Is there a web service that lets users post to my webapp via email - <AUTHOR>

One aspect of the website I run is a question and answer forum and I am trying to figure out an easy way to allow my users comment and do q&A via email   kind of like how you can email a blog to posterous. Essentially, I just need a quick and easy way to identify my users by unique email address and approve a post to the platform. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I don't know any service for this, but can be done... to reduce the spam problem that bdfh42 pointed you may only accepts anwsers if they are email replies to the question email...

you could also use a good spam filter also...which I believe will drastic reduce any chance of spam getting into your q&a

<comment><USER2> Other things to keep i mind for this, use a imap mailbox and i believe you could do some sort of header validation before accepting any email

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So once I have the email addresses of a few of your users - I would be able to SPAM your QA - every topic...

Unless you can figure out how to avoid that issue then your forum would drown.</comment>


List of things named after Leonhard Euler - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler <comment><USER2> A good snippet to come back to whenever one needs to be humbled:

 _Euler 's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler._

<comment><USER3> If you think that might make you humbled, then consider that he was completely blind at the end of his life and he was still coming up with new discoveries and conversing with other mathematicians via scribes.

<comment><USER4> And raised, with limited success, 13 kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those mathematically inclined, I highly recommend "Introduction to the Analysis of the Infinite": [https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387968247](https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387968247)

It's fascinating to see how Euler thought about things like infinite series, derivatives, etc. before they were formalized hundreds of years later. You'll find him make "mistakes" (i.e.,assumptions which are not true) but _he always gets the right answer_. Look for, in particular, his proof that \sum \frac{1}{n^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stayed in the Hotel Euler (not mentioned on the page) when I visited Basel. In the restaurant were no pictures of or anything related to Leonhard, at least not that I saw, but plenty of owls ( _eulen_ ).

</comment><comment><USER7> Edmonton Eulers of the NHL

<comment><USER8> Also can't forget the Houston Eulers of the NFL

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Things in fiction also get named after Euler quite often, like the Euler aliens from the Looking Glass series.

</comment><comment><USER10> Please don't let be be the only person to have misread Euler as Ruler.

<comment><USER3> You may have misread it as "ruler", but the problem I had was calling him Oo- ler. Turns out you pronounce it Oi-ler.

<comment><USER9> Well, shit. I've been saying "yoo-ler" my entire adult life.

<comment><USER11> Yoo-leh is the most common British dialect version which does chime with Euclid. I did also hear an English great grandson of Euler pronounce it that way in a documentary.

US is resolute that "oiler" is phonetically correct. The "oi" is arguably superior but the Swiss and German versions end in a sort of "euh" sound rather than a strong "er".

With "oiler" also being a word in its own right, some satirical potential could tint international debate over its correctitude.

"Eu say tomatoe, Eu say tomatoe"

<comment><USER10> "Eu say tomatoe, Eu say tomatoe"

Okay it's _supposed_ to be tomato or tomatoes. Am I missing an extra level to this joke?

<comment><USER12> It's tomayyto or tomahhto, but they're spelled the same way.

<comment><USER13> OT, but I've never once actually heard someone pronounce it "tomahhto" outside of this expression. Is this actually a pronunciation that people use?

<comment><USER14> I think it's a British thing.

<comment><USER13> Oh, interesting! I honestly had no idea</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Has SHA-256 been broken? - <AUTHOR> https://www.treadwell-stanton.com/services/latest-news <comment><USER2> Everything points to fake news:

1) The copy is not great, and is not of the standard you would expect from a supposedly American company: "In accordance with its disclosure policy, Treadwell Stanton DuPont won't be saying exactly how they did it — because once the proof-of-concept is out, anyone with enough computing power will be able to produce a SHA-256 collision, rendering the algorithm both insecure and obsolete."

2) The phone number listed is 917, which usually (not always) is for mobile phones in NYC. (Which finance firm can't afford a nice 212/800 central number from Verizon?)

3) Their About Us page doesn't actually list any real names of executives and directors: [https://www.treadwell-stanton.com/about-us](https://www.treadwell- stanton.com/about-us)

4) Their email is hosted by Godaddy:

host -t mx treadwell-stanton.com treadwell-stanton.com mail is handled by 10 mailstore1.europe.secureserver.net. treadwell-stanton.com mail is handled by 0 smtp.europe.secureserver.net.

FINRA, SEC, etc would probably not be pleased with Godaddy email.

<comment><USER3> This is not a quick fake site. Too much went into it. Also, their social media profiles go back to Oct. 2017. If it's a fake company (and that seems likely), they are playing the long con.

Their "address," 30 Wall Street, is for a virtual office business center, Capstone Executive Offices. [https://liquidspace.com/US/NY/new-york/your-wall- street-offi...](https://liquidspace.com/US/NY/new-york/your-wall-street- office)

In any case, this announcement seems to be a vaporware pump-and-dump scheme for a bitcoin accelerator: [https://www.facebook.com/TreadwellStanton](https://www.facebook.com/TreadwellStanton)

The timing of their first Facebook post is within 6 months of when they supposedly broke SHA256, so that definitely says long con.

<comment><USER3> AND they are associated with a lotto computer scam: [https://neural- lotto.net/index.php/en/kga6](https://neural-lotto.net/index.php/en/kga6)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> By some unknown blockchain miners with no proof that want to sell you one of 25 units instead of operating them using something something quantum? No, it wasn't. Come on.

</comment><comment><USER5> While not saying how they did it, shouldn't they be able to prove it? By showing some colliding hashes or so?

<comment><USER6> It's not just that, they're claiming computationally feasible preimage attack, something which AFAIK has not been feasibly achieved in SHA1 (SHAttered is a collision attack).

<comment><USER7> A preimage attack still isn't feasible for MD5. What an absolutely ridiculous claim they made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like an attempt to manipulate Bitcoin value? Pathetic.

<comment><USER9> From the article "it is not our intention to bring down Bitcoin, break SSL/TLS security or crack any financial sector security whatsoever."

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what one would say when he had the intention to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heres the Outline link, if anyone is having trouble visiting the original site like I was.

[https://outline.com/54ReCb](https://outline.com/54ReCb)

</comment><comment><USER12> OK, we've now found something even worse than the stupid "best logo competition" for vulnerabilities.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has been /.-ed to death already. Anyone have a snapshot?

<comment><USER14> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7M6t0i...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7M6t0ia3SfYJ:https://www.treadwell- stanton.com/services/latest-news+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-b-d)</comment></comment>


What if we could just *draw* the code? - <AUTHOR> http://www.metafilter.com/145129/What-if-we-could-just-draw-the-code <comment><USER2> That has been a dream since at least Sutherland's 1962 PhD thesis. Many have tried. It works for a few niches, mostly dealing with data flow. Besides LabView there's Quartz Composer on the Mac, and Yahoo Pipes, so it's not like it's an exotic solution. No one has managed to come up with one which is an effective general purpose language on par with the more text-oriented ones.

<comment><USER3> Never mind drawing it. I want to specify it. Not with wads of text, but with definitions that I could put in a database and granularly track. Declarations, members, singletons, resources, all of it in a form that tools can understand.

Because source control has negligible semantic knowledge, so does a terrible job of integrating code. Text files tangle up stuff that should be easily distinguished by tools but isn't.

<comment><USER2> How is that different than what CASE tools provide? Or an image-based language like Smalltalk?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Twitter know who my former therapist was? - <AUTHOR>

I got an email today with suggestions of people to follow, including my former therapist. This was a little surprising because he only has 13 followers and follows 5 people. My only guess is this information came from email and browsing behavior that was collected and sold to twitter? Does anyone have a good explanation? <comment><USER2> Your therapist probably gave permission for Twitter to scan their phone's or computer's contacts and it found your email. Then it recommended them to you. My phone's notification bar had an offer from Twitter to help me find more friends this way just this morning.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, this sounds very likely. It seems like this is irresponsible on the part of the therapist to essentially disclose a patient list to a third party. Do you know if there is any kind of legislation about this?

<comment><USER3> I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But this is very unprofessional from the therapist side. You perhaps should contact your therapist as soon as possible and let him/her know that there is a breach of trust. Also read about HIPAA(Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

[http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/i...](http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why docs should not participate in "social media" that require or recommend registration using real names. It is difficult to fully compartmentalize one's life to the degree required (ie, if you ever spoke to a doc on his cellphone your name may be in the contact list). I'm sure some professionals (docs) want to use Twitter or Facebook as advertising, but there are real security risks, as this situation illustrates.

I would suggest you let your therapist know what happened - he (?she) may be unaware of what happened and he/she may want to take action to prevent repetition.</comment>


Wolfram announces neural net model zoo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2018/06/14/launching-the-wolfram-neural-net-repository/ <comment><USER2> One of the authors here, happy to answer any questions should anyone have them.

