America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-stem-wont-make-us-successful/2015/03/26/5f4604f2-d2a5-11e4-ab77-9646eea6a4c7_story.html?hpid=z3 <comment><USER2> When: 43% of americans don't believe in evolution. (1)

53% don't believe in climate change (2) 15% don't think vaccination is safe.

Then I don't think you don't hace a problem of obsession with STEM, bit with The lack of It. 1 [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolutio...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution) (2)[http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/26/poll-53-of-americans- dont-...](http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/26/poll-53-of-americans-dont-believe- in-man-made-global- warming/&ved=0CCkQFjAE&usg=AFQjCNGSdRpjQK2jI1QYnqQS_vzyOAM6Yw)

<comment><USER3> I can see the worry with vaccination, as it directly affects everyone, but does everyone necessarily have to agree on the other two issues?

Is it a real issue if someone is doing really good things for society, being an excellent person, but happens to disagree with you about evolution or climate change?

Science is getting to be its own fundamental religion for many IMHO, who prescribe 'science' as the answer to everything, and treat scientific papers as the bible (They also cherry pick the scientific papers they like, and ignore the ones they don't, just like religious folks do).

Also, the link you cite for climate change is 404, but I would expect the only real bone of contention is whether any change in the climate is caused by humans or not. Are there really people who deny the climate is changing?

<comment><USER4> Yes. People who do not believe in evolution are holding back progress. They are making everyone's quality of life worse through their sheer ignorance.

People who do not believe in global warming are even worse. I will literally suffocate in my lifetime because of these imbicils.

I suppose in some philosophical sense, no we don't all need to agree, but in a practical sense if we want to survive and thrive as a species, we must.

<comment><USER5> It's extremely hard for me to imagine how my quality of life would improve if my neighbor started believing in evolution. Perhaps you can provide an example?

<comment><USER6> You would be less likely to get an antibiotic-resistant infection in the future, because an understanding of evolution is necessary to understand how massive application of antibiotics can lead to more resistant bacteria in the future.

You would be more likely to survive a pandemic in the future because there would be more public support for research into how diseases evolve.

There would be less racial strife because more people would understand that the differences we see in people lie on a continuous genetic spectrum, not broken up in distinct "races."

<comment><USER7> What do you think of the evolutionary impact of pesticides on bacteria resistance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is conflating two different ideas; that we should have more students studying STEM subjects, and that students should have a narrower (and more STEM-focused) education.

You can disagree with either of these proposals (and I disagree with both), but it is wrong to set up one as a straw-man to argue against the other.

The real reasons to think that STEM-mania is silly are much better described elsewhere (e.g. here; [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the- myt...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the- science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/)).

There is little-to-nothing to be gained by trying to entice reluctant students into fields with high unemployment and stagnant wages in the face of STEM majors leaving their respective fields in droves.

<comment><USER9> I have seen this argument a lot, and it doesn't hold water.

Those STEM majors leaving the field often get salaries higher than people who majored in that field going into it. It seems that these employers value the STEM education moreso than people who major in the same field.

Second, it is entirely possible that these STEM majors voluntarily left the STEM field. More people are doing STEM but that doesn't mean more people are passionate about STEM. Engineering isn't for everyone, and I myself have thought about leaving the field and going elsewhere not because I can't find a job but because I want to.

<comment><USER8> The burden of proof is on the pro-STEMmers to show that we really do need a bunch more STEM majors, not on the rest of us to prove we don't.

Edit: and are you sure that your higher-wages claim (source?) is not just evidence that STEM majors act as an effective filter for the smart and driven.

<comment><USER9> I originally read: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-rosen/the-truth-hurts- th...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-rosen/the-truth-hurts-the-stem- _b_3900575.html)

Quote: "People in STEM jobs benefit from being in such high demand. Study[1] after study[2] confirms that STEM professionals get paid more than non-STEM professionals -- often much more -- even when you control for their education and other factors. Contrary to Charette's claim that STEM wages have stagnated, reports from Georgetown, the Commerce Department[3], and the Information Technology Innovation Foundation[4] show that they have risen faster than non-STEM wages, even in recent years. That is a sign that employers are feeling the pinch."

The Studies linked: [1] [http://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/stem-good-jobs-now- and-future](http://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/stem-good-jobs-now-and-future)

[2] [https://cew.georgetown.edu/report/stem/](https://cew.georgetown.edu/report/stem/)

[3][http://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/stem-good-jobs-now-and- future](http://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/stem-good-jobs-now-and-future)

[4] [http://www.itif.org/publications/real-story-guestworkers- hig...](http://www.itif.org/publications/real-story-guestworkers-high-skill- us-labor-market)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity._

Indeed. But critical thinking and creativity are the things second least prized in US classrooms, right after outright disobedience. So it's no real wonder that broad, general education has fallen out of favor.

<comment><USER11> What countries do a better job of fostering creativity and critical thinking? Every culture has its sacred cows. The idea of an environment that's fully tolerant and welcoming towards any and all dissent is, as far as I can tell, a myth.

Nonetheless, my experiences with US (university) classrooms have generally been positive. As long as it's relevant to the topic of discussion, students are free to pose a wide range of ideas without fear of social or academic reprisal. Although I must admit that some recent developments on college campuses with regards to freedom of speech are troubling.

<comment><USER12> > Nonetheless, my experiences with US (university) classrooms have generally > been positive. As long as it's relevant to the topic of discussion, students > are free to pose a wide range of ideas without fear of social or academic > reprisal.

In university, yes, after 13 years of the exact opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article equates STEM education with technical "skills". This is comparison is absurd and is yet another attempt to set up a straw man in order to knock it down and to scream (borrowing from the movie _The Music Man_ ) "Oh we got trouble, right here in River City. Trouble starts with a _T_ and that's rhymes with" an _E_ , and that stands for _education_. So, in the movie the guy was trying to start a boy's band to sell musical instruments and band uniforms, and the OP is trying to sell courses in philosophy and art history?

To the OP, I would suggest that the STEM fields do better on deep and critical thinking than philosophy and art history.

For the US K-12 scores in math and science and the comparison of those scores with South Korea, Singapore, Finland, etc., I'd say: The claim of the OP on these scores is that US K-12 education needs to do better to _catch up_ with the other countries.

Okay, let's consider that claim: Compare the scores of students in those other countries with the scores of students in the US with recent ancestors from those other countries. E.g., compare scores of students in Finland with the scores of students in the US with recent ancestors from Finland. Then are doing better comparing the _schools_ and not just the cultures. So, in crude terms, will be _controlling_ on country of origin.

Here the OP has yet another straw man erected just to be knocked down.

</comment><comment><USER14> > _A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. > Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. > Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so > are English and philosophy._

It's a big strawman argument because the average American is poorly educated in STEM areas, _and_ in philosophy and English. One area isn't being pitted against the other.

Anyway, it's a big strawman because universities have liberal arts credit requirements for science and engineering majors. You can't just load upon STEM-related courses and nothing else. (Maybe you can in some schools? That's a local problem to fix in those schools.)

A science education at a North American university exposes the human being to approximately the right does of the liberal arts.

Encouraging kids into STEM steers them in an area where they will be able to do find some kind of career, _and_ pick up a rounded education along the way.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think we need to worry about STEM being over-pushed. STEM degrees are self filtering. Math, engineering, and science are hard, and getting kids interested at science at a young age can motivate them only so far. Many will enroll, and when things get tough, a good portion will transfer to other majors.

