Is It Okay to Go to the Beach? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/it-okay-go-beach/613849/ <comment><USER2> Would be ok if everyone was wearing a mask. You go to the bathroom, cough cough, you go to the restaurant, cough cough, and you're driving back home with your friends in the car, cough cough. If we tried to reduce infection during these occasions, there maybe wasn't even a need for much lock-down.

Germany is about to get rid of wearing masks in stores. That's like turning off the firewall because the attack is over. It's preventive, so you need to wear a mask before sth happens.

I'd be very happy if there was an experiment, just for 4 weeks everybody should wear the damn mask both in private and public, and see what happens.

How can so many people fail to grasp the concept of prevention?

<comment><USER3> > Germany is about to get rid of wearing masks in stores. That's like turning > off the firewall because the attack is over. It's preventive, so you need to > wear a mask before sth happens.

There were 140 new cases in Germany yesterday in a country of 83 million. In my city of 3,5 million there were 17 new cases. At what point would you say it's safe to not wear a mask in stores?

<comment><USER4> When it's been ZERO for a while. Obviously?

I don't understand this question at all. As long a there's >=1 case and little immunity the virus WILL spread.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't it the goal all along to flatten the curve and gradually introduce herd immunity while softening the impact on hospitals?

No one estimates a vaccine any time remotely soon and even with one it would take years at best to achieve zero cases globally.

<comment><USER5> Flattening the curve was the most immediate and important goal, because overloaded hospitals kill a _lot_ of people.

Herd immunity by everyone getting infected should _not_ be a goal. That's still going to kill many, many people.

The estimate for the US by that route was around 2.5million dead. You could probably scale that by population size and maybe reduce a bit as we get better at treatment for this disease, but that's still a big number.

I don't think we have much option other than to prevent the spread as much as we can while waiting for something like a vaccine and/or far better treatments than we currently have.

Zero cases globally will indeed be a while, if it ever happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Atlantic tries to churn moral panic 24/7, and now they are trying to also churn anti-moral panic?

Stop getting science advice from op-ed magazines! I sympathize with 100% of the Atlantic's political views and completely hate their desperate and misguided attempts to remain relevant.

<comment><USER7> Is it possible that the Atlantic employs multiple writers that don't all share the same set of opinions?

<comment><USER8> It's just as likely they run op-eds from authors willing to have whatever opinion is necessary.

The business of op-ed and analysis pieces is pretty crappy, and it does not require any moral or intellectual honesty from the authors.

<comment><USER9> The author of this piece, Zeynep Tufekci ([https://twitter.com/zeynep](https://twitter.com/zeynep)), has had a pretty consistent viewpoint throughout the epidemic: she called for early response, early mask wearing (when most western authorities were advising against it) and co-authored a review on the topic ([https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0203/v1](https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0203/v1)), and has consistently said that closing outdoor public spaces is a mistake. Whether she's wrong or right, she's not just writing what the Atlantic's editors tell her to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Being at the beach does not seem to be much of a threat, but going to the beach is a different story. Cramped, less than sanitary public restrooms, crowded food stands, parking kiosks that rarely get cleaned- this all adds up to lots of contact. Sweat is an interesting substrate which doesn't get a lot of airtime, as are shared beverage containers.

There are worse things than going to the beach, but when hundreds of thousands of people go to them at once, things most certainly get transmitted. I shudder to think how much gets transmitted at Venice Beach on a normal day, let alone in a pandemic.

</comment><comment><USER11> At this point, don't we have quite a few examples of a lot of people getting infected in one place? Can't such outbreaks be categorized and summarized to get an overall perspective on where it's really hazardous?

My impression is that such events have been places like bars, restaurants, meat packing plants, and nursing homes, and not outdoors, but I haven't seen an article or study on it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The problem is all those people _ALSO_ go somewhere else _AFTER_ the beach.

Do they need to go to the bathroom? Do they all need gasoline for their cars? Snacks to go home? Are they all overloading the stores on the way out? Do they need to hit an ATM?

 _THAT 'S_ where all the spread will occur. Especially amongst a bunch of entitled dipshits who _also_ don't believe in wearing masks or washing hands.

<comment><USER13> You ask a lot of questions for which the answer may very well be "no".

<comment><USER14> Only if people plan ahead and make some attempt to help contain the disease (wearing masks, limiting non-essential indoor stops, social distancing), which it's now been proven we can't rely on (at least in the US).

Unfortunately the people who feel most comfortable leaving the house are the people who are least likely to take precautions, which seems like a recipe for lots of super spreaders to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TL;DR: probably, as long as you maintain physical distancing.</comment>


Getting to know Android 4.1 Part 2: Notifications - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/07/04/getting-to-know-android-4-1-part-2-the-glorious-new-notifications-size-matters/

<comment><USER2> I share the author's disappointment that the gmail app didn't get action buttons for incoming emails. About half of the emails I receive are junk. Having to launch the gmail app to delete them or archive them seems like overkill.

Happily, now that the notification system is in place it's probably pretty trivial for the gmail team to provide this functionality as an app update.</comment>


Build Impossible Programs - <AUTHOR> https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/18/build-impossible-programs/ <comment><USER2> I just wanted to share that everything jvns is saying here is true.

In 2014, for the Google Summer of Code program, I applied to build a JIT compiler for the MoarVM virtual machine. (It is actually more correct to speak of my work as a JIT backend than a full-fledged compiler - the 'frontend' of the compiler was already under development when I started). At the time, I knew just short of nothing about compilers, let alone JIT compilation. So what I did instead was learn, and make lots and lots of mistakes.

And it worked. The JIT backend I created has been in production since 2014, with a new backend since 2017, and a small (but thriving) community of contributors. It is far from the worlds most advanced JIT compiler, but it does provide a nice speedup on real-world perl 6 programs. All the while I've continued learning.

So... definitely try ambitious things :-)

<comment><USER3> I would like to know, when you run into the situation that you don't know was is going on with what you are building and feel a sense of confusion, do you:

1) Stop and spend time trying to get a clear mental model of what you are confused about

2) Push forward and try to build despite not understanding

In the past, when I tried doing super-ambitious things, I used the second strategy. Many sleep-deprived (tip: "sleep is for the weak" is BS) nights in which I accomplished nothing left me with a strong feeling that I should not try to do impossible things. However, since I learned the first strategy and have been applying it successfully to projects at work, I am rethinking this. I have increasingly been feeling like I would be able to be surmount large challenges if I first set myself up for success in terms of resources and people to ask for help.

Questions:

A) Do you apply a "step back and study" strategy to tackle confusion? Have you found it successful?

B) Do you have any more detail you could add on how it works?

C) How do you set yourself up for success outside of a work setting? For instance, I would like to write a server-side debugger for nodejs that is independent of google chrome and works toward a pry.rb-like developer experience. However, I haven't written C since by OS class in uni and I don't know the internals of node.js. How would I go about building trustfull relationships with people who know the internals of node.js so that I can ask them questions in the style of [https://jvns.ca/blog/good- questions/](https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/)

<comment><USER4> A heuristic I use that is very accurate for me is whether or not I can easily step away from what I'm doing (for a break, or just to finish the day) or do I feel a compulsion to keep going. If stepping away is difficult, I'm definitely in a "death spiral". At this point I can be sure that my productivity is already low, and it will just get worse. It's a burnout; a feeling that your problem-solving apparatus has overheated; severe tunnel vision coupled with impatience. It's weird that it produces such a drive to continue.

So when you pose the question, whether to push or take a step back, in my experience, it's better to pick clarity over aggressive pushing. It's subjective though. While I think there are overarching principles, I also think that different people react to these situations at least a bit differently.

To say a few words about confusion when confronting something you don't fully understand, I think the more confusion you can take, the better. Ideally confusion should be second nature to us, too often we jump to something prematurely just to escape it. When you think about it, we never fully understand all the things at play. It's about not being paralyzed by that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some of the best experiences I've had programming is when I thought of something I'd like to make, but it seemed impossible. Then I went and made it.

You do that enough times and coding becomes like real-world magic. You know you can do it, you don't know how yet.

Yes, there are places you can get stuck. Rules-processing, unstructured data, Markov Chains, ML, and so forth. But even that's a win. You start understanding the various classes of problems to be solved and how best to approach each one of them. That kind of meta-knowledge is really difficult to get without wading into things.

At the end of the day, you realize that there's no such thing as _impossible problems_ in coding. There's just problems that people can't figure out how to produce optimum results. A lot of the ML stuff we're seeing now is more like "make the best of things" and less like math.

Programming is a hoot.

<comment><USER6> It's rosy, but there are actual theoretical limits (like the halting problem) which act as a bedrock in that magic. Eventually we might find a way around, but we cant be sure of it now.

<comment><USER7> Even something like the Halting Problem does not rule out as much as people impute it to. It just proves you can't write a program that can analyze _all_ programs, but doesn't mean you can't analyze _some_ programs. However I disagree with your concluding sentence - the whole point of a proof is that we _are_ sure of it now, there is no way around. I would instead phrase it as, we may in the future find that the things we're interested in doing need not run into this barrier, because we refine the notion of what we actually want to accomplish.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Want a program to halt? Put a timer on it.

