Novelty and Heresy - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/nov.html <comment><USER2> > _" Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon,"_

Famous, yes, but there can also be incorrect assumptions in that. Galileo, for example. A lot of people assume his heliocentric model was correct and was only rejected because heliocentrism was considered heretical because it contradicted the ruling assumption of geocentrism. But the Vatican at the time was seriously considering a number of models including some heliocentric models. One of the reasons Galileo's model was rejected, was because it contradicted observations. Planets didn't quite move in the way he predicted, and that's because Galileo clung to the incorrect assumptions that orbits had to be circular.

Of course his core idea of heliocentrism was less wrong than geocentric models, but at the same time it's an example of how addressing one incorrect assumption can lead you into another incorrect assumption. And that also lead to a lot of resistance to your idea, even if the core of your idea is correct.

As for Darwin, a lot of people at the time already assumed that something like evolution had to be going on, and that many animals had common ancestors. They just didn't know how it worked. Even while Darwin was working on his theory, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on the exact same idea. So in that case, the idea was actually obvious to anyone paying attention, and Darwin happened to be the one to get there first. But if he hadn't published about it, Wallace would most likely have done so.

<comment><USER3> Ok I know the Darwin stuff, but the Galileo stuff goes against the traditional story by quite a bit - given that going through google to find the truth nowadays is a chore, do you have some authoritative links?

<comment><USER4> AFAIK it's flatly wrong and the inquisition said it was heretical because it opposed what was in the Bible.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070930013053/http://astro.wcup...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070930013053/http://astro.wcupa.edu/mgagne/ess362/resources/finocchiaro.html#conreport)

The records are here. As far as I can see the only attack against the idea in the record is that it contradicts the Bible.

<comment><USER5> GP is taking into account the larger picture and discussion of Galileo's ideas. The Inquisition was sicced on Galileo and the justification was that his ideas contradicted the Bible. But the actual prosecution was _also_ motivated by Galileo's obstreperousness. Guy was difficult and he challenged the Church's authority in weird ways (not always intentionally). In particular, he was seen to have attacked one of his main supporters, who happened to be the Pope.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Galileo was originally on very good terms with the pope. Then the pope asked him to write a book comparing heliocentric and geocentric ideas from a neutral perspective. Galileo instead wrote a book ridiculing geocentrism, and had some things the pope said repeated by a character called "Simplico" ("Fool"). He insulted the pope, and that's where the trouble really started.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's a defense of the church.

<comment><USER6> It is not. But it is also different story and different complaint about church.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny both Galileo and Darwin are mentioned, since they are also mentioned on the same page in The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb page 167:

"Likewise we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the church didn't take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society saw "no striking discovery," nothing in particular that could revolutionize science. "

So Taleb makes the opposite claim that their ideas in their time weren't regarded as heresy as we now tend to believe.

<comment><USER8> I think we overestimate the dichotomy between those two things. It's pretty common to see people react to ideas with "that's either obviously true _or_ heretically stupid, but it's definitely not accurate and groundbreaking."

Galileo got in trouble over insulting his patron, but heliocentric theory more broadly was peacefully ignored, except when it became too visible and was persecuted. And the Catholic Church has maintained the same position ever since: into the 1800s, it was alternately publishing and banning works which accepted heliocentric theory. Even in the 1990s, we saw Cardinal Ratzinger rationalizing the Church's position as more rational than Galileo's at the time, while John Paul II was talking about "the error of the theologians of the time", as though the matter had consisted of a standard disagreement between scholars, rather than a heresy trial and a formal ban on Galilean ideas. One view says he was a foolish heretic who got lucky, the other an accepted part of the academy; neither concedes that his work was both controversial and _correct_.

We see the same thing all over. Darwin was hesitant to publish because he knew the conflict he'd attract, but the Linnean society declared his work unremarkable even as sparked outrage in other quarters. Soviet science suppression is recent enough to be well-documented; we see for instance that cybernetics was a "bourgeois pseudo-science" until it was rehabilitated, at which point Kolman wrote a history in which suppressed thinkers like Glushkov were credited with inventing the science ahead of Westerners.

Taleb's historical point is interesting, but I think he's wrong to portray those as conflicting reactions. Jumping straight from mockery to acceptance is a common approach for an establishment that doesn't want to lose face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just look at HN comment threads: Any truth that's inconvenient for the majority in the respective thread will be brainlessly downvoted. Killing the messenger is just as popular here (where all the smartest know-it-alls convene) as it is there (where all the ignoramuses reside).

<comment><USER10> Could you give me some examples?

<comment><USER11> Pointing out the environmental impact of having biological children is always unpopular here. A lot of HN-ers are pretty attached to the 'three kids and a white picket fence' lifescript.

Interestingly advocates of veganism (which has a similarly massive impact on your carbon footprint) are much more welcome, but I guess for most people the drive to reproduce is more inherent that the desire to eat meat.

<comment><USER12> If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem.

Those comments are unpopular because most people can see they're just smug self righteous twitter tier mic drops.

<comment><USER13> > If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it > then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the > problem.

I don't see how this is compatible with the observed reality that individuals make choices that are not best for society (whether due to rational self- interest/incomplete information/behavioral factors).

<comment><USER14> I suppose you could say there's room for that under redefining the problem, like "The real problem is that people refuse to employ known solutions to those problems."

<comment><USER13> That salvages the argument, but deflates it as an argument against talking about the known solutions: discussing them is part of the solution to such a meta-problem, directly, by leading people to employing them; and indirectly, by leading to insight on why people aren't employing them yet.

The former is hazardous (and verylittlemeat spoke against it): people fight for their views on the internet, and it degrades discussion more than it reaches people. The latter has leverage and is potentially highly impactful (i.e. the kind of discussion I come here hoping to find).

<comment><USER12> Many of the opinions downvoted on HN fit the same mold. They're what I call "if you're an alcoholic just stop drinking" arguments.

They're totally reductive and really just serve to stroke the speakers ego or shame others rather than actually address the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This squares with my experience.

In 2007 I had a social conversation with a well known and successful operator / VC in the valley about new ideas. Having just gone through negotiations for a raise at my corporate job, the information asymmetry between corporations and employees about salaries was huge.

So my thinking was that it was only a matter of time until salary information became more open. He was adamant that it would never happen. Sharing salary information between employees was heresy. Mind you, I was also 30 and he was in his 50s.

12 years later Glassdoor, levels.fyi, etc are all things.

For whatever reason - he hadn't gone through a salary negotiation in a long time, generational culture, etc - this was a major blind spot for him.

<comment><USER16> But sharing salary information is still heresy, it's attempted in secret across opaque unverifiable websites that companies themselves like to game.

<comment><USER17> People can break this dynamic by just going ahead and sharing their salaries: [https://jefftk.com/money](https://jefftk.com/money)

At least in the US, employers aren't allowed to keep you from disclosing your compensation.

<comment><USER18> Nice idea. I've been sharing my salary history via email for some time now to help equalize it - this just takes it public.

BTW, I would probably suggest qualifying the income by location to set the context. SV pay isn't always, e.g., Boise, ID pay.

<comment><USER17> Added!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The problem is that this outlook is often used as an argument in favor of some heretical position, instead of just being a defense against outright rejection. What is often forgotten (aside from the excellent points brought up by mcv) is that Galileo and Darwin were each among the very top experts in their respective fields, and many of those who rejected them most forcefully were laymen. _That_ was the biggest difference between them and their detractors -- they were experts facing off many laymen and amateurs -- not their heresy. These days laymen often challenge experts and see themselves as Galileo _just_ because their opinion is heretical, rather than because they've studied a subject more rigorously than others. Rigor and scholarship must precede heresy.

Another pitfall that's common nowadays is that many ideas that are presented as heroic heresy are just yesterday's rejected dogma. When dogma is rejected when a more rigorous heresy shows up, it doesn't lend more credibility to the rejected dogma, which is now heretical. In other words, these are people who claim Galileo's heretical status by arguing for geocentrism, which is today's heresy. Ironically, these days it is mostly reactionaries rehashing old dogmas that proudly describe themselves as heretics.

</comment><comment><USER20> Paul Graham, Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Sam Altman, and many others have promoted their share of ideas that entrepreneurial and VC communities have latched onto as sacrosanct. Take, for instance, the notion of "minimum viable product". Do the absolute minimum of work to validate an idea because that way you didn't spend years of your life creating something that there was no market for. If you didn't go to market after 3 months of development, you're doing it wrong. If you didn't seek sage advice from a panel of... "experts"... trying to convince you why you should give up 10% of your life's work for $100,000, you're doing it wrong. If you take a principled approach to your work and do what is right rather than what is popular, you're doing it wrong. Ship as quickly as possible. Go fast. We need Velocity©! You don't need to do anything right, just focus on appearances. Generally speaking, whatever you're thinking and doing is wrong. They know what is best.

