Welcome to a New Gist - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1276-welcome-to-a-new-gist <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite new feature: you can finally search through your own gists!

I use gists all day every day: it's where I dump and share pieces of reusable code. It's always been a huge pain to search for something you know you gisted, but can no longer find without browsing through 20 pages of 3-line excerpts. Search makes this a million times better.

The new code editor is also pretty sweet!

<comment><USER2> I like the update to gists.

\--- Somewhat OT:

I find that github has always had poor to okay search capabilities.

For example, have you ever tried to search for a repo name, only to find 1000 forks? wat. Ever tried to search issues for a specific issue, only to find no results, removing a word or two to get a less accurate search.

Search for me is about discoverability. And github is for developers for the most part.

As a developer I want discoverability for code! I want regex features (like in google code search), better matches. Ways to compress my search results down. Search tags code:'if Awesome()'.

I just feel they could be doing so much better in this area.

<comment><USER3> Gist is our first entry into Better Search. With the amount of code we index (and the unique problems of searching source code as opposed to prose), it's not something we can change overnight.

<comment><USER4> (Totally OT: And the best part is that you guys are here with us listening to our feedback)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Happy to see, Gist has been lagging behind for a while now. And my Gist usage has exploded since installing this Vim plugin:

<https://github.com/mattn/gist-vim>

<comment><USER6> And in case you're an Emacs user, here's an equivalent: <https://github.com/defunkt/gist.el> :)

<comment><USER7> Available via marmalade as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Github is slowly turning into an IDE for the web.

In my opinion: In a couple of years we will not use Emacs or Visual Studio or anything like that: Most of programming will be done socially in Github via small changes directly from the website, from hundreds of people... it'd simplify the process of collaborative programming a lot.

<comment><USER9>
      >  Most of programming will be done socially [...] via
      > small changes [...] from hundreds of people

This seems a little extreme. I'd venture that right now 'most of programming' is private code, or small side projects/toy code (i.e. single-developer projects).

<comment><USER10> I'd think that the total SLOC in side/single-developer projects is miniscule compared to the total SLOC in social projects (e.g. Linux, GCC, Emacs, etc.), and even smaller compared to the SLOC in private/corporate code-bases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> GitHub seems to be in the midst of a spree of new non-trivial features: in the past week or so, there have been 7 blog posts, every one introducing something new!

(Christmas spirit, maybe?)

<comment><USER11> Shipping spirit :) It's definitely nothing planned on our part. We just happened to wrap up some stuff around the same time.

<comment><USER12> Tidings of serendipitous code, eh? Feliz Navidad!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This broke embedding single files from gists :( That's what I get for using Gist in blog posts and websites, I guess.

<comment><USER14> Oh shoot:

<http://gist.io/3135754>

<http://bl.ocks.org/1353700>

Two of my favorite gist frontends, broken :(

<comment><USER15> The API is currently down: <https://status.github.com/>

Fortunately, I implemented a cache layer on top of GitHub's API recently, so many examples are working on <http://bl.ocks.org>. But only those that are lucky enough not to get a connection timeout. Hopefully the API will be back up soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Every comment here seems to be a gist love fest. I develop fulltime and use git and github, but have never understood why or how people use gist. Can someone explain how gist is valuable to them?

Clicking "discover" at gist.github.com is unenlightening.

<comment><USER17> Most users (myself included) seem to use it primarily as a better pastebin than most of the pastebins on the Web. It's tied to your account (so you can manage previously posted Gists easily), it's versioned and available over git as an ad hoc repository, and the highlighting is pretty good.

<comment><USER18> What I find puzzling is seeing what appear to be blog posts published as gists.

What's the reasoning for this? I imagine if you don't have a blog of any kind it fills in, but it seems a odd place to publish lengthy essays.

<comment><USER19> I think there's a couple of sites that take markdown in a Gist and put them up as formatted posts.

Add Disqus and you've got a neat little product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love "Secret Gist" vs. "Public Gist"

gist.github was way behind the rest of Github for a long time. It's good to see they've finally released this because they've no doubt been working on it for a while.

<comment><USER21> I think "Secret Gist" is just a renaming of "Private Gist" which has existed for a while: only people with the url will see it. It's a better and more accurate name, for sure.

I do wish there was a true "private" gist, though, for easily preventing people I don't specify from seeing it. I'd love to be able to use it to trade code examples for work, but there's nothing to prevent someone from accidentally pasting the url into the wrong irc window and showing the world our internals.

<comment><USER20> I know it's a rename. That's a cool idea. Sort of the way Google Docs handles it by letting you specify emails that can view your document.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm getting "OAuth Failure" trying to sign-in [1]

[1] [https://gist.github.com/auth/failure?message=timeout&ori...](https://gist.github.com/auth/failure?message=timeout&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2F&strategy=github)

</comment><comment><USER23> Gists are now wrongly named. For instance: <https://gist.github.com/4260740> this sounds a bit weird that this gist is named "readme.md"

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd love to see the ability to print (with the wonderful formating in-tact, and none of the interface) directly from my Gists. There are various bookmarklets out in the wild that attempt to do this, all of which are of course broken after this update.

I just had a need to do this with a bit of documentation I was writing. Ended up modifying the DOM to show/hide what I wanted and allow the screen stylesheet to be used in printing (to PDF).

<comment><USER25> Gists does ship with a print stylesheet which strips most of the interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love it -- I've been looking for a place to put trivial programs that is lighter-weight than creating your own repository.

I just wish that the advertising when you embed into another website was a bit more subtle. Right now it's a full line of text "This Gist brought to you by GitHub" that is tagged onto the bottom of every embed. If your blog post has a lot of these, especially short ones, it can quickly become intrusive.

<comment><USER27> Can't upvote this enough, It reminds me of the days when you had to have a banner at the bottom advertising the free site builder you were using. Not cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great improvements, love the search.

Still wishing I could get Gist pull requests or merge forks of my Gist from the UI.

<comment><USER29> I know HN doesn't believe in a comment where an upvote will suffice, but the first thing I searched this thread was for "pull request" and by golly, I think they would be a great addition also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As many have already said, Github just keeps delivering quality, well- conceived and well-integrated updates. I hope they keep coming.

Now for my shameless plug:

If you use Gist as a means to share web-related snippets, you might be amazed by the Plunker editor (<http://plnkr.co/edit/>). It was inspired by Gist, but will let you actually 'run' your code (and will do some other cool stuff like real-time collaboration, previewing and linting). This tool has become quite popular in the AngularJS community and I hope to see more groups get on board in the future!

<comment><USER30> Also, since we're talking about Gist, you can get your gists into Plunker very easily:

<http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:1136236?p=preview> is a snippet by the unbelievable Mike Bostock pulled directly from Gist.

<comment><USER31> I looked at Plunker, and then I got sperm on my screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's great but I wish they added the ability to comment on a line.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's the blog post about the redesign: <https://github.com/blog/1276-welcome-to-a-new-gist>

<comment><USER34> Isn't that what this post is linked to?

<comment><USER35> Maybe somebody changed the link?

<comment><USER33> They did; it was originally just a link to a random Gist to show the new design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> GitHub sees the value in the snippet concept behind Gist and has been giving it serious limelight lately.

I want to see Gist evolve into a Dribbble/Behance gallery but for showing off code snippets of value instead of images. We can already convey advanced ideas simply in few lines. To provide a little more story behind our contribution and share it in a small network could really build a nice broad community whose infrastructure has been laid already.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's about time. I've been waiting for Github to overhaul the Gists functionality, I've been ever-increasingly relying on it to store my snippets as well as posting code in blog posts, and being able to search through your own Gists is a MASSIVE addition.

I've really been loving all of these Github updates the past year, they've been killing it and it's good to see they've finally given Gist some love.

</comment><comment><USER38> Much needed update and Looking Good but one thing, why is the 'Delete Gist' on the Edit Gist Pages rather than the Main Page?

</comment><comment><USER39> Doh! I just bought Evercode!

I don't see a way to post gists directly from an editor like Sublime, but I'll be all over that when I find it.

