In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.boredpanda.com/real-time-translator-ear-waverly-labs/ <comment><USER2> Sorry to sound so negative, but it seems something halfway between an April Fool and some Kickstarter "scam" (possibly in good conscience, but still).

Both voice recognition and translation are HARD problems, for which even companies with tons of resources and talent like Apple and Google were able to provide only sketchy and partial solutions.

No to mention issues like battery life, connectivity (hard to believe this device would be able to work without a permanent connection to cloud servers doing the heavy lifting, like Siri does) etc...

The FAQ is simply "too good to be true".

[http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird- and...](http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and-launch- date/)

<comment><USER3> I'm also skeptical. This is a problem where it's fairly easy to get 80% there but nearly impossible to get 100% there. Most speech recognition apps have trouble with thick accents. From there, imagine stumbling speech or people who change their thoughts in the middle of a sentence. Then there's the lag between input and output - you often can't translate a phrase or sentence until you know the whole thing and then you're adding computer computation time onto it.

I think this type of technology is inevitable, but I think we're still 50 years away from it being ubiquitous.

<comment><USER4> Nevermind thick accents. What about languages that have tens, even hundreds, of dialects?

Slovenian, for instance, has only 2,000,000 speakers. Yet there are 56 officially classified dialects. [1] They all vary in important ways, sometimes to the point that a speaker from one dialect has trouble understanding a speaker from another.

French is another language with hundreds of dialects. [2] My girlfriend is French, but when she goes to the Caribbean, she has trouble following conversation because their French is so much different than hers.

English makes for a wonderful example too. Not only does it have hundreds of dialects, there are at least 4 different Englishes. UK, US, Aussie, African- American Vernacular. They're starting to show signs of splitting into separate languages. They already have differences in vocabulary and grammar.

Then you can add slang on top of all this.

Oh and to add to all this confusion: In most European countries people learn the standardized form of their native language almost as if it was a foreign language.

I don't think we'll ever get to 100% accuracy with a tool like this. Even humans themselves can't do 100%.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects#List_of_diale...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects#List_of_dialects)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French)

<comment><USER5> In South Texas, I once encountered a man speaking English with a very strong Acadian accent. I had to listen to him speak for several minutes before I even realized that what he was speaking was in fact English. Accents and dialects are incredibly complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not wet and squirmy like a babel fish, but I fear the consequences of it being able to fully translate product/sales-speak into engineer-speak and vice-versa.

Like Douglas Adams wrote:

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

<comment><USER7> an ambivalent perspective from Vernor Vinge, aFUtD

"Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm skeptical we'll be seeing this device. I guess it'll mainly depend if they'd get funded and even then I only see this as a short lived gimmick. The machine translation software just isn't good enough. It's unmissable to me, but for real time translation, it's simply not there yet. Since they have to license the speech recognition and machine translation technologies, in the end they'll just be competing with bluetooth headsets that are suited for picking up voices in conversations and they'll simple draw the shortest straw.

<comment><USER9> Agree. What does the earplug device offer that regular bluetooth headsets don't. The actual translation is happening in the phone or cloud anyway.

<comment><USER8> Well, the regular bluetooth headsets wont do the job just yet, you want the microphone to be directional forward facing to keep it simple, preferably adaptable but that's more complex. The regular bluetooth headsets are aimed at picking up your own voice. So you'd want something more hearing aid like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to imagine that it will work smoothly enough to be useful, at least right away, and more of an interesting gimmicky gadget. I'm looking forward to trying it regardless, assuming they succeed in releasing it (due September).

edit: Slightly misleading on their website. Says "Signup on the waitlist and be entered to win a FREE pair!" When you sign-up it then says they are giving away one per month and you can get one entry into the prize draw by doing certain things such as tweeting about them or liking them on FB, but that I have 0 entries for signing up to the waitlist. Meh, I would have signed up for updates anyway, and don't particularly care about a contest I'd likely not win, it's just the principle of misleading wording.

<comment><USER11> +1 the kind of company I just don't want to deal with.

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of x.ai. You sign up, they put you on a huge "waitlist" that moves slowly, and periodically remind you that you can jump big chunks of that list by spamming people about the product on social media.

Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.

<comment><USER13> > Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup > marketing strategy.

New?

<comment><USER12> Among _popular_ startups? The waiting list approach? New, at least for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of garbage really.

I desperately need something to translate Japanese into my ear, and I'm probably just good enough to relay my point back without the other party needing an eng->jp version, so I would be a prime customer for this gadget. But the technological accuracy is just not yet there in either speech recognition or translation.

<comment><USER15> I'm from Scotland, and on the rare occassions time I need to phone a US voice activated phone line (e.g. Expedia.com's), I have to put on a ridiculous American accent for the system to understand me.

This is a _hard_ problem.

<comment><USER16> Obligatory link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think making the device is the easy part, the hard part is doing the translation right in most of the cases, which both Google and Bing have been unable to do so far. 'Google Translate' app already has a communication mode where two people with different languages can talk, but if it worked good there was nothing preventing them to make such an earpiece.

<comment><USER7> They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20[ _], which is pretty often. But in a face to face conversation, with so much non-verbal communication going on, it may be more than enough. Very different from cold, isolated translation or online.

It's certainly far ahead of having no language, or trying to look up a phrase book.

BTW It's like "word lens" for audio [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens) Google bought and made it free. I've tried it, and it works, it's very cool. But I don't know if it's actually that useful, or even gets used much, in the field.

[_] EDIT sorry, those figures were just for speech recognition!

<comment><USER17> > _They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20_

Which set of languages is this stat about? For example, trying English with Hindi (they don't support it right now), though Google Translate is impressive, there are still a lot of mistakes (much more than 1 in 20). For English to Spanish, I assume the error rate would be lesser in comparison.

<comment><USER18> It isn't that better. Admittedly I am only learning Spanish, but I get odd or incorrect translations far more often than 1 in 20 and because I am a beginner, I don't throw really difficult cases at it.

This is also text only use so ignoring things like accents (was that a p, v or b?) which can make the whole thing even more difficult.

For other languages, like my native Slovenian, it is even more ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to see more audio augmented reality systems. Translation, taking baby cry down a notch, amplifying speech directed at you, autofiguring out best moment to tell you things you might need to know.

<comment><USER20> > taking baby cry down a notch

This could end badly. I think the whole purpose of babies crying is to ensure you do something about it.

Not that there's always a solution, but I'd rather be awoken by a loud, irritating cry frequently than not hear them when they might need me.

<comment><USER19> With baby everyting can go badly. I wasn't thinking about shutting out baby cry to get some sleep (sleeping with headphones?) but rather making it little less intrusive when it screems in your face and you are sufficiently aware that it does already. Also I was thinking about capping the volume of baby cry to some level (80dB?) not reducing it propotionately.

Besides, I'm not sure how the number of babies harmed because of not crying loud enough compares to the number of babies that were hurt because they cried too loud.

Loudness of baby cries is probably delicately finetuned for other times when incentive to feed you baby had to overcome the desire to feed youself bit more.

I think modern humans have enough other incentives to keep their babies alive and healthy.

Disclaimer: I have no children. I am not significantly bothered by other people babies crying.

<comment><USER21> > I wasn't thinking about shutting out baby cry to get some sleep (sleeping > with headphones?)

This is not the intended use, but people will figure out on their own and do it anyways...

Then, one day, a baby will die horribly or something, a solicitor will contact the parents... and profit!!! (or in your case, bankrupcy)

<comment><USER19> If you wanted to shut out your baby crying while you sleep you wouldn't use rigid earphones with partial baby cry noise cancellation. You's just buy flexible comfy earplugs for few cents and you can do it today.

You are right that lawyers scare the crap out of innovators though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How good are cell phone microphones? Could I hack up a similar device with my regular headset plugged into my phone and the phone picking up the speech and translating it and reading it back to me (Google Translate)? So basically phone/app doing all the work and using whatever headphone is available. I suppose the hard parts are identifying what originates from a person and the actual speech to text and back?

So far it seems like it could be build from existing blocks. Doesn't have to be great and can gradually improve...a worthy hack around project imo

I haven't checked in on CMU's Sphinx in a while but that was a speech-speech system I looked at for a bit. What are the state of the art building blocks for such a project? Would I want speech-text-speech (I assume this is easier?) or directly speech-speech?