Herein lies the great dead zone of missed opportunities, rejected by venture capitalists and entrepreneurship thinkers who worked too hard to advance ideas that aren't universally applicable and in many cases are simply wrong.

PG et al: break from convention and challenge your theories about what makes projects successful

</comment><comment><USER21> Francis Cornford in 1908: "Every public action, which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time."

<comment><USER22> +1 for referencing _Microcosmographia Academica_!

[https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford...](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford7.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The idea of heresy as a path to being right shows up many times in Graham's work, but he adheres so closely to software heterodoxy throughout his essays.

\- Programming language of choice being a huge deal \- Taking it as obvious that the supernatural is fiction \- Assuming smartness is a crucial ingredient for success

I could probably come up with more, but that'll do for now.

<comment><USER24> Did you mean, "adheres so closely to software _orthodoxy_?" I only ask because it's hard to see how one could "adhere" to heterodoxy and your use of the word "but" suggests you're setting up a _contrast_ with heresy.

<comment><USER23> Apparently I did.

I had a functioning vocabulary once, but it seems to have failed hard with the advent of small children.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just keep in mind that if your thinking is heresy you either have a way to show results quickly or a huge marketing budget. Being right today doesn't mean people will listen. With so much noise on the web credibility is a huge driver for customer acquisition. If your solution doesn't clearly show results and requires a pitch be ready to spend a lot of time building up your case and selling it. For instance, insects are a good idea for animal feed, right? Well you still need a lot of marketing to convince animal farmers to adopt them, the easier thing for them to do is just keep doing what they are doing today.

<comment><USER26> Being right has /never/ been enough to convince people. Changing peoples minds has to have enough of an improvement to overcome switching costs /and/ any anchoring biases.

<comment><USER25> Yes but today you compete with everybody else. If you are in a crowded space, i.e. analytics, your ideas will have to compete with ideas of many other bigger players with bugger marketing budgets. You also more or less advertise in the same place where they advertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like a lot how G. B. Shaw phrased this insight: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

However, from the perspective of the reasonable man, things look differently: Only a small minority of 'unreasonable men' actually manage to change the world. So it is rational to be doubtful if someone's novel idea contradicts widely shared assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's linked at the end, but [http://paulgraham.com/say.html](http://paulgraham.com/say.html) (2004) is, IMHO, much stronger version of the same argument.

<comment><USER29> That's PG's most important piece. By occasionally publishing short references to it (like TFA), he re-surfaces it for people who haven't seen it before or haven't thought about it for a long time.

When I was a child it seemed that society could distinguish moral judgments from epistemological ones. Now it seems that epistemology is the only remaining hiding place for judgmental moralists. Fake news!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what conditions would be necessary for a culture that is more tolerant of heretical ideas, compared to the present environment, in order to be more conductive to new discoveries?

<comment><USER31> You don't think we're at the most open and accepting time in history?

No one gets beheaded for heresy, real or imaginary, anymore, except in Saudi Barbaria.

And on Twitter. But you can pretty easily avoid both places.

(Curiously, the people who will behead you on Twitter are the same ones who are most opposed to the dogma of Saudi Barbaria, but they're onboard with how to punish dissidents)

<comment><USER22> I am intrigued by this technology which allows people to remotely remove the actual heads of their enemies over the internet, but maybe I skipped that in the Twitter release notes.

<comment><USER32> > It's called swatting

Dark but true :( Again, mostly geographically limited to the United States of Barberica?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm working on a heresy: a cryptocurrency with constant inflation. Most people in crypto dismiss the idea of inflation. It has been tried before. This time, I come up with a reward schedule to bootstrap inflation. And my crypto has inflation as its narrative. Inflation is its main feature.

People think I start another scam to replace Bitcoin. I actually think my project is not competing with Bitcoin. Galileo didn't advocate heliocentrism to bring down the church. He just supported the idea. The funny thing about heresy is most of them are somewhat trivial to see. People will think it's too trivial. Someone must have tried/proposed it before. Galileo's and Darwin's cases were also like this.

My project may fail. But the interesting thing about heresy is someone will try again at some point in the future. So I'm not too hung up about having to succeed.

Check out my project. :)

[https://bitflate.org/post/2019/04/14/bitflate- cryptocurrency...](https://bitflate.org/post/2019/04/14/bitflate- cryptocurrency-with-constant-inflation.html)

<comment><USER34> Besides longer blocktimes (2.5 minutes v.s. 1 minute), a higher inflation rate (7% v.s. ~4.5%), and a different hashing algorithm (SHA-256 v.s. Scrypt), how does Bitflate compare with Dogecoin? What aspects of Dogecoin made you decide to start your own project instead of working with an existing community that revolves around an inflationary cryprocurrency? I don't hold any Dogecoins, nor have I ever been a part of that community, they just seem like the primary example of an inflationary cryptocurrency to me and I'm trying to understand what makes your project different than the incumbent in that space, or if there's enough distinction that you don't see yourself as even being in competition with Dogecoin.

<comment><USER33> Thanks. Dogecoin has a constant tail emission. As supply grows, the rate of new coin inflation shrinks. Dogecoin community rejects the idea that they have a compound (percentage) inflation.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wuhyj/info_clear...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wuhyj/info_clearing_up_missinformation_about_our/)

Dogecoin is a good example of how hard it is to depart from its own narrative, basically, commit a heresy.

Bitflate has a percentage point of 7% inflation. We're going to stick with it for the sake of this experiment. Given what I read, I think it'd be hard to convince Dogecoin to really do percentage point inflation. I'm nobody. Dogecoin community won't bother listening to me. In addition, my project starts out with inflation in the plan. It has reward halving until inflation stops at 7%. The reward schedule looks like this:

0: 50 (supply: 10 million)

1: 25 (supply: 15 million)

2: 12.5

3: 6.25 (end of halving)

4: 6.56 (start of inflation 7%)

5: 7.02

6: 7.51

7: 8.04

8: 8.60

9: 9.20

10: 9.85 (supply: 31 million)

Dogecoin narrative is fun/meme/tip coin. Bitflate narrative is inflation coin. I think narrative is important. Once set, it'll be hard to change. It's possible other communities will switch to inflation. I would consider it a success for our effort. :)

<comment><USER34> Thank you for your explanation. I'd seen your supply chart, but I somehow never caught that Dogecoin is only trying to inflate in terms of absolute number of coins. I guess I assumed they had a system that was roughly equivalent to some percentage inflation. Given this difference your experiment does seem interesting to me, and I wish you the best of luck!

As a side note, I dunno what to think about inflation v.s. deflation. My best guess is that those are different assets, we want both, and long blocktimes are more tolerable in deflationary stores of value than they are in inflationary currencies.

<comment><USER33> Thanks! I think Bitflate can become a coin for transaction use case. It departs from the Store of Value narrative. Follow us on Twitter for updates. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Side note: Almost everything by Paul Graham gets upvoted fairly quickly. Has anyone insights into what the key ingredients for this are?

<comment><USER36> In a manner speaking it is annoying to see (his not so profound) essay upvoted. Like people said he is the founder of he founded YC, so he has a fan following of the commoner naive programmer crowd. He certainly is an intelligent chap ( and very ordinary by some some measures) but by no means profound. In fact this subject of heresy is quite banal to me or anyone who has spent sufficient time observing society ( including the scientific community).

I have always wondered what his objective was when writing these essays.

(I always have an objective, when I write, which is not narcissism, or seeking approval/support/vindication).

<comment><USER37> I'm pretty sure PG entertains quite a few interesting heresies that he's simply not willing to share publicly because of the backlash. Instead, he nudges people to find them on their own.

<comment><USER36> >Instead, he nudges people to find them on their own.

A.k.a driving sense into the (intellectual) peasants :). I hope he succeeds. My observation though is that crows are never whiter by washing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The flip side of the coin is protecting truth or useful ideas from ultimately less true or useful ideas. Or just simply avoiding the overhead of exhaustively vetting every idea without regard for its apparent merit. It's just like genetics: mutation can be valuable and is ultimately the way that anything evolves, but any given mutation is much much more likely to be problematic than valuable. There's a fine balance in identifying the ideal level of mutation for the long-term health of an ecosystem. Similarly, there's a balance in finding the right degree of resistance to novel ideas. Maximum support for heresy is probably not the equilibrium point.

<comment><USER39> I don't think we should feel the need to comprehensively entertain every idea that is different and sounds silly.

For a healthy ideas ecosystem: If you hear a new and silly idea, and you don't have the time or energy or interest to look into it properly, the best thing to do for everyone's sake is to ignore it.