<comment><USER16> Agreed.. If you don't really love it you will not be able to pursue a career in it. It simply wouldn't be worth your time. I am in CS regardless if its needed or not.. Its simply what I like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this article sets up a straw man argument that is a little disingenuous. It seems that most of the politicians (save for a couple extremists) and everyday people who support more emphasis on STEM teaching aren't arguing it should be at the expense of the liberal arts education Americans are getting now. Sure, the focus on STEM is partially about "making America more competitive" as a whole, but I think it's even more about enabling everyday people to get reliable+productive jobs and career skills that will be important in the modern workforce for decades to come. That can only be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> A part of this obsession has to do with the fact that STEM subjects are easily measurable and tested for. Our "enlightened-meritocratic" society is obsessed with who deserves money and who doesn't. It will obviously value a math test that makes it easy to judge ability, than a philosophy essay which may improve a child's critical thinking but is a lot harder to judge.

That gets compounded with the fact that colleges are now practically vocational schools which themselves tout a "return-on-investment" as their salient feature.

The solution is quite simple: expand humanities requirements and make them stringent. Make a student take at least 1/3 of courses in non-STEM subjects.

</comment><comment><USER19> With software penetrating everything there is no such thing as "outside of stem" anymore ...

Edit: Also philosophy is part of STEM ... just lacks rigor sense and practicality.

</comment><comment><USER20> When I was in college decades ago, engineering degrees were still really valuable, but there was also awareness that engineering was not immune to economic cycles - in fact, it was recognized that engineering had a "boom and bust" cycle. That doesn't seem to have been the case in a number of years, but I am wondering if it still might happen.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can't really comment on America's obsession, but my business and real-life problem solving sense has definitely been empowered by the subjects I pursued in humanities & social sciences domain - rural development, organizational behavior, psychology, economics - apart from my Engineering major. I believe that technology is the backbone when it comes to large scale mobilization of a solution to a problem, but we do need the right perspectives to figure out the solution first.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm sick and tired of everyone saying STEM degrees don't value anything but technical understanding.

I'm also tired of posting the same rant all over the place! ;)

TL;DR of my previous HN comment on this is that my CS degree included history, writing, music, painting, philosophy, and many other fields of study, just like a degree with the letters "B.A." in it would.

But on top of that I also had to take science and math, courses which used to be considered part of a proper "liberal arts" degree!

</comment><comment><USER23> This coming from a man caught plagiarizing his work. People won't stop getting liberal arts degrees, but we need to make sure that more people (specifically, those who might not go to college or drop out) get into these types of programs. Some people don't like writing book reviews and are more technical in nature. They just don't think higher ed is for them because they don't want to go into these liberal arts classes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is this what happens, when non stem majors can't find jobs ? They villianize stem education ?

Don't most people just get degrees in stem, because they think it leads to a good job. There was an article on HN before on how students are jumping ship from law school to engineering school.

</comment><comment><USER25> Rich for Fareed Zakaria to lament a loss of creativity in America

[http://www.cjr.org/analysis/steal_this_idea.php](http://www.cjr.org/analysis/steal_this_idea.php)

</comment><comment><USER26> I resent the seemingly common belief that STEM and creativity are so disjoint. Every breakthrough in STEM required incredible amounts of creativity. Even average STEM workers (say, for example, a software developer) usually need to exercise creativity pretty regularly.

<comment><USER27> Similarly, I'm also bothered by the common argument that participation in sports is vital for learning to work as part of a team, as if STEM projects don't facilitate gaining such experience.

<comment><USER28> Eh, in a high school setting, there's no better way to learn teamwork than being on a sports team, imo.

<comment><USER26> There are other "teams" you could be on: drama departments, school bands, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I read this article as

"STEM education to the exclusion of other liberal arts"

versus

"STEM in balance with liberal arts"

and I tend to agree the latter is more preferable for the overall well being of a society.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a very disappointing article. It's a regurgitation of cliches. "Education is about critical thinking and 'self enrichment'; Steve Jobs was a Prophet; Mark Zuckerberg is a Public Hero" \-- how much was the author paid by Apple and Facebook, or is this what a "stupid sheep" looks like? The conflation of STEM with "Asian educational systems" is hackneyed; every person who does serious things in STEM knows that it's not just memorization. Speaking of which, why is it that people who aren't in STEM (the journalists and politicians) are so vocally worshipping it and "whining" about women and minorities being under-represented?

"No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write." Ironically the author has none of these skills, and the best thing for him to do would be to avoid the humanities and take several rigorous math courses -- maybe then he will learn how to define his terms and stop writing things that mean essentially nothing.

<comment><USER16> You are essentially attacking the person instead of his argument. But, the article never claimed STEM was about memorization. Perhaps you should re-read more carefully.

<comment><USER30> People like him should be "attacked", if you want to dilute the meaning of "attacked" to include non-violent criticisms of character. If he's going to litter his article with first person pronouns and make it personal, then he's "fair game."

I said the article _conflated_ STEM with "Asian educational systems", which are _conflated_ with memorization. Read:

>But technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success. America overcomes its disadvantage — a less-technically- trained workforce — with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook. A country like Japan, by contrast, can't do as much with its well-trained workers because it lacks many of the factors that produce continuous innovation.

>Americans should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are oriented around memorization and test-taking. I went through that kind of system. It has its strengths, but it's not conducive to thinking, problem solving or creativity.

<comment><USER31> > People like him should be "attacked", if you want to dilute the meaning of > "attacked" to include non-violent criticisms of character.

Attacking isn't purely about violence, it never was.

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/attack](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/attack)

> to criticize (someone or something) in a very harsh and severe way

To be honest, you are a prime example of the article's point. There is more to education than just STEM. The fact you failed to realize the person you were replying to used the word "attacked" correctly, for instance, can lead to a failure of communication. Failures of communication lead to things like this:

[http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer- repor...](http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/)

Perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss something purely due to your own arrogance.

Additionally:

[https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad- hominem](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem)

> Ironically the author has none of these skills, and the best thing for him > to do would be to avoid the humanities and take several rigorous math > courses -- maybe then he will learn how to define his terms and stop writing > things that mean essentially nothing.

Yet another flaw in your style of argument that could have been corrected with classes in the humanities.

<comment><USER30> "Attack" has violent connotations; so does "harsh." There is more to language than prescriptive definitions. Have you heard of "meaning as use", Wittgenstein's "motto"? The first half of my college education was spent as a philosophy major, which I think was useless, both personally and economically.

Please don't call me arrogant. (However much you might dislike me I can assure you I dislike myself more.) I don't have any pretensions to being intelligent or having something worthwhile to say. What I wrote was a knee-jerk reaction to what I read, and I criticized his character because the idea of his existing as a person "made me angry", and because I could not fully articulate my problems with the content. Maybe someone else will be able to do that. Part of it is that I spent a portion of my life believing in things like "self enrichment through education" or "being a well rounded person" \-- the general sentiments expressed in the article -- but now I think they're meaningless. I learned Homeric Greek and read parts of the Odyssey in it, but the idea of an engineer going home after a day of work and reading the Odyssey in Greek and thinking to himself, "boy, this really makes me think; I am a well-rounded person. Maybe tomorrow I will start Gravity's Rainbow" strikes me as ridiculous and makes me laugh, again for a reason I can't fully articulate, probably because I once had thoughts like that and I no longer do.