Edit: This list seems useful: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software#Open_source_acoustic_models_and_speech_corpus)

<comment> r-w Doesn't seem far from what Google Translate already does; it's just a matter of automatically dictating the translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just don't see this working very well. The current language translation tools just are not good enough to support a proper conversation. Translating languages via technology is a hard problem and it's far from solved. Coupled with this fundamental problem is identifying speech accurately; something Siri fails to do regularly with my voice. If this thing gets built I am guessing it will be a novelty product.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Do you want... do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"

<comment><USER25> My hovercraft is full of eels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just the fact that they are listing their product on Indiegogo instead of Kickstarter signals to me that they _probably_ got shut when trying to publish their project on Kickstarter—who is trying hard to distance theirselves from these moonshot projects that are likely to disappoint consumers. If you don't have a really serious working prototype now, Kickstarter is super-duper hesitant to let you on their platform.

</comment><comment><USER27> Now, if there were a product that would have appropriately been called babelfish, this would have been it.

But no, "pilot". I guess yahoo copyrighted babelfish?

<comment><USER10> Could they trademark (it wouldn't be copyright) a term that they themselves copied from a work of fiction they don't own the copyright to, given that the context (i.e. what it does) isn't different to that in the work of fiction?

<comment><USER27> Yes - and yes, trademark, not copyright, pre-coffee conflation. Consider the Nexus line of phones, lifted directly from PKD's _Do Androids Dream_. Copyright is about area of applicability - I bet babelfish is trademarked for "translation services and products".

<comment><USER28> This is like as if I'd trademark "Quidditch" for a sports league where a sport is played with brooms, flying around, etc.

That shouldn't be possible, and hopefully any court would laugh at whoever claims to have a trademark on Babelfish.

<comment><USER27> Oddly, while I can find three trademarks, Yahoo isn't one of the holders.

[https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html)

[https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html)

[https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel- fish-85107190.htm...](https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel- fish-85107190.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seems like a scam, or at best a marketing lie. Voice recognition is still an experimental field that's very difficult to get right. Even today's professional voice recognition software requires some voice training. There's no way this thing can accurately pick up speech in a random environment.

And given that most voice recognition software require some decent hardware (think your phone or your pc). I doubt it's gonna fit into that tiny earpiece with today's hardware specs.

</comment><comment><USER30> This isn't necessarily possible for any two random languages. Not every language has a SubjectVerbObject order like English, and even if it does, each language has its own quirks with how the words are ordered. For example in spanish "un pez grande" = "a big fish", but if you translate in real time it comes out as "a fish big". Of course, an interpreter can reword it as "a fish, which is big, ..." but this is not always possible.

</comment><comment><USER31> What is wrong with you people? 7 hours old and only TWO mentions of Douglas Adams??

</comment><comment><USER32> Too good to be true. Seems like they are just trying to get some media traction to convince some VC for some funding or creating a footprint for themselves in the tech fraternity.

Yes I will be a cynical hypocrite when it hits the market with seamless performance and after I will purchase it.

Real life scenario:

French chick: Bonjour. es tu perdu?

Scrawny-geek: (All blushing and shit...Is she interested in me? put on "groundbreaking" Pilot earbuds)

FC: excusez moi mister!!

SG: _gives hand gesture to wait_

10 seconds time lapse

analog audio signals are converted to digital and then data buffer is sent to the smartphone via BT. Phone pre-process the raw data and sends it to Watson- Siri-Echo-Now-esque ultra system composed of signal processor then NLP then translator and it sends it back to the phone and phone does some more voodoo on it and sends it back to the Pilot via BT and plays it to its user.

SG: Oh. I am sorry mademoiselle. I am just trying to find direction to the bathroom.

FC: _lost and confused expressions appear as if she did not understand one word of English_

SG: _punching the air in frustration..wish this device could play the translation back to me in French_

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't wait for the mis-translation anecdotes to start pouring in ... maybe I should make a site to collect them :)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google- translat...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translate- error-as-pontes-spain-clitoris-food-festival-grelo-galicia)

</comment><comment><USER34> Considering the variety of French accents - Paris, regional France, Africa, Caribbean, Canadian, South East Asian, and guys like me in Texas and more - I'm rather skeptical this unit will work as seamlessly as the marketing video advertises. Just a thought. C'est mignonne, vraiment.

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember reading an "interactive" book as a kid (a book with numbered short episodes, and at the end of each one you are presented with a couple of choices how the story would continue, it was awesome) where the good guy was sent back in time by the bad guy to the wild west where he had to convince the indians to trust him and fight with him against the same bad guy, who liked to slaughter them for fun, or die with them. In order to understand the natives, he had some gadget implanted in his brain that translated their language directly into his own. I remember thinking "yeah right, never gonna happen." :)

This is probably far away from being able to translate languages perfectly, but still. The future came pretty fast.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is just Skype Translator coupled with an earpiece... :)

[https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype- translator/](https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-translator/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Just wondering if this is anything more than a in-ear bluetooth headset connected to an app that uses google translate as its backend? Because if yes, they would maybe have more success selling the app that you can use with the headphones you already own already and so making the user acquisition a bit smoother than buying a bluetooth headset...I guess more people would give less money for an app that gets updated than an headset that could potentially break... Unless there is some technology in the headset itself so it can work on its own without the app connected to it. Didn't see anything like that mentioned here though.

<comment><USER38> hope not the requirement for being online all the time is quite taxing especially if you use this abroad

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Its a scam

We have brilliant entrepreneur coming up with revolutionary idea no one had before(lol), sleek renders and good looking models, price point already set, all that and ... absolutely ZERO tech behind it.

lets set so double the killer delete select all

</comment><comment><USER40> Machine translation is so bad that I can't get excited.

</comment><comment><USER41> Always imagine everyone using tech like this, slowly using their own slang, then something goes wrong, devices die, and no one understands the slang languages each person now uses.

__

Person : Babel.

Person2: Babel?

Person : Babel!!

<comment><USER42> To a certain extent, this is equivalent to "imagine everyone's glasses fell off and broke".

Sure, these devices are more complex and only a handful of people know how they work, but by the time they spread through an entire civilization and we adapted to be unable to communicate without them... they'd be as robust as modern day glasses and you'd have repair services in every mall.

<comment><USER41> Maybe, maybe not, but agree that your version of the future is just, if not more, as possible.

That said, more complex things get, the more likely that something will be missed, an error made, and/or unaccounted for due to its not having been seen before. On the bright side, intentional disruption rarely have this sort of impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Or you can always use babel fish but it is a bit ticklish

</comment><comment><USER44> Nothing new here. As the article mentions, it's the Babelfish from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've wanted to build one myself since I read the book, but the fundamental problem of machines translating languages is still a very hard problem. This thing won't work.

</comment><comment><USER45> About a year ago someone tried hiring me to do this. At least to do research and report back with recommendations.

On one hand I think we've never been closer to being able to create this kind of product. On the other its still rife with complexity and edge cases. Reality is messy.

</comment><comment><USER46> if you type finnish into google translate, the results in english are pretty bad.

furthermore, google translate only manages the "written" finnish language... which nobody talks like. everyone uses "spoken" finnish which is not translated at all in google translate.

i wonder how many other languages have this property.

</comment><comment><USER47> This product indeed sounds too good to be true but we'll probably have something that delivers within 10 years. Add that to a virtual assistant and the future could be very different. _Automatthew 's Friend_ by Stanislaw Lem explores one possible scenario.

</comment><comment><USER48> I must admit that I'm highly skeptical. Show me a working app for my phone that does voice translation, and then I'll believe that something like this works.

</comment><comment><USER49> "came up with the idea"

</comment><comment><USER50> "The creator says he came up with the idea when he met a French girl." and just like that he came up with the whole concept of real time language translation, something the world has never even considered before /snark

<comment><USER51> Annoyingly worded, but probably means "attained the drive for pursuing the idea" instead.

If it was a more common realisation that it is not the idea but the drive that is rare then we would have a lot fewer hot air inventors.

<comment><USER49> Well that's what makes it funny it's not even that it's just general advancements in this area makes this a very natural thing to pursue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> For business yes, for private? No thank you, you'll lose a lot of knowledge, understanding, mental skills by not trying to learn/understand a new language.</comment>


What Stanford learned building Facebook Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_stanford_learned_building_facebook_apps.php

<comment><USER2> No in-depth conclusions just a bunch of general observations that could be applied to any sort of development.