I thought the comment was both interesting and illustrative. Sure, in CS there's a ton of things still to do. But my comment wasn't about CS, it was about programming -- making things for people. The programs don't have to be provably correct or even consistent. That kind of stuff is the science part of programming which is completely different from the applied philosophy that is programming computers to make stuff people want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I'm reading that correctly, Segment was (is?) providing some people $8K per month for 3 months to work on open source projects. That's amazing! Here's a link to their 2017 application page: [https://open.segment.com/fellowship](https://open.segment.com/fellowship)

<comment><USER9> Wow, $8K per month is a crazy amount of money (for a developer in Europe), especially to work on a project of your choice.

<comment><USER10> Not really- it's a decent amount but not crazy. You would have to be a contractor to take this up, and that's quite a bit less than a contractor on say 500 EUR/day would make.

<comment><USER11> That's also less than what a contractor on say 10000 EUR/day would make.

<comment><USER12> Of course, but 500€/day is what you'd get in Paris as a Java developer with 3-4 years of experience. Which amounts to 10000€/month (counting 20 days).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing that caught my attention is Julia's value of work / life balance and the humanization (if that's the right word) of programming. She very deliberately didn't work on this in her spare time (underlining that coding isn't the only important thing in her life) and when she did build the prototype she explicitly wanted to do it at a weekend coders retreat with other "wonderful" people around (as opposed to secluding oneself in a room and coming out of it with a solution).

<comment><USER14> Same here. I had to do a double take when she mentioned that. She is a pretty accomplished individual and I always assumed that a lot of her personal time was taken up doing programming related activities. Now I know you don't necessarily need to sacrifice all your personal time to become HN famous.

<comment><USER15> I'm glad she mentioned that too, sometimes it feels like there's cultural pressure thag if you aren't hacking in every non-work hour then you're a slacker…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is so inspiring, thanks a lot. It's great to see that there are now resources going into supporting OSS developers that require only an idea and pedigree, and not a finished product and a business plan.

<comment><USER17> At last someone speak up about that very subject "doing impossible things" without being negative about the fact the community (of haters) forbids that behavior.

Innovation is NIH somewhat, somehow and that is a Good Thing.

<comment><USER18> I don't want to work for a company that only bolts together off the shelf components, although talking to me a few times you might get the idea that this is precisely what I want.

I hate working at a place where people are so busy being clever that they reinvent everything. You steal from the younger devs an opportunity to learn, and you externalize the cost of your poor documentation and interface consistency onto your coworkers instead of spreading it out over the entire industry. This is NIH.

What you should do is pick a segment of your problem space that has mediocre tools and make something much better. The 80/20 Rule seems to work quite well here, when I see it applied, which is not often enough.

<comment><USER17> > The 80/20 Rule seems to work quite well here, when I see it applied, which > is not often enough.

That is 20% of the effort can deliver 80% of the features?

<comment><USER18> The other side. We spend 80% of our time on the last 20% of the code. Make it count for something. Do something that differntiates you from competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I do love it when people post their slides for presentations, because this means I can usually get the gist of it without watching the video. Thanks, Julia! Though one quick comment: you're drawing your slides by hand, which unfortunately makes it a bit annoying for other people to consume–copy/paste doesn't work, and I'd assume people with limited vision might even be completely out of luck. So a transcript would be really nice.

<comment><USER20> The transcript is linked on the page. [https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/julia-evans-build- impos...](https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/julia-evans-build-impossible- programs)

<comment><USER19> Thanks, I must have missed that when I glanced through this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does someone have a direct link to the video? The iframe Vimeo player doesn't work and I can't seem to be able to find the original video on there.

EDIT: M3U8 link: [https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b...](https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b66b7f25139c7e6b7668931/290376045/video/1100074443/playlist.m3u8)

<comment><USER22> [https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045](https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045)

<comment><USER21> Thanks but that doesn't work for me, I can't figure which extension is blocking me.

I get this when opening that link:

TypeError: "play" is read-only player.js:2:3975

VimeoPlayer< [https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:3975](https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:3975) <anonymous>

[https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:260](https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:260)

TypeError: VimeoPlayer is not a constructor 290376045:1:9150 <anonymous>

[https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045:1:9150](https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045:1:9150)

<comment><USER22> Putting the link in youtube-dl and watching offline works for me.

<comment><USER21> Thanks I got this, playable with VLC for example: [https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b...](https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b66b7f25139c7e6b7668931/290376045/video/1100074443/playlist.m3u8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is really cool inspiring work. Julia Evans makes the world a better place.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm really enjoying the content that Julia Evans is releasing these days!

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't tell if she's nervous or awkward or excited but it reminds me of myself when giving talks, even to small groups. I get so flustered that my mind races and then the rest of my body tries to catch up so I'm now talking really fast and moving and jumping all over and being very fidgety with things. Anyway the difference is that she managed to get her points through while mine often gets lost.

I still don't know how to fix that except to practise and memorise what I'm going to say, and then just read it. But then it just becomes very monotone-y.

<comment><USER26> Whenever I have to speak publicly, I try to channel Barack Obama. He talks so ... slowly. He pauses so ... ... long between sentences. It feels like agony when you're doing it, but it works. In reality the pauses are never as long as you imagine, and it gives the audience time to absorb what you're saying.

<comment><USER27> Can you suggest a video with a good example?

<comment><USER22> Obama's final State of the Union is a good start: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLSBTAg0aM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLSBTAg0aM).

More archived videos are available here: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDGknzyQfNiThyt4vg4MlTQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDGknzyQfNiThyt4vg4MlTQ/videos).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What about thinking impossible thoughts?

[https://gist.github.com/AndreasS2501/2dc6c5813f5fd8abc79aad4...](https://gist.github.com/AndreasS2501/2dc6c5813f5fd8abc79aad44479843be)

Philosophy is pretty cool?

<comment><USER29> So I admit that I didnt read the whole thing, but this seems more like yet another push for bitcoin, and not actually about philosophy?

> So lets focus on that, the impossible thought: How can we live together in > peace and prosperity with each other and nature?

By fixing ethical misstandings, improving laws and destroying borders where none need be.

> So again, blockchains and ethereum are software and you can do any thing > with them.

You cannot fight racism with it. You cannot fight prejudice with it.

If all you have is a hammer, lots of things start to look like nails. Sure, you might be able to hit your girlfriend with the hammer, but the relationship would probably improve more if you talked about the problem.

<comment><USER30> "Sure, you might be able to hit your girlfriend with the hammer, but the relationship would probably improve more if you talked about the problem."

Or, rather, if the relationship ceased before violence entered the equation.

(In case anyone complains about pessimism, a friend of mine says often: "Relationships can only end in one of two ways: death or breakup." I'd rather think of it as a stoic position.)

<comment><USER29> well yeah, I didnt mean it that literally

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> there is nothing like jvns I wish I had more spare time to read her content. :/

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone know what Julia is using for those handwritten slides?

I absolutely love everything Julia writes. She writes in a way that makes absolutely zero assumptions about your level of technical competence. You could be a junior, mid, senior and still get _something_ from most of her articles.

Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new starts/non-engineers.

<comment><USER10> > Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and > communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male > counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new > starts/non-engineers.

It's not a good idea to generalise and push gender stereotypes in this way. You're saying that female engineers have better communication skills than male ones, setting the bar higher for female engineers.

You might think you're improving gender equality with statements like this but really you're setting a different bar of basic competencies for males vs females.

<comment><USER32> Honestly couldn't be further from the truth. I'm not trying to improve anything, I'm stating experience. The clues in the word anecdotally. It's a shame HN always devolves into contrarian and counter-contrarian tit for tats like this

<comment><USER10> Yes but if you said the same about a race or other marginalised group it would get called out on and you would probably agree. It's not tit for tat, it's sexism and it's important we address it collectively.

<comment><USER33> The poster above clearly didn't mean what they said as an attack or an attempt to set unfair standards for women, I don't think what you're saying makes any sense.

I work with a lot of gay men and I notice that they can often be more empathic and sensitive than straight men. Different groups behave differently and individuals can act however they like.

It's not sexist or homophobic to notice trends. We stand to gain a lot from noticing how people behave and reflecting on how we act ourselves.

<comment><USER10> The intentions are not the issue. The problem is demonstrated in your comment - the poster has presented an anecdote and you have interpreted it as trend.

You can't just say women are like X and men are like Y unless you actually have reasonable evidence to back it up. Prefixing it with the word it's an anecdote is just a get out clause that makes it seem ok. In the end the effect is negative on both men and women, even if it's a positive trait.

You probably aren't noticing actual trends, you're just reaffirming thoughts you already have by picking specifics traits out. It's perfectly natural and normal behaviour, but it's still not right and we should avoid it where possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How do you make those lovely slides?

<comment><USER35> From the article:

"As usual these days I drew the slides by hand. It's way easier/faster, and it's more fun."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Just be an ENTP [https://legacy.keirsey.com/4temps/inventor.asp](https://legacy.keirsey.com/4temps/inventor.asp)

</comment><comment><USER37> But if it can be built.. then it's not impossible.