There is nothing wrong with that last quote about his writing style. It is vague to the point of meaninglessness. My experience with the humanities has taught me to reject most writing. In fact I have "unlearned" most of my writing style and now try to be as honest as possible. Many people assume I am uneducated, so I guess it's worked.

<comment><USER31> > "Attack" has violent connotations; so does "harsh." There is more to > language than prescriptive definitions.

He communicated clearly and you are simply being picky because you believe restricting the word to its more violent connotations is "superior".

The belief that a person is "wrong" because they do not meet your subjective expectation is a conceit. Sorry, you can't simply expect the rest of the world to bow to your subjective expectations.

> (However much you might dislike me I can assure you I dislike myself more.)

I don't dislike you or have any opinion of you beyond the assumption you don't seem to realize how you come across and that word relayed that message. The fact you would complain about a person's diction when they are literally correct is precisely in line with that behavior.

> There is nothing wrong with that last quote about his writing style. It is > vague to the point of meaninglessness. My experience with the humanities has > taught me to reject most writing. In fact I have "unlearned" most of my > writing style and now try to be as honest as possible. Many people assume I > am uneducated, so I guess it's worked.

> Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden > and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments > as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, > ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures > of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of > high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three > countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and > Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, > landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed > economies.

That is pretty direct.

I'm dropping this mainly because at this point I am leaning towards this being another troll account, honestly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why do entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-engage-in-self-sabotage?ref=4au7 <comment><AUTHOR> The HN comment by "throwaway20180315" is dead and now invisible, though we should consider that personal stories like this reveal an important truth about the way that startups self destruct.

The most common euphemism about failed startups is that they suffered "team dysfunction". That is a bloodless phrase. What does team dysfunction actually look like? Are we talking about two founders having a polite disagreement or are we talking about two people screaming at each other, people who hate each other?

In some sense, it is a public service to discuss this honestly. People have emotions and emotions are messy. Therefore, startups are often messy.

It's possible that startup culture would be stronger and healthier if we discussed this more honestly.

<comment><AUTHOR> throw20180315 , regarding your most recent "dead" comment, is there any chance your account has been flagged? I don't see a problem with the 2 comments that you wrote here in this thread, yet they are both "dead".

<comment><USER2> That can happen with new accounts, and may be corrected by mods. New accounts to subvert bans also tends to be frowned on.

Source: I view "showdead" and email mods periodically on both misbehaviour and suspected bad flags. Reasons are frequently given, some flags reversed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage because they are people, and people engage in self-sabotage.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Co-founder with majority shareholding is into 3rd year of divorce proceedings after starting an affair with a client. His personality and behavior has been cited as the reason for every single one of our employees that has left the company. Recently had a breakdown and might stand-down. Good times.

<comment><USER5> How many employees have left?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a story:

My cofounder was more Salesy than me, so he did most of the relationship management with our clients and gatekeepers. To grease these relationships, he was always ... I tried typing a few euphemisms for "LYING" there. Overpromising, for sure.

This worked really well because it was SALES LYING, and I was in the back working my ass off the make those sales lies come true. I delivered, no one was the wiser. I'm proud of the work I did. Things were going well, people were impressed, we were gaining customers, and new lines of business.

Then he decided that if he could lie to others, he could lie to me. Lie after lie after lie until I didn't even know if the company numbers were true. They weren't, as our wiser readers probably already guessed.

I made the mistake of accepting this behaviour in the name of success. HUGE mistake.

Eventually I was forced to confront him when his lies created serious safety issues for our clients. He blew up and became extremely angry, and our relationship ended that day.

<comment><USER7> What happened next??

<comment><USER6> I took two years off to recover from the burnout.

Our market was/is (I need a better word than corrupt) such that business couldn't continue without his relationship massaging. I tried to talk to the gatekeepers, but they wouldn't even acknowledge me. I suspect he instructed them, I'll never know.

He tried to hire minimum wage contractors to replace me, and he found out the business couldn't work without actual expertise. This surprised him and pissed off the clients he was trying to keep - he promised the best and delivered incompetence.

We have not spoken since.

\---

As for me... I'm not founding any more for-profit companies any time soon. Instead, I have found 'my place' at [Sudbury Model Schools]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school)) and plan to make my life about advancing human rights for students. Our countries need leadership, and our industrial schooling model is not capable of producing it. For our liberal democracies, this is an _existential threat_.

A note on Sudbury Schools: the ideas that seem so natural to them in that environment are actually radical and difficult to grasp for most people who went through traditional schooling. It is not fast or easy to understand, it takes while to 'click'. If you take the time to understand what they're doing, you'll be rewarded.

To that end, I would recommend one of the original founders' latest book, a retrospective of the decades the schools have been in operation: [A Place to Grow]([http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/place- grow](http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/place-grow)) (If you click to 'Sample Chapter', you'll be able to read a significant fraction of the book for free.)

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Without open mindedness about the type of success you may encounter, your startup is doomed. And without humility about the limits of your knowledge, your startup is doomed._

I agree with most of the article, but gosh, why do people always have to make these kinds of absolutist negative statements? Frankly I find such a tone quite condescending.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought this was a great piece, and I too wish that more founders recorded themselves to watch later. I've definitely wanted to shake more than a few prospective founders and say "DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF?"

Some commenters here have suggested that founders self-destruct because to self-destruct is to be human. I think that's glib - founders seem to self- destruct more frequently than the norm, probably because founders are crazy people. That's not all bad, I think you have to be a bit crazy to want to change something significant about human behavior, but I think it's important to acknowledge one's own motivations.

<comment><USER10> They probably know they're acting crazy and don't care because they believe that's part of the ethos of being a founder, to be outrageous and misunderstood.

I'm sure for many of them being despised or criticized is just as much a benchmark of success as anything else.

It's sort of similar to the "there's no such thing as bad press" but more personality based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Self sabotage is a defense mechanism against actual failure. "We failed because the founders didn't get along" is easier to stomach then "We failed because I'm not good enough to do this well."

</comment><comment><USER12> Why do investors engage in psychological power games (like this)?

That piece of writing left me feeling icky. I hope the people he has advised have found more positive and less demeaning investors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think the subject is worthwhile? How would you talk about this? Do you feel there is any advantage to talking about the way entrepreneurs sometimes undermine themselves? How should mistakes be discussed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Watching yourself on video is always interesting. I do not however believe in rehearsals, unless it's training, not rehearsal. Getting better at talking is good, but being good at talking is actually more about listening, you have to adapt to the person you are talking to. Nothing is more annoying then a "on track" sales pitch. Then send them a video instead. Unless it's some kind of live performance.

</comment><comment><USER14> Camel / needle verse?

<comment><AUTHOR> While it is true that startup founders tend to come from upper middle class or wealthy backgrounds, not all of them do.

<comment><USER14> Can you explain your comment to me, because I don't get it?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the Bible:

" _I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."_ "

\--- Matthew 19:23-26

I assume you were saying that startup founders are wealthy, so they have problems?

<comment><USER14> Ah, well the reply was stated somewhat jokingly, but something along the lines of: if you are investing in a lot other peoples ideas / projects, it sort of implies you are not stingy (sp?) with money / afraid to take a risk with your money (or something like that)... (this assumes that it is an 'honest' investment).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Couple of Things You'll Love about Crystal Language – A Rubyist's Perspective - <AUTHOR> https://www.netguru.co/codestories/couple-things-youll-love-about-crystal-language?utm_campaign=Codestories&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social <comment><USER2> I really want to see Crystal succeed. I don't really understand why there aren't more languages like it with clean syntax and good type inference.