<comment><USER3> Nevertheless, it's still interesting to note that 1) Standford had a class where they had students building Facebook apps 2) there were no breaking news from the experiment.</comment></comment>


Don't Build Integrations - <AUTHOR> https://www.integrationsjs.com <comment><USER2> Awesome - nice to see it coming out of beta as a fully fledged product of its own! I feel like the widget-era is doing a come back as people realised that APIs are cool but only work for developers...and that's super exciting to see, reminds me of my geocities days where everyone could build a web presence and then extend it with all kind of fun widgets ( my favorite was an mp3 player widget)

<comment><AUTHOR> your geocities days :)

<comment><USER2> Haha yeah! others before me, and after, I am sure will remember what I am talking about</comment></comment></comment>


Study Finds Electric Vehicles Produce More Particulate Matter Than Diesels - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3579878/Electric-hybrid-eco-friendly-cars-air-toxins-dirty-diesels-say-scientists.html <comment><USER2> Misleading headline. More tire and brake particulates because of higher vehicle weights. Not engine exhaust! Furthermore the increased brake particulates reported in their model are in question because regenerative braking eliminates a lot of friction brake usage.</comment>


Introduction to ANN and Deep Learning – Sebastian Raschka - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rasbt/deep-learning-book <comment><USER2> A near-empty repository for a yet-to-be-published book... What am I missing?!</comment>


Amazon's subtle slam of the iPad  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/02/amazons-latest-kindle-ad.html

<comment><USER2> I think people should stop comparing these gadget. The kindle is a single purpose device, and it was made for reading books. The Ipad is something very different, and you can read books too. But, they are in so diferent markets, that this "slam" shoudnt be there.</comment>


How your computer's secrets could be cracked by a smartphone just LISTENING  - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526666/How-computers-secrets-cracked-smartphone-just-LISTENING-runs-encryption-software.html http://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/acoustic-20131218.pdf <comment><USER2> Substantial discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905) (tau.ac.il) (92 comments)

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6935289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6935289) (tau.ac.il)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933255) (slashdot.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932445) (slideshare.net)</comment>


Ask HN: Vim users, what's your favourite colorscheme? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I usually use Gruvbox [1]

[1] [https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox](https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox)

(edit: format)

<comment><USER3> +1 for Gruvbox. The best I know for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use paper theme [https://github.com/NLKNguyen/papercolor- theme](https://github.com/NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme)

Tempted to try [https://draculatheme.com/](https://draculatheme.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Dracula is where it's at. Totally recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use moria [1] since forever.

[1] [http://vimcolors.com/307/moria/dark](http://vimcolors.com/307/moria/dark)

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 for moria. I'm actually liking it !

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lucius [https://github.com/jonathanfilip/vim- lucius](https://github.com/jonathanfilip/vim-lucius)

</comment><comment><USER7> jellybeans [1]

[1] [https://github.com/nanotech/jellybeans.vim](https://github.com/nanotech/jellybeans.vim)

</comment><comment><USER8> I use One Dark[1], since it's also my preferred color scheme on Atom.

Since I use both editors numerous times throughout the day depending on what I'm doing it's very convenient having both look similar.

[1] [https://github.com/rakr/vim-one](https://github.com/rakr/vim-one)

</comment><comment><USER9> Default light vim colorscheme with custom modifications in .vimrc. I want everything work out of box without modifications of terminal colours like in Solarized. But used jellybeans for long time before that.

Preview: [http://imgur.com/Pf3DPqS](http://imgur.com/Pf3DPqS)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't say what my favourite coloscheme is because I haven't used other coloscheme before. Currently, I use spacegray [1].

[1]: [https://github.com/ajh17/Spacegray.vim](https://github.com/ajh17/Spacegray.vim)

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody know how to get themes working properly in iTerm2 on a Mac? I've downloaded all kinds of themes and some look good, others look bad, but not one of them looks like it's "supposed" to look like from screenshots online.

<comment><USER9> Most of them need also same theme for terminal to work as expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use minimalist. This colorscheme is inspired by material theme from sublime text.

[https://github.com/dikiaap/minimalist](https://github.com/dikiaap/minimalist)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a big fan of Hybrid. I use the Vim plugin linked below:

[https://github.com/w0ng/vim-hybrid](https://github.com/w0ng/vim-hybrid)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've used sourcerer for a while now. [https://github.com/xero/sourcerer](https://github.com/xero/sourcerer)

</comment><comment><USER15> My own, [https://github.com/andreasvc/vim-256noir](https://github.com/andreasvc/vim-256noir)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've always used Tomorrow Night and always will. The other ones try too hard and use strange colors I never see anywhere else (esp. solarized)

</comment><comment><USER17> I use iTerm2's homebrew theme, because I like bright green text on black background, I feel the text is stunning and clear.

</comment><comment><USER18> Black or white for bg, white or black for fg and gray for comments and strings.

</comment><comment><USER19> Solarized Dark

But I switch frequently

<comment><USER20> +1 for Solarized Dark, light when sun hits my screen

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wombat</comment>


Spark Breaks Previous Large-Scale Sort Record - <AUTHOR> http://databricks.com/blog/2014/10/10/spark-breaks-previous-large-scale-sort-record.html

<comment><USER2> FWIW, in 2011, Google wrote that they achieved a PB sort in 33 minutes on 8000 computers, vs. 234 minutes on 190 computers with 6080 cores reported by Spark here.

[http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/09/sorting- petabytes...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/09/sorting-petabytes- with-mapreduce-next.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why you list Google as using "8000 computers" and Spark using "190 computers with 6080 cores".

Using two different metrics for two like things seems like there is some sort of implication there. Were Google's machines single-cored?

<comment><USER2> I'm just writing down exactly what they reported. They used different metrics.

Certainly it would be interesting to have an apples to apples comparison. But the computers aren't the only thing that is relevant -- we also need to know about the networking hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting, but not earth-shattering. The "10x fewer nodes" means nothing; how powerful are the new nodes? What's the network? Do you use SSDs? etc. etc.

They also tuned their code to this specific problem:

" _Exploiting Cache Locality: In the sort benchmark, each record is 100 bytes, where the sort key is the first 10 bytes. As we were profiling our sort program, we noticed the cache miss rate was high, because each comparison required an object pointer lookup that was random..... Combining TimSort with our new layout to exploit cache locality, the CPU time for sorting was reduced by a factor of 5._ "

I would love to see MR and Spark compete on the exact same hardware configuration.

<comment><USER5> The article says exactly what they ran on. EC2 i2.8xlarge instances which have 32 cores, 800GB SSD and 244GB RAM.

<comment><USER4> I read that. But how does that compare with the nodes they're comparing against ("10x fewer nodes")?

<comment><USER6> The old entry had 10Gb/s <full-duplex> (40 nodes/rack 160Gbps rack to spine. 2.5:1 subscription), 64GB of RAM, and 12 x 3TB SATA.

The network part is probably the most important one here, and both have comparable network.

<comment><USER4> Since each node was handling 500GB of data (roughly), I think the disk speed may have been a more critical factor since each node had 244GB of memory. Their nodes used SSDs; the older nodes used spinning rust. The seek times alone will be a killer.

<comment><USER6> Not sure why you mentioned seek time. In large scale, distributed sorting, I/O is mostly sequential.

<comment><USER7> If only that were true -- the shuffle is typically seek-bound when the intermediate data doesn't fit into cache (plenty of papers show this pretty conclusively).

<comment><USER6> Hi Todd,

Except in the case of MR 2100 nodes the entire dataset fit in memory :)

<comment><USER8> Doesn't that speak to his point? Either smaller memory and more nodes, or more memory and less nodes. Why not do apples to apples? (This feels like the benchmarketing going on in browsers, which, at this point, is largely meaningless.)

Edit: on the other hand, this is an endorsement of the current wave of "per node performance stinks, let's avoid rewriting software for an extra year or two by throwing SSDs at it." Great for hardware vendors!

<comment><USER6> No it doesn't. The old record used 2100 nodes so the entire data actually fit in memory. There shouldn't be much seek happening even in the MR 2100 case. In Spark's case, the data actually doesn't fit in memory.

Also this was primary network bound. The old record had 2100 nodes with 10Gbps network.

<comment><USER4> As per the specification of this test, the data has to be committed on disk before it is considered sorted. So even if it all fits in memory, it has to be on disk before the end.

So you have 100TB of disk read, followed by 100TB of disk write, all on HDDs. That's about 100GB/node; and since Hadoop nodes are typically in RAID-6, each write has an associated read and write too.

This does not even include the intermediate files, which (depending on how the kernel parameters have been set), _could_ have been written on disk. Typical dirty_background_ratio is 10; so after 6GB of dirty pages, pdflush will kick in and start writing to the spinning disk.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but the final data is sequential only. We were discussing about random access, which only applies to the intermediate shuffle file.