Either address an idea properly, or ignore it. Don't write a 140-character snarky dismissal of it, don't attack the personal characteristics of the person holding it, and certainly don't seek to censor or "cancel" them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think when it comes to evaluating true novelty we underestimate how much our language does our thinking for us. Which is another reason why novel ideas hide from us so well. To put them into articulated forms that can be carried through time effectively (even to communicate them to later versions of ourselves) we have to bend the meanings of the words we're using in novel ways. Not easy to do but essential to an idea's survival.

</comment><comment><USER41> Happens to me every time. Every major product I've built from the ground up was first greeted as heresy by those already in that particular industry, and then later copied by the same people.

By now I'm used to it, and use it as a gauge of how sneaky I'll have to be in marketing it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Ok here's one, a website that shows things you posted that have been removed from Reddit [1]. Ask HN: heretical or not? This is the only tool AFAIK that shows removed content for a given account.

[1] [https://revddit.com](https://revddit.com)

</comment><comment><USER43> Maybe we need a special place where we can discuss highly unpopular and 'heretical' ideas that strongly contradict perceived wisdom or popular opinion. Any ideas?

<comment><USER44> I'd like to see a once per month thread on HN that allows it, with rate limiting removed from accounts that have been flagged for participating in flame wars, and a policy of "try to speak only in truthful terms". I think some interesting conversations that aren't otherwise possible might result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> To put it in other fancy words: when challenging paradigms, expect resistance. If you want to non-obvious ("contrarian" in SV speak), look for paradigms and question them.

</comment><comment><USER46> History and philosophy of sciences have studied this phenomenon a lot. Read Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of Scientific revolutions".

</comment><comment><USER47> Reading the comments its obvious that this hits a nerve with many people, exactly as the essay argues :) Our conceptual world is just that, conceptual, and is open to interpretation and change, and is fundamentally open ended. And at our current societal development we really really do not like that. We want to know how things are, and poking holes in how things are, is not popular (yet)

</comment><comment><USER48> I do not think people will call something novel that (actually) works heresy.

Example?

What's something with resistance that was discovered in the past 20 years?

If it works, people will see that, even without a working model.

Other than silly examples like calling the Wii a Wii I can't name anything. And arguably the Wii wasn't a 'discover something new'. (I also don't count one comment about DB) Is Wikipedia an example?

</comment><comment><USER49> Why now?

PG has written about this before. My thinking is that the tech stagnation has lately become evident even to the most disbelieving ones. And perhaps even SV is starting to think it's time to go ahead with the less safe ideas. That's just the idea i get from my reading of Twitters, i m not even in the US :)

</comment><comment><USER50> I dislike this essay's use of the concept of heresey. Heresy had force back in the day when religious orders had hegemonic control over society. That's no longer the case today. I know that's not what PG means by his use of the term, but there's no reflection in this peice about the metaphorical use of the concept.

Furthermore, the argument is fundamentally flawed. What consitutes heresy is entirely contingent upon the prevailing societal order's judgements. Let's put aside the problematic use of heresey for a second and deal with PG's actual argument—which is that it's good to go after ideas that the majority of society either doesn't recognize or sees as anathema. This quality alone doesn't prove the marker of a good idea. For all the « heretical » ideas like Darwin's and Galilleo's that proved lifechanging, there are a horde that were useless of harmful.

The value in these thinker's ideas has almost nothing to do with their heretical nature, which is a politico-religious quality—that these ideas are felt as « life-altering » in history may have something to do with their heretical nature (since they necessarily flew in the face of the prevailihg order of the day) but their fame and historical import does not actually have anything to do with their theoretic rigor, scientific value, or general usefulness.

I don't really see the point of this essay other than to say « think outside the box » in a quite clunky way by arguing from history and making some dubious claims (e.g. the essay seems to suggest that chasing heresies is an operable method to make novel discoveries while neither of the examples it uses are evidence of this methodology—while the discoveries may have been heretical, its unlikely Darwin or Galileo chased the discoveries on account of their heretical status).

<comment><USER51> Wikipedia defines the word as "any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization".

You're presumably using a different definition, or else neither of your arguments make sense. Maybe you should say what you think the word means?

<comment><USER50> Fair enough. But it's also fair to quote the sentence you cited in its etirety instead of chopping it off at the comma:

« Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, __in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization. __«

A better word for a belief that disagrees with general sentiment without having religious conotations is _iconoclasm_ which unlike heresy, has the religious meaning as its secondary definition.( heresy's religious sense is still the primary definition according to oxford).

Though I must say I'm not surprised the differentiation between such words is coming to ruin given our general laziness in regard to language, the decay of religious systems, and a broad ignorance of etymology and history. It won't be surprising to me if the word totally loses its religious elment in a few years.

Sorry for the salt. Have to presenr this one for the future so I can check my prediction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What are some examples of ideas today that are considered heretical but may have value to them?

<comment><USER39> Hoo boy, it's a trap. That's the thing about heretical ideas, I can get downvoted and possibly banned from the site from even gesturing in their general direction.

But okay, here goes. Here are some areas where there's a very large "dead zone" of ideas which surrounds some bad ideas but which may also encompass some good ones too:

1\. Intrinsic statistical racial differences or other ideas labelled as racist

2\. Intrinsic statistical sexual differences or other ideas labelled as sexist

3\. Maybe some aspects of the Holocaust have been exaggerated?

4\. (Increasingly) Climate change skepticism

I wish to stress, once again, that all of these heretical regions certainly contain a bunch of bad ideas at their core; but the size of the fenced-off region in each case is so large that it makes you wonder whether some good ideas have been fenced off too.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, those were some of the ideas I thought about but I found it difficult to find the kind of value PG mentioned from them in the midst of the bad ideas.

Thanks though! I also find myself hesitating to comment or post here to avoid getting downvoted. I would've thought HN would be the most tolerant among online communities of controversial or even obviously wrong ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Not sure what Grahams views are on economics, but I have certainly read/heard business people trumpet heretical ideas with praise before, having specifically in mind those heresies that conform to their particular world view. Graham uses two scientists as examples that have long been situated uncontroversially in the scientific world as canonical. Scientists are often used as examples of this kind of "revolutionary thinking" lauded by people in this world. I am curious how Graham would respond to the heresy of Marx's critique of capital to challenge the idea that capitalism is the best and historically final form of economics. Marx is just one example here of a thinker that is heretical without being "innovative" in the archetypical sense of Einstein or an inventor. I am generally curious if when someone promotes heresy, they already have in mind the kind of heresies that already fit into their dogmas. Graham may be more broad minded than this, but this kind of view does get thrown around enough to look like a trope.

<comment><USER49> how was Marx not innovative? Also, today it feels that Marx is the orthodoxy and the heretics are those who reject him

<comment><USER34> If Marx feels like orthodoxy you either haven't read a significant amount of Marx or you haven't been paying attention to who controls the capital in society. I say this as somebody who does not identify as a Marxist, but used to.

<comment><USER49> are we talking about now or the past? Marx is mainstream economic thought today, not some heresy. Back then, marx was certainly 'heretic', but i dont think there was talk of the end of history.

<comment><USER34> The "end of history" bit is Hegel, really. I could see Marx being considered Orthodox in some History and English departments, but his viewpoint is definitely a minority among Economists, and society is not broadly structured in a way that reflects his thinking. The social nets we see today come nowhere near a from-each/to-each narrative. The workers do not own the means of production. Wealth is more concentrated than ever.

<comment><USER49> e.g. the most prominent US democratic candidates openly support ideas that are more marxist than anything else. They represent a lot of people, it's not some small heresy

<comment><USER34> That party is currently in the minority, but more importantly their policies do not reflect Marxism. Their last Presidential nominee and last President both supported capitalism. You can point to some figures that pay lip-service to socialism, like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but even then the details of their policies are a mixed-market capitalism with a bigger socialist band-aide than we currently have. Marx was suggesting that people would identify as a groupman and act as if everybody mutually possessed everything. Obama (who was widely accused of being a communist) forced people to purchase healthcare from private corporations or face a government-imposed fine. These things are wildly different. While I wouldn't argue that the Soviet Union was ever _really_ embodying Marxism either, the idea was certainly orthodox. If the Democrats widely identified as Marxists despite not actually implementing Marxist policies, I'd give you that Marxism was orthodox in their party (and simply call them hyprocrits in addition). This is not the case. They both widely denounce Marxism _and_ don't implement Marxist policies. We can't call every welfare program Marxism unless we're willing to retroactively label Emperor Trajan a Marxist; Marxism is more specific than welfare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The opposite is also true: the interestingness and explosiveness of a novel idea is a function of its hereticity. We all create interesting business opportinities indirectly, by resisting to change.