Right now the only things keeping me from using it for everything are a lack of libraries, and it's sub-par GC.

<comment><USER3> There is an interesting project about a new GC for crystal written in crystal, see: [https://github.com/ysbaddaden/gc](https://github.com/ysbaddaden/gc)</comment></comment>


Prototool – A Swiss Army Knife for Protocol Buffers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/uber/prototool <comment><USER2> In another decade or so the world might replicate half of the very nice internal tools Google has.

Suggestion for a project: make a tool that, given a proto description and a file that contains concatenated proto messages stored as binary strings (sort of like RecordIO at Google) lets you run simple SQL queries on the data and extract a subset of the fields from messages matching a predicate, and maybe even do simple aggregations. That was pretty handy. I really wish Google would open source some or most of this stuff. It's not like keeping it closed source creates any kind of insurmountable competitive advantage, especially compared to the advantages that would accrue from broader adoption of protobufs.

<comment><USER3> Other tools and features that don't exist outside:

\- a tee loadbalancer for gRPC, forwarding the same requests to both A and B backend pools, but only returning results from A. I don't think Envoy has this, but it should.

\- load balancing dashboards showing traffic between frontends and backends

\- load balancer support for dynamic sharding

\- gnubbyd under ChromeOS: [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/chrom...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/chromium- hterm/LuDVJ67Q4BE/vKoY0j_RBKQJ) (I think most of this is doable these days, but the initial setup requires a Linux system)

\- Kubernetes: server-specific custom hyperlinks on dashboards (e.g. links to POD_IP:PORT/stats, /debug, etc. for each individual pod you are looking at)

\- Kubernetes: multiple Docker images in the same container or pod. E.g. the first container could be your code, while the second one might be data or the JVM runtime, etc., without having to bundle them together or doing costly copies in init containers.

\- Kubernetes: canaries and automatic rollbacks

<comment><USER4> Should you really be detailing the functionality of internal tools like this?

<comment><USER5> None of this is particularly secret. Any intern who worked at Google would have access to all this info.

(Source: I'm a SWE at an Alphabet company)

<comment><USER6> interns still sign NDAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We built [https://github.com/GyroscopeHQ/grpcat](https://github.com/GyroscopeHQ/grpcat) at my company, which takes text-format protos as input and sends them to a gRPC endpoint. Looking at Prototool I think I should just merge the functionality into Prototool. This is cool!

</comment><comment><USER8> Says "Handle installation of protoc [...] behind the scenes in a platform- independent manner without any work on the part of the user", doesn't support Windows yet [0]. Granted, as pre-1.0 I should probably read the features as goals.

0 - [https://github.com/uber/prototool/issues/9](https://github.com/uber/prototool/issues/9)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here are some other great tools that is quite useful with protobufs, one in C++ and one in pure javascript.

[https://github.com/mapbox/protozero](https://github.com/mapbox/protozero)

[https://github.com/mapbox/pbf](https://github.com/mapbox/pbf)

</comment><comment><USER10> danby - grpc for the browser :: is looking for testers [https://github.com/ericbets/danby](https://github.com/ericbets/danby) There are two upcoming features. The first one is streaming support. The second is a callback API template that mirrors the grpc node API exactly. Or you will have the choice to stick with the current promise API. It's not a priority for us at the moment but adding a simple load balancer that distributed traffic randomly across a set of servers would be a ~5 line patch.

</comment><comment><USER11> Always wished there was a tool for protobuf which could test whether a changes to any .proto files were backwards compatible and if not raise an error

</comment><comment><USER12> Yet another tool trying to "manage" "packages" on my machine!

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't use something with a CoC.

<comment><USER14> Why not?

<comment><USER13> It's a political tool. It means they are into politics.

<comment><USER15> Everything involves politics. At least they're being explicit about it.

<comment><USER13> No: physics, maths, cooking...

<comment><USER15> Oh please. Things involving more than one human invariably involve politics. Academics are just as susceptible as anything else, probably more so.

Cooking, if there is more than one person involved in preparing and eating the food, will involve politics.

<comment><USER13> No. You're mixing social interactions and politics. Politics is about power (who is the boss).

<comment><USER15> Alright, I suppose that's one way to frame it.

Why is a document describing the standards for social interaction that contributors pledge to live up to bad? Open source has been and continues to be rife with social interactions that are bad for individual contributors and for the project as a whole. CoCs strive to head that off and document a process for when people seem to violate their pledge.

<comment><USER13> You should read it. It includes words that are politically connoted. Those words can easily be leveraged by people who are in that domain.

It's not about common sense. You don't need to tell people to be polite (and you shouldn't). If someone isn't everybody will notice it.

<comment><USER15> > You don't need to tell people to be polite (and you shouldn't). If someone > isn't everybody will notice it.

Unless it's done in private. If someone is a jerk to me in private (over email or Slack or whatever), what do I do?

If I'm contributing to a project without a CoC and someone is a jerk to me, I'm much more likely to just contribute to a different project, or start my own fork, or just stop contributing to open source entirely.

Projects with CoCs have a stated procedure in place for dealing with abusive contributors. That's what the whole thing is about. Of course you shouldn't have to tell people to be polite, but that's not how the real world works. There are jerks everywhere, and more often than not they're going to express that in private.

<comment><USER13> I always reply to offensive people. Someone who is offensive has no arguments. Saying him he is offensive is often enough. If there is a public (like here) people will understand who is insulting who.

You're looking for a way to be less implicated. It's because you're accustomed to live in systems based on laws and rules.

People aren't bad. Most are kind and they don't want to harm anonybody. The bad guys are very few (like 1% or 0.1%) and as they are few they should be handled case by case. Building a complicated system of rules for them will just bother the "not-bad" majority.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Binary Deep – a sexy iOS app for Digital Ocean - <AUTHOR> http://forsakenlabs.com/binary-deep/

<comment><AUTHOR> A sexy app for iOS to monitor the status of your droplets, and if need be take action (like reboot, power cycle, or open an SSH connection).

Please, share your thoughts.</comment>


Prehistoric Babies Drank Animal Milk from Bottles - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/09/25/764243209/prehistoric-babies-drank-animal-milk-from-a-bottle <comment><USER2> Anyone who ever had a baby will not be surprised that prehistoric parents used all their creativity and craftsmanship to develop techniques which made it possible for someone other than the mother to feed the child.

According to Wikipedia, they still used cow horns filled with milk and hang above the crib in Scandinavia in the 18th century [0].

[0] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cow%27s_Horn_used_fo...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cow%27s_Horn_used_for_infant_feeding_Wellcome_L0036721.jpg)

<comment><USER3> As someone who had a kid, this is both obvious and a fun confirmation evidence.

One of the things people forget is nature is not perfect and doesn't always work. Sometimes babies don't figure out breastfeeding and die. That's why formula was, in theory, invented. (maybe something about the industrial revolution which required mom's to be away from their children)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not seeing if they were able to definitively say whether the milk fats and proteins they found were cow's milk or goat's milk.

Given that they found these in Bavaria, it's probably moot, as that's squarely in the area you would expect to find lactose-tolerating people, but everything I've read says that goat's milk has lower lactose levels than cow's milk. And, weak evidence, I know, but just about every piece of fiction I've read that featured babies that needed to be kept alive in the absence of their mother or a wet nurse has gone to goat's milk first - off the top of my head, this features in Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth.