Maybe you can email me offline. I can tell you more about the setup and how Spark / MapReduce works w.r.t. to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 100 terabyte benchmark used 206 Spark nodes, compared with 2100 Hadoop nodes.

Going up to 1 petabyte, the Hadoop comparison adds more nodes, 3800, while the Spark benchmark actually reduced the number of nodes to 190.

Does Spark scale well beyond ~200 nodes, or does the network become the bottleneck?

In any case, it's an impressive result considering that they didn't use Spark's in-memory cache.

<comment><USER10> I believe the network had become a bottleneck. As per the article:

> [O]ur Spark cluster was able to sustain ... 1.1 GB/s/node network activity > during the reduce phase, saturating the 10Gbps link available on these > machines.

If the network is the bottleneck it makes sense to reduce the number of nodes to reduce the network communications.

<comment><USER6> The job is actually very linearly scalable. i.e. running it on 200 nodes roughly doubles the throughput of 100 nodes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For the curious, the (max) price of those instances is $6.82/hr, so 206 * 6.82 * (23/60) = $538.55 --If they did it with non-reserved instances in US East.

If they used reserved instances in USEast, it drops to $181.

Obviously there are lots of costs involved beside the final perfect run, but it's an interesting ballpark.

<comment><USER12> You have to put spaces around your * 's to keep HN from italicizing everything.

<comment><USER11> Oops, edited. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing this. I'm the author of this blog post. Free free to ask me anything.

<comment><USER13> Your post mentions "single root IO virtualization" as a factor in maximizing network performance. I am wondering what the impact of this was in your sorting. Do you have data for runs where you didn't enable this?

<comment><USER6> It was part of the enhanced networking. Without enhanced networking, we were getting about 600MB/s, vs 1.1GB/s with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The strength of Hadoop isn't so much speed but that it's been around and there is a pretty impressive and fairly mature set of projects that comprises the Hadoop ecosystem, from Yarn to Hive, etc. There are still many issues to resolve, and this evolution will continue for decades to come.

The TB sort benchmark is pretty useless to me - I am much more concerned with stability, a vibrant community (which means people, the software they write and institutions using Hadoop in production).

Last time I tinkered with Spark (this was over a year ago) it was so buggy, next to useless, but perhaps things have changed.

Still - the idea that there is some sort of a revolutionary new approach that is paradigm-shifting and is way better than anything before should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

The problem of distributed computing is not a simple one. I remember tinkering with the Linux kernel back in the mid nineties, and 20 years later it still has ways to go to improve.

Twenty years from now it might or might not be Hadoop that is the tool for this sort of thing, we don't know, but I will not take seriously anything or anyone who claims that the "next best thing" is here in 2014.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Cloudera left M/R for Spark, Mahout left M/R for Spark. Spark community will be huge soon.

2\. Yes, Spark was/is buggy.

3\. For me Spark is really paradigm shift, next generation framework compared to M/R

<comment><USER14> Spark _requires_ Hadoop to run, so this whole Spark vs Hadoop debate makes no sense whatsoever.

There is a place for arguing how effective Map/Reduce is, but it's been known for years that M/R is not the only, nor best general purpose algorithm for solving all problems. More and more tools these days do not use M/R, Spark including, and Spark certainly is no the first tool to provide an alternative to M/R. AFAIK Google has abandoned M/R years ago.

I just don't understand this constant boasting about Spark, it seems very suspicious to me.

<comment><USER15> > Spark _requires_ Hadoop to run

This is not correct. Spark uses the Hadoop Input/Output API, but you don't need any Hadoop component installed to run Spark, not even HDFS.

You can -- and many companies do -- run Spark on Mesos or on Spark's standalone cluster manager, and use S3 as their storage layer.

> this whole Spark vs Hadoop debate makes no sense whatsoever

If we talk about Hadoop as an ecosystem of tools, then yes, it doesn't make sense to frame Spark as a competitor. Spark is part of that ecosystem.

But if we talk about Hadoop as Hadoop 1 MapReduce or as Hadoop 2 Tez, both of which are execution engines, then it very much makes sense to pit Spark against them as an alternative execution engine.

Granted, Hadoop 1 MapReduce is pretty old compared to Spark, and Tez is still under heavy development, but these are alternatives and not complements to Spark.

(Note: In Hadoop 2, MapReduce is just a framework that uses Tez as its underlying execution engine.)

> I just don't understand this constant boasting about Spark, it seems very > suspicious to me.

Suspicious how?

I think Spark's elegant API, unified data processing model, and performance -- all of which are documented very well in demos and benchmarks online -- merit the excitement that you see in the "Big Data" community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most recent results I can see to compare to (Google, Yahoo, Quantcast): [https://www.quantcast.com/inside- quantcast/2013/12/petabyte-...](https://www.quantcast.com/inside- quantcast/2013/12/petabyte-sort/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Going on a tangent here: this benchmark highlights the difficulty of sorting in general. Sorts are necessary for computing percentiles (such as the median.) In practical applications, an approximate algorithm such as t-digest should suffice. You can return results in seconds as opposed to "chest thumping" benchmarks to prove a point. :)

I wrote a post on this: [http://www.silota.com/site-search-blog/approximate- median-co...](http://www.silota.com/site-search-blog/approximate-median- computation-big-data/)

<comment><USER18> Perhaps I misunderstand your comment, but you actually don't need to sort to compute a median (see O(n) median of medians algorithm [1]).

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No matter what the circumstances, sorting 100 TB or 1 PB of anything is impressive, much less doing it during the time it takes me to eat lunch.

</comment><comment><USER20> Where can I find the source code & instructions on how to reproduce this benchmark?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What change the biggest difference in performance between Spark and MapReduce?

</comment><comment><USER21> Does this mean that Spark is the new God. If this is the case, then Databricks will be the next Cloudera. Cloudera is probably a 10B+ company.

Good job</comment>


Pseudosynchronous JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/three/pseudosynchronous-javascript

<comment><USER2> The promise usage here is so terrible it's not even funny. I've made a gist of how it'd look like with correct usage. Just contrast the single level of nesting (for the branching) in the correct version vs. the 5 nesting levels version in the incorrect version used in the article [https://gist.github.com/benjamingr/d08cfe94d3f0db1f954d](https://gist.github.com/benjamingr/d08cfe94d3f0db1f954d)

Not to take away from the original thought in the post - but it's hard to take a criticism on a model seriously where the OP doesn't understand the model. Here's a related StackOverflow question on the topic stackoverflow.com/questions/22539815/arent-promises-just-callbacks

<comment><USER3> It appears you've changed the API though? Just chain the promises instead of nesting them [https://gist.github.com/joshhunt/e3761594d10bb7025bcb](https://gist.github.com/joshhunt/e3761594d10bb7025bcb)

<comment><USER2> Chaining them is also perfectly viable (still one nesting level), as long as you're not dipicting a non-existing problem ("callback hell") it's all good. I used .call since OP used Q promises in the article - this works about as well with other libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea, it's a bit like how lazy list processing works, but then applied to promises.

However, I don't completely see the appeal as soon as ES6 or ES7 transforms with a tool like Babel are ok for you. ES7 is probably going to have C#-like async/await syntax[0], which takes this problem away entirely and in a much less complicated matter. This syntax works great today with babeljs. And even if you don't dare using experimental ES7 features yet, you can accomplish just about exactly the same with ES6 generators[1].

If you really really need to avoid compiling your code, then I can see the appeal of this "pseudosynchronous" idea, but I do feel that it's much more complex and error prone than setting up a build process instead.

[0] [https://github.com/lukehoban/ecmascript- asyncawait](https://github.com/lukehoban/ecmascript-asyncawait) [1] [http://davidwalsh.name/async-generators](http://davidwalsh.name/async- generators)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think debugabillity of this would be a huge problem. It's enough of a hassle to single-step through "traditional" asynchronous code. Using the proposed pseudo-synchronous interfaces, the only thing your own code basically does is to specify what should be executed, but not actually executing anything by itself.

At the time things are actually executed, you're almost 100% in library code, making stepping through your program extremely hard.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention spawn functions or the async/await proposal for ES7[1], which seem to solve the same problem in a way that could be both more efficient and more debug friendly.

[1] [http://jakearchibald.com/2014/es7-async- functions/](http://jakearchibald.com/2014/es7-async-functions/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I worked in a similar vein with Horseman:

[http://horsemanjs.org/](http://horsemanjs.org/)

The library runs PhantomJS. While there are many libraries that do this, I wanted a synchronous, chainable API. So I could do

var links = horseman.count('a'); if (count > 3) { horseman.open('[http://www.google.com'](http://www.google.com')) } else { horseman.open('[http://www.yahoo.com'](http://www.yahoo.com')) }

Under the hood, using the library literally blocks. Which is a very, very un- javascript/Node thing to do, and introduces other weirdness, I know.