<comment><USER40> The Sublime GitHub plugin for Sublime handles this nicely:

<https://github.com/bgreenlee/sublime-github>

<comment><USER39> Awesome, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I love these guys! Yesterday I came across an annoying bug related to embedded gists and markdown files, and this fixes it.

Related discussion: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11456558/markdown-not- ren...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11456558/markdown-not-rendered-in- embedded-gist/13807496#13807496)

</comment><comment><USER42> Github has been on fire for one week.

</comment><comment><USER43> I just wish a way to label or organize my gists. I have dozens of them. That would be great!

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't understand the benefit of gists. If they're full git repos, why not just use a normal github project?

Having a pasteboard type gist makes me wonder things like,

\- Can a gist have multiple files in it?

\- What is a file inside a gist named?

\- Can I convert a gist to a normal project?

\- Can I convert a normal project to a gist?

</comment><comment><USER45> Thanks github team!!

When I'm learning a new framework / lib / language I love to look at other people's gists for good (and bad!) working examples. That said, I would LOVE the ability to sort search results by date / number of comments / forks etc.

</comment><comment><USER46> I like the changes, except that it broke syntax highlighting for php gists without open and close tags. For example: <https://gist.github.com/3837352>

</comment><comment><USER47> Heads up, opening a Gist to edit/view from my list in a new tab (CTRL + clicking) doesn't work in Chrome 21.0.1180.75. The Stylesheet doesn't seem to load, not sure if this is an individual issue on my system.

</comment><comment><USER48> I hope we get to see Collections for gists, because I am finding them really unmanageable otherwise, and there is little incentive for people to browse through them otherwise.

<comment><USER43> Same here. I have lots of snippets (in JS, Python, Go,etc..). Managing them is a pain. Also I have some that I use for my blog examples however executing them alone doesnt do anything. It would be great if I could organize them.

<comment><USER48> Oh yeah, right. I forget the concept of using gists in blog posts, but I guess it's because I quit that thought because of how much of a mess it leaves behind in your gist list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does any one have problems to create or modify a gist? I am having the problem since this new face of gist.

Now it's still not fixed in my case. What happened to github?

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm currently getting HTTP 500 errors when I try to load <https://gist.github.com/>

</comment><comment><USER51> Am I missing it, or can anonymous gists no longer be claimed and deleted by the person that created them while still in the session?

</comment><comment><USER52> Whoops, horizontal scrollbar on 1024*768.

</comment><comment><USER53> Tried it out. It's bloody fantastic.

As long as whatever you're editing is supported by the editor, that leaves little to be desired.

Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER54> There is no preview mode for a gist :-(

<comment><USER30> [http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:<gist](http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:<gist) id>

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I was hoping that they would finally add the ability to put a gist in a folder or tag one :(

</comment><comment><USER56> automatic language detection would be great

</comment><comment><USER57> this is good ... but, frankly, i was hoping for the ability to tag gists + ability to get a feed from a tag

</comment><comment><USER58> is there any way to collaborate on gists?</comment>


Node.js modules you should know about: optimist - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/nodejs-modules-optimist/

<comment><USER2> The problem I have with optimist it that it provides no default usage statement (last time I checked). One of the big selling points of argument processors is that you can define the args and some descriptions so it will generate the usage statement. This cuts down of re-typing and errors. It also has the benefit of autocomplete tools being able to handle standard formats.

<comment><USER3> There are a few option parsers in node that do automatically generate usage. However, this is actually quite problematic if you have a _lot_ of options.

Check out <https://github.com/harthur/nomnom>, it may be more to your liking.

<comment><USER4> I really like nomnom. It's a super tight way to define options and commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been using Optimist in house for a while, and are satisfied with it. Makes launching a bunch of different node processes with slightly different configurations pretty painless.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can it handle multiple invocations of same argument? For example:

./foo.js -x 1 -x 2 -x 3

(should give an array [1, 2, 3] for 'x')

</comment><comment><USER7> Substack does it again. Great node developer.</comment>


Show HN: AsciiDots – a 2D esoteric language inspired by circuits - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aaronduino/asciidots/ <comment><USER2> This looks like a perfect skeleton for bringing Minecraft redstone to an ascii game like Dwarf Fortress. Very cool! Especially if you could design "sub- circuits" by zooming in, sort of like the chips in Robot Oddysey[0] or in the super circuit maker mod for Minecraft[1].

[0] [http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/temp/RO/stereorecord...](http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/temp/RO/stereorecorder.php)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/supercircuitmaker/top/](https://www.reddit.com/r/supercircuitmaker/top/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really interesting. I will look into that. Right now, subcircuits are created by using "libraries" to define custom characters (typically letters).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of befunge[1], which is also a two dimensional programming language, and has been around for quite a while. This language looks a bit simpler and easier to understand, though. Neat.

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

"[I]n Befunge, there is no comment syntax: to embed documentation in the code, the programmer simply routes the control flow around the 'comment' area, so that the text in that area is never executed"

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that Befunge is far simpler. It's yet-another-esoteric-programming- language but the program pointer can move in 4 directions instead of 2. Every instruction is simple stack/heap manipulation or IO. AsciiDots looks a lot more complicated, multiple program pointers which are also the variables in the program with no concept of stack or heap. Not to mention library support, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Felt instantly reminded of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14486482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14486482)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here, I'm open to any suggestions or feedback.

<comment><USER6> Neat idea, I really like it.

The only comment I have is that the `__main__.py` looks like a bit like spaghetti with ~1200 lines, multiple classes, and scattered global state. Not really a big deal unless you plan on growing the project or using it as a portfolio piece. Also in my opinion the project really is a prime portfolio piece, it shows creativity, polish, and theoretical understanding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> @davemp, I just uploaded the new code, a total rewrite.

<comment><USER6> Looks much cleaner.

Again, I really like the project and encourage you to dive deeper into progamming language theory.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty cool!

On the other hand I'm reminded of the horrors of LabVIEW.

<comment><USER8> The tragedy is that a data-flow oriented graphical programming language is probably a good idea. LabVIEW is a just a good demonstration of how not to do any of the details.

I mean there is no need for a strongly typed EDITOR that goes and actively looks for transient type errors and then inserts non-transient damage at every site where it finds one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A friend of mine made an even more minimal thing. Turns out he still has an internet version:

[http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ajn44/linelogic2/](http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ajn44/linelogic2/)

You basically have arbitrary-arity NOR gates, that are your only way of splitting signals. From it you can make anything from XORs to flip-flops to clock signals to anything you want. I remember him making a very fancy 8-segment display counter (that actually counted up over time) in one version of it back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very cool! Unfortunately, I couldn't get this working in Windows. Appears that the curses library is not compatible. Tried Unicurses with the same effect. Running Python 3.62.

Ran it in Ubuntu with no problem. Looking forward to writing some .dot programs. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that. I recently wrote some code to support debugging without curses (both the library and a pun when you are on windows and need it).

It just uses try-catch block to detect if it should go into compatibility mode, so you should be able to use the latest version of the repo without thinking about Curses.

Have fun writing AsciiDots code

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome, reminds me a lot of "programming" in minecraft!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's meant to be more fun than practical (or realistic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty neat! I can't wait to see what people make with it.

Here is my version of a counter: [https://hastebin.com/ranomaceha.pl](https://hastebin.com/ranomaceha.pl)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really cool!

I just gave the online demo a debug view, and your counter is the first code I tried (this is a link to your code on the demo site): [https://goo.gl/edPZdR](https://goo.gl/edPZdR)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the animation at the beginning but was disappointed that the online version didn't support it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually just added it :)

[http://asciidots.herokuapp.com/index.html?code=.-%24%22Hello...](http://asciidots.herokuapp.com/index.html?code=.-%24%22Hello%2C%20world!%22%24%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very cool! If you're not already familiar with LabVIEW, you might check it out as there are some very interesting similarities and differences between AsciiDots and LabVIEW. A couple that caught my eye:

\- LabVIEW creates loops by enclosing the repeated code in a graphical frame of sorts. That ends up being an elegant way to deal with iteration: An array that flows into a loop turns into individual elements inside the loop (one loop iteration per element) and elements that flow out of a loop stack up into an array. I wonder if something similar might work well in AsciiDots? Or more generally, a way to deal with multi-dimensional data by having dots pile up into an array?