<comment><USER5> I thought babies produced more lactase (lactose-digesting enzyme) anyway, even for people (and ethnic groups) with lactose intolerance in adulthood? Human breastmilk contains lactose - so the body expects to have to break it down at that age.

(I'd have thought any preference for goat's milk over cow's would be connected to the protein it contains.)

<comment><USER6> Indeed, lactose tolerance declines between 2 and 5 years of age in most people. Natural age of weaning in humans is 3-4 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems logical that these might have been used to feed babies, but the article also says it was previously thought they could have been used to feed sick or elderly. The only justification given for assuming it was a baby was not from the data, but that _" Sometimes research on women tends to be a little bit marginalized..."_ That is very much true, but it does not definitively mean these were baby bottles, it means the possibility may not have been considered previously due to a research bias.

<comment><USER8> There's also the content analysis that they definitely held milk. And Bronze Age is when Europeans would have just been developing lactose persistence:

" _A genome-wide scan for selection using DNA gathered from 230 ancient West Eurasians who lived between 6500 and 300 BCE found that the earliest appearance of the allele responsible for lactase persistence occurred in an individual who lived in central Europe between 2450 and 2140 BCE._ "

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutiona...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutionary_history)

<comment><USER7> Yes, but I'm not convinced milk was only used for babies. Fermented milk beverages like kefir have been around for thousands of year. Also, though probably less likely, is cheese: It's conceivable these could have had a part in that, letting the cream rise and pouring out the rest from the spout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suspect this might piss off some of the more ardent paleo-diet practitioners /s

<comment><USER8> This was sarcasm, but the article lists this as a Neolithic invention with domesticated animals. Meaning it actually fits perfectly within the Paleo diet story.

<comment><USER10> To add to your comment in the title "Prehistoric" , "before history", means before the advent of writing, i.e. 5 000 years or so; history originally referring to times that have written records.

"History" itself now refers to the entire Universe timeline before the present. But _pre_ history cannot mean that, because that would be pre- BigBang.

So the title "Prehistoric babies Drank Animal Milk from Bottles" could refer to 1491 born Guaraní babies drinking Llama's milk from ceramic bottles and a nipple made from the rubber tree. Cool, but of no relevance to a paleo-diet.

<comment><USER8> Generally correct; however also wrong in this specific instance. The article also clearly limits scope to Europe, specifically modern-day Bavaria. And therefore uses the specific and appropriate terms "Neolithic", "Bronze Age", and "Iron Age". As Wikipedia calls out [0]:

 _" The terms "Neolithic" and "Bronze Age" are culture-specific and are mostly limited to cultures of the Old World."_

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_prehistory#H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_prehistory#Holocene)

<comment><USER11> To add to that, terms like Bronze age refer to different times in different locations depending on when bronze began being used. It would refer to an earlier time in the near East than it would in Scandinavia(3300 BC vs 1700 BC). It is not as relevant in the Americas as metallurgy didn't even appear to exist in pre-Columbian North America. There was some minor use of bronze in certain South American cultures but it doesn't seem to have been extensive enough to define a time period.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Near_East#Periodizatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Near_East#Periodization)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre- Columbian_Am...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre- Columbian_America#Northern_America)

<comment><USER12> There are nails from Vikings found in pre-coloumbian US. Happy columbus day</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airpair Connects Startups With Expert Developers To Get Help With.. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/04/airpair-connects-startups-with-expert-developers-to-get-help-with-code-via-online-sessions/

<comment><USER2> Seemed. Good idea

No submit button on the form. At least that iPhone found</comment>


Emotely Turns your Phones into Wireless Controllers - <AUTHOR> http://emotely.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The cool thing about our system is that Controllers are built using just HTML, CSS, and Javascript. So once built they will run identically on all major Phone Platforms with no modification.

We are excited about new browser features such as WebGL, WebSockets, and Audio. We believe native Browser apps are really going to take a large step forward in richness this year.

Please do fire off any questions to firstname.lastname@example.com or leave a comment here.

<comment><USER2> When you say you don't need different apps for different phones ("Controllers are built using just HTML, CSS, and Javascript."), you do need some "native" code at the other end (what is being controlled).

Do you have a protocol worked out? Or is there one ready to use?

Cheers,

Stephan

<comment><AUTHOR>
      When you say you don't need different apps for different phones ("Controllers are built using just HTML, CSS, and Javascript."), you do need some "native" code at the other end (what is being controlled).

We're trying to make it zero install for the receiving end, but there has to be fallback. But there are certain where it is almost unusable if you maintain that goal.

      Do you have a protocol worked out? Or is there one ready to use?

People always have different definitions of protocols. So to be clear: The transport is abstracted for getting messages between devices. As far as the SDK user's code is concerned it's just getting input events like in a regular input loop.

      Cheers,
      Stephan

Thanks for the questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow! Awesome idea ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Random Tweet of Kindness - <AUTHOR> http://randomtweetofkindness.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently stumbled upon a cool website which allows you to send a "random tweet of kindness."

From the site:

Random Tweet of Kindness is a website which enables anyone with thirty seconds and an internet connection to make someone's day anonymously.

The idea was born from the notion that in a world full of negativity, we could all use more kind, gratifying words in our lives.

With Random Tweet of Kindness, all you have to do to make someone's day is choose a friend from Twitter, type in their username along with a few kind words, and click send!</comment>


Skara – investigating source code management options for the JDK sources - <AUTHOR> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2018-July/004801.html <comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like OpenJDK might be moving to github or gitlab?</comment>


10 steps to better secure your Mac laptop from physical data theft - <AUTHOR> http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data-theft.html <comment><USER2> First, the article is actually a PDF. [http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data- the...](http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data-theft.pdf)

Some of these are of pretty questionable utility in the case of physical data theft -- if someone has already stolen your laptop, they can extract the hard drive and read it directly. An automatic logout with password after a couple minutes isn't going to help much.

The important ones are to encrypt the personal data filesystem (which alone will cover almost everything but physical theft) and the swap file (which will make sure passwords in memory aren't swapped to disk in the clear). Also, note that encrypting the entire drive is counterproductive, as it would provide a large corpus for a known plaintext attack (and probably make booting really annoying).

Not that any of this is Mac-specific, of course.</comment>


World Airports Voronoi - <AUTHOR> https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/airports/ <comment><USER2> This is really cool. If I remember right international passenger flight regulations insist that there be atleast one airport that can handle your class of aircraft within 180 minutes of flying time at one engine operative speeds at all times. If we assume a passenger jet flies at roughly 0.8 Mach or ~960 kph, and one-engine operative speed is roughly 40% of that or ~384 KPH. That means an airport needs to be within a circle of radius 1152 kms. That's an area of ~4.16M km-squared. Simplifying that all airports can handle all passenger jets, not one of those voronoi cells can have an area greater than 4.16M km-squared.

Is there an easy way to calculate the area of each cell?

Did I mention this is really cool!!

<comment><USER3> The regulations you're thinking of are ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards or, alternatively, Engines Turn or Passengers Swim).

<comment><USER2> Lol! Engines Turn or Passengers Swim! Excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This runs slower on my computer than MGSV in ultra settings running on 4k resolution.

<comment><USER5> Completely unusable on my iPad Air. Damn.