For information on the neural net framework we wrote, check out the 'guide page' that summarizes the main functions:

[http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/NeuralNetworks.h...](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/NeuralNetworks.html)

The tutorial collection should give a good sense of how high-level and clean the framework is:

[http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/NeuralNetwork...](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/NeuralNetworksOverview.html)</comment>


Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/a-public-relations-nightmare-ticketmaster-recruits-pros-for-secret-scalper-program-1.4828535 <comment><USER2> This is super sleezy and I think Ticketmaster is one of the most awful companies in the world. But given the ridiculous levels of scalping that goes on every day (including all the companies that attempt to normalize it, like StubHub), doesn't it all imply that the fair market price of a lot of tickets is way higher than what they sell for? Obviously demand is way outstripping supply or people wouldn't pay $500-$1000 for $100 tickets on a daily basis.

By making all event tickets available at exactly the same time for an effectively-lower-than-market price, of course professional scalpers are going to snap up almost all of them and normal people without scripts won't be able to compete. I wonder what would happen if tickets went on sale for a really high price (like $500 each) and then the prices kept dropping automatically every hour until they were all sold. That would kill a lot of advantage that the scalpers have.

I guess customers would hate it and promoters would hate it, but I wonder if there isn't some other kind of sales model that would make this kind of sleezy self-scalping less profitable. Because with market forces this strong, companies are going to do anything that is legal-ish to get a piece of it. If Ticketmaster doesn't figure out a way to get a piece of the massive resell market, they are essentially just giving away free money to StubHub (from their point of view).

<comment><USER3> Ticketmaster provides a valuable service for the associated acts:

Reputation shield

If artists started charging fair market prices for their tickets the fans would go ballistic and the artists' reputations would be severely damaged. By ostensibly selling the tickets below, even if normal people never get to buy them at face value, they outsource the reputation damage to Ticketmaster. Since Ticketmaster already has a detestable reputation, they are well-equipped to provide this service with minimal damage to their brand. In exchange, Ticketmaster pays a portion of their revenues to the promoters and their associated acts. It's a win win: artists get more money without damaging their credibility with their fans.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused, so like an artist would be paying 80% of his potential revenue ($100 vs. $500) in return for reputation shield? That's how valuable this service is?

<comment><USER5> Artists' reputations may take a hit if they price their tickets overly high, as it's seen as gouging fans. Instead, Ticketmaster charged multiple hidden fees for each ticket, often including a venue fee, service fees, and other interestingly named fees that are different based on the event, venue, and tour (although all events in some tours might have a similar fee, some some venues might have a similar priced venue fee across all events...).

Some of these are collected and go right back to the artist, promoter and venue. Fans are unhappy about this, but they place the blame on Ticketmaster, not the artist or venue. This is the reputation shield Ticketmaster offers. They take the blame for higher prices while passing a lot of those fees back to the artist and venue. They take a cut for processing the order, and probably a higher than normal cut for taking the negative PR, but both Ticketmaster and the artists and venues make more money in the end.

<comment><USER6> The kickbacks go mostly to the venues who then write Ticketmaster into their contracts, making it really hard for artists to find somewhere to play without Ticketmaster being the manditory ticketing provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Freakonomics did a great deep dive [0] into the complexity of ticket markets. The short of it is that incentives are mixed and spread through the following parties: sellers, venues, promoters, artists, and fans.

Artists don't want to look like they gouge their fans.

Promoters take a cut and need to hit volume milestones.

Fans want access, and are willing to pay extra.

[0] - [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market- scr...](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-screwed/)

<comment><USER8> It's kind of unfortunate. I am perfectly willing to allow the artist to gouge me. If 2000 people want to see the concert and there are 1000 seats, what choice do they have? Sure, next time book a bigger venue, but this time... you just have to let people bid on the tickets and sell them to the 1000 highest bidders.

I feel like I've always gotten a good deal on the secondary market. Every so often I am in Japan in late August and like to attend a 3 day anime song concert. The tickets are sold way in advance, and are $60 (ish) for a randomly selected seat in Saitama Super Arena. This means your $60 may get you a front row seat or one on the upper balcony behind a pillar, you don't know. And you have to physically buy the thing from a convenience store in Japan 6 months in advance. So the primary market is just bad. I end up just buying tickets on Yahoo Auctions and for $200 I get a front row seat. Would I have been just as happy to give that $200 directly to the people running the event? Yup! But they don't let me, so they lose out on $240. Multiply that by thousands of tickets sold, and you wonder whether or not any of these people ever attended business school.

Similarly, you can get reverse gouged on unpopular events. My brothers are big basketball fans. Whenever they visit New York, we go see the Nets play. The Nets are historically terrible and never fill up the arena, but apparently they sell a lot of tickets for corporate events. These tickets end up on the secondary market for reasonable prices, and that's what I buy. The list price can be something like $1000 and yet we buy them for $100. (I also enjoy the banter with the coworkers of the people that sold us their tickets. Every time, it's "I can't believe so-and-so sold their tickets!" But people are drinking and you can't take yourself too seriously and be a Nets fan, so it's all in good fun.)

Anyway, kind of wandered off topic... but the only way to make demand meet supply is to gouge people, so that supply falls to exactly meet demand. The artist deserves the money, not middlemen.

<comment><USER9> Right? This whole thing comes down to the most basic of economic questions: "How do we distribute a scarce resource where demand is greater than supply?"

We have an amazing system for this - a market. Why don't we just accept that price is based on supply and demand and let the market (secondary markets included) determine the price freely.

<comment><USER10> Some artists want their concerts to be accessible. Not every creator is in the maximizing profit mindset.

<comment><USER5> So? If artists want to control the experience perfectly, don't sell on an open market. There are ways to prevent the majority of resale (will call, purchasing credit card required at gate, etc).

If artists really care, they would do more than lip service (some do!). When they don't, the message is clear. They might care, but they care about money more, because let's be clear, brokers buying out a venue within a day that might take a few months to sell out is good for the artist, promoter and venue. They get to offload risk to a broker, for the cost of _possibly_ some more money in the long run, and they get all their money up front and can do what they want with it for that time.

<comment><USER11> Uh there are many reasons. Artists desires are typically mediated through a promoter or a promoter and a venue and the contractual obligations of both. For instance if the only appropriate sized venue is a live nation venue then you're using ticketmaster! if it's one that has an exclusive contract with ticketmaster same thing. You often can't just "get a different venue" because for various sizes of venue there are only so many in a city, even fewer that are correct for your show, and that are available.

<comment><USER5> > for various sizes of venue there are only so many in a city, even fewer that > are correct for your show, and that are available.

"Correct for your show" is what I'm talking about. It's realative based on what your goals are. If you want to make sure fans get cheap tickets, you make sure supply isn't too far under demand. That can be adding a date, or playing a larger venue. That's risky, because if you misjudge demand, you might actually lose money (based on venue minimum costs).

So, artists and promoters like to ensure they are sold out whenever possible. To achieve this, they play it conservative, but that leaves value on the table. Brokers capitalize on this. If the artist or promoter was more willing to increase supply and take that risk, fans would benefit. Usually, they aren't. Sometimes, they are. Kid Rock and Garth Brooks are notable here. Garth Brookes will play a venue three days in a row, _twice a day_. Kid Rock might just book 6-7 days.

<comment><USER10> Assuming artists could predict demand and supply (versus spending time creating music), if they become popular, with this simplified logic they should only play large venues (which Live Nation controls) on back-to-back nights in primarily big cities. And if they were mainly concerned about money (which some are) then they'd only play the largest cities every year. There are only so many tour days in a year, how would they split their time?

That's not a music culture I'd want to be part of.

<comment><USER5> > Assuming artists could predict demand and supply (versus spending time > creating music)

I assume they pay people that are good at this to do it for them.

> they should only play large venues (which Live Nation controls)

Not all of them. Most, but not all.

> And if they were mainly concerned about money (which some are) then they'd > only play the largest cities every year.

For the most part, I think you just described the concert industry as it currently exists. Usually, the only thing indicating whether an artist will book theaters, arenas or stadiums is how likely they are to sell it out. Only the biggest artists can do stadium tours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given how frequently they ran out of 65,000 tickets for <enter_any_big_ticket_event> within seconds (which would pop up under resale with > 200% markup minutes later), glad this is out in the open.

Also, Fenway Park is the worst. Had a terrible experience earlier this year while trying to book Pearl Jam tickets. Presale went live at 10:00 AM on February 10th (for shows in Sept) and they ran out of tickets at 10:01 AM, are you kidding me? Suddenly I see spike on StubHub an hour later with ridiculous markups.

Fortunately my Uber driver pointed out and suggested that I wait until day of the event (as fenway park puts up unsold scalper tickets back online at market price). I followed his advice and snagged couple of tickets on day of the event at market price as he suggested.

The whole experience was mind numbing.Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out.

Edit : When I said 65,000 tickets - I'm counting Pre-sale tickets as well including Verified Fan scheme they had going this year.

<comment><USER13> > Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out.