</comment><comment><USER55> The timing of the publishing of this seems coincidentally aligned with YC's very recent backout of a Chinese outpost.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly- shut...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly-shutters-yc- china/)

I read this as a coded way for Paul Graham to express his distaste for those opposing the YC China expansion.

</comment><comment><USER56> Wonder what inspired him to put out two essays in short order after having been silent since early 2017...

</comment><comment><USER57> Gotta wonder if this was inspired by the Cybertruck announcement and the polarization that has followed.

</comment><comment><USER58> When did PG redesign the site?

<comment><USER59> 2006? That's the last obvious change I see in WayBack Machine (addition of the blue side buttons).

<comment><USER58> Oh I see now. The mobile version loaded differently this time. There's a shopping cart in the upper righthand corner for some reason. The desktop version is the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > " _Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it 's > probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas._"

The problem with this logic is that for every Galileo and Darwin, there are thousands of crackpots out there. Every month or so I see some news about engines that run on water as fuel.

As Walter Kotschnig said: "Let us keep our minds open, by all means, as long as that means keeping our sense of perspective and seeking an understanding of the forces which mould the world. But don't keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!"

<comment><USER61> The problem is, it's not obvious _a priori_ which ideas are crackpot and which ideas are hidden gems. (The infamous comparison being Newton's passion for theology and alchemy in addition to calculus and physics; it's not obvious he would have made his accomplishments in the latter, without being the kind of person willing to invest time in the former.)

I think the right strategy is to acknowledge that such pursuits are proverbial moon-shots, setting expectations and risk tolerance accordingly. Most innovations fail, and that's okay; "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas".

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Reading this I can't help but think about my mother, justifying all her shady pseudoscience beliefs by mentioning that brilliant and innovant scientists were treated with disdain during their own times, just as pseudoscience is. Heresies then turn into antivaxxers, electrosensitivity, homeopathy and so on.

This might work for business opportunities, but please leave science out of that.

<comment><USER63> I beg to differ. This is exactly spot on for science too. You gave homeopathy as an example. Here is an article that explain water memory, the underlying principle of homeopathy: ["Water Memory Due to Chains of Nano- Pearls"]([https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...](https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=89620))

<comment><USER64> Water memory is pseudoscience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Some heresies:

\- React is bad and bloated.

\- Startup industry is exploiting idealistic young people, as slaves of VC/venture partner "bet placers" with the promises of often unrealizable rewards, by promoting startup mythology, as lab rats most of whom will end up failed experiments.

\- China is not bad and should be supported, and the West can learn much from it, if the West could set aside its insecurity and pomp and see clearly.

<comment><USER66> There is a difference between being heretical and being impolite, insulting or deliberately provocative. It is not only what you say but also how you say it.

This being said, how do you expect to receive anything but backlash with a conditional clause like in your last sentence ( _" if the West could set aside its insecurity and pomp and see clearly."_). That's not heresy, it's deliberate edgy-ness.

Beside that I believe that 'the West' could learn some things from China because I believe that it is _not all bad_. Claiming that _China is_ not _bad_ in light of the China Cables is pretty bold, though.

<comment><USER29> _...deliberate edgy-ness..._

Strong disagree, from this Westerner. There is ample evidence of both insecurity and pomp anywhere one looks, in USA and in popular Western media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Can you expand on what types of things you think we should be learning from China?

<comment><USER65> Sure I could but then you'd just point out exactly why that looks wrong to you, since that seems to be what you'd like to do, so what would be the point?

It only works when you're actually ready to listen. That's not my problem. You get ready to learn on your own time. If you're resisting there's no point trying to put it in front of you so you see, since you'll just pretend you don't see. Cherished mistaken assumptions protection and all. Okay?

<comment><USER67> I was not asking from a standpoint of trying to tell you that you're wrong. I was asking because it seems like a good example to take away from the article but I'm not sure what specifically you were thinking.

<comment><USER65> Alright, I'll take you at your word and I'll risk it, let's see what happens.

China:

\- is good at doing things. Projects in the West are smaller and take longer.

\- can take the long view. Western governments think of the next election.

\- promotes harmony and unity among its citizens. Western electorates must be divided by emotional issues.

\- has a domestic security apparatus that's more transparent and obvious than corresponding forces in the West.

\- has 1.4 billion people. EU has 512 million. US has 330 million.

\- learn what works from others and make it their own. Less Western students go to China, than vice versa.

\- people emigrate everywhere, mix with everyone but still maintain their own culture. Less Westerners migrate to China than vice versa.

\- is very safe from violent crime and terrorism. The West could emulate China's effective law enforcement strategies.

\- has an admirable, inspiring and clear goal of striving for national rejuvenation, a harmonious and moderately prosperous country. What admirable, inspiring and clear goal for the future to work toward does any Western country have?

That's some of what I think.

But I don't think it's important to you what I think. I think what's important for you is you being _open_ to see what's already there in front of you. When you are open to learn, you will find your own things about China that you admire and wish the West would emulate.

<comment><USER68> Are concentration camps one of those things?

<comment><USER65> Sounds like so-called "concentration camps" are preventing you seeing anything else you could learn. How useful is that for you?

Or, if you need some help to get beyond that, let me flip it around for you. Do you disagree with an effective law-enforcement and counter-narrative strategy for countering radical extremism?

<comment><USER69> I disagree with _that_ law-enforcement and counter-narrative strategy for battling radical extremism, even if it is effective.

And seeing concentration camps (or, if you prefer, re-education camps) makes me rather hesitant about learning the rest. If what I learn is attached to re- education camps, I'm not sure I want to learn it.

For example, social cohesion is a good thing. We could really use some of that! But the Chinese method of achieving it ranges from the "social credit" system to the re-education camps. Do I want social cohesion? Sure. Do I want it that badly? No.

<comment><USER65> They have more ways than that to create social cohesion. You'd probably see it if you weren't blinded by the China bad hate narratives. But that's for you to work out. You've got to open your mind on your own. It's not my responsibility to do that for you nor even help you do that. Good luck seeing China accurately tho, I hope you achieve that! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> It's easy to say things like that when you live in a bubble of hypereducated successful people and you are being myopic concentrating on your own field.

There is no shortage of heresy in modern culture: astrology, homeopathy, creationism, dianetics, quantum mysticism, anti-aging creams and essential oils, torsion fields, moon landing conspiracy, the Bermuda Triangle, feng shui and yoga woo (at least in the form they are practiced in the West), conversion therapy, graphology, anti-vax, neuro-linguistic programming, phrenology, aryanism, etc.

I think Gavin Belsen is an apt caricature of this mindset turned up to 11, a successful Silicone Valley entrepreneur with megalomaniac tendencies and his own exotic, mystic and Eastern spiritual guru.

Yes, some people may cry wolf every time a new idea is presented, but oftentimes they are right and the new idea is indeed heresy and maybe even dangerous.

<comment><USER68> None of that stuff is heresy. Most of it is crackpottery and kookish, but crackpots and kooks tend to get debunked rather than shouted down. With heretics there's usually no attempt at good faith counterargument at all.

<comment><USER70> Oh, sure, when you agree with something controversial, it is just society being irrational. But when you disagree with something, it is obviously because it is crackpottery.

Don't you think people who are against these "heresies" have exactly the same view?

<comment><USER68> Did you even read my comment before replying to it?

<comment><USER70> Yes.

<comment><USER68> You clearly either didn't understand it or just didn't bother to address the actual point I was making, so I couldn't tell.

<comment><USER70> Have you ever seen a person who believes in such things? They think they are being rational and society just shouts them down. Sometimes it is even true (obviously, society can't debate the same things over and over, it would be ridiculous to have a discussion on whether rape is bad in prime time every week or so). The most obvious modern examples that makes it into news is the amount of racists, neonazis and misogynists who claim that they just want a debate and a public outcry from a big group of people to deplatform them to the point that they have to pay massive amounts of security fees when they make public speeches.

I have addressed your point but it seems you didn't get, maybe I wasn't clear enough, I hope in hindsight you will see what I meant.

Or look at moon landing conspiracy, or 9/11 conspiracy, people gather massive amount of evidence to support their claims. Simply applying a bit of empathy and retrospection should make you understand what's the problem what you are saying.

<comment><USER68> There are actual, fact-based debunkings of moon landing conspiracies, creationism, astrology, etc. That was my entire point and what makes these cases different from the evolution controversy or Lysenkoism.

<comment><USER70> Have you read the link?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I wonder if this could be applied to anti vaccination crowd.

<comment><USER31> The corollary is that your heresy needs to ultimately have an empirical basis which can explain the phenomenon in question better than the existing dogma.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tap a powerful, customizable note-taking system - <AUTHOR> https://www.tatatap.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

OP here. I lifted the forced CC signup for a few days so you guys can try it out.