\- The way AsciiDots deals with libraries (defining inputs and outputs spatially, i.e. top/right/bottom/left) is very similar to how sub-VIs are created in LabVIEW. The way your operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division take two inputs and wait until both inputs arrive to release the result is reminiscent of LabVIEW, but they way you use horizontal and vertical to mean different things is different and very interesting. Direction is mostly meaningless in LabVIEW, so I love the way that AsciiDots ascribes a meaning to horizontal vs. vertical. Can that idea go even deeper?

\- Having the "dot" carry information and have a value (not just be the point of execution) is very consistent with LabVIEW and a difference from some other text-based visual languages.

\- LabVIEW "wires" (the connections between things) have different thicknesses and colors to tell the user what datatype they carry. It sounds clunky but ends up giving a lot of readability to LabVIEW programs. Not sure if a similar idea could help make AsciiDots programs more readable...?

\- LabVIEW has a "highlight execution" mode that slows the program down and highlights the flow of data; very reminiscent of your animated GIF. More than just a pretty gimmick, it helps debug LabVIEW programs and it'd be a great addition to your "try it online" Heroku app.

\- For when arithmetic becomes a spaghetti of symbols, LabVIEW has a "formula node" that lets you type in traditional code in C++, thereby mixing graphical and traditional languages. Maybe an interesting paradigm for AsciiDots?

All in all, AsciiDots seems to have a much lower entry barrier than other text-based graphical languages like befunge. It could even be _practical_ for some things, the same way LabVIEW has an interesting niche in the data acquisition and instrument control world. Maybe it could be used for data analysis, where arrays flow from "open file" to "manipulate data" and "plot results"? Or a very interesting way for children to learn some programming concepts, combining the visual-ness of things like Scratch and Lightbot while still having the kids use a text editor?!

I'll shut up now. Fantastic work! Thank you for sharing it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, and thank you for the great comment!

These are really interesting ideas, and I can't wait to start figuring out implementations.

I wonder if I could make something like jQuery, but for AsciiDots...</comment></comment>


Server room with seismic isolation floor in Japan earthquake disaster [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXwQSCStRaw <comment><USER2> This is a great example of one of those investments that might feel like a waste, until it suddenly REALLY isn't.

I wish I had this video during my infosec & HA consulting days.

<comment><USER3> I live in seismicly boring Europe, so I have no idea what damage would be caused without this floor. Many broken hard drives? Or worse?

<comment><USER4> All drives broken at the very least, a 10k rpm drive doesn't like ordinary vibrations already, much less 40cm+ displacement in a fraction of a second.

Heavy servers and especially UPS battery rows would likely take the whole rack down/toppling over with them. Plus: most cabling is secured to the walls/floors with not very much slack, which means a LOT of damaged/torn cables and FUBAR'd ports.

All in all, if an earthquake of the scale in the video would hit a typical European DC, it's bye-bye and rebuild.

<comment><USER5> Forgive my uninformed question but I remember seeing a video many years ago where a (Samsung?) hard-drive had built-in protection from being dropped. The disk will stop spinning within a millisecond when it detects movement. They could survive a sudden drop onto a floor. I assumed this was a common feature of modern disk based hard-drives.

Could built-in protections like this in harddrives be a sufficient protection in an earthquake? What other moving parts are that at risk here? Assuming the servers themselves are locked in cages, I wouldn't expect them to crash to the floor.

Although the big difference here is it's not a sudden drop but a prolonged forceful shaking.

<comment><USER6> Sudden motion detection [1] is built into many notebooks, and also allows you to use your MacBook as a lightsaber.

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

<comment><USER7> And thinkpads.

I used it to add X11 autorotation to an X61 tablet. No spin animation, but it was a cool one-day hack nonetheless.

The fun part was that the orientation analyses was done from a shell script, and actually worked 100% of the time (unlike so many phones)! \o/

The insane part was that DRM/KMS on Linux is 1000% crazy and I had to patch the kernel to stop poking the backlight on every. rotation. event, grr. (I had to do it in the kernel - I basically killed DPMS - because X11 libdrm is utterly incomprehensible.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Poor sysadmins! They have to wear full 3 pieces suits on the DC Floor!

Besides that, the video/tech is really cool.

<comment><USER9> At least it's a nice cool temperature.

<comment> robinson-wall Depends which aisle you're in :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I visited a couple of DCs in Tokyo, and the tours systematically feature a look at the anti-seismic system. It's actually pretty unimpressive : basically the seismic-protected part of the building is mounted on big rubber dampers, with some huge pistons thrown in for active attenuation. In taller buildings (I visited a DC with around 20 stories IIRC) the stories are not rigidly connected together, so that instead of swaying (and possibly toppling) during an earthquake, the building just kind of wobbles.

Very effective though, as the video shows. My visits were post-2011, and each DC had a record of the building's movement during the big earthquake; max amplitude on the seismic-protected part was a couple of centimeters, vs 50 cms or more for the rest of the building.

<comment><USER11> Unimpressive?!

Well, I am quite impressed.

<comment><USER10> Just to clarify: I meant that the equipment itself is unimpressive (mundane would be a better term I guess) but the results are definitely impressive :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any video editors got a few minutes?

There's an open video stabilization request here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/comments/6e1mgj/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/comments/6e1mgj/request_stabilize_on_the_computer_servers_that/)

So far there's [https://streamable.com/lrkhg](https://streamable.com/lrkhg) which sorta gets partway there.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been in a datacenter in Tokyo where the floors were not seismically isolated, but the rack cabinets were made to sway. It's hard to tell many floors up that an earthquake is in progress, but you can _see_ it when you see the racks swaying!

<comment><USER12> I visited the Dreamworks DC in SOCAL back in 2005 and they had per rack isolation plates as you remember. They also had a 25' long tape drive on one huge isolation plate. Those plates basically are on a central piston and rotate in a circular pattern. Seems a lot cheaper than proofing the entire floor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if it is disorienting standing or walking on the movement isolating floor.

There's a (thought?) experiment you can do where you put someone inside a fake room built like an overturned box, and then jerk the walls in a random direction while the floor stay still. You get disoriented and fall over. Or the more common experience where you're on a stopped train and the train next to you starts to move, and it takes you a minute to figure out which of you is actually moving.

I'd have to imagine standing on the isolated floor while the rest of the building moves would be similarly confusing.

<comment><USER14> The guys in that video look to me like they are experiencing some vertigo from the room shifting. They keep grabbing things to steady themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Category "Auto and Vehicles" ? It is interesting to note that the people on the seismically isolated floor are not swaying with the video (it is explained that the camera is mounted to the non-isolated part of the building so it appears the server room floor is moving when instead it is the building that is moving).

Most of the data centers I've looked at in the Bay Area just bolt the racks to the floor and are done with it assuming, I presume, that it is the shifting on the floor that damages the hardware.

<comment><USER14> Probably more an issue of shifting racks damaging the employees. Bolt those puppies down and nobody gets crushed to death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That earthquake goes on for way longer than I would have expected.

<comment><USER17> The duration and intensity of an Earthquake are strongly correlated. You can even use it to estimate how strong a quake is and how far away you might be.

The Sendai earthquake in 2011 was 6 minutes long. There's a story which I now cannot find about a seismic conference being held in Japan some distance from the epicenter. They felt only moderate shaking, but were immediately aware of the severity of the quake due to the duration.

<comment><USER18> Relevant portion starts right at the top: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really- big-...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is amazing is how cool are the people in the video. Instead of running out screaming they calmly do their job.

<comment><USER14> There are an astoundingly high number of quakes in Japan that are strong enough that you can feel. When I was in Tokyo years ago, I felt one every four weeks on average.

