos from my phone directly to Facebook. I know it's not supported in Mobile Safari, but it's possible. I'd implement something like swfupload so that it's easy to upload the photos on to your site.

<comment><USER14> Isn't swfupload flash?

But, anyways it won't work on something like the iPhone because there is not folder structure for it to look for something. You have to build a iphone app like Facebook did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really interesting. For people trying to make money, the barrier to entry is minimal. Moreover, since people can upload right after you take a picture, you get rid of the bulk upload headache.

People are dying to make money on the fly. Think about the popularity of Mechanical Turk and other work at home sites.

One thought: Because it's so easy to post images, you may end up with a lot of subpar photos.

</comment><comment><USER16> It sounds like a good idea. Why don't you explain the revenue process using catchy graphics like: 1- Take photo 2- Submit 3- Profit!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely need to tart things up a bit, the homepage is currently a merge of what will be the final site (focused equally on buyers/sellers) and my test page to gather email addresses.

I might see if I can fit this in - perhaps where the current text blocks are at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Have you done any research into how to price the photos and who the buyers would be? $1 seems a little low. If news agencies would be the target, I would assume they'd be willing to pay more. You may also want to allow people to put up Creative Commons licensed photos. It could get you more users, which would lead to more people looking at the photos.

</comment><comment><USER18> How are you going to handle gathering model releases for the individuals in the photos? For example, iStockPhoto has detailed requirements on which photos require a model release (<http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_9.0_modelrelease.php>).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I'm not sure if this will fly, but as I understand it, getting a model release is the photographers responsibility. I will simply require them to "agree" to a statement that declares they have the permission of all people in the photo.

<comment><USER19> While you can probably indemnify yourself against legal responsibility of a photographer not getting a model release, based on your target photographers (teens and twenty somethings taking photos with camera phones i.e. in a hurry), this is something that could quickly kill your reputation if someone uses one of your images and gets sued because the photographer never got a model release. One suggestion on this would be to have something in your mobile app that would allow the user to collect the model release at the time of capture. I'm sure there are a lot of legal issues with what would be considered an appropriate signature.

One of the reasons people feel comfortable using crowd sourced stock photo sites like ShutterStock and iStockPhoto is that they are willing to take up to a certain $ amount of the legal responsibility you get sued for using an image (as long as you use it within their guidelines). If your target buyers are news outlets (who are allowed to use images more liberally than for commercial use) this might not be a huge issue, but I'd be kind of wary about using a stock photo site that basically took the stance that I had to counter sue the photographer. Not a idea killer, but it's worth looking at what the established players do to see if it makes sense from your business perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great idea! I agree with retroafroman - home page should have some examples - and I'd do an example photo next to, or composited on top of, the "end result" of the photo used in a website. This way people who don't understand the world of stock photography will visually see why people might want their snaps.

</comment><comment><USER13> Concept is great, copy is ok. I'd be more concerned about finding buyers for the photos than getting the photos.

Tailor your homepage towards the buyers and run Facebook ads along the lines of 'Pizza for your cell phone pics'. Instead of buying FB ads, why not spam the craigslist gigs section?

Where are you planning on advertising for buyers?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd personally like to see some more examples. If you already have some content, it would be nice to have a link to a sample gallery (or top pictures, or something) on the front page. The examples of what not to send are good, but what are some examples of what you want?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment... we have pretty much nothing, but I'm going to submit a bunch of my photos and get some friends and family to do the same to get a small user base going before it goes properly live. At the moment, I just want to gather a few email addresses to see if people are interested in the idea at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a neat concept - if you have indexed, up to date content, then people will pay for it - particularly the news outlets. They buy images all the time.

Can you tag images as they arrive in near real time?

A twitter for real-time photos, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER23> Getty images bought a company like this in the mid 2000's. They did current- event photography from phones. Might be something worth looking into.

<comment><USER22> That company was iStockPhoto.com, if anyone is curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Using IE8 at work and there is an IE conditional showing through on the page just above the photo header:

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I'll check that out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is a photo of Virgin balloon really copyright infringement, or is it just you taking the safe side? (referring to Photo Guide)

</comment><comment><USER26> Needs a better tagline than "Make easy money from the photos on your camera phone!" How about, "Profit From Your Pictures!"