I think you'll be waiting a while. TicketMaster shotdown Amazon Tickets in both the UK and US because they didn't want to do business with them.

<comment><USER14> Good thing no one was abusing monopoly power to the detriment of consumers, otherwise antitrust regulators might have to get involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bought 1 concert ticket from Ticketmaster that cost $45. My final total was $72. They charged me 60% extra in 'processing fees' for something I could have just printed out. How much 'processing' does it take to display information on a web page?

They also don't let you just print the ticket. I had to pay extra to have a physical ticket snail mailed to me.

Paying 60% of the cost of the product just to help the company continue to justify their existence is freaking ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> Part of Ticketmaster's purpose is to allow the artist, promoter and venue to charge extra but in a way that shifts blame to Ticketmaster. They are wildly successful in that, as evidenced by the number of people that bring up this exact point.

If you look at the fees, often there's a "venue fee" and other ones. They are different per event, but often are similar per tour and per venue... which means it's being set by artists, promoters and venues. It's trivial to show all-in pricing (some events have it turned on, so it's what you actually see on the main page). They don't do so on purpose.

<comment><USER16> I hear this a lot, and it might just be me, but I'd feel better about a $50 purchase where the $50 dollars all go to the artist/venue, vs a $50 purchase where $30 goes to the artist and $20 purportedly goes to Ticketmaster.

<comment><USER5> Except a vanishingly small number of tickets for popular events are even going for $50 any more, and how do you feel with the ticket costs $95 but you're actually paying over $20 extra for it? Sticker shock is real. Avoiding a $115 ticket price helps avoid some of that outrage. Here's a case study:

The last couple weeks Paul McCartney went on sale in a few places. At PNC Arena[1], the the prices for standard tickets were as follows[2]:

       25.50 + 15.59 =  41.09 (+61%)
       65.50 + 18.54 =  84.04 (+28%)
       95.50 + 20.41 = 115.91 (+21%)
      165.50 + 27.92 = 193.42 (+17%)
      250.00 + 39.24 = 289.24 (+16%)

That doesn't look too bad, until you consider that the lowest price offer, which is just over $41 all said and done, but there were only about 250 tickets at that price level releases, for a venue that holds about 20,000 people. That's just over 1% of capacity.

Less than 1,000 tickets of the $65.50 price level were released (and you had to pay $84 to get them). Less than 3,000 of the $95 price level (almost $116 for those) were released.

Now, I'm not sure exactly how you interpret that, but I suspect I know why they put put in a very low price level but didn't stock it with much inventory, and it wasn't to make sure deserving fans got a chance. It does conveniently allow them to to say that brokers grabbed all the cheap inventory in the beginning though...

That's not to say every artist does this. Some provide quite a large amount of low priced tickets, but the trend on that is down, not up, from what I've seen.

1: [https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826](https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826)

2: Feel free to check for yourself. Use this JS snippet in a developer console from the event page:

      _storeUtils.eventJSONData.tickets.filter(offer=>offer.description.match(/Standard Admission/))[0]
        .prices.sort((a,b)=>a.amount>b.amount).forEach(pl =>
          console.log(`${pl.combinedFees} + ${pl.combinedFees} = ${pl.displayAmountWithFeesTaxes} (+${Math.round((pl.combinedFees/pl.amount)*100)}%)`)
        )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder when we are going to see a startup do to ticketmaster what Uber did to cabs. They are asking for it with their escalating shitty rent seeking behavior. Unfortunately, due to their stranglehold on most venues in the country, they seem to enjoy more power over their industry than even the taxi lobby did.

<comment><USER18> How do you prevent scalpers? Better KYC?

<comment><USER19> Tickets are associated to a name at purchase; you are then required to provide corresponding ID upon admission at the event. Very similar to non-refundable airline tickets (which was designed to kill the secondary market for airline tickets [1]). If you cannot attend, your ticket expires worthless.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has been doing this as part of his fan club for over a decade, and is a vocal opponent of scalpers [2].

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to- som...](https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to-someone-else- if-I-dont-want-to-travel?share=1)

[2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping](https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping)

<comment><USER20> They did say that they were doing that. However.. they're still selling tickets through Livenation. That was only happening via the Presales.

Source: I have a ticket for NIN that I bought on Stubhub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know that they did this in the United States. But one of the interesting things that is helpful for investigative journalism in Canada, the entire country is a one-party consent jurisdiction for recording of phone calls, and recording of conversations in person. investigative journalists in Canada have taken advantage of this fact for many years, and exposed a great deal of corruption.

</comment><comment><USER8> I enjoyed reading the email chain linked from the article. Ticketmaster sent CBC the usual PR statement, CBC replied saying "we are going to say you declined to comment if that's your answer to our questions" and Ticketmaster replied that that's unfair and they were perfectly happy answering all the questions... off the record. Wow.

<comment><USER22> I really like that they add supplementary and primary source documents. Seems like something that more news organizations should do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing how long this ticketing scam has continued, and so blatantly. Everyone knows it's a scam!

They even managed to make settling a class-action lawsuit into a huge fucking scam. It's infuriating. I feel like they should be sued for the way they settled the lawsuit.

<comment><USER24> What do you mean ticketing scam? Scalping? If so, I'm confused on how you might stop it without allowing people who can't go last minute to resell their ticket. This feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situations.

Also which class action lawsuit are you talking about

<comment><USER23> This is a professional reseller program. It's not about individuals reselling tickets last minute. This is specifically about squeezing more money out of average customers using scalping methods.

Sorry for being vague about the lawsuit/settlement, it's just enraging that ticketmaster has been so shitty for so long... yet my options are still generally:

1\. use ticketmaster

2\. don't get tickets

The settlement was: [http://settlement.livenation.com/](http://settlement.livenation.com/) — in which Ticketmaster ended up giving tons of borderline _unusable_ vouchers to customers in settlement (the lawsuit was over fees and took a decade to reach settlement).

You have to sit and watch their site for specific availability to generally lower-tiered events and hope you're fast enough to actually get the available slots (you're competing against millions of people who also have vouchers).

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/media/ticketmast...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/media/ticketmaster- lawsuit-vouchers.html)

<comment><USER25> I'm sure the attorneys were well paid at least.

Those things are almost as bad as those coupons for $10 off your next IOMega product because your Zip drive was a piece of overpriced garbage.

<comment><USER23> Hey at least I could use the IOMega voucher, I used to go to a lot of shows so I have like 50 worthless Ticketmaster vouchers from the lawsuit. Sometimes I get like $2 off a ticket, but the vast majority of them will go unused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I see ticketmaster selling tickets for an event, I know it's not going to be worth my time, money or effort trying to go.

There are a ton of venues and artists out there. If you're put off by this action, understand that this action is taken by TM, the venue and the artist, and vote with your wallet. Spend your entertainment dollars elsewhere and support artists and venues that are more honest. Find a club that sells tickets with some other company or where you can buy tickets at the door.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why aren't ticket sales an auction? That would allow Ticketmaster and the promoters (and hopefully artists) to extract maximum value for each ticket. It would simultaneously take all the profit out of scalping. Tickets could be exchanged at face value, but if the maximum value the market will pay is already extracted there will be no margin left for resellers.

<comment><USER28> Because many performers want their concerts to be accessible to their broad fanbase, and this is probably better for their bottom line in the long run, since there is sure to be animosity towards a popular performer once fans discover that only very rich people can attend their concerts.

<comment><USER27> If that's the goal, then active measures to deter reselling tickets should be used. Thom Yorke succeeded at this when I saw him earlier this year. All tickets were Will Call and you had to enter immediately after ticket pickup. Selling tickets in a way that puts fans in direct competition with well- resourced resellers doesn't help fans either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I had no idea Ticketmaster had such a reputation for being consistently sleazy until I read all the comments here. They scammed me once and I thought it was an isolated screw up that they just didn't want to own up to.

One would think that review sites, etc. or the BBB might do something about companies like this, but even companies I always have good experiences with have some disgruntled former employees or customers trashing them online, and I've never known the BBB to do much. What's one to do? Are there sites for feedback on companies like this where it's not just paid shills and disgruntled people?

</comment><comment><USER30> This doesn't hurt ticket buyers as much as it hurts artists and producers. It's they who get payed less from Ticketmaster, the consumer would have to pay market value anyway.

What they should really do to get market value ethically is simple, have an auction for the tickets. The going price would be transparent to buyers, artists/producers and Ticketmaster wouldn't have the ability to doubly collect fees without paying the artists/producers their real cut in the end. Of course you could argue Ticketmaster would have the ability to benefits from resellers anyway, but in reality the price difference the second time would not be big enough to be benificial for scalpers and Ticketmaster.

If the band/artist want to give more to dedicated fans, just set a side a set of tickets for their fan club and let them buy for a flat fee or from a private auction.