Hence the topic should be "Build possible programs".

<comment><USER38> I'm pretty sure the implied sentiment is "Build programs that look impossible because they might turn out to be possible."</comment></comment>


AWS S3 (Ohio region) is currently experiencing issues - <AUTHOR> https://status.aws.amazon.com/?ohio <comment><USER2> Glad they got it fixed; even data wants to get the hell out of Ohio.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it's back up again. Was out between 3:00 and 3:30.

</comment><comment><USER3> Appears to be back up for us, but the Personal Health Dashboard still has the issue as 'Open'</comment>


New Reddit CEO reporting for duty - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-reporting-for-duty.html

<comment><USER2> Good luck to him. He sounds like a good choice. So glad they didn't find some square-jawed empty suit. The fact that he heavily participates in online communities is a very good sign.

I do hope he has a delicate touch though. It's surprisingly easy to set off communities if you come in guns blazing. It would not be difficult to replicate the The Great Digg Rebelling of 2010.

Probably the best thing to do would be to win over the community by making very small and uncontroversial improvements. Nothing that is self-serving. UI improvements, better search, nicer notifications, etc.

Increasing revenue would be _easy_ to do but very risky if it involves any new forms of advertising. I hope they can push that one off a bit or come up with something users don't find objectionable (which will be tough).

Reddit has grown so large with only very minor improvements over the years. It would be a shame to have someone "fix" what ain't broke.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to hear your ideas for improving search. IndexTank improved reddit's search greatly when they took it over, but IndexTank is shutting down in one month. At Searchify, we would love to power reddit's search, and are willing to spend a good amount of resources to make sure the results are good.

<comment><USER4> As a reddit user here is my experience. Reddit's search tool is terrible if you want to find a thread about a specific topic. It only searches for exact keyword matches and only in the title, not in the thread body. Add to this the fact that reddit users have a habit of link baiting their submission titles such that the titles rarely have any useful information and the search function is practically useless.

If I want to check reddit's opinion on something I have to resort to doing a google search like "site:reddit.com lopping tree branches".

<comment><USER3> You're correct - the current search only searches the titles. This is one of the most common complaints, and one that we would love to help reddit fix. One challenge is there are 5 to 10 times as many comments as there are threads. So a search index for that would be much larger, require more machines and RAM, and in the end it would be quite a bit more expensive for reddit to offer.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I understand that. The "search" feature of reddit is just so underwhelming that it doesn't even really feel like a feature. It feels like it's just a temporary kludge.

External sites are so much more useful it's crazy. Google lets me search comments and I can search in subreddits using "site:reddit.com/r/subname foo". Tineye + Karmadecay lets me even search for threads about an image or gif.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yishan knows more than most people about (the importance of) community on discussion sites, has the experience of being a major participant on LJ, Quora, and Facebook, and the engineering/engineering management experience of PayPal, Facebook, and some startup consulting.

I really doubt there's anyone more qualified to lead Reddit. I predict Reddit will add stronger social networking features to try to leverage the existing community in new ways; there has to be a reason news sites with great engagement like Reddit, Digg, etc. sell for less than 1% of a social network with the same stats.

He also built a pretty interesting invite-only physical tech community (like a less-crappy version of a coworking space), but I'm somewhat biased.

(what I _really_ want is a hacker news social network, but there are reasons that is unlikely)

I wonder if this technically makes Yishan CEO of a YC funded company...

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the smartest people I've encountered, even if it is only on Quora. Great sense of humor, doesn't pretend to have answers on things he doesn't know about. Probably a great guy to work with and for. Congrats, Yishan.

</comment><comment><USER7> As I said on the comments there, I'm excited about this change. I just hope they gave him sufficient leeway to do what he needs to do.

<comment><USER8> Are you sure you are allowed to post here? :)

<comment><USER7> Not sure why I wouldn't be. :) I'm a hacker after all.

<comment><USER9> I have to say, the incongruity between your accomplishments and your website [1] is mindboggling. You have listed on your resume, as one of your accomplishments, that you built the tools necessary to manage 1B pageviews/month with a _single sysadmin_... and your home page is _32 lines of html_. Not sure I've seen such a disconnect between skills and presentation since Knuth's homepage. [2]

[1] <http://www.jedberg.net/>

[2] <http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/>

<comment><USER7> Thank you I think?

I don't have a lot of time to update my homepage, so it's basic. It's way down on the bottom of my todo list to update it at some point but honestly those links will tell you far more about me than anything I could write about myself.

<comment><USER9> >Thank you I think?

It's a sorta-kinda complement, in a roundabout way. Were you just some random with a homepage, I would dismiss you as not being worth my attention. Knowing, however, the amount of work you'd put into keeping reddit up under some pretty unfavorable circumstances, you've been filed under "dudes with crazy skills and shitty homepages".

It's a small file with some interesting names in it.

Edit: At the moment, it's pretty much just you and Knuth.

<comment><USER10> How could you _possibly_ forget this?

<http://bellard.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is awesome. I'm really interested to see how an engineer will do as CEO

<comment><USER12> I wish they would try politics next.

<comment><USER13> [http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas- top...](http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine- government-officials-are-scientists/) The top 8 out of 9 Chinese officials are scientists. Granted the culture and political structure are a bit different in the West vs China.

<comment><USER9> Engineers and scientists are particularly well-suited to hold office in a communist country. The very idea of managed economies was based on the idea of informed technocrats being able to make decisions to the benefit of all. In fact, in the case of the Soviet Union, it worked brilliantly... until it didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm by no means a reddit fan, but Yishan comes across as an amazing guy (kind, bright, and insightful) on Quora, so I don't know if reddit could have chosen a better guy for the job.

It'll be interesting to see how visible he'll be inside and outside the site.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope he'll be able to do something about the declining quality of posts and comments, although I wonder if there really is a solution for such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER16> "But as I continued the conversations, I came to understand that reddit wasn't looking for a conventional CEO candidate, because reddit is not a conventional company."

Kind of scary that despite years of being a redditor, he didn't know what kind of company it was?

Perhaps he could have written it a bit more neutrally:

"But as I continued the conversations, I came to appreciate that reddit was serious about tech and wasn't looking for a conventional CEO candidate because reddit is not a conventional company."

<comment><USER17> There are plenty of unconventional companies that aspire to be conventional. Reddit could have been one of them for all anyone outside knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Why Reddit got a new CEO and _you should too_ "

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice! All the best to Yishan! He'll need it, that's for sure.

[edit: Okay, apparently pointing out struggles Reddit will have in maturing is not welcome here. Rest of post deleted.]

</comment><comment><USER20> Is Quora going to get the recruiter fee?</comment>


'Strong' Black Woman? 'Smart' Asian Man? The Downside to Positive Stereotypes - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/02/17/586181350/strong-black-woman-smart-asian-man-the-downside-to-positive-stereotypes <comment><USER2> I'm glad it was written from a minority point of view. I found this article an interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an Indian I get frustrated when people assume you are the local doctor, the media are wholly to blame</comment>


Life Cycle Energy Consumption and GH Gas Emissions from Li-ion Batteries [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ivl.se/download/18.5922281715bdaebede9559/1496046218976/C243+The+life+cycle+energy+consumption+and+CO2+emissions+from+lithium+ion+batteries+.pdf <comment><USER2> "This review shows that assuming the current level of emissions from manufacturing, the electricity mix of the production location greatly impacts the total result. This is due to the fact that the manufacturing is a large part of the life cycle, and that most of the production energy is electricity."

If the world's energy systems continue to be dominated by fossil fuels, then manufacturing and transporting goods will continue to generate GHG. On the other hand, if we manufacture lots of Li-ion batteries to electrify our cars and run them on solar- and wind-generated electricity (which we make more useful by incorporating Li-ion batteries for peak smoothing), then their life cycle emissions will decrease.

If you intend to change a system, the system will not yet be changed at the beginning of your effort. Boy you are bad at changing things!

If you are going to count to 10 on your fingers, when you say "1", you haven't counted very far, have you?

</comment><comment><USER3> The interesting question is what greenhouse gas emissions will look like once transport becomes mostly electrified and electrical generation becomes mostly non-emitting.

It's no surprise that producing batteries in the current carbon-heavy economy emits carbon. The big benefit will come when you can start to close the loop and take advantage of these non-emitting technologies in order to build more non-emitting stuff.

To make a crappy analogy, imagine pushing cars in the late 19th century as a solution to the problem of hose droppings accumulating in the streets. (Which was a real problem at the time.) It might be interesting to look at how many horse droppings are produced just supplying an automobile factory and how that compares to the horse droppings saved by the automobiles they produce, but it doesn't really tell you what the world will look like when automobiles become common, and especially when they can start being used to transport materials and workers to the automobile factories.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where in the study did it cite 8.2 years as a break even point?

By comparing to a gas car, you would need to calculate the CO2 cost of manufacturing an internal combustion engine, fuel pump, transmission, catalytic converter, etc

I think the headline you posted is quite misleading.

<comment><USER5> also the CO2 cost of extracting and refining the oil for the gas

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what's better : decentralized burning of oil in heat engine cars or centralized burning of whatever to produce electricity for electric cars...