It's amazing how fast computers are. And it's amazing how slow we make them with layers and layers of cruft built atop more layers and layers of cruft.

<comment><USER6> The difference is that all you have to do to view this is punch a URL into a browser, on virtually any computer in any form factor, and it's on your screen instantly with absolutely zero setup. Of course there's a performance cost to this incredible convenience.

Imagine if the author had instead used, say, DirectX and C++ and only bothered compiling it for his own platform. Not only would it be nearly impossible for this to have reached the same audience so quickly, but it likely would have taken the author longer to make as well because JavaScript + D3.js are uniquely suited towards rapidly making these sorts of prototypes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty soon there's going to be a nice big new polygon added in the middle of the South Atlantic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena_Airport)

<comment><USER8> Looking at the map, I am liking some of the place names on St. Helena; "The Gates of Chaos" is a particular favourite.

<comment><USER9> Something tells me you'll like the noun the inhabitants use for themselves. Hint: They don't call themselves "helens".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a cool project! This is very fun to play with in conjunction with the ETOPS (extended twin-engine operations) settings on the Great Circle Mapper. [http://www.gcmap.com](http://www.gcmap.com)

Among other things it drives home how remote the waters MH370 disappeared in are.

<comment><USER11> I recently did ORD-HKG and spent quite a lot of time thinking about ETOPS diversion airports over Siberia (because honestly what else are you gonna do). Now I'm wondering if you can even land a fully laden 777 at any of them. Most of them don't even seem to have wikipedia pages.

<comment><USER12> A few years ago I flew to the north of Sweden in January and as expected the ground was covered in snow. What surprised me was that the runway wasn't cleared - we actually landed on the snow. This was in a Boeing 737 so not exactly a small aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two comments.

1) This appears to be only airports that offer commercial passenger service.

2) Easter Island has an airport! I was under the impression you could only get there by boat.

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down) .

The upgrade of the runway to support the Shuttle started in May 1986 ([https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19860423&id=...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19860423&id=bn0zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aTIHAAAAIBAJ&pg=6565,6718694&hl=en) ) and ended by August 1987 ([https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19870817&id=Y...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19870817&id=YPNYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=H48DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4240,4618788&hl=en) ).

<comment><USER15> "In addition, astronauts now carry passports and other documents, including traveller's cheques, in case of emergency landings."

<comment><USER16> Given the high cost of every pound when launching things into space this seems at first glance to be a pretty lousy idea. It seems to me solving this problem through diplomatic channels would be a much better plan given the fairly low probability of this event.

<comment><USER17> Space shuttle cargo was something like $20,000/pound. If each astronaut needs a pound of paperwork for contingencies (which seems like a vast overestimate) then that's $20,000 each, which is tiny. And the marginal cost per pound was small. Given that you're doing a launch anyway, you're probably not exactly at the mass limit, so a few extra pounds of paperwork costs almost nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's definitely a handful of airports in Antarctica. Are they not "official"?

<comment><USER19> Well they certainly have iata codes and serve larger aircraft than places like albany wa.

Wilkins supports normal commercial aircraft like the a319

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious if there's any region smaller than that of LaGuardia Airport. A glance doesn't find any.

<comment><USER21> London City is probably smaller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a South African, I never realised we have a few airports that are actually the closest to a large part of the Antarctic coast. I know there are flights from Chile and New Zealand to Antarctica, but none that I'm aware of from South Africa.

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought that a voronoi partition is not possible with only straight lines on a non-euclidean space like that; this leaves me confused.

<comment><USER24> The edges are segments of great circles, which are the reasonable equivalent to a straight line on the surface of a sphere.

<comment><USER7> Or another way to look at it: if you model the earth as a perfect sphere, there's a one-to-one monotonic relationship between geodesic distance and distance in a straight line _through_ the earth. Points that are equidistant by one metric are also equidistant by the other.

So you could get exactly the same diagram by finding the 3D Voronoi diagram of the airports as a collection of points in space, and then taking the intersection of that with the geoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It looks like the furthest point from any airport is (not surprisingly) about the same place as Point Nemo ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceanic_pole_of_inaccessibility)), the furthest point from land.

</comment><comment><USER26> Off-topic, but if you want to see a great talk about working with Voronoi in Clojure, watch this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=627&v=hzLAX_pr- Wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=627&v=hzLAX_pr-Wc)

</comment><comment><USER27> Hm, appears to be missing a lot of smaller airports in the USA. My home airport (E45) in particular. I'm guessing it's only using airports that have commercial air carrier service of some sort.

<comment><USER28> They're using OurAirports data, filtered to exclude all but "large" and "medium" airports. Anything smaller than that includes all sorts of cruft like African bush landing strips, heliports, etc.

[http://ourairports.com/data/](http://ourairports.com/data/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is the type of thing that's so simple and rewarding that it makes me annoyed that I hadn't thought of it and made it first! Really cool, good work!

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks cool, but would have been a lot smoother in webGL

</comment><comment><USER31> This is awesome, and I really wish it would give me information on which airport each tile represents.

<comment><USER32> You can hover over a tile to get the airport's name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So cool (though it includes Plymouth City Airport, which is sadly closed)

</comment><comment><USER34> Neat, but it would be nice if it could zoom out a little more or adjust to the browser window size. I have 2560x1600 display split into four equally sized panes, and it's difficult to use and view in a single pane.

</comment><comment><USER35> This badly wants labels.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER37> Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER38> @shitsandwich just in case you see this, you are hellbanned.

<comment><USER39> I check someone's comment history before alerting them - the previous comments by that handle were all trolls. Hellbanning is meant to block these users; no point telling them.

<comment><USER40> Hellbanning (as opposed to the many, many other options available to a moderator) is one of the most disrespectful and passive-aggressive types of moderation.

To clarify, a hell-ban is the type of ban where a user's posts are hidden from everybody except themselves (and on HN, those with "showdead" enabled in their profile settings).

It ranks right between simply redirecting a login to a browser-bomb page (which is slightly more evil, except for the part where it doesn't potentially waste months of a person's time) and slow-bombing/random timeouts/delays (which is ever so slightly less of a dick move to do to someone's account, yet almost always works better than a hell-ban).

Except in the most extreme cases (anything short of a mentally disturbed, obsessive, or dangerous person that otherwise just won't go away), reaching for a hellban is always the wrong choice, because there's always another moderation option that deals with the situation both more effectively, as well with more respect and dignity to one's entire userbase.</comment></comment></comment>


An issue found in Joomla before 3.9.4 may lead to Cross-site Scripting - <AUTHOR> https://coocoor.com/advisory/cve/CVE-2019-9714 <comment><AUTHOR> More on this: [https://coocoor.com/advisory/cve/CVE-2019-9711](https://coocoor.com/advisory/cve/CVE-2019-9711) [https://coocoor.com/advisory/cve/CVE-2019-9712](https://coocoor.com/advisory/cve/CVE-2019-9712)</comment>


Ask HN: How to attribute startup titles? - <AUTHOR> We are launching a new startup/project and we need title to apply to an incubator. We were perfectly able to work properly without titles until now, but this application makes us wonder what to do. We are a group of 4 co-founders and here are our profiles (btw, it's a travel startup):
Founder A: Lot of background in the travel industry, less in the startup world, very good at business development and good organization skills
Founder B: Engineer, startup experience, good knowledge of business, good at business development and good organization skills
Founder C: Engineer, no startup experience, good organization skill (especially in tech projects)
Founder D: Lot of background in the travel industry, zero in the startup world, customers champion and very good to manage relationship with partners
Here is our we gave the titles:
Founder A: CEO
Founder B: COO
Founder C: CTO
Founder D: CMO
We are not sure if it's good. There is no ego here: anyone can have any title.
What do you think? What would you do? <comment><USER2> Do it however you want.