</comment><comment><USER31> Eventbrite should be ringing the NYSE bell pretty soon, but even Eventbrite is unable to penetrate the decade long deals Ticketmaster has in place.

</comment><comment><USER32> anyone else get a bunch of free tickets from ticket master in that lawsuit a few years back but then realize that basically none of the concerts are eligible ?

specifically talking about this: [http://settlement.livenation.com/](http://settlement.livenation.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe this will finally get the FTC to pay attention to ticketmaster/livenation. It's been one of the most abusively anticompetitive companies out there for decades, blacklisting venues that don't use it for everything and setting ticket price requirements (and then of course charging bigger fees because of it).

It's insanely bad monopolistic behavior the FTC never appears to care about, I dunno, maybe because it's just entertainment or something.

</comment><comment><USER34> This industry can only exist because labels and artists are not willing to sell tickets at the market clearing price, since they would be seen as exploitative by their own fans. So they sell the tickets are significantly discounted prices, in the hopes that at least some of them end up in the hands of the fans, saving face but creating a niche for a super-sleazy industry.

The solution I believe is to directly engage the fans and include with the price of the ticket benefits that only have value for fans. For example, when purchasing a ticket the market price is $100, out of which $40 is the price of the ticket and $60 is the "anti-scalping deposit" that fans get back when purchasing from their account with the band's site. So you would get $60 back in your account that you can use to purchase items valuable for fans such as limited edition CD, merchandise or even other tickets in the future (this is a bit tricky since scalpers can automate it, but exposes them to a major risk of detection and loosing the deposit, unlike the automation of the single ticket purchase, which either works or is risk free).

Providing this service seems like a nice idea to build a company on.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's another essential component to this systems which is that the artists, managers and promoters are all often in on this. See:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123672740386088613](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123672740386088613)

and

[https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/3/16045790/ticket- industry-...](https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/3/16045790/ticket-industry- problem-solution-e4b3b71fdff6)

LiveNation often offers the artist guarantees for the tour up front. This is great for artists as the risk it transferred to LiveNation. LiveNation then extorts the fans via Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster becomes the scapegoat, but since they're a near monopoly with a one of the worst public images it makes no difference to them. The artists also take a piece of those "convenience charges" that often make up a large percentage of the face value of a ticket. Again Ticketmaster takes the heat and everyone wins except the fans.

</comment><comment><USER36> >> "This is going to be a public relations nightmare."

Lol. Does anyone think tickermaster cares one iota about its public image? They have been hated for decades, by fans and artists alike. The survive on their ins with venues, bulk purchasers, and CC companies.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, my problems with this article, as someone that works in the industry:

1\. It's not a secret. It's Ticketmaster's secondary market division, TM+. They may not advertise where people out of the industry would see it, but that's nothing special. They may not want to draw attention to themselves, for reasons such as this article, where they are portrayed very unflatteringly and given little chance to provide their own context. Tradedesk, their new POS offering, is new, and has been somewhat buggy (most might be worked out now), so they've targeted known brokers, but it's a free tool, so they would probably be happy to have anyone that buys and sells more than 1-2 sets of tickets a month (there are a LOT of people that do this as a little extra income, or to pay for their concert habit).

2\. Ticketmaster has multiple divisions. The division responsible for proving primary market tickets and the division for running Ticketmaster's secondary market are sometimes at cross purposes. I can tell you from experience though, Ticketmaster does a LOT to prevent the more egregious use of bots, to the point where it can bleed over to regular fans. Every few months there's some new site feature that makes bots harder to utilize. Recently it's a new queuing system and new purchase mechanism, where you select seats off the map (which they've had for a long time, but not during _sales_ ).

3\. Distinguishing a broker account with 100 purchases on it and a corporate account for bonus gifts or a concierge service may not be as easy as it sounds. It's also not that hard for a broker to just use an account for a few purchases. If I was running a concierge service and Ticketmaster cancelled hundreds of purchases all of a sudden, I would be a bit peeved that they took my money (credit, most likely) for months and then basically killed my business because they incorrectly identified me as a broker account. Also, artists/venues/promoters may not actually want to you cancel tickets and put them back on the market. Being sold out has it's own benefits (and nobody wants to return cash they've already gotten).

4\. One of Ticketmaster's main purposes is to offload anger about pricing from artists, promoters and venues to a separate entity. There's a reason why there are often over 50% additional fees per ticket (and they are higher for higher costing seats, how interesting...). It's because many of those are set and received by the artist, promoter and venue. It allows for pricier tickets which is hidden up-front, and the blame goes to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster of course tacks on their own fees for this service.

5\. I believe the secondary market provides a useful function (otherwise I would seek other employment). It helps artists, promoters and venues offload risk (up-front usable money _now_ , instead of little by little as the tour goes on), it helps spread tickets to those that have more money than time (people that devote time still often get tickets, brokers very rarely get everything), and it allows fans to get tickets _well_ below original cost in some (fairly common) cases, such as when a tour is overbought or demand lessens as it goes on. I could find any number of events with secondary market tickets under primary market cost at any moment.

In the end, it's a market. There are tried and true ways to alter it if that's what you want, but for the most part, I think most people are happy with how it works, and happy being able to complain about the time is doesn't as well. Fix and/or make an example of the market participants that are too greedy (such as the broker that got in trouble for buying ALL the Hamilton tickets), and it mostly functions in a way that people expect and find useful. I'll tell you this, getting rid of brokers (if you could) wouldn't result in much cheaper tickets. A lot of the money left on the table would just shift to other market participants, and I doubt it would be the fans.

<comment><USER37> > nd the blame goes to Ticketmaster

This argument is repeated over and over again, but i just cant imagine that being right. This is not usually how efficient markets operate, taking into account all the subjective brand appreciation. I can believe that Ticketmaster can shame any artist outside ticket master, or some other network effect, but not that hating ticketmaster, and deteriorating the user experience, is the economically efficient way to do it.

<comment><USER5> > This is not usually how efficient markets operate

Efficient markets assume clear information that is known by all parties, which make rational decisions. We're talking about a luxury entertainment purchase based on subjective taste in music, and how people feel about those performing that music.

> I can believe that Ticketmaster can shame any artist outside ticket master, > or some other network effect, but not that hating ticketmaster, and > deteriorating the user experience, is the economically efficient way to do > it.

Either you didn't understand what I was saying, or I'm not understanding what you're saying. It's not about Ticketmaster shaming artists, it's about artists not wanting the negative attention and feeling that high ticket prices attract, and offloading some of the price to a third party (by having them collect additional fees) to manage this.

<comment><USER37> > it's about artists not wanting the negative attention and feeling that high > ticket prices attract, and offloading some of the price to a third party (by > having them collect additional fees) to manage this.

I'll try to rephrase. This would only work if the artist selling the ticket by themselves could only sell it lower than Ticketmaster. That is, Ticketmaster can extract MORE money out its customers because they hate Ticketmaster.

That is the idea I contest: people pay more on satisfaction, not on dissatisfaction. Yes, the artist save themselves _some_ hassle, but they dont reduce it, they increase it. I would believe Ticketmaster has some leverage we are not considering.

A thought experiment: lets say artists now sell their tickets on platform independent and simultaneous to Ticketmaster, at the same total price. Would people buy on Ticketmaster because they prefer to hate it than to hate the artist?

I doubt so.

<comment><USER5> > That is, Ticketmaster can extract MORE money out its customers because they > hate Ticketmaster.

This is what's happening. People want to see the artist they like, so they see Ticketmaster as a necessary evil. If those feeling were transferred to the artist, the artist may alienate fans, which not only affects that specific concert, but future reputation and events as well. This should not be looked at one event at a time in isolation, reputation persists, and pays of in a myriad of ways (album sales, word-of-mouth, etc), so it makes sense to look at it over time, If an artist is able to cultivate a reputation for caring about fans, it helps to have a partner able to take any blowback for actions fans do not like.

More established artists often just charge a lot for tickets. They can get away with it. Having to pay $100+ for the cheapest Rolling Stones tickets isn't going to phase most Rolling Stones fans at this point (and a lot are at a stage in life where they can support it, and much more expensive tickets). The same might not be true of a newer artist, which is still trying to grow their fan base.

> people pay more on satisfaction, not on dissatisfaction.

Generally, yes, but it's also skewed by how often the item in question is purchases, have they purchased it before, etc. No matter how much I enjoy a new car, I still hem and haw at the price when I an seriously considering buying one. Expensive luxury purchases are like that (at this point I do pay for satisfaction in cars - to a degree - but it wasn't always that way, by necessity and by my current state of knowledge).

> lets say artists now sell their tickets on platform independent and > simultaneous to Ticketmaster, at the same total price. Would people buy on > Ticketmaster because they prefer to hate it than to hate the artist?

Is the artist advertising a similar face value and adding fees on to create a higher purchase price, like Ticketmaster? If not, then I expect the vast majority would probably end up at Ticketmaster because of a lower advertised price, even if it's the same at checkout.