<comment><USER7> Centralized burning is more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> TL'DR:

\- this swedish government study analyses CO2 emissions from battery pack production

\- for a Tesla S3, the emissions at purchase are 17.5 tonnes of CO2

\- That means 8.2 years of driving to just break even with an equivalent petrol car [0]

\- for the smaller battery Nissan Leaf, it is 5.2 tonnes of CO2 and 2.7 yrs of driving to break even

\- vast advances in battery production are needed to have climate impact w/ electric vehicles.

\- Or battery production close to abundant clean energy sources.

Additional source: [0]: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fing.dk%2Fartikel%2Fsvensk- undersoegelse-produktion-elbilers-batterier-udleder-tonsvis-co2-200080&edit- text=)

<comment><USER8> The analysis in your link of this document is very flawed. They only consider tailpipe emissions from a gas vehicle. Without considering the GHG cost of an electric car in total vs cost to manufacture an equivalent gas vehicle in addition to the lifecycle GHG cost of extracting, refining and burning fuel, the time to payback is artificially inflated. An apples-to-apples analysis results in electrics having a much more favorable outcome (I have done this myself in the past).

Also, as more renewable electricity production comes online the numbers will continue to become more in favor of electrics.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that would seem to be nonsense, the general estimate you see floated around is that the manufacture of an IC engine vehicle generates emissions equal to those from its operation[1]. Clearly the battery pack in an EV / (P)HEV will also create some, but it seems unlikely to be as large a delta as all that.

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living- blog/20...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living- blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good try Swedes. It'll take more than that to keep me from my sweet Model 3.</comment>


Ask HN: I hate my SaaS startups, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> Hey there,
Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I'm currently running two bootstrapped SaaS startups on my own, making around $2000 a month. Both are working great, are (relatively) feature complete and I constantly get great feedback and compliments from customers.
My problem is, I HATE marketing. I just hate everything about it. Looking at SEO or growth hacking forums fill me with disgust. The same with writing cold call emails or blog posts.
I know I need to do marketing in order to make them sustainable, but I fail miserably at it.
I'm a problem solver. I love talking to customers, identifying their pain points and writing code that solves them.
I don't have the money to hire someone to do the marketing for me. I've put everything I have into these startups for the last 3 years, so shutting them down is really not an option.
What should I do? <comment><USER2> > What should I do?

I can see a couple of options:

1a. Suck it up and do the marketing that you know you need to do. This seems to me to be the most straightforward option.

1b. See if you can find a way to automate some of the marketing. You said you're a problem solver, so put your mind to work and solve the problem!

2\. Take on a partner who can do the marketing, in exchange for an equity stake in the company.

3\. Look for some marketing student(s) who might be willing to work part-time (maybe on a short-term contract basis) for a reasonable rate, and let them do the marketing work.

4\. Sell the businesses to someone who is interested in putting in the effort to market/grow them.

There are probably other options, but those seem to be the obvious ones.</comment>


PyPy 5.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2016/04/pypy-51-released.html <comment><USER2> Wow. Just wow. Congrats to the PyPy team. It never stops.

I stopped calling myself a Python programmer sometime ago and started saying I'm a PyPy programmer because this is the future of Python. The underlying basis for PyPy has big implications for a number of dynamic languages though so we should all be cheering it on and contributing.

For those who want better Python3 support, there's only ONE answer so no need to keep begging. Donate more money to the project or donate your talents. Patches welcome!

<comment><USER3> How can it be the future if Py 3 support is the side project?

<comment><USER4> After they get momentum by attracting people with their speed improvements, it will be a lot easier to attract talent and money to tackle Python 3. The reason Python 3 is on the back burner is that there simply isn't a large enough audience right now. That could change if they keep increasing their reach.

<comment><USER3> After they get momentum? But pypy has existed for a long time. They are in a maturity phase now, surely.

<comment><USER5> You don't get many cases of 20% memory consumption improvements in mature projects...

<comment><USER6> "20% consumption" is more a factor of how much memory you have installed and how much you intend to use than PyPy's maturity. I frequently use malloc()/mmap() to consume much more than 20% of system memory.

EDIT: strike this, I misunderstood.

<comment><USER7> I think they're talking about a 20% _improvement_ in memory consumption release-over-release, not complaining that it's consuming 20% of their memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why does PyPy not get support from the big Python based giants - the Dropboxes or the Googles of the world. It seems to me that PyPy is struggling for funding. PyPy has the potential to become the canonical Python - if the entire team had their finances taken care of (and not have to do things like [http://baroquesoftware.com/](http://baroquesoftware.com/) ).

Is there a particular reason for this ?

<comment><USER8> PyPy is in the unfortunate position of being both uninteresting to many of those who rely on Python (numpy, etc and Spark work fine and are fast without PyPy) and irrelevant to application developers who switched off Python because it was too slow (to things like Go, Rust, etc).

(This isn't an insult to PyPy, btw--it's an amazing project that has accomplished a lot. I'm just explaining why it doesn't get the support one might expect.)

<comment><AUTHOR> but assuming the vast majority of python users are using it for web application and so is Dropbox/Google, it seems to me that PyPy has a marketing+PR problem than anything else.

<comment><USER9> That's not a fair assumption: a huge number of Python users are using it for some level of data processing and data analysis. And that percentage is growing each day, because Python is a very hot technology in data science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there major technical issues that make it hard to do PyPy for Python 3.5, or is it just a matter of wanting to focus 100% on the fixed target of 2.7?

<comment><USER11> The main issue is that PyPy's commercial target audience (people who need fast Python, particularly for numerical calculations) doesn't care about Python 3. There's not nearly as much potential funding for Python 3 as for Python 2.

Technically, Python 3 is not any harder to implement than Python 2, it's just useless.

<comment><USER12> I think you're partially right about the reasons (the other half of the equation simply being the momentum of Python 2 efforts), but I think your last clause ("it's just useless") is incorrect.

I can tell you for 100% certain that, if a project of mine could run on a version of "Python" that was even twice as fast, I would switch immediately, because 6 application servers could become 3. If the gains are even greater, that's tremendous.

It's not just scientific computing that benefits, and in fact, a lot of the scientific / numerical analysis done in Python is really done in C / C ++ anyway (think Numpy, et al which delegate to compiled code for much of their expensive operations).

<comment><USER13> I think it comes down to the question how much funding would such folks be able to raise to support that effort. It is my understanding that PyPy is quite resource starved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Had to happen. New PyPy release, new 2vs3 feud in comments. Can't we all just get along?

Anyway, my $0.02: I'm looking forward to test this with Hy (hylang.org) and seeing if some of the module referencing is fixed. Makes for a great JITed LISP already.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there plans to add Python 3.5 support?

<comment><USER16> Pypy3 is a separate project. From previous comments by the PyPy team, their customers are almost all targeting Python 2, hence Python 3 doesn't get nearly as much attention.

Pypy3's last release was 2.4.0 in 2014. It targets Python 3.2, which is relatively unsupported compared to Python 3.3.

Here is a recent comment by a core member of the team on future Pypy3 work: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262150).

<comment><USER17> > their customers are almost all targeting Python 2

Odd statement. How can they have any customers who target Python 3 if they don't support it?

<comment><USER18> The vast majority of python codebases are still in python 2, even though many of the popular framework have been ported to 3, and there's no reason for most of them to bother with the amount of work it can be to port to py3 when they're happy with py2. Whether it be devs like Dropbox or open source software like NVDA, they will stay in the world of python 2 for the years to come. The amount of customers they could get by supporting python 3 is definitely not worth the effort unless they get paid explicitly for it.

In terms of libraries, python 3 is "mostly" ready (though there are still issues with highly popular ones like wxwidgets. Or amazing tools like Pyjamas, which replicated GWT with Python instead of Java. Or Google AppEngine, which still shows no sign of moving to 3.) but large codebases outside of highly worked on web frameworks haven't moved on and there's not enough gain to justify the effort it takes to port them. The Python 3 debacle caused a lot of devs to also look at other languages for new projects. Old python 2 codebases will stay python 2, but new projects might not necessarily be python at all. The anger with Python 3 is real.

See also: [https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi- downloads/](https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi-downloads/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/45sm94/what_are_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/45sm94/what_are_the_most_recent_python_3_vs_python_2/czzy5wa)

"Looking at these graphs, we can see that in the past year Python 3.x has grown from roughly 2% of the total downloads from PyPI to roughly 5-6%"

I expect things like AppEngine to deprecate Python rather than port to 3, when/if python 2 reaches EOL and not enough people gather to maintain or even evolve that old branch.

Python 3 users are a vocal bunch, but the war they're fighting is a lost one.

<comment><USER19> >The anger with Python 3 is real.

But why?

<comment><USER20> Because here is a quick list of just over 100 things that have to be considered to port and maintain compatibility between the two:

[http://python-future.org/compatible_idioms.html](http://python- future.org/compatible_idioms.html)

Python3 is a different language than Python 2.7 and there is no compelling reason to move from 2.7 to 3.