You quickly come to a different relationship with the world when it refuses to stay still that often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Commercial racks and datacenter products have optional features that can be utilised in earthquake prone environments. What you see in the video is not only those rack features but also structure of the building itself (both are important and neither one is sufficient for certain areas).

For example see: [https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXN8P/com.ibm.s...](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXN8P/com.ibm.storage.ssic.help.doc/f2c_prepearthqkitraised_30yyzi.html)

Without employing these techniques, you'd get something similar to this: [https://i.imgur.com/Sb2M5Qo.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Sb2M5Qo.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER21> Can a multimedia person make the video fixed on the servers instead?

</comment><comment><USER22> Related: [https://www.curbed.com/2011/3/15/10477706/japan-benefits- fro...](https://www.curbed.com/2011/3/15/10477706/japan-benefits-from-wrights- lessons-on-earthquake-preparedness)

</comment><comment><USER23> I guess a similar level of movement isolation would probably be required for all those repurposed oil rigs and maritime-oriented machine rooms that anticipate taking advatage of sea water as server coolant.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Techno Mind Corporation".

Think I saw them play in Berlin once.</comment>


Case Study: Choosing A Memorable Domain - <AUTHOR> http://adchop.com/case-study-choosing-a-memorable-domain/

<comment><USER2> The business of naming things is interesting because most of it is bullshit for startups. This applies to everything from Igor's frequently mentioned and unscientific naming guide (turns out great names are the ones that Igor has made up...) to the tips and tricks-y blog posts that pop up every now and then. There simply are no hard rules and very few guidelines that startups can actually follow.

You would think that there would be a couple of well-referenced research papers on the subject given how much resources are allocated to naming products and businesses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checked out Igor's guide... 122 pages - holy smokes! I agree that a scientific guide... or scientific data, is best.</comment></comment>


TellFi (YC W11) brings Google Voice-like service to Canada, for free - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/ca/2011/03/14/tellfi-brings-google-voice-like-service-to-canada-1-year-free/

<comment><USER2> I like the simplicity. It took me 2 minutes to sign up, get a phone number and leave a voice mail. The audio file (MP3) was delivered instantly to my email. How are you planning to compete with Google Voice when they roll out in Canada?

<comment><USER3> Same experience here.

One minor bug - HTML entities shown in the email transcriptions: 5 o'clock

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the note, will get that fixed! I wish I knew how to speak in HTML entities when I left voicemails...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome - I got a 403 area code, finally! The front page should make it more clear that there is an extended free trial. .

<comment><USER6> 404 would be cool Page not found 5555 ;p

<comment><USER7> Move to Atlanta.

<comment><USER6> mmm, or better yet I could just get a virtual number from Vonage but it would be pretty useless ;p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this forwarding/voicemail only, or is there actually VOIP service directly to/from the number?

<comment><USER9> Forwarding, voicemail & extensions (basically multiple forwards depending on what the caller hits)

Still, could be useful. Unfortunately I live in the middle of nowhere with no local numbers on any voip service basically :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great idea. signed up for the free plan and didn't read the small print (50 free minutes and 30-days free trial). I'd be ok w/ 50 minutes free but not w/ 30-days trial. I'm an occasional user but my calls may vary in lengths since it's mostly to businesses and gov't agencies. If there was a plan to let me keep my free number but charge for overage minutes, I'd stick around. As it is, I can't use it, even the free plan, since I can't be sure that my TellFi number won't be cancel on me. Therefore, this TellFi number will not go out to my connections in Canada. I'm cheering for you guys, TellFi, even I can't use your services as is. Love your simple sign-up process.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback! Canadian numbers automatically get bumped up to 100 free minutes and 1-year free. The only reason we've left off 'overage' at the moment is because we wanted the signup to be seamless and credit card free! Ping us at firstname.lastname@example.com and we can work something out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know whats taking so long for Google Voice to become available in Canada? How are you planning to compete with free when it is available? I'd love to see conference calls and virtual programmable ivr as a added service.

Calling land lines is soo year 2000. I need a local number and a SIP number that forwards to my phone or takes a voicemail if i don't answer.

<comment><USER12> It's because of the intense competition between Canada's phone providers.

Unfortunately the intense competition is limited to the golf course - the rest of the time they are free to fix charges, limit services and ensure that their friends in government keep out any competition

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was super easy to configure which is nice. I'm a little uneasy about the 100 minutes per month meaning at minimum 1 minute for every call I receive. Per-second billing would be nice.

My ideal plan would be unlimited calls straight to voicemail. I recognize the transcripts eat up some EC2 time but I have a feeling the total cost would be pretty reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER14> Signed up! Eager to take this for a test drive. I've been waiting impatiently for Google Voice to roll out in Canada..

<comment><AUTHOR> Great - We'd love to hear what you think. Email us at email@example.com with questions or suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Please someone build something similar for the UK.

<comment><USER16> Twilio isn't available in the UK, but using Tropo this could easily be someone's weekend project: [http://blog.tropo.com/2010/10/20/free-tropo- development-now-...](http://blog.tropo.com/2010/10/20/free-tropo-development- now-even-more-open/)

</comment></comment><comment> D-mo blame canadaaaaa</comment>


Constructors Must Be Code-Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2015/05/07/ctors-must-be-code-free.html?2015-18 <comment><USER2> Sounds like an amazing technique for developers who are paid on a $/LoC basis. Otherwise... not so much. Pointless ceremony is pointless.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.warplife.com/tips/code/c++/memory- management/para...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/code/c++/memory- management/parameters/)</comment>


Men View Their Ex-Partners More Favorably Than Women Do: Study - <AUTHOR> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1948550619876633 <comment><USER2> > Second, there may be gender differences in the perceived causes of breakups. > Women blame their male partners more often for breakups than men blame their > female partners (Choo et al., 1996). In addition, women more frequently > report problematic partner behaviors as the reason for a breakup, such as > infidelity, substance abuse, and mental or physical abuse (Amato & Previti, > 2003; Morris, Reiber, & Roman, 2015). Men, in contrast, are more likely to > claim that they do not know what caused their past breakups (Amato & > Previti, 2003).

This feels like the important bit to me. People view their ex's less favorably if they blame them for the breakup; and women blame men more than men blame women. Women also reported receiving less support from their partners than men. Reading between the lines, men in average like the women more because the women put in more effort to the relationship.

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, society ascribes agency to men in a way it doesn't to women, and so men are less likely to blame external factors or expect support.

<comment><USER4> Right, they just need to man up. I say that in jest but you hit on an important part of it. While some may not admit fault in the open, Men (I know I am generalizing) do internalize failure, it is a core part of their ego and identity. So it would seem natural for them to internalize the failure of a relationship.

<comment><USER5> >>they just need to man up

This is exactly what men are told.

One good example where the difference can be demonstrated clearly is forums devoted to dating questions. A lot of people come there to whine and they get very different responses depending on gender. Guys almost always get something along the lines of "be more confident, go to gym, be more interesting, etc", while girls gets reassured that they are totally fine, just not lucky yet

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Linked Paper instead of article:-[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506198766...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1948550619876633)

<comment><USER7> Thank you. I looked at the paper initially wondering whether their sample acknowledges the disproportionate number of men who murder their ex-female- partner, and, while not resolving that, I ended up finding that while the researchers record the type of breakup (substance abuse, personal problems, infidelity, etc), none of their quantified metrics appear to use this as a variable. I'd be curious to see how the outcome varies based on type of breakup.

Anyway I found this quote telling:

> there may be gender differences in the perceived causes of breakups. Women > blame their male partners more often for breakups than men blame their > female partners (Choo et al., 1996). In addition, women more frequently > report problematic partner behaviors as the reason for a breakup, such as > infidelity, substance abuse, and mental or physical abuse (Amato & Previti, > 2003; Morris, Reiber, & Roman, 2015). Men, in contrast, are more likely to > claim that they do not know what caused their past breakups (Amato & > Previti, 2003).

<comment><USER8> > wondering whether their sample acknowledges the disproportionate number of > men who murder their ex-female-partner

Curious how this is relevant to the study?