In the end though, some fans may be upset at the pricing and treatment, and that may prevent a future album or concert ticket purchase. Fans are fickle, and there's a _relationship_ between artists and fans, and that's essentially why it's not a rational market. There's emotion in there.

<comment><USER37> > Is the artist advertising a similar face value and adding fees on to create > a higher purchase price, like Ticketmaster? If not, then I expect the vast > majority would probably end up at Ticketmaster because of a lower advertised > price, even if it's the same at checkout.

Lets try to ceteris paribus it. I have no doubt the price shennanings Ticketmaster does have an extractive effect, but given the same price for TM and the artist, who would choose TM? And if the artist is cheaper because there is no middleman?

Of course TM would punish any artist doing that, thats why I say they must have leverage.

In the end I might be wrong about this, but deception is a poor substitute for economic efficiency. The day one artist collects more money with no fuss, the house of cards falls down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ticketmaster is also largely pushing behind the scenes for digital only / digital first ticketing.

The experience of being gifted tickets for an event is no longer the same.

A side effect of this is that Ticketmaster alternatives (Stubhub) etc, are also better frozen out of the secondary ticket market, and ironically, Ticketmaster takes their place through their fan-to-fan resale platform.

TM has acquired Stubhub as well, so there are likely other competitors/targets they are targeting too.

</comment><comment><USER39> One of the few blockchain companies I actually see the value in is [https://guts.tickets](https://guts.tickets) Their technology prevents reselling tickets for anything other than the original price, among other things. (Disclaimer: I just happen to know one of the founders from a past endeavor, I do not own any of there token)

</comment><comment><USER40> This is exactly why we built rystband! We're an all digital ticketing company so we can do what the big companies can, but better. We sell tickets with $0 service fees, forever. Check us out! [https://www.rystband.com](https://www.rystband.com)

</comment><comment><USER41> Artists/celebrities keep using it (i'd even want to say endorse it). Customers keep buying from it. Unless politicians pick this up and do something like condemn this practise and threaten regulations, nothing will happen.

</comment><comment><USER42> The dark side of this is how they damage the total sales in their "explorations". The actual performer doesn't get a cut. They don't get to know their market value, or how bad the pricing hurts the fan experience.

</comment><comment><USER43> So HFT taking advantage of ticket sales arbitrage?

</comment><comment><USER44> Has Ticketmaster hit the point where their brand image is so bad that they aren't hurt at all by bad press?

<comment><USER45> Their reputation doesn't matter.

If Favorite Artist comes to town to play, you will buy a ticket because you love the artist. Whether the ticket handler is a piece of shit is inconsequential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ages ago I was paid by professional scalpers to build bots on TM to get the "fruit". Fun times.

</comment><comment><USER47> excuse my ignorance but why can't artists just setup a stripe page and collect money from fans and set up a location and date? why are market makers needed in tickets market that create incentives for scalpers?

<comment><USER48> It's because the venues are the ones partnered with these types of companies. Unless the artist themselves own a venue, they usually have to go through the ticketing of whatever that venue itself uses. The artists sadly don't get that much control on that type of thing, esp the average artist that doesn't have the type of "klout" to demand X Y Z happen for them to play that venue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICO)

</comment><comment> brian-armstrong Guess it's not so secret anymore

</comment><comment><USER50> "secret"

</comment><comment><USER51> How is the artist not getting absolutely screwed in this situation?

</comment><comment><USER52> Sell tickets by auction, it would extract maximum value and kill the scalping market.

</comment><comment><USER53> I bought my son a ticket for a music festival that was sold out within hours of ticket release from ticketmaster's reseller site seatwave and paid triple the price to some guy with an Indian name who I'm fairly sure never had any intention of attending.</comment>


Ask YC : Is Ruby on Rails the holy grail of web programming ? - <AUTHOR>

I keep seeing this posts about ruby on rails and it sounds more and more like it's suppose to be the holy grail of web programming. Yet, I don't see many success story's to back it up. Is it going to be a ruby bubble happening soon ? How many projects for YC use Ruby  ?
<comment><USER2> I think everyone else has pretty much summed it up.

My answer is: No, but it is closer than anything else. It is a huge stepping stone towards a truly powerful web applications framework.

Rails won't stop innovating any time soon. There's an absolutely enormous amount of innovation going on in Rails plugins / RubyGems. Eventually the different plugin/gem approaches to common problems will become standardized, and those standardized approaches will make it to Rails core.

Once Rails core has all of these awesome things standardized (multi-stage deployment, more "ruby-like" templates (ERB replacement), fixtures replacement, automatic generation of integration tests, better caching, etc), it will become both great and a bloated piece of crap.

Then, another platform emerges that does to Rails what Rails did to PHP. It will take all of the features of Rails+Bloat, and put it in a sexy package. Then, THAT will be the holy grail.

At least until the cycle happens again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only if the evolution of programming languages has stopped.

</comment><comment><USER4> Clearly, the answer is no. It is not the holy grail of web programming.

Is it a step in the right direction? Absolutely.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are a few success stories out there using Rails, starting with, of course 37Signals themselves, and Twitter. Rails has gotten a lot of publicity and there are more than a few Ruby fans out there.

I would not call it a holy grail. There has been the growth of several frameworks that use the Rails philosophy recently like Grails and hopefully we will see a few success stories come out of those too.

<comment><USER6> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Twitter having scaling issues earlier this summer? I think Twitter's developers placed the blame squarely on Rails.

<comment><USER7> We've been through this :P

Twitter had scaling problems because they had such a massive onslaught on their systems. Any language/framework would've buckled a little under that stress. I'm not saying RoR is perfect (its not...) and it has its bottlenecks, but to solely blame the language isn't fair.

Scribd runs on RoR and they've yet to bitch about scaling. Twitter seems to running well now.

Just use whatever feels right in your hands. I use RoR with Django/Python a close second. If you ever run into Twitter-like scaling problems, then good for you. Worry about that when it happens.

<comment><USER6> So after getting downmodded, and no one actually correcting me, I decided do a quick Google search and see what came up. Oh, looks like I was right. In an interview, Twitter developer Alex Payne blames the Rails framework for scaling issues.

Interview: How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. _Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework._ The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it's not just cost, it's time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t] reach your site.None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It's great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it's tough. If you're looking to deploy a big web application and you're language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

[http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with- twi...](http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter- developer-alex-payne/)

And just to be clear, I wasn't knocking Rails. I have absolutely nothing against it, I haven't even used it yet. I was just trying to point something out. The developer's words, not mine.

The fervor among some of you is disturbing.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure this has been on here before but this is a good follow up to that article and it's also from the chaps at Twitter:

\---- For us, it's really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and Ruby haven't been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. The performance boosts associated with a "faster" language would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in January. \-----

[http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making- twitter-10...](http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making- twitter-10000-percent-faster)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a very intelligently-designed framework built on top of a very expressive (even fun) language.

But some web apps are too trivial to justify the overhead, and some may be too vast to want to run in a somewhat pokey interpreted language.

But for something of the size and complexity in the range of Basecamp or (one of my favorites) Snacksby, you'd be stupid not to use it (or a similarly- capable framework).

Another seriously cool framework is Seaside, but so far I haven't gotten my hands dirty with coding, just played around with the seriously amazing dabble DB. It's not very "web like", but it can do stuff that makes my head hurt when thinking of programming it even on top of Rails.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's important to remember that Ruby and Rails are not the same thing.

Ruby has a lot of very nice features, but a slow-ish runtime (JRuby & IronRuby might be a different matter). As for a Ruby bubble (as opposed to a Rails bubble), I doubt it as there is now quite a community (and a loyal following of prag devs) around the language itself.

Rails is one of many interesting frameworks getting around these days (another worth a look is Python based Django). As the framework matures the hype bubble will burst, but Rails has some way to go before obscurity.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a big step on the path forward, even if you only judge by how many people are copying it.

It gets a lot of things right, in my opinion. It had to - no one would even consider jumping to a new platform for a %10 increase, so it must be significant.

</comment><comment><USER12> I do not think it's the holy grail. At the same time, I wouldn't count success stories to gauge its usefulness. There are many factors going into success, and the programming language you choose is just one of them.

</comment><comment><USER13> while we use it to power our startup, I don't think that it is a holy grail :)

</comment><comment><USER14> scribd!</comment>


Chinese hackers obtained designs of most sensitive US weapons - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/confidential-report-lists-us-weapons-system-designs-compromised-by-chinese-cyberspies/2013/05/27/a42c3e1c-c2dd-11e2-8c3b-0b5e9247e8ca_story.html

<comment><USER2> What I want to know is, why are these systems accessible from the public internet in the first place?</comment>


Performing HTTP Requests, Parsing HTML, and Traversing the DOM in Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://theexplorator.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/performing-http-requests-parsing-html-and-traversing-the-dom-in-common-lisp/

<comment><USER2> Nice article. Common Lisp shows its age a little, but when I see niceties like setf multiple return values I smile :-)</comment>


The Universe Is Not a Simulation, but We Can Now Simulate It - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/coder-physicists-are-simulating-the-universe-to-unlock-its-secrets-20180612/ <comment><USER2> I'm so disappointed by quanta lately. Clickbaits and worsening quality.