Most of what would have been compelling reasons are being handled in PyPy. PyPy is the present and future of Python and that future is 2.7.

<comment> X-Istence If you want to use just Python 3, after the initial port there is no issues with having to maintain Python 2/3 compatibility.

Working in open source, there is going to be a time when I stop supporting Python 2.x, and already I and others are building libraries that are Python 3.x first, are developed on Python 3.x and Python 2.x is an after thought in testing.

PyPy will eventually have to catch up to 3.x, and no, the future is definitely not 2.7.

<comment><USER18> No matter how hard you're wishing it to be true, does not make it so. PyPy will "have" to catch up? in the name of what? PyPy is but one of the many projects that are still thriving in the 2.x ecosystem, there's even a competitor to PyPy that was launched 2 years ago that is also a 2.x exclusive: Pyston. [https://blog.pyston.org](https://blog.pyston.org) Yes, a very new implementation project that happens to focus on 2.7.

Python 2 gets all the better runtimes. Long after the end of life of the official CPython 2.7, we will still be running 2.x programs, and doing it on much better runtimes than CPython.

We've been hearing the same tirades of Python 3's future over and over again by its partisans ever since its release in 2008. 8 years have passed since then. 8 years will pass and Python 3 will still have nothing but a minority of vocal open source users. Python will be treated as a legacy language the way COBOL and BASIC are treated before py3 starts picking up any steam. That's kinda what some companies are already doing, like Dropbox. Switching to Go here and there, while keeping the maintenance of their very large 2.7 python codebase with absolutely no intention whatsoever of moving that behemoth to 3.x. Why bother? they could write new software features, fix bugs and so on instead of waste time on porting. Why waste so much time on porting when it brings so little benefits? Programming is ultimately about problem solving. Porting to python 3 doesn't make my software better. It's certainly not running any more efficient either, that's PyPy and Pyston territory (Using PyPy can allow you, under some circumstances, to seriously cut down the amount of hardware you need). It doesn't magically add new features, or fix the bugs.

Python 3 will go down in history as the best example of what you should never do while growing a language. People like to complain about C++'s complexity, but unlike Python 3, C++ isn't threatened by its own past selves, and that's despite adding features that are arguably far more compelling to look into than the various differences between Py2 and 3. It's also very hard to regain lost trust. The trust that was lost after what was done to Python with Python 3 can never be fully regained. I can write software in C++, Java, C#, Javascript, Lisp, Perl 5 (which is still being worked on) and so on and have an expectation not to have to go through something like Py3. To a lesser extent, even Ruby, although it breaks compatibility from time to time, it never went through anything as major in a one time fashion as Py3 did, which is why the ruby ecosystem hasn't self destructed.

With moore's law being utterly dead, the fact that all the interesting improvements to language implementation are happening only to 2.x rather than 3.x really contradicts your idea that the future lies in 3.x.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Numpy: "Fix transpose(arg)...add broadcast..."

Does anyone know if there are some milestones in sight regarding packages which use numpy? e.g. "working scipy or sklearn".

EDIT: BTW I forgot to add: tremendous thanks to PyPy team for your continued work on this project. I benefit from it and always look forward to the next release!

<comment><USER21> (PyPy dev here) Thanks. As our C-API support improves, we hope to be able to support more of the scientific python stack with minimal upstream changes

<comment><USER22> Hugely impressed that you now have broadcast and all ufuncs. As a user it seems like these constitute a big chunk of what makes numpy what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish PyPy supported multiprocessing. It does theoretically, but imposes a significant penalty, so it's not in a practically usable state.

[https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/issues/1538/](https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/issues/1538/)

<comment><USER24> That's from almost 3 years ago. Have you ran the attached patch to check the benchmarks with a more current release? I don't know if that's been fixed, but it probably wouldn't take much time to test out.

<comment><USER23> I last tried my own code which uses multiprocessing a few weeks ago. If anything, it gets slower with each release.

<comment><USER25> Is this the same case with threading (like multiprocessing.dummy)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is IBM involved in PyPy at all? Seeing PPC64 and s390x on a list of supported targets is unusual for a language runtime.

<comment><USER27> They funded the PPC and s390x ports, as far as I'm aware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Startup time is ok. "Hello, World" runs in something like 0.08s on my computer. Not sure what this would be like for an app that actually has a lot of code. Startup time is a metric I care a lot about, because it speaks to whether it feels snappy to use for command-line applications.

But holy crap the binary is enormous. I'm getting 22MB of text, compared with 991kb for CPython.

</comment><comment><USER29> How compatible are third-party packages with PyPy? Is there a compatibility matrix for all the packages on pypi?

<comment><USER30> [http://packages.pypy.org](http://packages.pypy.org)

The web server type stuff works. The scientific computing type stuff mostly doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Pardon my ignorance but what exactly makes PyPy different from standard CPython?

</comment><comment><USER2> Because the future is whatever you're building software in _today._

For the vast majority that's still Python2. For those starting new projects that might be Go, Elixir, Python2 or Python3.

Just because some entity like the PSF declares Python3 the future doesn't make it so. Even if some people buy into it and believe it. It has to take over from the bottom up and its been floundering since 3.0 landed in 2008.

<comment><USER7> This attitude is the exact reason why Python 3 hasn't been getting the uptake that was expected back when it was released. People who sit around and say "the future is today, and I already have Python 2 today" go on to start even totally new projects in Python 2, when they very well could and probably should be using Python 3. As the sibling comment points out, it's just laziness (and rationalization). There's no two ways around it.

Like it or not, the fact of the matter is: for Python programmers, Python 3 is the future. It's really only a matter of time, even if it's much more time than was expected.

<comment><USER2> You're confused. The unfortunate matter is that it has few to no technical merits. It defined technological churn with total absence of technical innovation. THAT is why it failed. Not because "everyone is lazy".

Python3 was lazy. Demanding that everyone including PyPy port, is lazy. Let Python3 live or die based on its technical merits like every other piece of technology.

Not to mention I wish the sword you're wielding cut both ways. You aren't entitled to demand someone else's labor any more than your buddies that litter every PyPy post demanding better Python3 support are. I hope you're harassing them for being lazy.

You made your own choice. You should have picked based on technical superiority rather than propaganda. To be honest with you, you should be ignored as you chose VERY poorly. Don't dare tell someone else what to use.

There are so many better choices to build new software in today than Python3. Python2 on PyPy is one of those. Those people can still port to Python3 if it ever does make sense. Even if that idea clearly threatens some of you, that's the smart play.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I have made my choice. And frankly, it isn't Python at all.

But the fact of the matter is that Python 3 is being actively developed, whereas Python 2 is in maintenance mode, and for how much longer? One of these days, Python 2 will become unsupported, and at that time you either finally move to Python 3, or you fork -- at which point you're no longer, strictly- speaking, programming in Python.

You're right that it's also lazy for people to simply demand Python 3 support from the PyPy project without being willing to invest in the effort. I have nothing to add to that, really.

I should also add that I'm probably one of the laziest programmers to ever exist, so I'm not trying to demonstrate superiority or anything like that. I'm simply pointing out that refusing to use Python 3 just because it hasn't seen much uptake only perpetuates the problem.

<comment><USER2> You'd be correct. The distinction is whose fault is that, the lazy Python3 core dev team or the lazy userbase? We'll just assume everyone is lazy in effort towards equality. Python3 was created without any backwards compatibility to make the core dev teams job easier, nothing more nothing less. LAZY?! Yes. That's their prerogative, but the rest of us don't have to use it either.

When I say lazy in this post, I mean simply acting on one's self-interests. Because that's what every party involved here is doing.

It's important to note the difference between Python the language, and CPython. Using Python2 doesn't mean you're using some deprecated language, there's virtually no difference. That's what made the break such a shame honestly. Moving to Python3 with new code is easy. Most people just have few great reasons to now with their existing projects.

People need to stop harassing the community and start harassing Guido van Rossum and the core dev team. Usually when people make a mistake, people fix it. GvR and his rogue band of developers have not corrected the Python3 mistake in any way. They've simply continued their mistake for so long, that people are becoming twisted thinking that it's EVERYONE ELSE who is at fault! Amazing really.

CPython2 maintenance mode is just a way for the core dev team to maintain their grip around this whole debacle. If they had the guts to dump it in 2015 they would've lost complete control of the situation. It wasn't out of compassion as they say. Because they simply removed the incentive for a 3rd party to swoop in and takeover CPython2.

Even that is backfiring now. People[0] are noticing how Python3 is turning into feature soup, which is never an improvement. Thus Python2's conservatism is starting to be seen as an asset.

As far as CPython3 being under active development, so is PyPy and it's superior to CPython. The language doesn't change too much at this point. Python is Python for the most part. When the time comes for someone on 2 to move to 3, it will be a non-issue. They're not "losing out" today in any way by acting in their best interests using 2.

Python3 has nothing that didn't already exist as a 3rd party library, nor does it have anything that doesn't exist in form of a backport. Thus technical innovation contained within is zero.

Programmers aren't stupid. And I think the PSF folks think we are. Or just blatantly disregard the community that truly made Python what it is.