Titles aren't binding for the most part. What each of you will likely shift throughout the startup.</comment>


Myst: the Drawbacks to Success - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success/ <comment><USER2> As a teen, Myst was my first rabid geek fandom. I spent hours, days, weeks, playing and replaying Myst, and its sequel Riven which is like Lord of the Rings to Myst's Hobbit.

I was accepted into the early beta test program for URU, the MMORPG spinoff of the Myst franchise. It consumed the better part of a year…I helped run fan forums and organize in-game events. I made friends. For a time, it was an incredible community.

A visual art reference and "making of" book about Myst and Riven became my bible as I pursued 3D graphics art and almost went to art school to become a game designer. I ended up dropping that idea and went into web/software space instead. (good career move!)

All that to say, Myst is to me what, say, Star Wars is to many others. Its impact was gargantuan in my life and it shaped the person I am today. I will always be grateful to Cyan for that.

<comment><USER3> My first website was a Geopages Myst fan site. I spent weeks trying to "debug" why I couldn't get a picture of Atrus to be the tiled background on my page using the eponymous tag. 12 year old me realized -- eventually -- that there is a "g" in the word "bacGround" ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm fascinated by the "outsider" profile of the Myst creators.

Per the article, they didn't play contemporary games and only used off-the- shelf GUI tools on the niche Mac platform — this in an era where "real games" used handcoded x86 assembly. Yet their creation outsold practically everyone in the industry by an order of magnitude.

Where are the tools today for someone like this to be successful? Unity is of course impressive but seems very tightly bound to gaming industry thinking — not that approachable or interesting to an outsider.

Around 2000-2005, the Flash GUI had lots of potential here... But then Adobe turned Flash into a programmer-oriented sprawling mini-Java and eventually Apple threw it under the iPhone bus.

<comment><USER5> Look up "Dreams" on the PS4. This is absolutely today's version of that.

<comment><USER4> That's very cool. I remember an excellent Siggraph presentation about the still in-development Dreams engine a few years ago. Nice to see it shipping.

There's a difference in distribution freedom though. HyperCard and Flash were conceived as production tools. You could interface with other tools and APIs. For the finished work, you could put it in a box and sell 6 million copies (like Myst), or host a game on your own server (like everything in the Flash golden era).

The Dreams runtime is a console game — a prerequisite investment, and limited audience compared to desktop / web platforms. Hopefully they'll offer some kind of player-only licensing program for creators eventually?

<comment><USER6> Like a demo-tape, a great game could be picked up (like Portal was). Why wouldn't Sony do this?

A distributable runtime, to a market of 100,000,000+ PS4 (plus PS5's), royalties to creators as publishers, would be an intermediate step.

Bundled with PS5 for early gen content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also, a 2 hour (!) interview with Rand Miller by Arstechnica, which has been absolutely killing it lately with their in-depth gamedev coverage -

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended- interview...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended-interview- with-atrus-himself-myst-creator-rand-miller/)

</comment><comment><USER8> " the overlap between players of games like Doom and those like Myst is inevitably limited. (The surprising thing is that an overlap exists at all…)"

Really? Is it that rare to like both?

I find this hard to believe.

<comment><USER9> I do too, especially because when you combine the two you basically end up with Metroid Prime, another very popular well made game.

<comment><USER10> For years I've (often unsuccessfully) tried to pitch people Metroid Prime, calling it 'Myst with a gun', to which my friends responses often include 'what's Myst?'.

Doesn't quite capture the platforming awesomeness, though. First good first person platformer I've played.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Myst was really the last game I played. As the article mentions, Doom was released at about the same time, and really became the blueprint for the future of gaming. My problem was I couldn't play a FPS for more than 10 minutes or so before bad headaches kicked in.

Sometimes I wonder if Myst was like Angry Birds. A game that gamers hated because it didn't conform to their expectations, but something that found mor purchase with people that didn't game heavily.

<comment><USER12> How could you hate Angry Birds unless you also hate the classic series Lemmings and Worms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For any Myst fans wondering if there are any recent games they might like, I'd highly recommend The Witness and Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Outer Worlds). The Witness is a gorgeous puzzle-solver where you learn a sort of 'puzzle language' while walking around a beautiful island and Outer Wilds is genre-defying, but blends physics, space-travel, exploration, puzzle solving and much more to become the most unique and captivating gaming experience I've had in many years.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately Witness is different genre because the puzzles are mostly self- contained and exploration is not as necessary. Myst and Riven are adventure- puzzle games, while Witness is almost pure puzzle game. (Likewise Talos Principle, but it has some story.)

Outer Wilds is action-adventure in that order. It does not allow the slow pace like Myst.

<comment><USER13> I respectfully disagree on both counts. The puzzles in the Witness are linked - but instead of e.g. picking pushing a lever to help with another puzzle, you learn a new rule that will allow you to solve more advanced puzzles that combine the rules of several other puzzles.

And the primary focus in Outer Wilds is not on action, but on exploration. And the way you learn about the history and technology of a previous civilization is quite similar to Myst.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently played Gorogoa, first game that reminded me of Myst in ages. Although it was much easier than I remember Myst being, it has that artistic flair that I loved about Myst.

[http://gorogoa.com/](http://gorogoa.com/)

<comment><USER14> Hmm. Gorogoa. Its puzzles are trivial in comparison. Byeing visual puzzles with only a few simple order of operations additions, they're hard to make harder. The game does not force exploration either.

It's more like a puzzle visual novel than adventure game. (And you have no agency in it really.)

But it is pretty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Myst was captivating. Visually so "immersive" with just enough graphics to really stimulate what "might" be around the corner. I truly could sense that I was somewhere else, another planet or whatever, abandoned, with me to explore.

<comment><USER17> I felt that way for about 10 minutes, after which it felt like visiting a Hollywood set; looks great but it's just a facade. The level of interactivity was just too little to be convincing.

As TFA says, a lot of people blame Myst for the death of the adventure game, but it was already trending that way in '93 as graphics improved. Most of the random actions that you could take to interact with the world in the Sierra games resulted in a fairly generic animation and a wall of text. This meant anything the designer anticipated could be interacted with, because the cost of writing that text was low (particularly with Sierra's near lack of editing and playtesting).

Once a generic animation and a wall of text was no longer acceptable from a production-value stance, these games were stripped of their charm, and all you were left with were charmless puzzle games with some window-dressing. Myst got there first and did it better than everyone else, so it gets the blame for something that was inevitable.

<comment><USER18> More inexcusable is the aesthetic choice to do this now, when you can afford to have decent graphics _and_ let players do whatever they want but designers often inexplicably decide to curate the experience to the point where you might as well just watch somebody else's play.

I wouldn't have built Myst because to me it seems pointless, why not just make a movie about this? Or a picture book? But clearly lots of people enjoyed it. Still, back then I could safely assume anything that looked that good had nothing behind the facade, today it's harder to guess.