</comment><comment><USER7> With RxJS, you can compose with existing Promise-based libraries, solve asynchronous programming (and error handling) in an elegant fashion with code that looks like simple linear chains (or DAGs) of Observables, and you don't need to give up non-blocking JS. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYN2xt11Ek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYN2xt11Ek)

<comment><USER8> eventstreams are handy for handling a stream of events (user actions in UI, streaming API client), but when a request gets a single event as a response (ajax/http), async/await looks like a much simpler option (functions return the output, instead of taking a handler to process it). Thoughts?

PS: enjoyed your talk 'user is a function', looking forward to how cycle evolves.

<comment><USER7> What is an event? Put differently: what cannot be an event in your application?

<comment><USER8> While events can be used anywhere in your applications, they're not the best option in my opinion. I still think functions should take an input and 'return' the output, not take a handler function to process it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Generators and channels using js-csp is much more readable in my opinion.</comment>


Timex – a golang time toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DarthPestilane/timex <comment><USER2> The language is called Go.</comment>


Show HN: Deploy a Go Lambda to Ping a Site in 20 Seconds - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/frankcash/go-lambda-ping <comment><USER2> Kind of a shame to have to hack on the source-code and inject a new URL - would have been better to have used a parameter. Anyway - here's how to do it with OpenFaaS and Python from August 2017 :-) [https://blog.alexellis.io/first-faas-python- function/](https://blog.alexellis.io/first-faas-python-function/)

<comment><USER3> Much nicer example I think and no AWS tax / lock-in.

<comment><USER4> What are the main benefits of using OpenFaaS except for vendor lock in? 99% of the time, I want a kinesis stream, or S3 event to start my lambdas, which it seems I would have to wire up myself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An actual ping would be more impressive :)

Perhaps to be less wasteful, the HTTP request should be a HEAD instead of GET? There's little point downloading a whole page if you are going to just throw away the contents...

<comment><USER6> actually, it's not. We create a special page, with PHP and one with nodejs, that just replies '1', so besides status, we also get a notice if nodejs or PHP malfunctions (which does happen on some servers, 1-2 time a year).

<comment><USER7> HEAD is still less wasteful and just as effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks nice!

1\. Why go? (nothing wrong with it in itself, but last I had checked (before go on lambda was released)...Python was supposed the fastest of the bunch available)

1 a. Python can be embedded into a CF template...meaning deployment is slightly nicer (maybe not recommended though?)

2\. I think the ability to change the time (20 secs) based on an SSM parameter would be cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I chose go since Lambda support was recently added for it. I have a lot of experience using Python and Node.js with Lambdas.

2\. Sorry, I include the "20 Seconds" as a symbol of how easy it is to deploy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty neat. Instead of hard coding the url, you could provide it as parameter to the main. Pretty sure it's possible (at least using the node and c# Lambda it was).

<comment><AUTHOR> I could definitely look into this, thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER10> I raised a PR to just that: [https://github.com/frankcash/go-lambda- ping/pull/1](https://github.com/frankcash/go-lambda-ping/pull/1)

The URL is set in terraform.tfvars, which then gets passed to the lambda resource.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious about how AWS handles lambdas written in Go. Go produces statically linked Linux binaries. What is it about Go that is supported? What is it about binaries written in other languages that isn't supported?

</comment><comment><USER12> I built a python version recently, it uses the serverless library to deploy to AWS. [https://github.com/nickromano/serverless- ping](https://github.com/nickromano/serverless-ping)

</comment><comment><USER13> What's approx. monthly cost of running something like this on lambda e.g. every 5 minutes?

<comment><USER2> If you want to access it over HTTP you will have to pay for "AWS API Gateway" which is not free.

<comment><USER14> API Gateway isn't much at that rate.

(1 month) / (5 minutes) = 8760

"$3.50 per million API calls received, plus the cost of data transfer out, in gigabytes." [0]

8760 * ($3.50 / 1000000) = $0.03.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/api- gateway/pricing/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is amazing! Does anyone know a good resource to learn more about Lambda and how to setup small projects like this?

<comment><USER15> I'm working on a comprehensive resource for running Lambda Go projects here:

[https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas](https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas)

The guide on periodicnworker functions is how I would build this pinger.

[https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas/blob/master/docs/worker-f...](https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas/blob/master/docs/worker- functions.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dumb question, never used lambda before, how often is this triggered? I can't tell at first look through the code.

<comment><USER17> The lambda doesn't have a schedule within because doing so would split the concerns poorly; rather you would hit this lambda on your own schedule.

<comment><USER16> Ah, so you ping the lambda to have it ping the coded in website?

<comment><USER18> Or you could invoke the lambda on a schedule using Cloudwatch

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with- scheduled-...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-scheduled- events.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! Didn't want to include the TF to do the scheduling (for simplicity) but I could add it if people want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice! Is there a use case for this, or is this just a go/terraform example? Either way, pretty cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> I created this as a terraform example and chose go since it was recently added to Lambda.

I have a personal use case of this: pinging my heroku "dev" tier instance so it stays alive a bit longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's a bit long really.

<comment><USER21> That's not the function invocation time (i.e. cold start etc) but rather time to build and deploy (and then maybe imvoke?)</comment></comment>


PagerDuty Names Jennifer Tejada CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/07/21/pagerduty-names-jennifer-tejada-as-ceo/#3f9225d317dd <comment><USER2> [ Got to confirm that Forbes has backed off a bit on their ad-blocker denial -- interesting. ]

I met the folks at PagerDuty when Blekko was at a Berkeley recruiting meetup. I don't recall the technical lead who I talked to but I do remember that they had all the correct answers for the questions I posed them. At Blekko we were pleased with the high degree of both automation and quick visibility into problems of our ops stack. It was part of our "secret sauce" for being operationally efficient, and the PagerDuty folks had all the same instincts.

Given this announcement, the financials mentioned in the article, I'd expect an S-1 to drop somewhere between October and February. That would be a positive thing both for them and tech in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> PagerDuty is one of the unique companies you can hate (because it wakes you up in the middle of the night) but also love and recommend to everyone. If you don't have it in your stack, get it.

<comment><USER4> I hate the name, the website, the logo. I hate them all. But I guess this all my fault.

And, I agree. PageDuty is one of those terrible product ideas executed right.

Good luck guys.

<comment><USER5> I hate the voice that calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pager duty is one of the must have 3rd party apps in pretty much every user facing system I can think of!

The the UX side it can improve - but it's rock solid in what it does! Well done!

</comment><comment><USER7> I have no relation to anyone working at PageDuty. I'd like some real customer experience (but I can't tell if you are really a customer or not). Sorry if this is not allowed.

But why PagerDuty? I looked at it many times (especially I am an AWS customer so at every convention I see them). I can set up an alert as email or even as SMS message with AWS, by feeding only CRITICAL issues to the ops team. What other features do PagerDuty offer and how did PagerDuty save your day?

<comment><USER8> We use it at my company. I'm not intimately familiar with all the features, but here's what I can tell you:

-It's easy to set up and manage different on-call schedules

-It's easy for someone to manage their own alert settings (e.g. I can add a bunch of different ways to be contacted, like "text me, then call me after 5 minutes if I haven't ACK'd")

-We've integrated it with our internal metrics collections systems so it's really easy to say, "page someone when ${complex_condition} happens"

-IIRC it's not particularly expensive and totally better than the overhead of setting up and managing your own alerting systems.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Its a human intervention/alerting/escalation broker. No ops team (or team who does ops) should be without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> OT but what's with the splash screen? I can't get pass it (Chrome, Android). This is the second time today I've been unable to read a Forbes article. Why do they care so much about showing me some useless quote that they risk making the site unusable?

<comment><USER11> It happened to me too (Chrome, desktop), but after backing out and loading the page again it didn't stop at the spash screen. It seems as though the first load sets a cookie to indicate you've seen it on the first visit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> PagerDuty is the kind of cool company that I am surprised haven't been bought yet.

After Atlassian acquired StatusPage, I can see them going after PagerDuty (or similar) to complete their devops solution.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER14> Any time a company brings in a professional CEO it's a bad sign.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, really killed Google.

<comment><USER16> You're using a mismatched understanding of experienced and professional.

Shmidt wasn't a professional CEO, he was a software engineer who worked his way up the ladder and then took his experience as CEO to another company.