Roughly 0.001% of women are killed by a male partner each year in the US and - while terrible in of itself - I can't see it affecting the results of this study in any significant way.

<comment><USER9> Among US women, fear/wariness-of and preparedness-for attempts at bodily harm and abusive behavior by men appears to be near-universal.

EDIT: Removed bad pre-coffee math. See replies below for better math.

I hope this helps you see why such a consideration could be considered relevant to the study.

<comment><USER8> > 0.001% of US women is somewhere in the six-figures territory (125,000 per > year if I do my math right)

No - you're off by two orders of magnitude. Much closer to ~1500 women/year.

That's still ~1500 too many, no question. But is it likely to impact this study in any meaningful way? Seems unlikely to me (to put it mildly).

> Among US women, fear/wariness-of and preparedness-for attempts at bodily > harm and abusive behavior by men appears to be near-universal.

That sounds like a reasonable assumption and not one I'd argue against (as someone with no real insight here).

But the question was explicitly regarding murder. Not more general violence/abuse.

I welcome the well-meaning comment and think your contribution was valuable in its own right, but please don't move the goalposts.

<comment><USER9> I apologize that my reply does not meet your standards. It is not my intent to "move the goalposts", but simply to convey a mindset you seemed not to recognize, in order to help you understand why they might have included that concern. You now grasp that mindset, even if my construction was terrible. I am grateful that you were able to discern my intent regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My bet is that men tend not to have emotional support or positive attention in their lives, unless it's from a mate, hence they value it more.

<comment><USER11> Also, (since we're speculating) from an evolutionary perspective it's advantageous for men to have positive view of and attraction to as many women as possible, while at the same time it's advantageous for women to be as sceptical and critical of men as possible.

<comment><USER12> >while at the same time it's advantageous for women to be as sceptical and critical of men as possible.

I don't know about this. These days, I've seen and met many women who have numerous male friends. Sure, ultra-conservative and religious women don't, but lots of women aren't conservative any more.

<comment><USER13> He's talking about evolution though, and it definitely seems to hold up for our past as a species.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't be so sure. This line of thought seems to reflect a bias towards modern-day societies and how they operate ("modern" being the last couple thousand years or more). In ancient hunter-gatherer societies, people most likely lived in small tribes, so this idea that women have to be skeptical or critical of men doesn't really hold up. Men who are a real problem would have been cast out of the tribe or killed, and marriage probably didn't exist back then at all. We've seen in other primitive societies that monogamy is not the norm for humans at all.

<comment><USER11> > people most likely lived in small tribes, so this idea that women have to be > skeptical or critical of men doesn't really hold up.

This premise and your thoughts on polygamy can coexist with my suggestion about women being selective. If you can have only a handful of pregnancies in your lifetime each of them carrying the very real risk of death for both yourself and the baby, as well as the burden of taking care of any children that survive, then you really need to make sure that your shots count and you're choosing the best mates from the tribe. Men don't have the same burden of pregnancy and childcare - additional partners only increase their chances of passing along their genes, so as a result they become far less selective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this true for same-sex couples, too? (Meaning, for example, that two gay men will on average have more positive attitudes towards ex-partners than two women, on average?)

<comment><USER15> Anecdotes: [https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/zngjgw/lesbians- friends-e...](https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/zngjgw/lesbians-friends-exes- relationships-narcissist-psychopath)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love my wife completely. She is perfect for me. I cannot see my life without her. When I travel for work, everyday I am away I miss her and she is never far from my mind. We have been together for 20 years. There was a whole set of women before her. There was one for 5 years. The other day it was her (5 year relationship) birthday and I remembered randomly after noticing the date and dropped her a short note wishing her a happy birthday. So as a proof point for me at least, I guess this is true. Looking back at all the relationships from the past, with the exception of one, I generally still have a positive view to all of them. In some way the things I learned from those relationships have made my marriage so much stronger. It is strange because as I write this I think back to how I handled my relationships and breakups when I was younger and I cannot understand my behavior at that time anymore. I wonder if it is just time that removes any negative view? It would be interesting to know if the positive attitude has a time component.

<comment><USER17> This is my perspective as well... only 1-2 women I've dated do I have negative feelings for and it's mostly a "do not ever talk to them, ever" kind of feeling, not an "I have to get revenge" feeling.

I've been with my girl for 5 years now and there's no other girl for me. If we're apart for more than a day it feels like I've lost a limb or half of my soul.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have had some amazing relationships with amazing women, and looking back, I didn't always understand at the time the exact cause of the breakup, but knew it was my fault.

Now I understand that it was always my immaturity and selfishness that was causing it.

I still have a lot of Love for all those women who put up with me while I was growing (and continue to).

Some will never speak to me again though ...

<comment><USER19> I'm going to go out on a limb and say that men and women are wired differently when it comes to sex and relationships.

The instinctual influence over men to have sex with multiple partners, I believe influences their desire to still "feel good" about prior partners.

...whereas a woman's instinctual desire to find a man to protect her offspring influences her desire to "feel bad" about prior partners who didn't stick around.

Of course, we're above these instincts cognitively, but it's folly to think they have no influence on our emotional association to past partners.

<comment><USER18> Is it possible that it's folly to think we're above these instincts cognitively?

<comment><USER20> I think we're capable of rising above our instincts as a sentient species, and as a result human relationship desires are far more diverse than they would be for any other species of great ape, but instinct is not the only source of selection pressure involved, since those instincts are often reinforced by culture and society, religion and sometimes by law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd put it down to privilege. Women in traditional relationships are expected to perform more emotional labor over the course of the relationship and so the experience of being in a relationship is generally better for men, so they'll have more positive feelings afterward.

<comment><USER22> > expected to perform more emotional labor

Can you explain what you mean by this?

> the experience of being in a relationship is generally better for men

Seems wildly speculative.

<comment><USER21> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Internet is inverted therapy, beware the negativity please!

When we have a internalized, skeptical view on something, we have a tendency to seek confirmation of it and ignore clues that can open our minds.

There are other, more accepted perspectives we can use to understand relationships. I hope this can be helpful to people!

Attachment Theory: [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d36/ac75d7081fcd86d467f6d2...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d36/ac75d7081fcd86d467f6d2ef408d60c8ffca.pdf), [http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_orig...](http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins.pdf)

Schema Therapy: [https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf](https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf)

Also I recently found some nice study notes relationships:

[http://fiupsychology.com/ch.6.htm](http://fiupsychology.com/ch.6.htm), [http://fiupsychology.com/ch.7.htm](http://fiupsychology.com/ch.7.htm), [http://fiupsychology.com/ch.8.htm](http://fiupsychology.com/ch.8.htm)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgWnadSi91s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgWnadSi91s)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yet it's common for lesbian women to be friends with ex-partners.

</comment><comment><USER25> Anecdotal, however I find that in my lifetime I was/am able to 'move on' and forget about things such as minor disagreements between partners where they (female partners) have tended to dwell on things longer than my male friends. Could have been the same if I had male partners I suppose, although that isn't my personal taste.

Not just in relationships but even among co-workers I notice there is a lot more gossip between the biological females and they tend to bring up things like, "Do you remember when so and so did [Insert minor issue from 2 months ago]?"

To repeat this is just my observations from 20 years of office work and a half dozen or so relationships I had before settling down with the current love of my life.

The point of all of this, I feel is that to many people, the epiphany the article is making was quite obvious, although it is neat to see this quantified.

<comment><USER26> Relationships are more "loaded" with negative personal consequences for women. Less so than in the past, but it's there.

There's often a negative interpretation of a woman having more relationships or ending one that isn't really a factor with men. IMO, this creates a bias to justify ending a relationship for cause.

With a man, there's no threshold where your next girlfriend will lead to you being categorized negatively. If anything, you get more respect in some circles.

<comment><USER27> It seems to me the negative consequences are about the same for men and women. Lots of women speak poorly of their exes and get their friend groups turned against them...

<comment><USER26> I mentioned to a group of friends that I had run into a female acquinatance from 20+ years ago, who is now a judge.