It reminds me of a phenomenon which is broadly disliked in tabletop Role Playing. Some GMs like to plot out everything in great detail which necessarily means you can't go off piste, they need you to go into the tunnels under the castle with the torch because they've worked out exactly what will happen when you do. If their players try to instead simply leave the castle because it's boring, or divert a river into the tunnels and flood them to drive anything down there out the GM will either be angry and demand the players reconsider or will try to railroad the players into proceeding with the plan as they envisioned. Either way this is an unsatisfying experience for everybody.

<comment><USER19> There wasn't enough story for a movie. It was pretty enough to be a picture book, but how big is the market for picture books?

It was a puzzle game. The puzzles were pretty basic, but the market for basic puzzle games is significant. Especially if the puzzle is also attractive enough that the next batch of visuals feels like a decent reward for having solved the puzzle.

Such a game won't attract people who want more interaction from their games -- though you do have to remember that at the time even a game like Doom was a huge advance in interactivity. Myst was relaxing rather than exciting, almost the way a game of solitaire or a crossword puzzle is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For some reason I vaguely remember 1993 as having a 7th Guest vs Myst marketing theme. To this day I still haven't played Myst but my memories of 7th Guest have not grown fonder with time.

<comment><USER21> Play realMyst - it's a fun experience.

<comment><USER22> Just note that if you play it on iOS there is a bug that makes one really useful clue not show up, and can leave you scratching your head as to what to do. (Hint: When you see the map in the library, the tower should be blinking. It's not.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was introduced to Myst as a youth in high school, which was probably the only time where I truly enjoyed writing. I'm not much of an author, but we we played through the first two worlds in myst together as a class and then had to write fiction set in those worlds, which really caught my imagination.

</comment><comment><USER24> Myst's style of gameplay (user jumps from environment to environment by clicking) seems like it would be a great fit for the current generation of virtual reality headsets.

<comment><USER25> Cyan's latest game, Obduction, is quite good in VR.

<comment><USER26> It's epic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We got our first Mac in 1984 when I was 12 (and we were seemingly the last people to get a computer in the fairly affluent neighborhood we moved to not long before).

I've always loved Macs, and games.

Myst was the last great Mac-only game.

When it got ported to Windows, I was very sad, because I knew it meant the Mac was "dead man walking" as far as being a viable gaming platform was concerned. Oh, it floundered for a number of years later (shout-out to Oni [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggC6kfJJE_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggC6kfJJE_w) , Myth II: Soulblighter [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84pODz7ATs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84pODz7ATs) and the Marathon series, all of which were made by a barely-known-at-the-time Bungie Software primarily (at first only) for Macs) but... anyway.

Myst was magical and inspiring because Macs were magical and inspiring.

<comment><USER3> Marathon Infinity was the absolute jam. It came with its own software for making levels/scenarios, and there were all these community-made Marathon games online. No one ever talks about it!

<comment><USER27> At the time (I was enlisted in the USAF for 4 years) I had PC gamers using my Mac just to play Marathon. Probably one of the last times that's happened, lol. (And I just realized one of the guys who did that often, Paul Voss, was killed recently in a crash, sigh: [https://www.stripes.com/news/middle- east/air-force-aviators-...](https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/air- force-aviators-killed-in-afghanistan-crash-were-lieutenant-colonel- with-25-years-of-service-and-b-1-bomber-pilot-1.616815) He also liked Escape Velocity, which was another Mac-only game at the time)

<comment><USER22> Escape Velocity was so much fun! Someone recently did a remake (or copy is maybe a better term) of it called Endless Sky.

<comment><USER3> I remember getting a skin pack for EV that turned all the ships into Star Wars ships, it was awesome

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone who loved the adventure games of the 80s and 90s but somehow never played Myst, do you think it would be worth my time in 2020 to give it a play through?

<comment><USER29> All a matter of what you like to do with your time.

Myst was a great adventure/puzzle game for its time. Although IMO, Riven and Myst III were better, with Riven being the pinnacle of the series. I would replay these if I were to play any of the games in the series again. Otherwise, if you're looking for something more modern, I'd recommend Quern.

<comment><USER30> It'll probably run a lot better on modern hardware.</comment></comment></comment>


A College Student's Perception of Job Options - <AUTHOR> https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Alb1vwfHsecgdFZ6SHNfbG5qb0FoQmZfZTNPdk1TQXc&hl=en&output=html

<comment><USER2> As a college student myself, I think this list is rather ridiculous and hope that the person who made it doesn't take it seriously.

<comment><USER3> It's not funny enough to be comedy. Dry satire, perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scala is cool.</comment>


Best way to (re)learn modern C++ as its own language? - <AUTHOR> I stopped using C++ back in the mid 90s (before RAII or iterators, for example) -- thus my view of C++ is more of a "C with classes".  I want to learn C++14 or C++17 "as it's spoken".
It looks like C++ has moved beyond being an extension to C and now has its own conventions and "slang"(e.g. in C you iterate with for(;;) even though there are vestigial do and while constructs.  What are the modern C++ conventions?).  What I want is like learning German by watching TV and listening to how people speak instead of reading a textbook.  I can and will read the reference, but would like to do so after being "native".
Any recommendations?  The names I've read are Gregoire and Gottschling.  I mostly program in Lisp, C and assembly; I'd rather not have a this-is-a-byte beginner's book as it probably wouldn't get into the meat of the language. <comment><USER2> If you like to watch language conference talks to get updates about the state of the language, there are plenty of recordings on Youtube.

Look for: CppCon, Meeting C++, Microsoft's "Going native"

I can personally recommend any talk by: Bjarne Stroustrup, Scott Meyers, Stephan Lavavej, Sean Parent, Andrei Alexandrescu

Of course, there are many more gems (e.g. Chandler Carruth's talks are great if you are interested in a compiler author's perspective).

As far as reading materials go, I know of two books that seem to cater to your background:

Stroustrup: A tour to C++ ([http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html](http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html)) Meyers: Effective modern C++ ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/mobile/0636920033707.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/mobile/0636920033707.do))

I personally only own the second one, but have already heard good things about the first one as well.

The C++ core guidelines (work in progress on [http://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines](http://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines)) should certainly also be worth a read.

Of course, for actual practice, reading/contributing to open source code seems like a good start. Maybe have a look at this list: [https://github.com/fffaraz/awesome- cpp/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/fffaraz/awesome- cpp/blob/master/README.md)

Edit: The "Awesome C++" list also has a "Resources" section that links to even more material...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks btschaegg, great list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> try to contribute to a modern open-source C++ project on GitHub / BitBucket?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/489f9l/open_source_pro...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/489f9l/open_source_projects_with_examples_of_good_modern/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, gigatexal!</comment></comment></comment>


Linux First OS to Merge Multipath TCP with RFC8684 Support - <AUTHOR> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next.git/commit/?id=08a45c59f16efe33ca715e894231a9b7afd3b7b4 <comment><USER2> EDIT: Probably a misreading on my part if the author wanted to convey it's the first implementation of RFC8684

Title is editorialized & factually incorrect.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/urlsess...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/urlsessionconfiguration/improving_network_reliability_using_multipath_tcp)

Apple has had MPTCP publicly for 3 years at least: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201373](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201373)

MPTCP was used internally for even longer.</comment>


Othello for Desktop, Mobile and Web:  an AI and GUI Exercise - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanshq.net/othello.html <comment><AUTHOR> Impressed by the amount of work put down in this.

File size: Exe: 98 KB Mac: 195 KB iOS: 0.4 MB Web: 32.7 KB transferred</comment>