The existing Python2 community is overtly disrespected when called "lazy" and all this type of harassment that goes on. I know I'm in the majority opinion because upvotes don't lie.

I'm just a guy who likes "Python", the language. I can't blame you for not using it and honestly, what a mess Guido and his core dev team has created right?

Python is my preference but I'm not held hostage by the PSF or Python3. I use Python2, Python3, Boo, PyPy. I don't hate Python3 and don't know anyone who does. It's just no slam dunk, and that's the core development team's fault- and they may lose their battle against Python fans as a result. I do _highly_ dislike the groupthink about Python3, with a portion of the Python community on this topic.

One more thing to add, is Python3 inevitable? No. It just fragmented the Python ecosystem. Nothing more. We all won't be on a single version again. GvR and his band of rogue developers should be ashamed of themselves. Again, change happens from the bottom up. Not top down. They failed the community and should abdicate their roles but I'm afraid their egos are too big.

[0][http://learning-python.com/books/python- changes-2014-plus.ht...](http://learning-python.com/books/python- changes-2014-plus.html)

<comment><USER32> > The distinction is whose fault is that, the lazy Python3 core dev team or > the lazy userbase?

I agree that Python core devs should have not made such breaking changes, And hindsight is 20/20, even for them. I also am a bit annoyed that they've been pretty stubborn about adding additional compatibility layers between the versions. (If six (maintained by a core dev) can help with compatibility, why can't the standard library have those shims too? :)

I also like Go's approach to unicode better than Python 3's approach.

"harassing" the core devs may have been helpful in back in 2008-2012, however, at this point it's a little late to start complaining. I doubt it will help at all.

> Python2's conservatism is starting to be seen as an asset

I totally agree. It's an unfortunate problem.

> is Python3 inevitable?

Yes. It's only a matter of time.

\- Django is planning on removing Python 2 support from master in January.

\- Nearly all popular libraries are compatible or have compatible forks.

\- Large python projects, like OpenStack are putting in the work to be Python 3 compatible. [http://blogs.rdoproject.org/7894/status-of-python-3-in- opens...](http://blogs.rdoproject.org/7894/status-of-python-3-in-openstack- mitaka)

\- Ubuntu and Fedora now ship without /usr/bin/python available by default. RHEL/CentOS 8 may very well do the same.

\- Debian has plans of removing Python 2 completely from it's repository not long after PSF drops support.

<comment><USER2> I agree with a lot of what you're saying. On Django though (or any library that intends to drop 2.x support), I feel if they truly go through with it, they'll be in for a shock.

It will more than likely hurt them more than it hurts Python2 (I also don't understand the obsession with people wanting to kill or hurt Python2). People and companies may be more likely to start new projects in Flask or another alternative, maybe even fork Django which would be a disaster for them.

But as of today, Django's roadmap has the LTS release that supports 2.x as an unknown EOL. So it won't be anytime soon.

Overall I tend to agree that Python3 will eventually take over. That wasn't what I was arguing and I never said otherwise in my posts. My problem is with the harassment over Python2 folks to port and all the associated nonsense. That's the part that is more counterproductive than anything.

"A matter of time" is a really bad last leg to stand on as well, because time has an awfully broad range. :)

As far as the other points, I have doubts about the impact of Ubuntu or others defaulting to Python3. That won't stop me from building for PyPy, I can say that at least.

In general I feel that I'm on a similar page to your stance though. I do use Python3, and have since the 3.0 release in testing alone. For someone who has tried every release and found performance issues and bugs galore, it's a testament that I (and others) haven't given up completely. I think many have.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: dwata – Manage Databases without knowing SQL (v0.4) - <AUTHOR> https://dwata.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone,

Founder here. I worked today entirely on the product site. It had fallen behind and was out of sync with the actual product. Would love to have your feedback. In particular if you could answer these two questions:

\- Do you understand what dwata is?

\- Do you feel you'd know someone who would need it?

Basically I am looking for clarity of product and audience. Thanks for your time and help, means a lot. Cheers!

Sumit</comment>


Nuget.org is down (slow day for .NET Devs starting new projects) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nuget.org/packages It's been like this since at least 8am. <comment><USER2> Thank god i have a private nuget feed in my network with local packages (internal api's and dll's for it) and the most important nuget packages (elmah, json.net, ...)

[http://docs.nuget.org/docs/creating-packages/hosting-your- ow...](http://docs.nuget.org/docs/creating-packages/hosting-your-own-nuget- feeds)

It's pretty easily and makes you less dependent on nuget... It took me a half an hour te get it set up.

PS. I wonder if it's as easy to setup your own private rubygem feed :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that bit of info, I learned something new today.

edit: It's not really back yet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Impressively Responsive Modern Software? - <AUTHOR> Even though modern computers are thousands of times faster, many modern user applications respond to user input fairly slowly. Just typing text into Word or OpenOffice can feel sluggish, Photoshop lags out processing input, many applications run on embedded web engines, etc. Often this results in tens or even hundreds of milliseconds of delay before responding to user input.
There's reasons for this. Modern software is doing a lot more, and we now have plenty of resources to waste...
I'd like to learn from the stand-outs in the field right now, so I'm wondering, in your anecdotal opinion, what are some pieces of software that exemplify "responsiveness" -- quickly loading, editing, saving, or otherwise reacting to users? <comment><USER2> IDK what you're doing to your computers, but I frequently have multiple enormous Word documents open, 50+ tabs open in Firefox, with various sundry apps running in the background.

Throughout all that, almost always the perceived delay between me hitting a key on the keyboard, and having it appear in Word, is zero milliseconds.

For text, Notepad++ has always been pretty snappy on all the points you mentioned.

<comment><USER3> I agree here if we are talking about personal computers. Work computers can be sluggish depending on how much monitoring software is used or how poorly it is configured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does it have to be GUI software?

If not, Q/Kdb[1] redefined my notion of "economy" in the sense of resource usage. The whole environment with about 60% of what you'd expect is like 500kb?

It's also very very fast, processing millions of records a second. It changes the way you iterate on things when you can get results back instantly.

This is one of the few software packages I've used in the last couple years that stunned me with speed. Most people are too lazy to care.

Q/Kdb is far from perfect, but you didn't ask for perfect. :)

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Sublime text.

<comment><USER6> Yes! You can keep your Atoms and VS codes. Sublime is sooo fast. It never lets me down for opening huge files.</comment></comment>


LoJack for bikes - <AUTHOR> http://weft.io <comment><USER2> Sigh, the idea has merit, this seems like its just a landing page to collect a mailing list of people who might buy one if you happen to make it.

Here is an "easy" answer, make a reflector with a simple RFID tag embedded in it. Make them look like all the reflectors you normally have on your bike. Create a repository for registering reflectors and give a free reader to every bike shop that wants to combat bike theft.

Will determined thieves swap all the reflectors? Sure. Does it raise the 'cost' of stealing a bike? Yes.

Alternative idea, put the tag in the bike seat. You can re-use pet tags, you can then re-use pet tag injectors and pet tag readers.

<comment><USER3> Bike thieves often strip the bike to the frame. Through dumb luck, I got back a bike that was almost nothing but a frame by that point. Reflectors and seats are easy to remove, something dropped into the frame would be really difficult to remove and bike thieves don't bother doing something like that.

This is a good idea, actually. Just taking email addresses _for_ an idea might well still be sketchy but that's as may be. Someone should do this even if that someone doesn't my email in the meantime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we stop posting landing pages that are simply fishing for interest in a non-existant product?

<comment><USER5> I think this type of A/B testing (assuming these kind folks are doing that) is valuable for early stage product design.

If not posting to HN, where would you advise to post?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bike theft is a huge problem precisely because there's no good way to track stolen gear. I'll buy one of these in an instant if it works well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now how are you going to power the transmitter, that is my question, sure you could add a little dynamo but it's not quite so elegant then.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting. I've been thinking about buying a topcap tracker from spybike-gps.com after my previous bike was stolen, but haven't committed yet as it's damn pricy. If you need any help testing or developing for it let me know. I'd be glad to give you a hand.

<comment><USER9> Had a nice napkin design to hook an old cellphone to an accelerometer to trigger text messages through a cheap plan, unfortunately I'm not an EE nor a hacker so it's only unicorns at this point.

This could be a nice national/college project, anyone coming with a cheap design could help a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a great idea and it's one that I've had too. The hardest problem you have is pricing -- making it all inexpensive enough for it to be worth it for you and your target market. Is this a subscription / is this a one-time purchase / is this pay-per-use?

Price too high, and only high-end bikes will have it. And high-end bikes have smart thieves / are already stored safely, etc.

Otherwise, I can see how this would work. GPS, batteries, low-power design, goes inside your frame and is visually undetectable, M2M deal with jasper wireless (or sprint or whatever), etc. It'll take a while to make it reliable and have a great user experience, but its totally possible.

Good luck and make it happen!

</comment><comment><USER11> "It's like LoJack for your bike, but better."

IANAL (and as far as I can see this isn't a real product), but..

While this phrase gets the message across very nicely, it is likely legally problematic.

Not only is it coat-tailing a trademark, but it is making a claim of superiority which is not a wise thing to do unless you have some strong objective proof.