Can't wait to hear what you think.</comment>


This Is the Week Wall Street Went Nuts Over Cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-13/this-is-the-week-banks-finally-went-nuts-over-cryptrocurrencies <comment><USER2> Isn't Bitcoin capped to 10TPS and Ethereum to 25TPS? How is this technology going to handle real-time large volume of payments without reducing latency in the order of a few magnitudes? If this is not addressed, *coins are just an experimental vaporware.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin faces serious barriers in scaling to high volumes. As you say, transactions are limited to ~10/s. A side effect of this is that transaction fees are now $2 per transaction (and rising). Furthermore, the blockchain has now exceeded 100 GB in size. At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale. Only data centers will be able to store the blockchain, and power will be concentrated in the few players able to build/rent blockchain data centers.

However, these barriers do not mean Bitcoin is doomed to fail. Logically, there are two paths to success: (1) Bitcoin is rearchitected to handle high volumes or (2) Bitcoin succeeds in low-volume applications.

<comment><USER4>
      transactions are limited to ~10/s
      [...]
      At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale

This is a big reason why many people want to keep the transaction size small. Currently, hard drive size is expanding faster than the block chain.

<comment><USER5> MAST is in discussion now and will dramatically reduce transaction sizes (SEgwit already did it too, and segwit is still being deployed).... with MAST bitcoin will be more of a smart contract system, and even very complex transactions will be tiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wall Street hasn't gone nuts-- it hasn't started buying it and the mechanisms by which they buy are not yet in place. This recent rally is bitcoin enthusiasts anticipating the upcoming hard forks.

<comment><USER6> Banks and hedge funds are not blocked from buying bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> There is no convenient instrument for them, and many funds have rules about what and where they can buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Autoplay = immediate tab close</comment>


Cheating In Computer Science Classes Worse than in other classes - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2010/02/18/cheating-in-computer-science-classes.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> A bunch of comments showing up in the blog post. Several from students. Not everyone cares about cheating apparently.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think that cheating is fairly common in any undergraduate class. In my experience, business courses had the most obvious cheating. Perhaps learning how to work the system is all part of a business degree.</comment>


What should a developer know before building a public web site? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-developer-know-before-building-a-public-web-site <comment><USER2> This has definitely been posted before... I feel like StackOverflow isn't the right tool for this kind of info, either. Wasn't there some kind of website that sought to document all of the "checklist"-style information out there?

<comment><USER3> There are many, I think. I know of one offhand: <http://lite.launchlist.net/>

I'm making a wiki with some of them but that's the only one I have on hand, aside from the SO post.

<comment><USER4> That's a nice looking site. Thanks for sharing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not convinced an XML sitemap is crucial for seo—except perhaps for the new extensions (video, etc.)</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone found a good hands on way to learn nginx.conf? - seph-reed I've been searching for a playground to learn nginx configuration in, something similar to https://regexr.com/ but for nginx conf.  Nothing seems to be out there.<p>Has anyone found a good hands on way to learn nginx.conf? <comment><AUTHOR> I'll usually put the following at the top of my conf when I'm trying to get something to work, and want to test it out interactively (makes it run without forking, and log to stdout instead of a file you'd then have to tail):

daemon off;

master_process off;

error_log /dev/stdout;

<comment> seph-reed brilliant. the logging bit has been slow, and this seems very helpful.

> makes it run without forking

what's forking? I didn't find much in a query ([https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nginx+forking](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nginx+forking))

<comment><AUTHOR> normally when you start nginx it will start another process, detach it from your shell and then exit. This leaves the other process running.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_\(computing\)) [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17954432/creating-a- daem...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17954432/creating-a-daemon-in- linux/17955149#17955149)

When you don't let it fork you can easily hit control c to kill the server, make some config changes and then restart.

<comment> seph-reed Ah. Thank you. I did not realize this was called forking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Mine is usually modular. You just want to keep all services, hosts and common things included.

I start with the bare minimum and start adding as need be.</comment>


Ask HN: How do YOU define a junior developer? (repost) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Reposts articles from 20 hours ago (jk).

It's someone who is relatively new to professional programming -- less than four or five years experience.

In my opinion, it takes more than five years to truly know the difference between shit and shinola.

I started in 1989 and try my best to maintain a beginner's mind -- because rigid thinking leads to rust -- and I don't wanna rust.

</comment><comment><USER3> Duplicate from 20h ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11434676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11434676)</comment>


"Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate. - <AUTHOR> http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/12/%e2%80%9cmerry-christmas%e2%80%9d-vs-%e2%80%9chappy-holidays%e2%80%9d-nearly-double-the-conversion-rate/

<comment><USER2> I think people think the "Merry Christmas $name" email is not spam (it looks like a message from a friend), so they open and read. "Happy Holidays" is something that only people trying to sell you something say, so you mentally filter that email.

The conversion rate is just a depressing example of how people will buy anything you tell them to. Once you get people to read your email, you'll much more likely to convert. (You get Viagra spam because _somebody_ clicks it and buys.)

This is basically why I give everyone a unique email address, and /dev/null the address after I stop needing it. People like the author of this post try to abuse my attention, and that is not OK with me.

<comment><USER3> While I very much agree with your sentiment (email marketing is usually a _bad thing_ ), this article seems like a small example of "psychological hacking" and I hate to admit how interesting this sort of thing really is.

It frightens me to know that there are people who spend as much time optimizing the performance of their marketing messages as we do on algorithms. The key difference (at least this is what I tell myself) is that while my work improves the actual product, the marketers work does no such thing.

<comment><USER4> If you keep thinking that way, you're doing yourself a great disservice. No matter _how_ great your algorithms are, without letting people know about it, you won't sell anything.

Like everywhere else, 90% of everything is crap and "marketing" is no exception, but how many bingo cards do you suppose Patrick would have sold if he wasn't greatly skilled at some oft-disparaged disciplines like SEO and email marketing?

Marketing done wrong is just as useless as all the programming done wrong you laugh at on Daily WTF. If you think you can run a profitable startup while religiously _not_ doing "marketing", I think you're wrong. I'd love to hear how you pitch that philosophy to investors though....

<comment><USER3> Hey, I said it was evil... I never said it wasn't a _necessary_ evil. Obviously having salesmen is just the way the world works, and just like how libertarianism, communism, and utopian markets could all work in an ideal world, I recognize that's not the world we live in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And I bet if you sent 'Happy Hanukkah' vs. 'Happy Holidays' you'd get much more traffic from Jewish recipients. Repeat with any holiday specific to a group.

<comment><USER6> The conversion rate could be much better because people rarely see Merry Christmas any more. I'd have bought something from Walmart if they just said 'Merry Christmas' over 'Happy Holidays'. I'm sorry, I'm not celebrating 'happy holidays' I'm celebrating mother fucking Christmas.

I'm not religious, it's just the goddamn holiday. I don't say 'happy holidays' to a Jew, because it's flat out _rude_. They're Jewish, it's their religious holiday and I respect that. I'll say happy Kwanzaa if I knew someone celebrated it. I'll say happy noodle day to a spaghetti monsterist.

I like respect. If I'm spending money, I want some damn respect or I'll go to the little store downtown and buy something that's actually celebrating the holiday I'm buying for: _Christmas_.

<comment><USER7> "Frohe Feiertage" is the German equivalent to "Happy Holidays" (usually only referring Christmas and New Years because minorities play a much smaller role in German society) and I'm not aware of anyone who was ever offended by it. (I'm also not aware of anyone who was ever offended by "Frohe Weihnachten", the German equivalent to "Merry Christmas".) The local catholic priest will get very angry at Santa Claus but he will say "Frohe Feiertage" ("Happy Holidays") without even flinching.

To me this looks like a thoroughly ridiculous and awfully US-centric "controversy".

<comment><USER8> I have to say that I have never met anyone who was offended by Merry Christmas. I'm an atheist and I hate "Happy holidays." I know what the holiday is: just say its name. My Druid ex-girlfriend would point out to me that it was a Christian usurpation of a pagan festival and then wish me Merry Christmas after the lecture :-)

I've known more people who were upset by "Merry Xmas" than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One problem: you did this test on Dec 21, well after Hanukkah had passed (it was December 1-9 this year).

So for a big portion of the folks who are supposed to appreciate your PC-ness you missed the holiday by almost a month. Hardly surprising the remaining segment liked "Merry Christmas" better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots and lots more agnostics and aethiests than Jewish people in the USA:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States#M...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States#Main_religious_preferences_of_Americans)

But fair point - would be interesting to test a happy holidays message earlier in the season.

<comment><USER9> That's fine, but plenty of atheists/agnostics/other non-Christian folk celebrate Christmas (at least in the gift buying sense, which is what you care about).