The reaction: "Lol. She was quite the party girl." Not the reaction that you'd get re: a dude.

<comment><USER28> ? Why that's a pretty common reaction for a dude too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned?

</comment><comment><USER30> It's probably because men are trash.

</comment><comment><USER31> Social Psychology has one of the worst reproducibility problems in all of academia. Claims like this make is easy to see why. Simple scientific inquiry into this claim leads me to the question, "Okay, but why?

That women potentially harbor worse feelings of their ex partners on average than men is one of the most interesting but useless things I've heard. The confounding explanations for this type of research are mind boggling. Does this research hold cross-culturally, are there any other psychological variables that explain this phenomena? Is it possible that the current nature of modern relationships is a confounding variable and sex has little to do with it? These are the more interesting questions to answer than whatever question this dubious result is trying to answer.

<comment><USER32> > The confounding explanations for this type of research are mind boggling.

Yes! This is very true, your questions are good questions to ask of any study of genders & attitudes. It's even more important to ask of studies that try to factor out cultural issues, because confounding explanations are _extremely_ difficult to remove.

> Social Psychology has one of the worst reproducibility problems in all of > academia.

This is true, but it's not scientifically fair to imply this study isn't reproducible just because others weren't.

> Simple scientific inquiry into this claim leads me to the question, "Okay, > but why?

Science doesn't necessarily answer why. Physics has one of the better reproducibility rates, and we'd love to know why, but we don't truly know why yet. We don't know why gravity exists, we know it's a force that's there, and we can predict what it'll do, we know it happens in proportion to mass and inverse squared distance, but why? Science hasn't answered that.

<comment><USER33> Just a few remarks, notwithstanding your/my opinions.

Physics has not "one of the better reproducibility rates" but 100%; per the Scientific Method any _valid_ theory must:

\- be reproducible (verifiable empirically)

\- have predictive power

\- not negate existing theories

This constitutes 'acceptable proof'.

It yields a 'compound effect' to theoretical research: for instance, Newton's Laws were never wrong, just narrower in scope than Einstein's. No future valid theory will ever prove any of these two wrong, it can only generalize more, because we know these two to be true. True is true forever, barring a fundamental change in this universe itself. So we keep the theoretical foundations forever, they're solid.

Their interpretation, however, may change as we widen the scope, and that is the 'human' part in science, the art of it, to produce valid representations linking the math with the experience of reality. That changes a lot, in time, and even from person to person.

The 'why' things are is another matter entirely and not a concern for physics nor science in general; we search for the root causes to explain 'how' things work the way they do. We stop there _in theory_ for beyond is mere interpretation, opinion, belief.

Now this would exclude all social sciences and biology and countless others from the realm of 'science' and that's not fair; these fields yield very usable results despite the nigh impossible search for pure theory. I like the 19-20th century view that 'empirical sciences' gain value when we try _to the best of our ability_ to apply the Scientific Method and mathematical tools to account for fuzziness.

Deep learning is certainly a formidable upgrade to the tooling of empirical sciences, brute-forcing 'how' things work for lack of a better truth than retrospective.

Just don't compare it to e.g. physics, don't ask for predictability (as you wouldn't ask a fish to fly), it's pointless and only serves to undermine the value of empirical sciences, while overemphasizing that of theory.

Because you know, in theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they're not... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER32> I think you might have misunderstood? Academic physics publications do not have perfect reproduction rates. Especially theoretical physics. The criteria for a valid theory doesn't prevent human mistakes.

Everything you said applies to social sciences too. Per the scientific method any valid theory must be reproducible and predictive. It's an unfortunate fact of life that the academic research and publication process allows results that turn out to be untrue, both in social sciences and hard sciences.

Maybe have a gander at [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_scien...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science)

<comment><USER33> Perhaps you can help shed some light on my apparent misunderstanding? See this other comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365183)

<comment><USER32> I'll give it a try. I can't speak to the downvotes, but from my perspective you started talking about physics itself being repeatable. That is a separate topic from whether academic publications are repeatable. The thread's context was the top comment suggesting the research linked at the very top is questionable because of it's conclusion and it's category (social science). My argument is that neither the conclusion nor the category can be used to assume the linked article is less than scientific, and that no sciences are designed to tell us why things are the way they are. When you add that physics itself is 100% repeatable, while true, it isn't relevant to the topic nor does it help reflect on the article's validity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm living mit multiple partners and they are also dating multiple people.

Since they tell me about their dating experience, I got more insight of how other men behave to women, then when I lived monogamous.

What I wanted to say is, after what I heared from my partners about men they dated, I totally understand these results.

<comment><USER35> Men are the WORST! BLEGH!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What about trans people?

<comment><USER37> Outliers

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Url changed from [https://sciencebeta.com/mens-ex- attitude/](https://sciencebeta.com/mens-ex-attitude/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh boy, research showing differences between biological genders. This is going to either be ignored or absolutely explode.

<comment><USER40> >biological genders

The word you're looking for is "sex." There's no such thing as a "biological gender."

<comment><USER41> "a term for a grammatical subclass to join sex in referring to either of the two primary biological forms of a species"

Don't try to rewrite grammar to fit trends.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/gender)

<comment><USER42> It's not a trend, it's an increase in scientific understanding.

Language is fluid, or we would all be speaking some variant of old German on this forum (try reading Beowulf in the original).

It's not grammar, it's semantics.

Words are social. When one person tries to rewrite the meaning of a word, unless they have significant social clout they are just going to be misunderstood. When many people rewrite the meaning of a word, they change the meaning of that word.

<comment><USER43> The problem with this argument is that you are using descriptivist reasoning ("Language is fluid", "Words are social.") to support a prescriptivist conclusion ("There's no such thing as a 'biological gender.'") If historically 'gender' and 'sex' were mostly synonymous but recently people have decided to use the words differently then that's fine, but it doesn't make it wrong for people to still use the words the old way.

<comment><USER44> > If historically 'gender' and 'sex' were mostly synonymous but recently > people have decided to use the words differently then that's fine, but it > doesn't make it wrong for people to still use the words the old way.

But using the phrase "biological gender" isn't using them in the old way: the way in which they were synonymous is in reference to a idea which conflated sex, gender identity, and socially ascribed gender. If one wants to refer to that meaning, there's really no reason to prefer one or the other, though _either_ will be unclear to many modern audiences without additional explanation referencing the outmoded concept being invoked, because the concept being referred to has lost currency.

But if one is discussing the separated concepts, then one cannot honestly use "sex" for the sociological or psychological components or "gender" for the biological component and say it is the "old way", as the old way doesn't recognize the there being separate components.

<comment><USER43> " _But using the phrase "biological gender" isn 't using them in the old way: the way in which they were synonymous is in reference to a idea which conflated sex, gender identity, and socially ascribed gender._"

You just contradicted yourself. If the term 'gender' conflates several ideas, and adding the term 'biological' distinguishes them, then the previous poster hasn't changed the meaning of the word 'gender'. He's incorporated the new understanding but adapted the older language. Either way, the mere fact that nearly every person reading this understood his meaning shows that his expression was adequate to express his meaning.

<comment><USER44> > If the term 'gender' conflates several ideas

It doesn't. It, when used in the old sense for which sex was equivalently used, refers to one idea which does not recognize the physical, psychological, and social elements as distinct. It does not conflate different ideas, it predates the idea of a distinction; the idea of the distinction is concurrent with the terminology which incorporates it.

"Biological gender" is neither the new common usage (which labels the biological element "sex") nor the old usage (which refers to an indivisible trait.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What sort of men? Cisgender men? Heterosexual men? Arabic men?

There's no such thing as a man -- "man" an abstract concept that needs definition before any useful statement can be made about people in that category.

<comment><USER46> If you need "men" defined for you, you're going to have trouble participating in useful communication. Use a bit of intuition.

<comment><USER47> It's absurd to group half the population into one group, and then try to work out what makes that group as a whole tick.