</comment><comment><USER12> Minor design quibble. The "we'll keep you posted" banner that appeared after I submitted my e-mail does not fit in with the (otherwise very elegant) design of the rest of the page. #FFFFFF on #FF0000 out of nowhere is jarring.

</comment><comment><USER13> As someone who rides dual suspension bikes religiously on the north shore of vancouver bc, and has had expensive bikes stolen in the past, I would absolutely buy this for all of my bikes. Especially since it helps you to track the thief down. Nothing sucks more then bike thieves.

Don't steal bikes bro.

</comment><comment><USER14> What happens when everyone is checking for them? Security by obscurity doesn't really scale.

<comment><USER15> Thieves are dumber than you think. One time, they stole my front bike wheel because it had a quick-release, but left the back wheel even though it also had a quick-release. (The back wheel is worth more because of the gearing system on it.)

<comment><USER9> Let me guess, it also takes a few seconds more to untangle the dirty wheel chain ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the interested, there was a pretty good article earlier this year by priceonomics about bike theft:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4444708>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> designed by HN's own kyro (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kyro>)

</comment><comment><USER17> Default bookmark is default.

</comment><comment><USER15> where's the kickstarter?</comment>


Movie Theaters Cut Listings From Newspapers - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/21/movie-theaters-cut-listin_n_265337.html <comment><USER2> Is anybody surprised about this? It was only a matter of time. In fact, I _literally_ can't remember the last time I, or any of my friends, used the paper to find movie times. Chalk up another victory for the Internet.

<comment><USER3> I can't remember the last time I used the paper.

Wait, no, I cut out a few articles to put up on a board to help add some office ambiance to a movie set.</comment></comment>


We shut down our startup - <AUTHOR> https://entrepreneurs.maqtoob.com/my-cofounder-said-i-love-what-were-doing-and-we-shut-down-our-startup-80d5e710c2b2#.fpa1bd25p <comment><USER2> I've worked in the food industry for about 20 years now. For the last 3+ years my business has done nothing but sell to restaurants. I sell them food. Perishable food with a short shelf life. The most common responses to our products by people who have eaten them are. "I love them" and "That's the best I've ever had."

On average, my customers resell my products for about 2.5 times what they pay me. Depending on the customer, my products requires anywhere from no labor to 20 seconds of labor from restaurant staff.

The business was profitable its first month and has shown year-over-year growth every year in both product sales and revenue. Everything is done by myself and one other person (who joined after two years). We've spent $40 on marketing from that time I had business cards printed. We have higher per- month revenue than Dishero and there's never been a monthly loss.

As food industry people, we use our understanding of the food environment to help our customers. We know the awfulness that is restaurant life and we accommodate our customers' needs using what we know, what customers tell us, and what we see that isn't stated.

Probably my favorite action is when I show up delivering what my customer has ordered, only to cancel the order because I know the customer does not need the items. These are not products I can simply sell some other day. When that happens—and it always does—my customers know our focus is taking care of them, not making every possible sale.

In short: We have relationships with customers, and relationships are always give-and-take arrangements. I've found that focusing on the giving ensures we make enough to keep giving.

All those self-congratulatory things said, I have no doubt that our success thus far can be attributed to customer service. No, that's not saying anything novel, but—as always—it requires listening, watching, adaptability, frustration, flexibility, and a host of other behaviors/actions. It's hard work and it's not easy to get out of my own head to get inside someone else's head.

The economic and non-economic results have been good. We haven't lost any customers. The majority of our customers have found ways to get more products from us. All new business has come from word of mouth.

But I don't think there's anything novel in what we've done. I say that because I believe the success of every business come down to three factors: cash flow, logistics, and people skills. I don't know of an instance in any industry where a great product overcame deficiency in those areas.

I was unfamiliar with Dishero prior to this piece. From what was shared, it's hard to see if they did well with logistics or people skills (the author says they missed on cash flow). The author noted they had trouble overcoming the logistics of interacting with restaurant staff. If so, it's difficult then to build relationships, so there goes people skills.

It certainly sounds, though, like the people behind Dishero had some good product-making skills. And I have nothing but respect for the decision to cut their losses. I can't imagine the difficulty of that choice, and the accompanying pain, despite the apparent wisdom of that decision. My best to those people in their next pursuits.

<comment><USER3> You are describing a traditional, organically grown local business. And absoulutely nothing wrong with that, but quite different from the Dishero situation of needing to find a viable path to an exit or at least the next round.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it is possible to scale a business before you've validated the concept on a smaller scale. Validation _really_ should come first and that includes the business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They went from a company trying to sell to restaurants to one that will sell to developers?

Developers are some of the cheapest people I know. Many refuse to even pay for tools that save them a lot of hours per month (i.e. PyCharm). They don't know how to value their own time.

So unless they start targeting the C level management this product is probably doomed.

<comment><USER6> Developers are cheap in that they won't pay for something themselves if they have a remotely functional workaround. Development teams, however, are much less frugal about spending their employer's money to save them time and pain, and it's pretty easy to get management to sign off on purchasing something that will save their developers time, pain, or just plain make them happier.

<comment><USER7> > and it's pretty easy to get management to sign off on purchasing something

Whooa, where is this mythical land of milk and honey, and can I but tickets to get there?

<comment><USER8> Do you work someplace that won't pay for Photoshop or even SublimeText (et al)?

<comment><USER9> I worked in companies that would try to avoid paying for those and companies that would never pay for those no matter what.

<comment><USER6> I've worked for companies that would never pay for those, companies that would pay for pretty much anything if we made a case that it would help us, and my current employer, who will pay for things that we can prove delivers value, but don't default to saying "yes, we'll pay for," and who also audit every subscription they're paying for quarterly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm missing the bit where there was a word of appreciation for the paying customers and I suspect that they didn't rate a mention is a factor in why this company was unsuccessful.

<comment><USER10> He also kind of shittalked his cofounder. Implicit in the setup of the piece is the fact that his cofounder was essentially clueless about everything.

 _" I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, "Awesome! I love what we're doing these days!" ... It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If they don't want to work on a restaurant service, that's fine. But I'm not sure their learnings are spot-on. Looks to me like the raised a lot of money which wouldn't be a problem unless they started over-spending (which they did; 17 people & 3 countries???).

For an offering like that, get out of SF and find a "small" city like Des Moines or Tallahassee that has 1,000 restaurants but not a million Silicon Valley sales bros calling them every 5 minutes. Prove the business with a lean team before opening up the purse strings.

<comment><USER4> > sales bros

Can we please get rid of the word 'bros'? It's quite annoying.

<comment><USER12> Do you have a better term for young, white, arrogant, entitled young men?

<comment><USER13> Yes, but it would violate HN policy/use guidelines...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are many options for mobile app debugging / analytics already, I feel like these founders just want to start something... anything... Maybe it's time to take some time off and reflect? I've never started a company so I don't know these things, but it seems like a desperate move to me.

<comment><USER15> > I feel like these founders just want to start something... anything...

Wantrepreneurship... I've been there too. Taking some time off is definitely the best cure but $1.8M in the bank is very tempting to keep diving into anything as long as you can keep deluding yourself you're working on the next big thing.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why the investors would not take the $1.8M back once the idea they invested in was shut down.

<comment><USER16> I guess they value the founder more than the money? Their lottery ticket already failed, this is a pure free bonus round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > selling to restaurants is a dead end.

I can expand on that: Selling to small-to-medium-enterprises is a dead end. They are entirely focused on the near-term, and usually their finances are hand-to-mouth each month. Unless you can demonstrate that they will be making real, actual money with your product from day one, without any extra effort, save yourself the bother.

<comment><USER18> Can you expand on your experiences, and why you think they are a trend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "the goal to replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence."

"Our business was seemingly working and from 30K feet — it looked great:"

"We had had happy customers and revenue almost from day one. Our revenue grew continuously for 11 months in a row."

"Despite of all of the above, Dishero was still in a mediocre category: we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue. The revenue continued to grow, but the growth was painfully slow and unpredictable."

We're not in a bubble....

<comment><USER20> Right! I'm sorry, but $9k/mo in revenue with 45 sales people and $100k in expenses??

Definitely not in a bubble. I run my own bootstrapped company that does $5k/mo recurring and my expenses are sub $750 a month.

<comment><USER21> If you have no employees and don't consider your own salary an expense, you're not comparable as a business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The core take away here is that unless you are one of the top 3 employees in a start-up, or even moderately successful business, you are trivially expendable. No matter if you put in hours of overtime, poured your hart and soul into your job, all of that is null and void on the whim of the owners. Of course they will have a rational justification why you lost your job. Unless you control your destiny you will forever be subject to the destiny of others.

Take all of this into consideration when next interviewing and negotiate for the best possible deal, knowing that no amount of possible "future" prospects is a solid as hard cash in the bank now, be as predatory and hard nosed as you can possibly be. You are working for Me(Inc) and its dependants, you are morally obliged to extract every last drop of value you can from your current employment relationship, because, as you can see from this example, the converse is a given.