So for people who do celebrate Christmas, regardless of religion, of course the more specific "Merry Christmas" would beat the generic "Happy Holidays."

Of the folks who _don't_ celebrate Christmas, but _do_ celebrate a gift-buying holiday, Hannukah is pretty important. My gut tells me that Jewish folks are a big portion of this segment, and running the experiment 3 weeks after Hannukah would pretty much kill any chance of conversion for them.

Still, the takeaway from your experiment is solid: if you're running an email campaign 4 days before a major holiday, go ahead and focus on those who celebrate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Happy holidays" smacks of politically-correct pandering and pussyfooting. (I'm a Christmas-celebrating atheist.) Merry Christmas, HN!

<comment><USER11> I'm a Christmas-celebrating Catholic and I say "Happy Holidays". This notion that the words "Happy Holidays" are a political statement is bullshit. People said them long before Bill O'Reilly declared that there was a war on Christmas.

It's not "politically incorrect" or offensive to say "Merry Christmas" to someone who isn't celebrating Christmas (or, as is far more likely now, is instead preparing to celebrate New Years). It's _stupid_.

<comment><USER12> Saying "Happy Holidays" to someone who isn't celebrating any holidays this time of year (e.g. a Chinese Buddhist) is also stupid.

<comment><USER11> If I was in China, I wouldn't say it. In North America, I'm safe in assuming they're at least celebrating New Years, because they're probably getting the day off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's a pretty interesting finding, I wonder if anyone else has done similar testing and would care to share their results?

Also, I can't help but grin about "conversion" and the religiously-tinged "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" debate. Perhaps the already-converted are more likely to... convert?

<comment><USER13> Or maybe Jesus rewards those who keep "Christ in Christmas" with higher conversion rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now that's interesting. I wonder if it's because businesses tend to use HH while personal mail tends towards MC?

I just love to see this kind of experimental results.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just to take a step away from the particular discussion at hand, I found the very similar season greetings cluttering my inbox to be a nuisance.

It's worth remembering that the conversion rate only applies to the people who clicked at all - remember the surly curmudgeons like us who don't. :)

Just before you think about applying this to your business.

</comment><comment><USER16> Um, what was the unsubscribe rate on this particular campaign?

While they converted 16% they probably alienated another 16%

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm possibly wrong, but for me, Merry Christmas has a direct association with buying, sales, or e-mails about a sale etc., while happy holidays doesn't conjure up the same meaning, and hence a higher probability of me opening an e-mail?

Maybe fewer percentage of the people even opened the e-mail and the click- through percentage of the people that actually opened the e-mail was the same?

</comment><comment><USER18> An important note about email conversion rates.

There is a conversion funnel to actual paying customer. For this kind of test they are testing conversion from one step to the next. At other steps in funnels that I've seen, I've found that the increase in conversion at that step goes fairly straightforwardly to conversion to paying customer. However for email in particular at a couple of different places I've seen that improvements in clickthrough rates do _not_ convert linearly to improvements in revenue.

While 100% more people may have clicked through, I'd be willing to bet that actual purchases went up by substantially less than 100%. This is not to discount the value of, say, a 20% increase in sales. But you really should measure that instead of clicks. (That said, people like this company like to measure clicks because it is very easy to do so.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid point.

In this case the results were nearly linear, this is addressed in the article: "While we haven't included the buy rate in the chart above due to client confidentiality, the results were similarly impressive."

<comment><USER19> "similarly impressive" is deliberately vague; I certainly wouldn't take it to imply nearly linear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Merry Christmas" always seemed more personal to me than "Happy Holidays". Family members wish me "Merry Christmas", corporations wish me "Happy Holidays". Its not really a religious thing in my mind its more a matter of an meaningful gesture vs an empty statement.

</comment><comment><USER21> Google agrees, "Merry Christmas" reigns supreme:

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=merry+christmas,+happy+holida...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=merry+christmas,+happy+holidays)

</comment><comment><USER22> What the writer is referring to is the "Click Through Rate". A "conversion" is when the user takes an action post click (submits info, downloads, purchases, etc.).

He also incorrectly calculate the CTR. The CTR on an email campaign is clicks divided by opens. He divided clicks over sends, which since fewer people opened the "Happy Holidays" email, fewer would have naturally clicked. "Merry Christmas" still performed better, but not at the rates he's suggesting.

</comment><comment><USER23> Who cares about offending people who consider Christmas exclusionary when your CTR doubles? Most Americans still consider Christmas a "religious holiday" so this email means, to most people, your company is "picking" Christianity. I personally disagree with this practice. There's enough Christian privilege to go around as it is.

</comment><comment><USER24> I hear Happy New Year more than Happy Holidays

</comment><comment><USER25> 'Happy Christmas' remains awkward.

<comment><USER26> "Happy Christmas" is accepted in the UK, just not in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> From 30 Rock:

HAPPY HOLIDAYS is what terrorists say. Merry Christmas, Avery and Jack.</comment>


Reflecting on Susan Fowler's Reflections - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hadrad1000/reflecting-on-susan-fowlers-reflections-e2dccb374b47 <comment><USER2> > Sexism is a systemic issue, just like any other ism, and it can't be solved > by firing the handful of HR reps that were directly involved.

So let's ignore the unacceptable behaviour of Uber's HR reps and focus on the problem holistically ? This article isn't making a lot of sense, the author wants to support Suzan's cause yet do nothing to fix Uber's way of handling it ?</comment>


Jetbrains products all crash on the 2020 MacBook Air, sometimes crashing the OS - <AUTHOR> https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 <comment><AUTHOR> (Bug report mentions PHPstorm but it manifests on CLion, GoLand, and others.)

This is clearly an Apple bug as well as possibly a bug in Jetbrains' UI or other native libraries or maybe upstream in the JVM. It's an Apple bug because it can bring down the whole system, sometimes with an absolute hardest possible crash that generates no debug logs! Sometimes it also just crashes the JVM. Sometimes it's a softer crash with logs and sometimes a hard crash with no logs. Logs show crashes happening at random different places in the code.

Absolutely nothing else does this, including heavy stuff like running two Parallels VMs at once (Windows 10 and Linux) and running heavy multithreaded compiles. Also ran a RAM and CPU burn-in test. It's not a hardware problem. Many others are reporting it too.

Given that the new 13" Pro is a slightly larger version of what seems to be the same machine (10th gen Intel core, etc.) I would speculate that it will probably show the same weird problem. (The 2020 Air is a "2020 13" Pro, No Touch Bar Edition.")

People using Jetbrains products on earlier or different MacBook models have no issues. This includes the 2019 Air.

Posting here to attempt to get Apple's attention. Drawing attention on social media is the new way to get tech support focused on an issue -- "blue checkmark service" as it's called on Twitter.

Edit: I bet there is a security vulnerability here given that it brings down the whole OS. Any security researchers in the audience? The 2020 Air has a new 10th generation Intel chip and a new version of Intel integrated GPU graphics, so my money is on drivers or kernel support for one of those. (Runs off to disable WebGL and WebGPU...)

<comment><USER2> Or possibly an Intel/hardware problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'd be an extremely esoteric one if these products crash it and literally nothing else does including:

\- Hours of CPU and RAM burn

\- Multiple concurrent VMs running different OSes (Windows 10 and Linux).

\- "make -j8" on a large C++ code base

\- Visual Studio Code and other large Electron apps that also run under a JIT.

\- I ran a 3D graphics demo to stress test the GPU, no issues.

Zero crashes of any kind, then I launch a Jetbrains app and _boom_ at a frequency of about once per hour of app use. Sometimes the app just crashes, sometimes the whole machine crashes and does so very "hard."

The simplest explanation is an Apple bug being triggered by a Jetbrains runtime or JVM bug, or if not an outright bug something really odd and out of the ordinary that this software is doing via some OS API. Given that it only happens on this machine my bet would be on something video or screen related as the GPU differs slightly from other Mac laptops and that's a common place for bugs to hide.

<comment><USER3> Recent Mac GPUs have been... weird. I've had small artifacts on three different 16-inch MBPs (one that I returned, a replacement that I decided to keep, and one that I was issued at work).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not real impressed with Apple Mac OS stability lately. I am currently experiencing the WindowServer crash coming out of sleep on my MacBook Pro 16.

Look like it has something to do with the AMD dGPU and Catalina so again probably a GPU driver: [https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from- sleep-kerne...](https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from-sleep-kernel- panic-in-16-mbpro-2019)

Then you have another fun one probably related like it spinning up the fans and the GPU consuming double power when you run the built in display and an external monitor, but not with just external monitors: [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with- an...](https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an-external- monitor.2211747/)

Of course the problem with Apple is zero communication even acknowledging an issue leads to all sorts of wild goose chases usually involving reset pram or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating. This could form the basis of a serious zero-day.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if this affects Android Studio.