<comment><USER27> I would also mention somewhere that this is a marketplace for photos. There is a heavy focus on selling photos but almost none on buying them until the third box at the bottom.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's deliberate. At the moment, we don't have any users in either category - we have to get the photos in before we can start selling them, so that's my priority to start with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On the Photo-Guide it might be a good idea to provide 'What to send' examples to contrast your 'what not to send'.</comment>


Connecticut Teen Made a Drone That Fires a Handgun – And Police Say It's Legal - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/drone-gun-connecticut_55af1016e4b0a9b94852f95b?

<comment><USER2> That's pretty cool, honestly.

People are just getting scare-mongered about drones the same way they've been made scared of firearms. A great many things which are dangerous and foolish aren't illegal, and shouldn't be made so.

I like the argument "but but but what if the drone accidentally delivers a handgun to a kid think of the children"\--kinda reaching for straws.

</comment><comment><USER3> The rare double whammy. Makes both gun owners AND drone enthusiasts look irresponsible.

Also I'm thinking this could be filed under "Any other weapon" for Title II purposes.</comment>


Move over facial recognition, Stanford releases prototype for anal recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailydot.com/debug/smart-toilet-anal-recognition/ <comment><USER2> Wasn't there a Dave Chapelle skit about exactly this?</comment>


SIMD Intro:Comparing SIMD Assembly with C on a Trivially Concurrent Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.dataden.tech/programming/power-simd-assembly-instructions/ <comment><USER2> Good writeup!

Don't mean to be nitpicky...but I noticed some minor issues in your article, which I will list them below...

* the instructions for CPU are in bare ISA binary code, and not assembly. Although there is generally a 1-1 mapping between assembly and binary code (assuming they are well-formed), but you cannot run assembly code directly on CPU. You have to assemble them into ISA binary code first...

* at this assembly level, their corresponding ISA binary instructions are only atomic with regards to the regular users...but for CPU, the binary code would be broken down into microcode and then they will be executed...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! Nitpicky readers are the kind of readers I look forward to, since they're the ones that help me learn the most. That's why I thought this site would be a good place to post. That said, I learned those two things in class, but I see I didn't make them come accross at all. I'll see how to make that clearer.

Thanks for your reply!

<comment><USER2> Sure...You are welcome! And if you are interested in processor level parallelism, here is a very good article to read for start...

[http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/](http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll definitely check that out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Small biz owners willing to be interviewed about crypto? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm doing some market research & validation (or invalidation) for a startup that is building software tools for businesses to use Ethereum and accept Ether.
If you own a small business, would you be willing to answer some questions about accepting and using cryptocurrency? I'm looking for the whole spectrum of owners:
- those who aren't interested in accepting crypto & why
- those who have been considering it for some time, but haven't yet set it up
- those who currently are accepting it and have been paid in cryptocurrency
Offering $5 (bootstrapper's budget) Amazon gift cards as compensation for your time!
If you respond to this post, I'll reply to your message with a google hangout invite.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Hey, shoot me a message. I'm working in the crypto space though, so not sure it's perfect - but we can have a chat. Email's in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I didn't see an email in your profile, want to add it?</comment></comment>


Google Ads Removes Search Terms for 28% of Paid Search Budgets - <AUTHOR> https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/google-ads-removes-search-terms-for-28-percent-of-paid-search-budgets/ <comment><USER2> People were already quite unhappy with Google since the ads performance, especially since the start of the pandemic, was already subpar and the ROI was very bad compared to other platforms. But, sure, why not upset them further..</comment>


Apache Ant 1.10.6 Released - <AUTHOR> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201905.mbox/%3C814751dc-5906-0385-4d8b-036d8d98ebb7%40apache.org%3E <comment><USER2> As the person who first committed Ant to an ASF repository, it is astonishing that people are still working on this project.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are your favorite alternatives to ant? We use it at $corp but nobody there really likes it, most of all because of xml

<comment><USER4> We've switched to Gradle. If I had to do it over again I would have waited until Gradle kotlin as I am not much of a groovy fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For better or worse, it seems Ant lost the war to Maven (and more recently, others.)

I still appreciate the simplicity of Ant, though.</comment>