> The Universe Is Not a Simulation

That's based on what? Author of the article opinion? That's cool but then it should be "In my opinion.." and "here's my reasoning".

<comment><USER3> Is the "Universe is a Simulation" more than a dreamy internet theory, though? Like, are astronomers and physicists taking it seriously? I don't know either way, I just assumed the headline was basically saying "no, this isn't some sensational new post about how we're all in a simulation, this is hard data leading to realistic results". Kinda defensive more so than click-bait-y.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it is a serious theory, taken seriously by serious scientists, and seriously investigated by them.

It can be hard to tell through the popular science stories, where the author is typically unable to relay anything about this research without adding "woo woo" sounds and wiggling their fingers, but it's a real theory.

One thing that may be worth remembering is that in the real theory, the "simulation" is not necessarily running on "a supercomputer just like what we have, only way bigger", which is actually a silly idea for various reasons, and we also do not know that the simulation is literally simulating every particle and every cubic inch of space in the most accurate possible way (i.e., for all we know, far away galaxies could just be a few megabytes in size, rather than fully simulated to the nth degree). The "Great Simulator" is not required to run anything remotely resembling our physics. What seems an absurdly large computation may be smaller than it appears, and may not be an absurdly large amount of a universe running on fundamentally different physics.

(Occasionally when I'm bored, I noodle around with a theory of cellular automata in which the universe has infinite computation power by virtue of being able to split a cell in half or quarters, that then runs at double-speed relative to the outside. If this is done recursively the universe has arbitrary computation abilities relative to the "top level". I've never worked it into anything usable, but I think it can give a flavor of why we should not be sure that our simulation host is necessarily as staggered by the computation as we would be. We are not even capable of saying that they aren't running an exponentially-expensive quantum approximation algorithm with the entire universe actually arbitrary-precision integers under the hood. The staggering amount of computation that represents may not bother them at all.)

It is not a theory that is, strictly speaking, falsifiable thanks to Church- Turing equivalence, but there are ways in which it could potentially (to any arbitrary degree of confidence you may want) be confirmed if it is true. To take one degenerate case, if the Great Simulator broke silence and starting wildly breaking the laws of physics to get our attention, that would certainly put a lot of probability mass on the "we're a simulation" theory. There are less extreme cases we could conceivably pick up on, that just fits into an HN comment nicely.

<comment><USER5> > It is not a theory that is, strictly speaking, falsifiable,

So in what ways is it a "serious theory"?

<comment><USER4> Well, along with the religion case that whatshisface points out, there's also the problem that _any_ theory of the nature of the universe has this problem. The problem here is not with the theory of the universe per se, but the fundamental limits of science itself.

Despite what seems to be a popular opinion, we are not actually obligated to curl up into a ball on the floor and cry about our inability to know anything just because science can't be definitive on some point. We just need to be aware of the limits of our knowledge. We have no choice; even in just our day- to-day lives, we are required to make all kinds of decisions for which science is either quiet, insufficiently informative, or (and this one may _really_ hurt to think about too much) simply _wrong_.

<comment><USER5> > Despite what seems to be a popular opinion, we are not actually obligated to > curl up into a ball on the floor and cry about our inability to know > anything

I have no idea what you are referring to here. Can you be bit more specific about what viewpoint or philosophy you are satirizing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually, when you found out it was a simulation, we scrapped the current data, we had to restore it to the last valid snapshot and adjust local simulation parameters so that you wouldn't find it out. It's all reported in the post-mortem of the incident. Service levels are now fully restored.

<comment><USER7> There is another theory which states that this has already happened

<comment><USER6> Yes. We have some guard code in place for when this happens and it's getting really good at catching it before or right after it happens and doing all the rollbacks automatically, but they can't catch every possible situation.

It's now down to one minor outage every couple years. We are aiming at five nines on the next major release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Skimmed through the article and couldn't find any mention of the first part of the title which was the initial reason for reading it as it's a subject of great interest to me. I wasn't expecting this from quanta. Very disappointed.

<comment><USER9> It's still an extremely interesting article imo.

I sometimes read hn as the discussions here can add to articles on topics I find interesting but have limited knowledge on, but the 3+ top comment threads (so far) discussing the title and not content of this article is somewhat disappointing.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry you feel disappointed. But do you also feel like you've been bamboozled? Because this is how I feel after reading the whole article thinking that somebody managed to refute the 'simulation hypotheses'. Interesting article, of course, but I would have not read it at all if the titles was accurate. So I feel bamboozled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In Charles Stross's "Accelerando" (strongly recommended!) astronomers suspect that the inhabitants of Andromeda Galaxy converted all its baryonic matter to computronium (here: configuration of matter capable of the most efficient computation as per the laws of physics) and are using it to run a massive side-channel attack, trying to verify if the Universe runs on a virtual machine (and I guess maybe break out of it).

On a different note, here's a sobering thought for the Universe-as-simulation optimists: while it's possible the simulation's Creators wish us well, e.g. will store your soul/mind and let you live carefree in a Paradise... it might rather work like our current massive simulations (e.g. the Millennium Run [0]). It generates enormous amounts of data, but only some small amount (like a state snapshot every 100M years) is actually captured and analyzed. I.e. the "dumb" computing power at the Creators' disposal is far greater than their mental capacity. The whole existence of humanity might go unnoticed, just a side-effects of the simulation's fidelity.

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

</comment><comment> ur-whale Is it just me or all that talk of "codes" combined with all-uppercase names is exuding a potent whiff of fortran :D ?

And if so, I'm wondering if any of that stuff runs on GPUs or if we're still talking about "traditional" supercomputers?

Anyone knowledgeable in the field care to share?

<comment><USER11> Not knowledgeable in the field really, but I have a bunch of old school friends who do this for a living.

Your ability to detect Fortran is apparently excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is nothing in the article to refute the conjecture that our universe is a simulation – and in fact the rapid progress it reports in simulating simplified universes could be seen as further support for the idea that universes like ours may be simulated.

</comment><comment><USER13> Because you can chroot doesn't mean that you are not in a virtualized container. Actually this tend to say the opposite...

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a good book that covers primarily or at least secondarily the ideas behind the universe being a simulation? I'd like to learn more.

<comment><USER9> There's several links in the wikipedia article which can make for good jumping off points:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could someone elaborate on how accurate the results of these simulations are generally considered to be by the broader scientific community? It seems to me that the universe is so insanely complex that any simulations we can currently make would be fairly inaccurate because of lack of knowledge. Couldn't that cause a problem of building a whole base of theory on unproven guesses? I guess the researchers all know that but I'm just curious what the actual attitude towards this kind of work is.

</comment><comment><USER16> > The Universe Is Not a Simulation

Proof left as exercise for the reader?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there any of the code for the simulation or similar available in the public domain? Would love to be able to take a look.

<comment><USER9> Googling the names given in the article turns up some interesting links:

[http://gasoline-code.com/](http://gasoline-code.com/)

[http://bluetides-project.org/](http://bluetides-project.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not down to the planck level. Simulating the universe at the planck level would require at least 10^157 bytes of storage.

<comment><USER10> Right, but adaptive refinement is bread and butter of today's physics simulations. I imagine that in order to simulate our Universe, you'd go down to elementary particle level only when some of the simulated folks run their accelerators, etc. But for an in-simulation billiard game you'd use a plain impulse-based rigid body dynamics.

<comment><USER18> The problem isn't particles, its particle interactions and the orders of magnitude in time these events occur at. There is a reason why planck length is shortest theoretical measurable time interval. I'm sure you are aware of the equation E=mc^2, at the planck length the value of c=1. Therefore a planck length, cubed, of the universe can be considered to be 1 bit, for the purposes of storage for a universe, or at least this one.

<comment><USER19> I think you should at least check out the relevant wikipedia page here

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

to see how strongly it conflicts with what you have written about it.

Among other things catalogued there, the Planck length has dimension of [Length], rather than [Time], and per Bekenstein [1973] (doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.7.2333) "1 bit"[0] relates to the minimal increase in the area of the event horizon of a hairless, monotonically growing, stationary, spherically symmetric (or with some further assumptions, axisymmetric) black hole into which matter is being thrown. This remains contentious because black hole mass is continuous and not discrete (one can throw almost arbitrary wavelength photons in, for instance).

By contrast with what you wrote, if you look at it (e.g. via sci-hub) Bekenstein's PRD paper sure doesn't assert that a horizon area on the order of Planck area would contain "one bit", especially as he was aware of the content of the about-to-be-published Nature paper, Hawking [1974] (doi:10.1038/248030a0), which details the "explosion" of black holes with small horizon areas (and was additionally the first Hawking radiation paper).