Tejada's experience seems to be all related to corporate management, and thus is a professional CEO.

<comment><USER15> No, I am saying something funny, for effect, based on an ignorant stereotype that professional CEOs never succeed.

<comment><USER14> No one said that professional CEOs always fail. I said it's a bad sign when one is hired. Are you arguing it's a good sign, or that tech companies do better with non-founder managers?

<comment><USER15> Yes, and I am telling you that is an ignorant stereotype.

Edit: You've edited your response so many times I can't keep up. I am not arguing any point of view. You unilaterally said that it is always a bad sign when a company brings in an experienced CEO. That is an ignorant stereotype. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Sometimes it's a smart hire, sometimes it's not. The late Dave Goldberg taking the reigns at SurveyMonkey was an incredible turning point for the company.

<comment><USER17> Also in this case the CEO is staying on as CTO which is a good sign that this is a strategic hire rather than some internal issues leading to ousting of the CEO.

<comment><USER15> Founder CEO staying on as quasi CTO while professional CEOs are brought in? Nobody tell OP about what Larry Ellison's done with Mark Hurd and Safra Catz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought the CEO was on the list for pager duty.</comment>


Spacefunk Sublime Text Theme Is Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.longren.org/spacefunk-sublime-text-theme-is-awesome/

<comment><USER2> Site was down, so here's a link to the theme:

[https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Theme%20-%20Spacefunk](https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Theme%20-%20Spacefunk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yah the sites back up now. Fucking Digital Ocean and MySQL, so thanks for linking the github repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My personal favourite is Flatland: [https://github.com/thinkpixellab/flatland](https://github.com/thinkpixellab/flatland)

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like Flatland too. I thought you could change the blue color though. Must have been another theme I was thinking of.

There's a really good supply of high-quality Sublimetext themes, which is partly why I love it so much.</comment></comment>


A New Timeline of the Day the Dinosaurs Began to Die Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/science/chicxulub-asteroid-impact-dinosaurs.html <comment><USER2> Different article about same topic, discussed yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20922827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20922827)</comment>


Thriverism - <AUTHOR> https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/thriverism/ <comment><USER2> > While I refuse to learn philosophy

What?? You want to inquire into meaning and purpose and you ignore the discipline of inquiry into meaning and purpose? That is absurd.

If you can ignore for a moment the archaic sexism of terminology, there's a reason why mathematics is called "the queen of the sciences" — the king, or _Ursprung_ of them all, including mathematics, is philosophy.

<comment><USER3> No, she's right. The field of philosophy has failed to separate out its bullshit, so anyone who decides to "learn philosophy" without a lot of prior independently-generated philosophical sophistication will be lead into a trap. [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FwiPfF8Woe5JrzqEu/philosophy...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FwiPfF8Woe5JrzqEu/philosophy- a-diseased-discipline)

<comment><USER4> No, she's wrong. The modern scientific models each form a kernel of truth from among the BS, and today we have to deal with quantum mechanics and its quirky bizarre predictions which invalidate the "just look at it" and "just think about it" schools of philosophical thought.

For example, she claims that God exists. A typical trait of God is knowing everything about the universe; say, knowing the positions, momenta, and spin of every particle. But QM gives us Heisenberg's Uncertainty, which prevents _anybody_ , including hypothetical deities, from knowing that information. Indeed, QM typically isn't materialistic; it is _wrong_ to insist that all of those particles _definitely_ have some position and momentum at an instant in time. So, whatever her God is, it isn't the all-powerful one. (The all- powerful God has many better-tread problems in pure metaphysics, like the Problem of Evil, but I don't know what "evil" is and so I'm leaning on QM.)

There is no problem in having to learn philosophy by reading surveys of historical ideologies. Philosophy is cumulative, and as little as one semester of studying historical philosophy can massively improve a person's critical thinking skills.

Really, the problem is in not taking seriously enough the _invalidation_ of old philosophies by newer thoughts, as we continue to improve what we know. There are many positions that are simply _wrong_ , including positions which we currently think are correct!

<comment><USER5> you might do well to learn what attributes classical theism claims of a deity before slandering them; any deity bound by the natural laws of the world is hardly in keeping with the claims of theistic traditions of all stripes , excluding some late 20th century evangelical protestants.

and the problem of evil is only significant to lay people; in the study of the philosophy of religion it has been considered a rather weak objection for some time now.

<comment><USER4> The wavefunction isn't ontic. This means that, even if God can see the whole universe, they can't actually know the _real_ values associated with each particle; they can only have an epistemic, partial view. You might do well to study some quantum mechanics!

<comment><USER5> supernatural means above the natural order; your conception of a deity is out of step with traditional theism and represents straw man building at best

<comment><USER4> No amount of natural evidence (that is, empirical evidence) can ratify a supernatural belief. Following Popper, then, the burden of evidence is on _you_ to overcome quantum mechanics.

We're both deists, by the way. I follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster. However, the FSM is absurd, which means that I cannot use the FSM's existence to conclude facts, and additionally doesn't affect the material universe. Also, the FSM doesn't maintain cults, encourage child abuse, start wars, nor allow simony.

Your "traditional theism" is metaphysically and epistemically weak; it cannot say anything about the world other than that its deity exists and has material affect upon the universe. However, empirically, there is no evidence of the deity (because they are supernatural), and so the deity _cannot_ have any scientific method associated with it. Simply put, there's no room in the natural world for a supernatural being! Every empirical effect is instead considered scientifically.

The only gap left would be for you to show that miracles or other supernatural phenomena are real. On that, I have nothing polite to say, just to wish you good luck on what will definitely fail.

<comment><USER5> we were on the subject of your straw man burning; Which you seem to have already fessed up to ... something which speaks to some redeemable qualities.

Let's not pretend that naturalism rests not on metaphysical assumptions.

<comment><USER4> I've not confessed to or recanted anything, silly; I merely have outlined my position more clearly so that you don't have any ridiculous dodges like "that's what an atheist would say."

I don't have a straw man. I have _any_ deity which is like Jehovah, with Jehovah himself as a special case. _Any_ deity is subject to self-defeating arguments and open to criticism from science.

I am not a naturalist, but that's the closest position that you can imagine, I guess.

Anyway, if you don't actually want to talk about QM, then we'll just have to talk about how Jehovah's followers keep trying to do something about COVID-19, but all of their appeals have led to nothing. Meanwhile, science and technology give us models for understanding, combating, and preventing the pandemic. Are you _really_ going to pledge yourself to your deity and cough your lungs out?

<comment><USER6> Broskie, take it from an agnostic/natural theist, who actually ended up going down the Philosophy of Religion rabbit hole. Throwaway is right. You've lost before you even got started. The arguments you brought up have been well trod, and very influential pieces of theistic philosophy built around them.

Science can only posit the _how_. Not the _who_ or the _why_. Throwing quantum mechanics at the problem doesn't solve anything either, because ultimately you at some point at the end of a nigh infinite chain of why are left with the question "Why something rather than Nothing?"

The answer is either silence, or God, the recognized nominative signpost of the answer , even by the Wittgensteinian approach.

Your COVID-19 related rantings commit the fallacy of assuming the nature of God, or committing the anthropocentric fallacy of thinking God even gives a rat's arse about us, or that there is enough of a working understanding of prayer to count on it in a technological way. It's not a terribly uncommon itis for the modern theistic skeptic, but does demonstrate a horrendous lack of effort in having grounded one's skepticism through actual effort to confront and dismantle the theistic construct at it's core, or to understand it's place in human society.

Religion has no beef with science, nor the other way around.

<comment><USER4> All you're showing is that you don't know much of quantum mechanics either. Should you choose to change that, MIT has published a nice lecture series on quantum physics [0], the first in a group of three.

Your bold claim "why something rather than nothing?" _assumes_ that there is, in fact, a something to refer to, and QM directly challenges the simplicity of that assumption. So many words to fight against the lack of an ontic wavefunction!

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9dYRPiyVWDd80G)

<comment><USER5> this claim is contested , and some would even say disproven; why do you keep bringing it up like a life raft.

<comment><USER4> Show your work. Prove for us that the wavefunction of the universe is ontic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Internet makes it easy to see who is _winning_ at life and who isn't. It also guides you on where you should _compete_. If someone else is winning at a particular topic that interests you; then you can decide to either join them or out-compete them with better results.

This article addresses The Great Man Theory[0] or what I call _supernaut syndrome_ [1] which has affected the masses terribly. Every person has to be _all they can be_ now, and their full potential actualized, otherwise there is no point.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch)

<comment><USER8> I find the connection between the increased connectivity afforded by the Internet and the widespread miasma of supernaut syndrome quite astute. To my knowledge, I haven't seen much serious discussion of this.