<comment><USER11> It makes a lot of sense however, to separate people based on a criterion and find out how the resulting groups differ from each other.

<comment><USER47> I believe the criteria needs to be more nuanced that 'man' and 'woman' to be able to elicit anything valuable about society.

<comment><USER11> It's enough for the criterion to be real in order to be of interest. And this one is definitely real.

<comment><USER47> Okay, this is where I leave you I'm afraid.

<comment><USER13> You are essentially arguing that all gender studies are useless because there is parity among individuals in each gender. It's true there is parity, but the scientific division between male and female is very clear. It seems VERY useful to study the differences. To throw them away because all men and women aren't identical feels to me like a terribly short sighted perspective.

<comment><USER47> I'm saying I believe the premise and criteria should be more nuanced. Men vs. women suggests comparison of two binary absolutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> So women blame others and men take responsibility?

<comment><USER48> Was it something I said?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned (and dumped).

</comment><comment><USER50> My hot take: Women give and men take in relationships.

See life expectancy of married vs unmarried men and the same for women.

When a breakup happens women loses more as she committed more.

<comment><USER51> Since when life expectancy is measure of a good and meaningful life? It is more a measure of risk-avoidance.

<comment><USER52> Cardiac health is correlated with mental health/happiness

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Put another way, both men and women seem to agree that breakups are more likely the man's fault than the woman's. What I found curious is that at the same time, apparently the majority of "laypeople" when asked about it in an online survey, expected no gender difference at all.

It's a strange disparity in the data, I wonder if it's due to sampling or if people genuinely think their own experiences are atypical.

 _Edit: I 'd be interested in finding out what's so offensive about this observation. I'll gladly take 100 more downvotes and flags, but please tell me what caused so much consternation._

</comment><comment><USER40> Can't help but wonder if maybe this is because violence towards women in relationships is higher than it is towards men.

Edit: Before you dismiss my comment, feel free to look at the details. There have been countless studies that confirm this. [https://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/](https://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/)

<comment><USER54> What percentage of relationships include violence? I doubt this is a strong explanation for the difference stated in the article.

<comment><USER40> I hate to be dismissive, but literally google your own question. Start here [https://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/](https://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/)

<comment><USER55> Actually it was up to the original poster to give the numbers. He was right to ask. You can't prove your point and hope that everyone will know the numbers you are relying on to prove your point.

Moreover, you original question suggets that you didn't read the published article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter is again over capacitated? - <AUTHOR>

Is twitter down again? <comment><USER2> I just wrote this comment in another thread:

Start by checking Twitter's API health page: <https://dev.twitter.com/status>

Which links to, e.g., what looks like big problems with the home timline:

[https://status.io.watchmouse.com/7617/125017//statuses/home_...](https://status.io.watchmouse.com/7617/125017//statuses/home_timeline-\(OAuth-1.0a\))

I realise that I do a lot of Twitter and other API development, and so it's easy for me to say, but I don't think it's too crazy to suggest you should be looking in their general direction for answers first. reply

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Really, why not look at Twitter's status page rather than asking on HN? In your - the submitter's - profile, it says you're a software engineer, so there's really no excuse.</comment>


I'm Working Remotely. Can I Keep Hiding My Secret Baby? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/business/work-baby.html <comment><USER2> This is such a stupid question haha

I mean, I can totally understand not wanting to tell people you work with.

But what is the dilemma? Either you tell someone or you don't. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems overdramatic.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is a stupid question. Deciding when to tell others you are pregnant is a very difficult decision. If you tell others early, it may factor into their decisions on what to include you in. If you tell others late, they may be frustrated that they weren't told earlier, and again factor that into their decisions on what to include you in. People have different expectations on when is the right time to know, and react in very different ways. It is a dilemma with no clear answer because of how varied people's expectations and reactions are.

<comment><USER2> You're right, in that there is "no clear answer because of how varied people's expectations and reactions are."

So what's the point in trying to gauge this? Either you'll find people who accept it or they won't. Seems like you'd be adding further stress to an already stressful situation by agonizing over this.</comment></comment></comment>


Launching Mathematica 10 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2014/07/launching-mathematica-10-with-700-new-functions-and-a-crazy-amount-of-rd/ <comment><USER2> This made me laugh:

[http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/key-value- assoc...](http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/key-value-associative- arrays/)

Version 10 introduces fundamental new constructs called associations. They associate keys with values, allowing highly efficient lookup and updating, even with millions of elements. Associations provide generalizations of symbolically indexed lists, associative arrays, dictionaries, hashmaps, structs, and a variety of other powerful data structures.

<comment><USER3> A very broad generalization of hash tables has been built into the language since day 1 so this feature is mostly for people who just want a structure that they are already used to (or don't want the extra behavior for performance reasons or whatever).

Hash-tables in previous versions of Mathematica:

        >mymap["abc"]=1
        >mymap[2]=2
        >mpmap[hello]=3
        >mymap["abc"]
        1
        >mymap[2]
        2
        >mymap[hello]
        3

Whoa:

        >myDerivative[a_ x_^n_] = n a x^(n - 1)
        >myDerivative[1.1y^3]
        3.3 y^2

<comment><USER4> More specifically, the the previous hash-table-like method is just assigning constants as values for a function.

        In[1]:= mymap["abc"]=1;
                mymap[2]=2;
                mpmap[hello]=3;
                DownValues[mymap]
        Out[4]= {HoldPattern[mymap[2]]:>2,HoldPattern[mymap[abc]]:>1}

Defining a function is really just a pattern is matched based on arguments, and is replaced with an expression with the arguments substituted into it. And you can set a constant key argument to a value of a constant value — creating the odd built in hash-table-alike which has been around forever.

That said, Association[] looks nice. Presumably it gets a speed improvement by bypassing the pattern matching. And I remember being annoyed by using JSON data in Mathematica structures, this looks nicer. The literal syntax is appreciated too. Actually I'm kind of surprised they didn't choose another weird unicode symbol like 〚, for the literal syntax.

<comment><USER5> Well, unlike adding and changing definitions for symbols in the symbol table, associations are actually immutable. So you can pass them around as values, mutate them, and the old versions are still available unchanged. That's just not true of using downvalues of symbols.

Also, using definitions on symbols to store key-values is incredibly limiting, because you can't do reverse lookups without getting into very low level (and slow) hackery via DownValues. Or list the keys or values. Or even know how many keys you have.

Associations really will replace basically all uses of symbol downvalues for storing key-value pairs. And Associations have really nice general-purpose functions like GroupBy, Counts, Merge, and so on (mentioned below).

Associations even support function application syntax, so you should be able to drop them in into existing code that expects symbol downvalues as you're using them above.

Associations are the single most significant language-level improvement we've had in many versions. And we've integrated them really nicely across the system -- they're not just some special-purpose data structure.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, using definitions on symbols to store key-values is indeed incredibly limiting.

Association seems very similar to List: immutable, really good Part syntax for accessing things in deeper levels, etc. I've started to read some of the docs on it too, it looks very nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm very impressed by this stuff--especially the new computational geometry features.

I'm just a little hesitant to do any meaningful work in such a closed ecosystem.

<comment><USER2> For a non-commerical user, it's hard to see Mathematica as more than TODO list for [http://www.sagemath.org](http://www.sagemath.org)

<comment><USER7> I'd like that to be true, but I think it's still some years away from being a similar experience. Sage is impressive but still very much shows its seams: it's trying to glue together a bunch of separately developed projects, with their own ideas about things (everything from Maxima to R), and the glue is often pretty noticeable if you do anything remotely complex.

(That said, I also avoid using Mathematica for most things because I'm squeamish about ending up with any significant project too closely tied to a proprietary platform.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the list of what's new since version 9 of Mathematica: [http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new- in-10/](http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/)

</comment><comment><USER8> ZIPCodeData and many other geographic functions are missing and have badly mangled documentation. I assume something went wrong in an automated build process. This is on the Mac OSX release.

So far ZIPCodeData[], NeighborhoodData[] and MountainData[],BroadcastStationData[], MovieData[], BuildingData[], PersonData[] are all mangled.