</comment><comment><USER7> the thing that sucks about jetbrains is that you need to keep updating license keys on your own end every year, even though you're paying a yearly fee. they really need to make this much easier. the end user shouldn't have to do anything.

<comment><USER8> No? Just login to your JetBrains Account and it should just work in my experience? No need to fiddle around with license keys.

<comment><USER7> nope, it just says "no suitable licenses found" even though i got the email that i updated.

<comment><USER9> Something is wrong with your account. You should have support look into it.

I just login into my account on the IDE and all licenses are automatically imported.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me be a better 508 compliant developer - <AUTHOR> I would like to be better at developing applications with accessibility in mind. What are some good resources? Where can I contribute? <comment><USER2> I would suggest you to go with WAI-ARIA [0].

[0]. [https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria](https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria)

<comment><USER3> ARIA can provide things like accessible Name/State/Role/Value where it is not provided with custom controls. I think a better place to start would be understanding the requirements of Section 508 and WCAG.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING- WCAG20/Overview.html#con...](https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING- WCAG20/Overview.html#contents)

508 is a requirement for the Federal Govt. but WCAG is what most of the private sector is tested against. These standards cover a lot more with respect to accessibility than just what is provided by ARIA. ARIA won't provide things like keyboard functionality but does help ensure that content is conveyed properly.</comment></comment>


Hackathons don't need prizes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lessons-learned/26ce8a86010e

<comment><USER2> I won an Android phone and made my first app using my prize. The article should discus how prizes in hackathons serve a promotional benefit.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, there are many people (including you) who benefit greatly from prizes. But I'm more concerned about the mindset of attendees (i.e. those that "play only to win"). It's also worth noting that prize-winners are definitely in the minority, numerically speaking. Nonetheless, good point and thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's an app you'd pay $5/month for? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to build apps and learn as much as I can about programming, rails, APIs etc.
HMers, what's something that's been bugging you?
I'd love to make something here, for All HN to see.
Why $5?
Anytime someone is willing to pay any sort of money, it becomes a clearer problem :P. Plus it's a lot more motivating to make money + program
---
Edit : There seem to be some really good ideas here! it might just make a nice resource that new hackers can use to start and Show HN <comment><USER2> Anything that will save me more than $10 per month. E.g. could save me money on bills, fees, government charges, tax, anything. But it has to be on something I am already spending money on (e.g. a recurring spend).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. What are you currently spending money on? Is there a process you hate to do, that you do anyways on what you're spending money on?

These are pretty loaded questions, but even a brief answer will be very appreciated :)

<comment><USER2> Some examples ... insurance, mortgage, car loan, internet, mobile phone, usenet, web hosting. Maybe an app could help in finding better/cheaper deals with some of these... probably difficult to automate much of that though.

<comment><USER3> Who do you use for usenet? What for primarily? Any good?

<comment><USER2> Astraweb - no complaints - $10 a month. Never hit any limits yet. I download TV shows and such like (via NZB) that I can't find anywhere else. Much better than torrent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A subscription to something like Longform - curated stories of interest to me. For $5 per month I'd like to have ad free versions of the stories, with better than normal styling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting as well! I took a look at their site, and it did seem hard to parse with the styling.

So the current reason you aren't happy with Longform are the ads and the styling?

<comment><USER4> Oh,I'm happy with Longform.

But I'm happy to pay for great content. I think that's a clear signal to producers to keep making great content. Until micropayments are sorted and I can pay each different newspaper for every article I read I guess it'd make sense for users to pay the aggregator who then pays the papers based on article read rates.

There's some thorny problems there to be sorted out.

The styling thing is mostly my personal preference; I like big san-serif dark fonts on a light yellow (#ffffcc) background. I use browser plugins at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A service that did bandwidth intense tasks for me. If I'm on my cell phone, I'd like to be able to take a link to an mp3 file hosted anywhere, and have an "upload to Google Music/Amazon/etc" option. The key would be to have you, the service provider, download and upload the file. Send me an email when it's done. This would be infinitely convenient for me when it comes to podcasts, videos, large DJ sets, conference footage, etc.

I say this as someone on America. I imagine you could find a few users in nations where virtually all services are metered. And once you program your tool once, it's automated.

The work is finding what services allow this, and adding then to your framework as requested. And, of course, your own bandwidth/storage bill...

Maybe this is best as a feature for existing data lockers.

<comment><USER5> In the exceptionally rare case someone comes across this in the future, I've been informed that someone is doing this with DropBox! It's called URLDroplet, and is at urldroplet.com!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am already paying that for Backblaze.

Okay - here are some services that can be automated. Deal hunters - I say I want 240 GB SSD or 7970 for x, you scrape regularly some interesting places (newegg, ebay etc) and if something drops - notify me and charge me a dollar.

</comment><comment><USER7> I covered this in my blog and it has many answer comments: <http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/the-5-saas/>

</comment><comment><USER8> There are plenty of things I would, and do, pay monthly for. An app still isn't one of them.

My point is there's opportunity everywhere and people these days think it's only in software.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Two examples for inspiration: Manpacks and Candy Japan (the owner is on HN). There is also a startup based out of Mountain View that delivers new games and puzzles for kids every month, but I cannot remember the name of it.

<http://www.manpacks.com/> <http://www.candyjapan.com/>

<comment><USER10> Do you, by any chance, knows who is the owner of those? i would like to be able to contact him directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A web service that makes it easier to debug problems that users of my website are encountering, by recording all console log statements and letting me filter and search on various dimensions. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081806>

I'm not sure how many other people want this. But you'd be saving developer- hours, which are worth a lot, and could charge accordingly.

<comment><USER12> Something like a combination newrelic and keen.io?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about a coupon manager. For example I scan all the items I'm buying at a store using the app, and it finds all the coupons available from that store or manufacturer. Than I hand over the phone to clerk, who scans it, and all the coupons are applied.

<comment><USER14> These guys are doing EXACTLY what you just described, great idea!

<http://www.saverrapp.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An feed (RSS/twitter) reader that takes voice (or wand-like) commands, reads me the entries so I can commute and listen to meaningful news without blind tapping my phone.

This is worth $5/mo to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really interesting! It could be cool to learn how to interact with Twitter, as well as Voice API's. The only downside I forsee is that hearing the news might be unbearable, with the text-to-speech type of stuff.

Thanks for the suggestion r00fus

<comment><USER16> Try <http://voicebunny.com/>. They have an API, or listing the jobs on Mechanical Turk to be read by a human.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A fart app.

<comment><USER18> Someday I'll be able to downvote you.

<comment><USER19> Would you pay $5 a month for the ability to downvote?

<comment><USER20> I would pay $5 per month to be able to down vote, to be honest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sir Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web – A Mid-Course Correction - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bj15 <comment><USER2> TL;DW? Can't watch it outside the UK</comment>


Why your SaaS application should support SAML - <AUTHOR> https://www.petekeen.net/why-your-saas-application-should-support-saml <comment><USER2> Decoupled authentication from your application should be part of any base architecture these days.

The article is thin on details, but adding SAML authentication to the mix shouldn't be terribly difficult if you have somebody on board or bring somebody in who knows it already.

Learning how to do it without any experience is fraught with problems. The documentation is hard to absorb with all kinds of abstracted out concepts and important settings that are easy to overlook (like requiring encrypted assertions). And really, the more you dig into it the more complex it seems to be, when on the surface the concept is very simple. Unfortunately, that's one of the reasons that libraries supporting SAML aren't as widely available as they should be given it's age.

It's kind of like SOAP. If you know what you're doing and you've done it before, it's simple. If you're brand new to it, you're left twitching and angry at the end of a weekend coding session.

Regardless, decouple your authentication mechanisms and be prepared to add support for a new technology as necessary. Don't just think about end users, think about automation, how you might support it, and how it behaves differently.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't suggest anyone to develop SAML support on their own unless they want to sell that as a component or service by itself. Instead, I'd strongly recommend that they look for libraries that have been around for sometime that take the grunt work out and provide high level APIs for the application to invoke. With this approach, supporting SAML becomes a whole lot easier and quicker to accomplish. One may have to pay real money though, depending on the platform, framework and language. Free ones in this area, to the extent of my research, come up short on reliability.

Also, the most common use cases are related to browsers, and don't need the entire specification of SAML to be implemented, like all the profiles, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can personally vouch for this imo silly little thing. It once came up in a meeting to which we said we could implement it immediately. You try explaining some stuff to totally tech illiterate people that make the business decision for a government company that needs to publicly do this. It's one big mess, they have to publish reasons and comparisons between several companies and they didn't make any sense when you read them because the people writing them didn't have any any of what they were talking about. You'd often find words like databases, servers, the cloud, and more words strewn around everywhere without making even the closest sense as to what they mean.