Finally, if you don't like wikipedia and sci-hub, your favourite search engine will surely supply numerous discussions among working physicists (including peer-reviewed publications) of the Planck length and whether it is physically significant in any context other than Bekenstein's or close relatives (e.g. Loop Quantum Gravity requires that all surface areas are quantized, although not to integer multiples of the fundamental quantum, which in turn is roughly on the order of the Planck length cubed).

\- --

[0] A modern semiclassical statement of this is: to leading order, the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its event horizon area at one nat per four Planck areas. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_(unit)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_\(unit\))

<comment><USER18> [https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9409089.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep- th/9409089.pdf) (DOI:10.1063/1.531249) cited 3221 times:

Let us begin with a maximally dense object, a black hole. It will be assumed that the entropy is found on the horizon and that no more than one bit per Planck area can stored there.

The only thing I stated incorrectly was planck cubed instead of square.

[https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.74....](https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.74.825)

The metaphorical name of the principle ('t Hooft, 1993) originates here. In many situations, the covariant entropy bound dictates that all physics in a region of space is described by data that fit on its boundary surface, at one bit per Planck area

[https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/787/483/RUG01-0017874...](https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/787/483/RUG01-001787483_2012_0001_AC.pdf)

3.5 Holographic screens

An important implication of the holographic principle is that all the information in a given region can be encoded on a surface B, at a density of one bit per Planck area. We can now ask ourselves if the information contained in an entire spacetime can be encoded on a certain hypersurface, which we will call a screen.

What's that you were saying? I can't hear you over the sound of how right I am.

And why is a planck area one bit?

Because at the planck length, h=G=c=k=1. Where h is the Planck constant, G is Newton's constant, c is the speed of light and k is Boltzmann's constant. Or if you like some Einstein. E=mc^2 reduces to E=m

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure what you're trying to convince anyone of, other than that you have read at least some of several documents dealing with gravitational physics. That's promising, so I'll react. I'm not a string theory fan, but don't let that discourage you from digging deeper into the field.

> "no more than one bit per Planck area can be stored there"

Sure, that's a postulate to help clarify the Susskind's string theory argument about the information content of his 2d holographic screen at infinity from the black hole with all of the above in a 3d spacelike hypersurface at t=const. Being a postulate, the sentence fragment you quote is not proven in the paper, it's just assumed.

Changing the number of states at the horizon in that spacelike hypersurface to an arbitrary finite number does not really frustrate his gravitational argument (but see below about his matter GUT argument), while arguments about the upper and lower limit of states at the horizon are available in Bekenstein [1973] op. cit. and many subsequent papers.

It is perfectly normal for gravitational arguments to set c = G = 1, and possibly normalize some other terms to unity too; the choice of what to set to unity depends on the trade off between ease of writing down formulae and the difficulty of checking their dimensionality. The reason Susskind uses Planck units, and relevantly to our discussion the Planck length, is because it's convenient in analogies as he develops his argument further down the paper using units where the string length is set to unity.

(The majority of the Susskind paper is heavy (pardon the pun relating to scaling of interaction with momentum) with non-gravitational string physics, and I have no expertise on that, but his gravitational arguments are low energy ones, and there I am comfortable).

> The only thing I stated incorrectly was planck cubed instead of square.

You wrote, "shortest theoretical time interval". The word "time" is incorrect since it is a unit of length (this matters in a Lorentzian spacetime), but changing it to "spatial" does not let you claim that the Susskind paper supports your statement at all, for the reasons above.

You can certainly make arguments about states on a stretched horizon (Susskind does in the paper you found) -- complementarity is wildly popular with string theorists. However, their entropy:information argument, as also repeated in the Bousso paper and the master's degree thesis you found, does not set a minimum length scale rather than fixing a limit on the number of microstates you can squash into an area before the macrostate resembles a hairless black hole, the idea being that any sparser region's macrostate grows gently, and moreover that you can with some care use the macrostate to describe all the internal microstates (which is the core content of SUGRA theories, essentially, where the care one takes is in the choice of a conformal field theory to represent the evolution of the macrostate).

> "a planck area [is] one bit [b]ecause at the planck length, h=G=c=k=1"

No. More on that in the paragraph after the following one.

You also wrote "the equation E=mc^2, at the planck length the value of c=1", which is a bit confused. All Planck units set five constants, c = G = hbar = k_e = k_B = 1. Any quantity measured in Planck units will have c = 1 (and also Boltzmann's constant = 1 and the Coulomb constant = 1 etc.). The partial dispersion relation you provide has nothing to do with it, other than that you can solve it for an appropriate system in Planck units just as in S.I. or cms units, and you can simplify by dropping the term normalized to unity, just as your version has already simplified from the fuller special relativistic relation by normalizing momentum to zero.

In the stringy arguments, the reason there is supposedly four nats or one bit or a small finite number of microphysical degrees of freedom or whatever per unit area on the horizon of a black hole is complementarity described in another Susskind paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/hep- th/9306069](https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9306069) (amusingly it should be "coarse graining" in the Abstract, of course, as it is on e.g. p. 3 just above Postulate 3 and several more times throughout the paper; the published PRD version has the same error in the Abstract).

I do not find the BH complementarity model especially convincing as it was contrived to save information from being lost in traditional black holes but does not appear to do the job, appearing to require replacement of black holes with fuzzballs or some other complementarity-preserving resolution of the AMPS problem. Their cosmological model is even shakier, since it is mostly tested on a non-infinite (but large) distance boundary on anti-de Sitter space, with some arguments about how a series of slices of AdS space can resemble a series of slices of a space much more like our expanding universe. The master's thesis you found is interesting in that it tries to tackle the physics in (among others) de Sitter space, which is a fair approximation of our universe at late epochs. YMMV.

<comment><USER18> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_\(time\))

<comment><USER19> Even though your two-link reply seems like an obvious "I don't want to talk any more", I'll leave you with three things.

Firstly, there is nothing special about natural units compared to any other system of units, except that some popular formulae can take on especially simple forms in that system of units, provided one takes care not to lose dimensionality:

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

You (still) are confusing two different dimensions, length and time. Again, this matters in a spacetime like ours, where the difference in dimensionality gives us a system of causality[1] and a reasonable setting in which to do time-series physics[2]. It also matters when switching from natural units to a different system of units in which c != 1, such that we cannot omit the conversion constant (or change of sign when calculating spacetime intervals [3]).

Changing a physical system like a black hole from one system of units to another does not change the physics of the system, just how we describe them. It is enlightening to do so in general, because it is easy to fall into the trap of treating as physical a condition that vanishes upon switching to a different set of units. A quantity that is a ratio of two dimensionful quantities (area and information) surviving across changes of units on one or both dimensions may be interesting. In the case of black hole complementarity, which earlier you found links for, it's a (near-horizon) density that (according to some string theorists) corresponds directly with a (interior) density (states / volume) taking into account the Ricci tensor's effect on interior volume but removing the physical singularity through string interactions in a "fuzzball" or something similar[4].

Secondly, your second link says of Planck time, "Presumed to be the shortest theoretically measurable time interval (but not necessarily the shortest increment of time - see quantum gravity)", which does not really support your position. Rather than reinvent the wheel for you in qualifying that, which I think would be wasteful given your previous few replies, I'll direct you to physics se and in particular to Lubos Motl's 85 point comment at : [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9720/does-the- pl...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9720/does-the-planck-scale- imply-that-spacetime-is-discrete)

Finally, I don't know what you're trying to accomplish although it seems you're set on convincing yourself and perhaps some people who know even less physics than you do that you know what you're talking about. Hopefully it's more optimistic and instead you're trying to learn more than you already do and are just going about it inefficiently.

\- --

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

[2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01403](https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01403) (section 4) - sadly the wikipedia has only scattershot coverage of it in e.g. the short and/or not very accessible pages on the ADM and BSSM formalisms, and on Canonical Quantum Gravity (which is a quantization of the Hamiltonian formulation that is "only" an effective field theory good to one loop, and provokes the question of "the problem of time"). Unfortunately most introductory material about 3+1 formalisms in general is already highly technical (e.g., textbooks aimed at graduate students).

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

[4] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Fuzzball_(string_theory)](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Fuzzball_\(string_theory\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> this is highly naive of me to ask, but "in theory" if we could simulate the universe, would familiar stuff like living organisms/'societies'/'humans' potentially just emerge within such simulations?

just super cool to think about even if not the case/unrealistic.

<comment><USER21> Depends on how you define living, really. It's a philosophical problem, what makes one collection of matter "alive" and another "not alive"?

Since at least Thomas S. Ray's work on Tierra in the 90s we've been creating universes in which things that could be called "life" have developed.