In other words, it probably isn't healthy that we are regularly subjected to what is marketed as the best/brightest/most-anything in whatever category we're looking for information on. There's nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that continued exposure to it can change our view on the type of work that _we_ need to be doing to make our way through the world. It might be an overreach, but it smells a lot like the mind virus of so-called incels: "I'm not remarkable, so why do I have worth?"

Escaping that requires an enormous amount of energy.

The truth is pretty much tautological: "you have worth because you exist."

<comment><USER9> I can't find the passage at the moment, but in his book _Notes on Culture_ , T. S. Eliot actually argues that this is endemic to a societal system which is run by meritocratic, technocratic elites. That is, by those who excel at the required skills necessary to 'climb the ladder' and _not_ by a broad cultural class which maintains power, I.e. a hierarchical aristocracy in the British form. His argument is something like: when you get the entire populace concerned with acquiring power, they will inevitably be dissatisfied with their current societal position.

Not sure I agree with him entirely, but it's an interesting position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It may not be exactly for the reasons she gives, but I think her instinct is correct to reduce these metaphysical questions into minutiae. To "unanswer" them by forcing them to conform to her empirical observation without any additional inquiry, because that inquiry quite frankly is a waste of time (the important caveat being unless you're making the inquiry for its own sake and therefore enjoying it).

It's a deeply pragmatic approach.

It reminds me of the Buddhist parable about the poison arrow: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow)

"'Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have been answered, the man might die first.' Life is so short. It must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to the truth."

</comment><comment><USER11> Arete is one of my favorites.

Picked up by way of Mage: the Ascension, where you are a reality bending mage & your general mastery over reality is called "arete". Your efficacy at magic, your excellence... silly intro but got me introduced to the idea & a host of other good ones that still shape my perception of the world.

That game world also has a "trimurti" which closely parallels the Hindu triumvirate, which is another good perspective I've been glad to carry. Creating/sustaining/destroying, crudely said.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article searches for meaning and finds God. Whoops! It was a good try, though.

Let's use the opportunity to be productive, though. Meanings must live in their own realm apart from sentences, so that when we say that a sentence has a meaning, we imply that there is a mapping from sentences to meanings. However, those meanings cannot be complete and consistent; there must be some sentences which don't have permanently-mapped meanings, because such meanings would lead to self-contradiction [1].

The author should read more Meaningness, especially the section on the fallacies of eternalism [0]. They could also read Derrida on meanings and deconstruction, although Derrida's not easy reading.

Edit: As usual, downvoters, want to reply?

[0] [https://meaningness.com/eternalism](https://meaningness.com/eternalism)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem)

<comment><AUTHOR> I literally linked to Meaningness in the post lmao

<comment><USER4> Understandable, and yet, you did not _read_. The page I linked says, openly,

> Dropping religious beliefs is only a first step towards freeing ourselves > from eternalism.

And continues to explain how your beliefs, about how there are definite meanings and purposes to life, are illusions. The next page [0] states it clearly too:

> We cling to the idea that there must be a cosmic plan because we fear that > without one everything would be meaningless. But this is mistaken; which > means that most ideas about meaningfulness and meaninglessness are mistaken. > Fortunately, life is meaningful without any cosmic plan or ultimate source > of meaning.

If you like arete, you could also stand to read Pirsig. He was very concerned with ethics and values.

Finally, to directly critique your metaphysics, please first consider this phrase you wrote:

> Everything matters, because we feel everything, and thus it matters to us.

And then consider Russell's teapot [1]. Does Russell's teapot matter, floating out there around the rings of Saturn? Can we feel it? A bit of consideration will show that, while everything is connected to everything, not everything affects everything else equally. We are, in fact, far more sensitive to things which are close to us.

[0] [https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-plan](https://meaningness.com/no- cosmic-plan)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really inconceivable to you that I simply disagree, huh?

<comment><USER4> It's quite conceivable. I believe my eyes; I read your words. But you have no _evidence_ from which to justify your disagreement. If you genuinely are simply airing your opinion, and don't care about whether it convinces anybody else, then please don't post it to HN, since it is an actively anti- intellectual position.

Everybody's entitled to their opinion. They're not entitled to immunity from critique, nor are they entitled to have their opinion be _true_ nor _provable_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I change my company name and domain to a proper spelling? - <AUTHOR>

I recently launched a SaaS app called Zencastr (http://zencastr.com).  At the time of launch I didn't own zencaster.com. I have since bought it but now am wondering if it is worth switching over.
It would be a significant amount of work to change everything.  I'd have to go through all my copy, get new email accounts set up, change any references in the code, get another ssl certificate, try and get the corresponding social accounts, reprint promotional material/banners/cards used for events etc.
I redirect zencaster.com to zencastr.com so I don't lose any traffic that way.  I guess I am wondering if it will be more professional and give more confidence to potential customers?  What would you do? Is it worth it to invest the time to switch and risk confusing people in the process? <comment><USER2> I would stick with having zencaster.com redirect to zencastr.com, and keep your current name/trademark. I think this is a fair compromise and probably your best bet.

For what it's worth, I prefer Zencastr over Zencaster.

<comment><USER3> I strongly agree with you. After Paul Graham's 'Change your name' essay lots of startups have been having sleepless thoughts about naming. Dude just offer an amazing service! When you hit product market fit, then maybe u can change your name! then, ur users will follow u. Product market fit is the key. I recently decided to stop being bothered about my [http://classroom.ng](http://classroom.ng) (unified and uncluttered inbox for educative email subs you care about and can't miss), because no one will see a .com fro less than $10k ... Focus on users. look at Yahoo! Who knew?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I should feel lucky. I got zencaster.com for $1100.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Right now, this very minute, is the #1 priority for you, you as a founder, building the product or building the company?

If the priority is building the product, then changing the name is entirely a distraction. Get back to work. The critical part of a name change, acquiring the resource is done. All the bureaucracy can be JIT'd until it matters. If the priority is building the company, delegate or outsource the grunt work when the name is having an impact on growth. Right now, fry bigger fish.

Changing the name is always easier than the real work that matters.

Good luck.

<comment><USER5> I don't know why this is the top comment but:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html)

<comment><USER4> The "top remark" in Graham's remarks:

      If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com,
      you should probably change your name.

That's not the case here. The advice on changing names is narrow. The easy part of a future name change, picking a new name has been done. The hard part, getting the domain is also done. The bad part, opportunity cost, can be avoided until the company is big enough that there are staff to handle the name change as a normal part of their collateral duties. The description of "playing house" in _Before the Startup_ [1] is sort of implied in the question.

As they say, " All happy companies are happy in their own way." The details matter both in Graham's essays and in the applicability of any action for any particular startup.

[1]: [http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What would I do? Depends on how far along I was in the project and if I had customers. If I was just getting started, hadn't launched, and didn't have any customers, I would probably change the name.

That doesn't sound like the case with you though. In your case I would keep it just the way it is and redirect to your current name. With the email addresses, just set up a relay for the addresses.

Over time you could always change. For example, as your SSL certificate expires, renew for the new domain. In the meantime I wouldn't stress about over changing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I'm leaning this way. I suspect that if I don't change it now, I probably never will as it will only get harder. Probably doesn't matter that much though.

<comment><USER7> Don't bother. Just redirect, carry on. Food for thought: micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-aflac-got-its-name.html

Keep in mind, they are a multi billion dollar company and did not bother.

Best of luck.

<comment><USER8> Someone could probably make an entertaining book telling how companies got their names. I always enjoyed how an early employer of mine, Callan Data Systems, got theirs.

As you might guess, Callan was the name of a founder (Dave Callan). However, he was just one of three equal co-founders. Another will Bill Pohlman (probably best known as the leader of the team at Intel that developed the 8086). I don't remember who the third was.

When they were just starting the company they could not agree on a name, and this was holding up filing corporate paperwork. During this time Pohlman and the third founder went on a camping trip together without Callan.

When they got back Callan told them he'd gone ahead and filed the paperwork with a temporary name so they could move on with the important stuff, and they could change the name later when they finally agreed on a name they all liked. The temporary name was Callan Data Systems.

They never agreed on a new name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I kind of like Zencastr over Zencaster. But I am not really the target audience. Just thought I should mention it though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, some of the current users have said that as well. It's a tough call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Benchmark it? These guys used amazon turk to decide which was best. [http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/03/05/test-company-domain- na...](http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/03/05/test-company-domain-name-with- mturk-survey-data/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd 301 it for sure. It won't take long for people to adopt. Not an exact match for a case study but when SEOmoz to Moz switched they also changed domains.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would change it now. It would be different if you didn't own ZenCaster.com, but you do so re-brand (slightly) now, rather than later.