After that meeting, when someone asked us whether our stuff is in the cloud, we just said yes.

When they asked us whether we had SAML, we said yes.

When they asked whether we had x, again, we said yes.

It's not possible to explain to these people that you'd like to talk to developers or at least people who were trained at some point in their life.

<comment><USER5> As someone who has had to become fluent in Executive, Project Management, Bureaucratic Procurement, Software Development, and Operations (I consider each of those completely distinct languages), I can empathize.

The best way I've found to improve on that type of pain is to try to shadow as many similar interactions as you can, but with people speaking the same language on both sides of the table, while having a lot of visibility into one side so you understand how their response differs from what yours would be in that situation. Unless something is horrifically wrong in a way which has clear consequences, I generally stay silent and keep my interjections to myself. And at most follow up after with the person "on my side" to try to explain to them, and let them decide if it matters enough to bring up. If they can't see the problem, it's generally useless to bubble it to the other party who has even less understanding of your position. I've learned a lot that way about how to appropriately articulate the same situation to each of those stakeholders.

In your situation, the way I've learned to handle it is always a "Yes, our system is designed to be able to support that." The buyer side just has a list of checkboxes that at some point distill down to a bid. They have no idea what the checkbox means, nor care. But they understand that bids have a lot of variables. If you as the technical resource know that it's possible to, in some warped sense, adhere to that definition, then it's a yes. But never a hard yes - every check box on their end is a potential to pull out a cost. If you have to develop SAML support, but know that it's a net new feature that'll need integrated into your auth system, then it's a "Yes, we're capable of supporting that." followed by an explicitly called out segment of your bid that pushes the anticipated development cost onto them as a line item denoting the cost for that feature's support and it becomes another negotiation point. Maybe they don't need that checkbox, if the cost is too high. Or maybe you can frontload the entire development cost of that feature onto that one customer, and it's an inconsequential expense for them. Or maybe they need it, but aren't willing ot fully absorb that development cost and push back. You don't know, and they don't either if you just say yes and try to work out the math on your side to make it work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For people on the "hipster" train of SPA/JWT etc, I found OpenID Connect (not the original OpenID) incredibly useful. With a simple JS library [1] you can ask your users to log in with Google, Microsoft, etc, and you can then validate the JWT tokens issued on the server-side.

[1]: [https://adodson.com/hello.js/](https://adodson.com/hello.js/)

<comment><USER7> OIDC is definitely my preferred approach, but that's kind of the point of the article. Big orgs & governments, today, are generally going to be using SAML, if you're lucky (other times they're going to ask you to integrate directly with their 2-decade-old Active Directory).

SAML's kind of quirky, but the handful of integrations I've done so far haven't been _that bad_. Most of the pain comes from all of the half-baked implementations. I used to get riled up when a customer would ask "can you please not use signed or encrypted assertions? Our side doesn't support that"... now I just mostly shrug, make sure we're doing it over HTTPS, and... meh.

<comment><USER8> A not-encrypted assertion over https makes sense, but not signed?!?!?

<comment><USER7> > but not signed

That's right... Key management is hard lets go ride bikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> SAML SaaS providers are increasingly used over internally hosted SAML servers like Microsoft ADFS. Okta and Ping, to name a few, make things extremely easy for internal security teams, and likewise for SaaS providers.

I have been on the implementation team inside a large enterprise for Okta and MS ADFS. It was far easier for me to say to SaaS providers "make sure you integrate with Okta" vs having a series of technical meetings to implement a specific configuration for ADFS. It outsources risk, and means SaaS providers only have to manage the integration with one provider for a potentially large customer base.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Basically there are two ways to do SAML:

1) Specify you are using Ping/Okta/Sailpoint and everyone else has to interop.

2) Support ADFS and Shibboleth (as suggested by someone else further down here) and tell everyone else they have to conform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunately every enterprise-level SAML server implementation has critical incompatibilities with the others. So you need to support specific servers and that's a lot of work and testing.

<comment><USER12> I have integrated as an SP with a number of different IdPs and have yet to run into any problems. For the number of players in the space, it's remarkably compatible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same (author of the OP here). Every IdP is slightly different, but at this point adding a new one is just importing their certificate and checking the right boxes (GET/POST, IdP vs SP initiation, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this standard for enterprise edition of all SaaS. SAML, Audit log, SLA and `contact us` pricing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why did this submission jump from 265 votes to 15 votes?

<comment><USER15> Vote ring detection seems like the most likely answer?

edit: but this is just purely speculation based on it being the only way I know of for a post on hn to decrease in votes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazon's Cognito makes this super simple - I only learnt this last week because AWS' naming schema is so wonderfully opaque

</comment><comment><USER17> Enterprises , especially the big ones would typically have already made significant investments regarding authentication systems and processes. From that perspective,it is not fair to ask them to conform to any service specific authentication models/ processes.

<comment><USER18> I don't see how fairness even applies. It's a negotiation; you support their protocol if you get enough in exchange. And sometimes what they offer is not worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why try to implement SAML yourself when you could more simply integrate with something like Office 365 with OAuth and let them do the SAML integration with the customers Idm system?

<comment><USER18> If the client doesn't already use Office 365, doesn't that impose the burden on them to integrate their Idm with it, plus an extra cost per user?

Seems like you're just adding extra costs to your solution, which will weight against you during the negotiation.

<comment><USER19> the key word is "like". I certainly wouldn't mandate moving the customer to 365 just for this. But chances are they are already using something "like" Office 365 or Google and have already done the Idm integration.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough. In my experience, they aren't (that's mostly SMBs, not big enterprise), but maybe the market is different there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would this imply end user having to have a SAML server on the public internet? I'd guess big companies would be wary about this

<comment><USER21> Not necessarily. Both the customer-side component (IdP) and SaaS-side component (SP) just have to be reachable by the client. If the customer org has its clients on a private network, SAML can function just fine without being accessible from the Internet. Just put the IdP on the private network and the SaaS can run anywhere the client can reach.

Look up SAML 'profiles' to see the flows. There are exceptions to the above but they are rarely required.

<comment><USER7> I'm just in the process of setting that up right now! We're on the SP side, and the IdP lives inside an enterprise network and is not externally accessible. The only problem is that it's a bit tricky to debug, since they won't give us VPN access at all. Debugging involves picking up the phone, asking our contact to do a login, and watching the log messages. Slow, but it works and it's a big enough contract that it's clearly worth it.</comment></comment></comment>


The truth behind in-app purchases in mobile apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soom.la/post/35147518562/in-app-purchase-is-misleading

<comment><USER2> "It is not really about monetization. It's about engaging your users and giving them ways to advance in game play, measure their progress and add an extra layer of fun into the game."

The author nails it right here but is wrong IMHO about the % of games that can handle virtual currencies gracefully.

Sometimes I just want to enjoy a good game without being herded repeatedly with a cattle-prod into purchases i don't want to make.

Too often, in-app monetization is a hack-job that takes away from the gameplay experience. One reason why the vast majority of "hardcore" games are pre-paid.

Our consumerist obsession with free has hobbled our producers' ability to create quality. I get excited about the new crop of companies helping gamedevs pay the bills without nickel and diming their players to death. I hope they will lead to a golden age for quality social games.

</comment><comment><USER3> If all games were to follow the path of this article, gamers and game developers alike would all benefit. As a gamer, I'd like to be able to first try out a new game without committing to pay. As a game developer, I'd like to create a highly engaging game in a manner that will monetize those who keep playing again and again. This model is brilliant and creates a win-win situation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great stuff. Insightful.</comment>


Coronavirus (Covid-19) and CDC - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/covid19 <comment><USER2> >In the last 14 days, have you traveled internationally?

It is strange that this is still one of the screening questions considering the US now has more confirmed cases than anywhere else in the world. You would very likely have less exposure to the virus in Beijing than you would in New York City.

</comment><comment><USER3> the "screening" bit is barebones. so basically if you have any symptoms call 911?</comment>


Trump Tumult Has Gadget Giants Splitting Along U.S.-China Lines - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/the-world-s-gadget-makers-are-splitting-along-u-s-chinese-lines <comment><USER2> I like to look on the bright side. We're doing less business with a country that has millions of Uighurs in concentration camps.</comment>


Was it even used? Google Removes Instant Previews From Search Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-removes-instant-previews-from-search-results-adds-a-dropdown-for-cached-and-similar-results-updates/

<comment><USER2> Was wondering where that went. I used it all the time, but only for the link to the cached version. Good to know it's still available under the green arrow.</comment>