<comment><USER22> My understanding of Tierra and its successors like Avida are that the "digital organisms" are written beforehand and then systematically (pseudorandomly) mutated. Because the initial "organisms" are written, it would be a stretch to say that "life" _developed_ in these systems. A statement like "the process of evolution by natural selection was simulated in an artificial system" would seem to be more accurate.

<comment><USER21> Yes, this is true, however I think the distinction is irrelevant. The initial VM was created with the intention of encouraging this evolution, had the original intent included spontaneous emergence of a-life as a goal I'm pretty confident that would have happened.

<comment><USER22> Seems like that's an assertion begging for an experiment. Take the software that manages experiments in Avida or Tierra, but don't supply pre-written organisms. Bit-flip randomly and see if something develops. Unfortunately I don't know the implementation details of those systems at all, so I can't say whether or not that would be feasible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GIT Obsession – Are we the Monkeys in the Monkey-Banana-Water Gun Experiment? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/a2d8e293ee9f

<comment><USER2> Personally I think Git is not a good design. And the reason is simple, to access the files of variant revisions we have to use a specialized tool: `git`. Thus all the files are hidden away behind what is essentially a secondary file system. Yet the primary file system itself is (or should be) sufficient. Eventually I expect someone will make a new version control system that combines the advantages of git with the primacy of the file system in the way SVN utilizes it. That would be ideal.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this differ from a user branch in svn?</comment>


Richard Hammings "Learning to learn" course video lectures - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&feature=plcp

<comment><AUTHOR> I just saw in a comment from the user dsego in the "You and your research" re- submission a link to a video version of this essay of Hamming (which I have seen before), and I was very surprised to see that the complete "Learning to learn" course is now available online on video. There is a Kindle book available that I think consists of notes for this course:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Doing-Science-Engineering- ebook/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Doing-Science-Engineering- ebook/dp/B000P2XFPA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1349710551&sr=8-2&keywords=the+art+of+doing+science+and+engineering)</comment>


San Francisco Leaders Approve Ban on Cashless Stores - <AUTHOR> https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/07/san-francisco-considers-ban-cashless-stores-amazon-go/ <comment><USER2> What are the arguments for and against this measure? I'd imagine that (some) businesses don't want to have to accept cash because it's a hassle and securing/handling cash costs time/money. And the government doesn't want people to be forced to go through an intermediary (i.e. a bank) to be able to participate in marketplace?

<comment><AUTHOR> They already force people to use plastic for EBT/Foodstamps so I think they're trying to protect people who're marginalized, but they're not.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> TLDR; I think my city leaders are completely wrong on this and their anti- progress stance is terrible. San Francisco needs to a beacon of progress and not a pothole on the way to advancing society.

<comment><USER3> Spoken like someone who has never been poor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even the poor in SF can pay via plastic.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Red pepper chef – distinguish parts of a red pepper to keep vs. discard - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@anthony_sarkis/red-pepper-chef-from-new-training-data-to-deployed-system-in-a-few-lines-of-code-8d25b77fe447 <comment><USER2> Unrelated to this technology but related to peppers in general: if while they are whole you grab the stem and push inside until it breaks, you can take out the part to discard with all the seeds quickly; I don't get why I see people and cooks spending time cleaning the seed part with knives after cutting them.

<comment><USER3> [https://youtu.be/hZGqtmwboHU](https://youtu.be/hZGqtmwboHU) I defer to an expert.

<comment><USER4> I use the same method, but I don't cut the stem and I don't stand the peber upside down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool, nice work.

Pairs nicely with the end-user programming post earlier[0]; maybe training neural nets will someday be possible from a spreadshet.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469912)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

Def going to get easier over time I think!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm possibly being too cynic here, but what are we reading other than an ad- blog for Diffgram?</comment>


Snap 0.5.0 released (Haskell Web Framework) - tomh- http://snapframework.com/blog/2011/06/18/snap-0.5.0-released

<comment><AUTHOR> I still don't understand the merit of using the same markup syntax for template programming.

Its harder to tell what is part of the template and what is part of the html.

Example from <http://snapframework.com/docs/tutorials/heist>

        <bind tag="longname">
        Einstein, Feynman, Heisenberg, and Newton Research Corporation
        Ltd.TM
        </bind>

        We at <longname/> have research expertise in many areas
        of physics.
        Employment at <longname/> carries significant prestige.
        The rigorous
        hiring process developed by <longname/> is leading the
        industry.

In django, instead of <longname/> it would be {{longname}} or {% include "longname" %}, which is much easier to pick out from the html markup.

</comment><comment><USER2> I watched a video of one of the Snap developers a couple of days ago and just tried installing Snap and playing with it for a short while. Definitely a light weight framework, but looks nice enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title should be edited to say "Haskell Web Framework", this is not obvious at all.</comment>


Huge Cavity in Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7322 <comment><USER2> Which major data centers or internet infrastructure are most at risk from coming sea level rise?</comment>


Setting the record straight on icorrect? - <AUTHOR> http://www.icorrect.com/browse_corrections?page=1

<comment><AUTHOR> The founder appeared on the Colbert show and at first I thought this was a joke. They plan to charge $1000/year for people to "correct" information on the inter-tubes. Seriously do they have a clue?</comment>


Startup looking for developer (Frontend/backend)  - <AUTHOR>

Startup is about 80% complete.  Need assistance getting prototype complete for fund raising.  If into sports and able to code quickly this could be a great oppertunity. <comment><USER2> You didn't mention which technology, frameworks you use.

In case you guys are on python. Here's my portfolio: <http://www.sidmitra.com/portfolio.html>

Currently taking gigs for my django development studio(<http://cloudshuffle.com>). Feel free to ping me.</comment>


The Big Switch: How We Rebuilt Wanelo from Scratch and Lived to Tell About It - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wanelo.com/post/31534906083/the-big-switch-how-we-rebuilt-wanelo-from-scratch-and

<comment><USER2> First of all, congratulations on what seems to be a very well executed rewrite.

That being said, it will be interesting to see how this compares to all the stories about dangers of rewriting. I definitely want to see an update in a few months about the results.

<comment><USER3> The facts of this case seem to tilt things in favor of a rewrite more than other other examples I've seen. \- reasonable confidence that large portions of the current codebase are truly dead \- lack of tests in the existing codebase \- a fair amount of real world experience showing higher productivity in rails over java web stacks \- a problem domain that the decision makers can actually wrap their heads around (vs a legacy system that manages commercial mortgage repackaging or something where there is no one person who actually understands everything important that the system does) \- a new development team who's going to have learning curve anyway

this seems like about the perfect situation for starting over. congrats!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! It's nice to read accounts like this from those who have braved the task and successfully completed a ground-up rewrite.

Looking ahead, I can see the formation of dedicated development teams who specialize in rewriting working-but-just-barely apps completely from scratch. As those teams get better at doing this kind of work (and their clients prosper!), more companies will start to seriously consider the re-write option. Who knows, a whole industry could form just for app rewrites.

<comment><USER5> I'd say that if anything could be formalized as a set of skills or as a process that could be applied to multiple projects, it would be extreme discipline around what gets built. For example, we were fairly militant about cutting features and keeping things as simple as possible, which is always easier said than done.

Also, this rewrite wouldn't be possible without each team member's personal productivity which was also aided by pairing. Curiously, we worked fairly regular days (although some nights and weekends, but those were by personal choice).</comment></comment>


Who maintains RPM? (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/196523/ <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the Poettering/systemd/Red Hat mess reminds me of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a hard time finding a hire date for Poettering at Red Hat BTW. It looks like Jeff Johnson was hired at Red Hat in 1998.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Whatismyzip.com – Built in a few hours on a train while commuting - <AUTHOR> http://www.whatismyzip.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice! Was not expecting it to work internationally, so was pleasantly surprised when my Australian postcode showed up flawlessly. Beautiful design and interaction too, you've really nailed "the best ui is no ui"concept.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome. Nice work!</comment>


University Newspaper on iPAD - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/university-plans-ipad-student-paper/29500

<comment><USER2> Pure gimmick. Universities shouldn't build for proprietary systems. What's wrong with building for a browser with web standards?</comment>


Familiarity Bias Is Holding You Back: It's Time to Embrace Arrow Functions - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/familiarity-bias-is-holding-you-back-its-time-to-embrace-arrow-functions-3d37e1a9bb75 <comment><USER2> This guy is incredibly sanctimonious, but he misses the biggest problem with his notation. Not all the operators he uses are associative.

      const secret = msg => () => msg;

This technically parses uniquely, but it's not at all obvious what the parse structure is. Writing it with the squiggly brackets makes it clearly parsable.

      const secret = { msg => { () => msg } };

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you're trying to express. The "squiggly brackets" example is not valid JavaScript.

If you need to disambiguate associativity, you need to wrap with parentheses:

        const secret = msg => ( () => msg );

But in this case, it's not required, because the alternative doesn't make sense:

        const secret = (msg => ()) => msg;
                                ^ Unexpected token

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The interesting bit seems to be the "premium content".</comment>