You: Sure just go to ZenCastr.com!

Potential Client: Is that ZenCaster.com, just like it sounds.

You: No, we're at ZenCastr.com, without an e in Caster, drop the E that would normally go before the R. But we do own ZenCaster.com so you can just put that in to get to our website.

You are ZenCaster!

Nice site btw.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I got to thinking about this because of PG's latest essay Change Your Name [http://paulgraham.com/name.html](http://paulgraham.com/name.html).

I know he was talking about .com tlds but it made me wonder about the cognitive effect that a misspelled domain could have.

Edit: spelling

<comment><USER13> Cutesy spellings aren't cute any longer, if they ever were. That point is debatable.

Startups looking to seem edgy and special use them, but I don't think they are effective. I only look at them to see what sort of product is behind that mis- spelling, not to actually buy something or use their service.

Mis-spelling shows me just one more small outfit trying to be splashier and trendier than the some other small company with a splashy logo or trendy spelling.

IMHO, you're always better off using standard spelling.

If your product or service just rocks, then it just does, and you'll have word-of-mouth. Odd spelling habits won't help you if it doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Rivers are easiest to cross at their source." Syrus

Do it now before it gets harder.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I'm afraid of. I know it will only get harder.

<comment><USER4> When growth justifies a marketing staff, it will be much much easier. Sure the first cost will be higher, but the overall cost will be much lower and you will have data to back up the decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [http://zencastr.com](http://zencastr.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> Ys

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes</comment>


Website that guesses how old your are - <AUTHOR> http://how-old.net/

<comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9466298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9466298)</comment>


The missing query and programming language - <AUTHOR> https://askql.org/press-release.html <comment><AUTHOR> so this has never been done before? no query languages that also are programming languages? why?

<comment><USER2> I suppose server admins have always been concerned about security when allowing clients to send scripts. We haven't had very many easy solutions such us AskVM for running these programs in a custom context (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23302670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23302670) for more). Here, more security allows better expressibility, which helps with the performance. Trust leads to better systems.

Marcin Hagmajer ~ AskQL Core Team, xFAANG

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> what's the difference between ask {<askcode>} and eval(<jscode>)?

<comment><USER2> eval( <javascript> ) is terrible at ensuring security. Query programs are executed against the same environment as your own programs!

ask { <askscript> } runs on AskVM which is a separate execution context that you define yourself with the exact set of resources, values and limits the each incoming program needs. AskVM is currently implemented in JavaScript. We plan to port it to Python, C and AskScript very soon.

Check out [https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2010/10/26/wanted-dynamic- exe...](https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2010/10/26/wanted-dynamic-execution- contexts-in-javascript/) to learn more about this subject.

Sorry to have taken almost an hour to get back to you, we're talking with a few people at the moment. The code is live for 6 hours already.

Marcin Hagmajer ~ AskQL Core Team, xFAANG</comment></comment>


"I Am a 10X Programmer" (PHOTO) - <AUTHOR> https://belitsoft.com/php-development-services/10x-programmers <comment><USER2> Well I'm feeling inadequate!

I wish I had the focus of these people, I'd love to have serious concentration levels. Mine are pretty bad, I'm not a programmer, but I am above average in my field, I just wish I could sit still and focus on something (with breaks) for 4-8 hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, all of them work and live either harder or smarter than many of us...</comment></comment>


Koka – A function-oriented programming language - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/koka/ <comment><USER2> I recommend reading this tutorial: [http://www.rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial](http://www.rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial)

The syntactic sugar used here look absolutely beautiful. I really love this, it looks like a saner functional Ruby/JS baby.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone should check [https://github.com/purescript/purescript](https://github.com/purescript/purescript) as more mature language. One of the source of inspiration was the Koka

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this project abandoned? Latest update on codeplex is 2.5 years old. It's a shame because it looks like a very nice language.

<comment><USER5> Publications

        Daan Leijen, Koka: Programming with Row Polymorphic Effect Types, in Mathematically Structured Functional Programming 2014, EPTCS, 18 March 2014.

[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2106...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=210640)

Maybe it's not dead yet.

<comment><USER6> March 2014 isn't exactly proof the language is alive today.

<comment><USER5> Still better than 2012.

KOKA author is now on this [http://2015.ecoop.org/profile/daanleijen](http://2015.ecoop.org/profile/daanleijen)

and also tutoring PhD (I assume) students for [http://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/koka/icfp15.pdf](http://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/koka/icfp15.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is fantastic work. It has a very approachable way of controlling side- effects. That's also one of Haskell's goals, but the learning curve is much steeper.

If I was going to teach Haskell to someone, I'd be very tempted to start them off by spending a few days noodling around with Koka.

I love that you can even annotate a function to let it read from a variable, but not write to it, or vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm definitely going to check this out - I think that having effects explicitly controlled in the code but strict by default is the sweet spot I'm looking for in my next language.</comment>


Money matters: why women founders struggle in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4067276/money-matters-why-women-founders-struggle-in-silicon-valley

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I wonder if I should hire a token guy to act as a firewall for bargaining purposes. Then when it came time to bid for a project, I'd bid X, and he would bid X+Y as himself, but secretly he'd be working for me. If his (obviously higher) bids were accepted over mine, it would suck, but at least I'd get the business. His only job would be to be the figurehead. I'd be doing all of the magic behind the scenes.

It might be a sobering experiment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would love to see more women in "hard" technology startups. There are too few women founders out there (a sad thing), and out of them a lot work on companies that appeal mostly to women. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I would LOVE to see more women building complex tech startups - evening out the picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just can't get why that has become an issue. What's the difference between male & female founders? Is there any discrimination of the female founders or not? If not, so why is it harder for the women to get funding?

<comment><USER4> Did you actually read the article? Founders aren't being judged in the same way, due to their gender.

You see the same thing in academia: give some professional mathematicians some identical papers, but randomly with male or female names on them, and they'll rate the ones with male names more highly than their peers who are given an identical paper with a female name. Unfortunately, both male and female mathematicians bias their judgement in the same way, so simply having more female mathematicians (or investors) goes less far than one might think.

<comment><AUTHOR> imho, your example is not very good, because VCs don't give funding preferably to those with male names. According to the article VCs just "can't see the world from a woman's perspective". Then the question is why VCs don't hire more female experts if they "can't see the world from a woman's perspective".

<comment><USER4> Excerpt from the linked article: \</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> At one point, the founder was introduced via email to the head of a VC firm and got a reply from one of his associates. "We were given explicit advice that if we were introduced to a venture partner in a certain way and they passed us off to an associate, we were supposed to respond with, 'Thanks so much. I'd love to talk, but I'm heads down on a product right now and I'm only able to talk to people with decision-making ability,'" she says. She composed a reply saying as much. Before sending, she showed it to five different male friends who were also founders and they thought the tone was fine. But the response she got from the associate at the firm was shocking. "I got a massive slap on the wrist," she says. "The tone of the response I received was, 'Don't get too big for your britches, little girl.' And it happened a second time as well." When she showed the reply to the male founders, they were amazed by the brazenness of the email. They had never received anything similar in tone and couldn't understand why the response was so cold and angry. \</comment><comment>

Another excerpt: \</comment><comment> Money men look for people who are a younger, better, smarter version of themselves. It's human nature. The typical funder is an old, straight, white male, hence the typical fund-receiver is a young, straight, white, male. \</comment><comment>

There's a hierarchy of (generally unintentional) discrimination. In practice, there's a lot more discrimination when meeting face-to-face than when just confronted with names - but even in controlled conditions like the above math example, there tends to be a massive amount of bias against women in technical fields. And it's not a matter of perspectives.</comment>


Ask HN: Amazon API Question - <AUTHOR>

My programmers and I are trying to figure out if this is possible. I would much appreciate any input.
Is it possible to create a website where people can create accounts with a credit card and shipping info and purchase Amazon products from this separate site? As in, our site would store CC and shipping info and transfer them to Amazon when a sale is made so that they fulfill the order (and still receive a cut or commission).
Came across Amazon MWS (https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/index.html/183-8675474-3819327) and thought it may potentially help make this possible.
What do you guys think? Is it technically possible? <comment><USER2> I don't know if it is possible, but if I were Amazon, I'd shut you down as soon as I discovered it...

<comment><AUTHOR> why? I'd be sending them new business they weren't otherwise getting</comment></comment>