<comment><USER3> _No matter if you put in hours of overtime, poured your hart and soul into your job, all of that is null and void on the whim of the owners._

Well presumably you got paid. I'm not sure what else an employee has a right to expect beyond that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Restaurants have terrible margins (in the 3% range [1]) and high failure rates themselves. Selling to them as a startup is like playing on ultrahard mode difficulty, unless you're solving a hair-on-fire level pain point. The total neglect most restaurants show towards their websites and menus would indicate it's actually not a very high priority problem.

Startups are already hard just by themselves. If you want to increase your chances, pick a industry with healthy margins.

[1] [http://smallbusiness.chron.com/average-profit-margin- restaur...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/average-profit-margin- restaurant-13477.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Interestingly, I found this post to be full of answers and opportunities in the restaurant space.

-> "replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence"

This isn't a task of selling to a restaurant. Restaurants don't make their own menus, they go to designers. Designers are the customer for new paper menus. They are currently being threatened by Canva, which is making it easier for non-designers to get a better product.

->"[restaurant owner] doesn't have a spreadsheet estimating how many people show up on a Tuesday night"

Uh, HUGE opportunity. Machine learning across what is going on in a city and how that would affect restuarant sales. Network effects (if you're getting data as well as selling answers) and you get to sell the same product again and again and again.

I'm maybe not so sure they were looking at the opportunities enough.

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be really interesting to see long-term stats on success rates of founders who pivoted vs those who persevered with the original idea.

<comment><USER26> I can't figure out what this would tell you. Would it tell you that initial ideas were often better or worse than subsequent ideas? The sensitivity of teams to how product market fit occurred? I can't figure out how it would be actionable, due to the wide gamut of ideas and execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Here's our big insight / little secret — selling to restaurants is a dead end.

But fantastic if you can make it work a la Grubhub and Seamless who got $360 million in revenues primarily by selling to restaurants.

The restaurant business is indeed hard, but lucky (or good) sales people have had tremendous success and profitability tackling it.

<comment><USER28> I think the key difference is that Grubhub and Seamless offer restaurants an additional revenue stream without the overhead or operational headaches of doing in themselves.

<comment><USER27> SinglePlatform did _exactly_ what this business did (centralized menu mgmt), but was profitable and sold for $100million.

<comment><USER29> "SinglePlatform is your connection to the top search engines, travel and review sites, online listing directories and mobile apps used by over 200 million people to find local businesses." (from website)

Sounds more like digital facing store front management, way beyond centralized menu management, which would be a clear value add for local restauraunts.

<comment><USER30> Isn't that Locu?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yeah, don't try to sell to restaurants. I'm not sure if that, or running a restaurant, is the worse idea.

<comment><USER32> Worse to sell to a restaurant since if you have a chance of success if you are running a restaurant.

There whole SMB market is a death trap for technology companies. It looks so attractive on the surface; great demand and no competition, but the reason there is no competition is the cost of acquiring a customer in this market is greater than the lifetime customer value.

<comment><USER33> So how does slack, square and shopify do it with their SMB products?

<comment><USER34> 'traps' don't necessarily have a 100% capture rate.

<comment><USER32> Exactly. People see the few companies that manage to succeed in this market and assume it is easier than it really is - the few survivors hide the thousands of companies that tried and failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How is spending 100k/m, while only bringing in 9k/m is a "moderate success"? Their lessons learned is basically "tech startups in the restaurant space is a stupid idea"!

</comment><comment><USER36> Shouldn't there be a lower cost way to figure out WTP, CAC, churn rate, customer purchase journey map, etc. etc. before starting a company and having a large-ish sales/marketing team?

</comment><comment><USER37> IMHO the wrong thing about most startups (no offence), is that they all want to change the world. Everyone wants to redefine an existing market as that all previous guys who tried to do it were idiots or didn't know a thing about what they were doing. It's not a bad thing to be ambitious but don't think you are the only special in the universe.

<comment><USER10> I agree. I mean, Dishero was very young. I doubt that in a market as conservative as the one they were in they'd find the magic bullet in less than two years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Very good read, but at the end, there is no universal recipe for either success or failure.

</comment><comment><USER39> What exactly did Dishero do? I don't understand from the article.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER41> A lot of what's said is very similar in the education space as well so I can somewhat understand. Great writeup!

</comment><comment><USER42> good read

</comment><comment><USER43> "We had raised a total of $2.8M (2 rounds)" "we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue"

That is how startups in America work: a) take any idea b) find enough believers c) throw money at the problem until it either works out or fails.

I mean are those people for real? It's like watching 5y olds playing monopoly

How about: If you need millions investment for your idea then your idea is just BAD (except you are building Teslas maybe)

<comment><USER44> We're going to add the Principle of Charity ([http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html](http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html)) to the HN guidelines as a way of emphasizing how badly comments like this break them.

If you assume that other people are stupid, nothing is easier than to conclude that they're stupid as well. This is good for attracting upvotes from others who feel the same way you do in the first place. But it's deeply bad for thoughtful discussion.

<comment><USER45> 1\. You've been saying that for a long time. Do it! Is this a trickier task than I think it is? Can I do it for you?

2\. Consider adding AGF at the same time:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith)

Not all of WP's idioms are valuable, but there aren't many community management problems they haven't engaged with (and none of the ones they've missed apply to HN) and this is one of their better results.

Post-Dang HN has been pretty great. Thanks! Level it up again. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue

There's all that needed to be said, right there.

<comment><USER47> I like how he specifically called that "mediocre success"...

<comment><USER48> Even worse, he contrasted "mediocre success" against "failure", whereas anyone outside of the tech bubble would have looked at the numbers and rightly called it a failure outright.

The bubble is not in valuations, the bubble is in people's heads - the naive delusion that you can disrupt all aspects of human nature by applying enough technology and holistic ideology.

<comment><USER49> _The bubble is not in valuations, the bubble is in people 's heads - the naive delusion that you can disrupt all aspects of human nature by applying enough technology and holistic ideology._

It may be true that there are aspects of human nature that can't be disrupted by technology, but the problem is recognising which can and which can't. Often when something fails you don't actually know because it may succeed under slightly different circumstances. The failure of a startup is evidence that there may not be a market for "disrupting human nature" in that domain, but it definitely isn't proof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Every time I read one of these (less and less frequently) I find that the core problem is the management writing the article.

None of the insights they talk about are particularly noteworthy or trade secrets. They could have been discovered as part of coming up with their business plan. It's more than fair to assume they'll make the mistake again.

<comment><USER44> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11925924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11925924) and downweighted it.

It's not strictly off-topic, but it's a nasty, generic dismissal. Piling onto other people's mistakes ("They could have been discovered as part of coming up with their business plan") is a lousy thing to do, and if you're going to do it here (though please don't), your comment should have at least have some other redeeming quality. Instead you draw contemptuous conclusions about someone's character, kicking them when they're down.

This is the sort of comment that, even assuming it's 100% correct, says more about the commenter than its subject. I'm ashamed to see things like this on HN and particularly ashamed that they routinely attract upvotes.

<comment><USER50> This was a hurtful response.

I am a single poster/person, not a group of people or a pattern of commenting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Gotta love hacker news: I think I just lost half my karma points near me for asking a question, suggesting that maybe, just maybe we shouldn't rush to judge people so negatively. Haters gonna hate...

<comment><USER44> Please don't violate the HN guidelines by going on about downvotes ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).

I agree with you that the comment you replied to was unduly negative. It was probably unfair to downvote yours, though it wasn't particularly substantive.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11926020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11926020) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Another one of these posts? When will they end.

"We shut down our startup"

Thanks for letting us know.

<comment><USER53> I thought it was pretty interesting. Also the related comments here.</comment></comment>


Monty Python Finally Says Goodbye - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/monty-python-final-reunion-performance-interview

<comment><USER2> I say Poppy Cock!!! This is a piece talking to people who just finished a HUGE production. There is no "Official" we are done. This is man I am tired and I can't think of anything that would bring us around to do something again. Doesn't most people feel that way after finishing something???

I call Link Bait on Esquire in a print article :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up with them. Didn't we all?</comment>


How an ad campaign changed engagement rings forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27371208

<comment><USER2> Please re-read the HN guidelines. They ask you not to editorialize story titles.</comment>


When your data science activities can send you to prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/doing-illegal-data-science-without-knowing-it <comment><USER2> This is a very strange article.

The first set of activities would usually be considered to belong to the fields of cryptography or information security, not data science per se. The author doesn't distinguish between export controls and classification. The issue of export controls on this type of technology may be an issue but it's something that's been discussed elsewhere and I think is fairly well known. I've never heard of any encryption work that wasn't funded by the government being classified. I think there is legislation that allows the government to classify patents, even if they weren't developed with government support or using classified information, but as far as I know it's very rarely used and the only cases I've heard of involve nuclear technology.

As for the other items, "data science" can be applied to any activity, including ones which are illegal for various reasons (like running an insurance company without respecting the relevant legislation and regulations). That's a far cry from claiming that doing "data science" itself, ie. developing algorithms, analyzing data, etc. can be illegal. If the author has any evidence that this claim is true in the US, he doesn't present it.</comment>