Worse yet, URLFetch is broken also. Something bad happened, at least with the Mac release.

In[1]:= URLFetch["[http://www.google.com/"](http://www.google.com/")]

General::unavail: ExportString is not available in this version of the Wolfram Language.

ImportString::string: First argument ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101, 32, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62, 60, 104, 116, 109, 108, 32, 105, 116, <<19757>>, 111, 100, 121, 62, 60, 47, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62}, <<2>>] is not a string.

Out[1]= ImportString[ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101,

<comment><USER5> What is your value of $Version and SystemInformation["Small"]? I can't replicate these problems on any of the 3 platforms using freshly-downloaded versions.

<comment><USER8> Would having an old version installed make a difference? I renamed my current install to "mathematica backup.app" then installed mms 10. It feels like some part of mms has failed without adequately reporting it.

Mac OSX 10.9.4

uname -a <~/Library/Mathematica/Licensing nyx[33] Darwin nyx.local 13.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 13.3.0: Tue Jun 3 21:27:35 PDT 2014; root:xnu-2422.110.17~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

Session log below.

Mathematica 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) Copyright 1988-2014 Wolfram Research, Inc.

In[1]:= $Version

Out[1]= 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (June 29, 2014)

In[2]:= $VersionNumber

Out[2]= 10.

In[3]:= SystemInformation["Small"]

Out[3]= {Kernel ->

> {SystemID -> MacOSX-x86-64, ReleaseID -> 10.0.0.0 (5098698, 5098537),

> CreationDate -> DateObject[{2014, 6, 29}, TimeObject[{20, 38, 32}]]},

> FrontEnd ->

> {OperatingSystem -> $Failed, ReleaseID -> Missing[NotActive],

> CreationDate -> DateObject[$Failed]}}

In[4]:= URLFetch["[http://www.google.com/"](http://www.google.com/")]

General::unavail: ExportString is not available in this version of the Wolfram Language.

ImportString::string: First argument ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101, 32, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62, 60, 104, 116, 109, 108, 32, 105, 116, <<19641>>, 111, 100, 121, 62, 60, 47, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62}, <<2>>] is not a string.

Out[4]= ImportString[ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101,

> 32, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62, 60, 104, 116, 109, 108, 32, 105, 116, 101,

\-- Snip --

In[5]:= ExportString[]

ExportString::argrx: ExportString called with 0 arguments; 2 arguments are expected.

Out[5]= ExportString[]

<comment><USER5> Looks like it... I would delete both from disk, redownload 10, and reinstall it. Also check that you didn't run out of disk space.

If all else fails, phone our technical support at 1-800-WOLFRAM, they're pretty good.

<comment><USER8> I checked the MD5sum given on the wolfram website (b58c6bb7393f23137355da923f2734fc), they match.

Completely removing my previous copy of Mathematica and nuking my ~/Library/Mathematica directory made the documentation formatting errors go away. I'm not sure if that was the cause or not.

However, I still get ExportString messages out of many functions.

General::unavail: ExportString is not available in this version of the Wolfram Language.

EDIT: I'm trying to hunt down why I get the unveil error message. Might this be a limitation of a trial mathematica license?

<comment><USER5> Turns out the trial version is (probably accidentally) quite broken: [http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/290210?p_p_auth=uf...](http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/290210?p_p_auth=uf0Lnir3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an impressive release.

GeoGraphics is amazing example of the power of integration between domains. Built-in data about the world, with semantic integration into graphics as well as data analysis. This is way beyond what any existing mapping solution has delivered.

The geometry stuff is also amazing and very useful for generative design and "making"

</comment><comment><USER10> I hate to be that guy, but I wish to share my opinion about closed source mathematical software.

There is no doubt that what Wolfram Research has done with Mathematica is amazing and tempting. It is a very complete and uniform engine, and can be very useful for very different kinds of mathematics.

However, Wolfram Research deliberately keeps their methods and source code closed. Note that this is more serious than just the "Stallman-esque" open- source-everything philosophy. Wolfram insists that users do not need to know implementation details of their methods. This is plainly in their documentation. You can see the uncompelling argument from Wolfram here [6]. The gist of the argument is that interfaces matter, not implementations.

I strongly argue that users, especially mathematicians and engineers, should care about the internals of mathematical software, especially when it's being used, even in a utilitarian fashion, for research and engineering.

Not only this, but Wolfram has litigated against his own employees for publishing mathematical proofs about cellular automata. Information about this lawsuit is sparse, but evidence of it can be seen in [0]. More information can be found here [1].

Unfortunately most responses to the above from users of Mathematica is "well I just use Mathematica as a calculator, nothing serious" or "I wouldn't look at the source code anyway, so what gives?" It's an unfortunate response, and I don't have a technical rebuttal, but a moral one, which many don't want to hear.

It pains me to see the technical reliance on Mathematica (and other software such as MATLAB) in professional mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. It reminds me of an addictive drug; one of the best hackers I know does their work completely in Mathematica, and can no longer work without it.

As is the case with a lot of closed source, proprietary software, there aren't a ton of good alternatives. There is a plethora of logistical issues with existing computer algebra systems, but I nonetheless recommend them. Sage [2] is a continuously growing system based on Python which has backing from a lot of mathematicians. They are continually improving it. There's also Maxima [3]. None of these has quite an extensive array of functionality and graphical capabilities as Mathematica.

I (and others) have written more about this issue more extensively here [4] for those interested. This is an extension on the article written by Jordi G. Hermoso [5].

If you took the time to read this, thanks.

[0] [https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/theory- edge/conversation...](https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/theory- edge/conversations/messages/5828)

[1] [http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...](http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/)

[2] [http://www.sagemath.org/](http://www.sagemath.org/)

[3] [http://andrejv.github.io/wxmaxima/](http://andrejv.github.io/wxmaxima/)

[4] [http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=69](http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=69)

[5] [http://www.symbo1ics.com/files/jordi.pdf](http://www.symbo1ics.com/files/jordi.pdf)

[6] [http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUs...](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html)

<comment><USER11> My impression is that you don't hate to be that guy, but actually love to express this opinion.

Open source systems like Sage always look desirable, simply by virtue of being open source. But every time I look at it I'm left with a very bad taste in the mouth because of the constant badmouthing of non-open-source systems that is going on in that community. Companies do that sort of thing, and it doesn't inspire trust. But we know that it can happen just because a few people in the management made bad decisions. But when a community (!) around an open source (!) system takes on that attitude, it looks much worse. Don't you realize you're driving people away?

Why not put all that energy into improving your own system instead of trying to actively hinder others? Examples of that are forking GMP and making in GPL (not LGPL); actively pointing out to people (as Mr. Hermoso did to me) that no you can't link Octave to Mathematica because Octave is GPL (which is just a hindrance for my research, as well as to others); building on the fallacy that results obtained with Sage are inherently better because Sage is open sourced software is _theoretically_ verifiable. All software is buggy, and the only thing that makes a research result more trustworthy is if it is indeed verified, not if it's theoretically verifiable, but no one ever does it. Practical verification is almost never about reading the source code. It's about making sure the result is consistent and computing it with alternative tools.

<comment><USER12> Results obtained with _are_ better because Sage is open: in a mathematical research paper you can say:

"This reduces the problem to computing blah, which we did using the following Sage code. The function foo used here uses the algorithm of X and Y as described in their paper [XY2006]"

You can't say:

"This reduces the problem to calculating blah which the following Mathematica code computes using an unspecified algorithm for which there is no accompanying paper proving correctness."

Of course a paper proving that an algorithm is correct can contain errors, and also even if the proof of correctness is fine the actual implementation can contain bugs. But if you have no way of knowing how something is computed and whether anybody at any point in time even tried to prove mathematically that the method used is correct, you have no moral authority to rely on the result. That's just the standard adopted in mathematics: you can depend on results you have good reason to believe are true _and_ are documented in the literature; you can't rely on stuff that's not written about. I don't know how citing results works in other areas, but that's how it is in mathematics (at least in the fields of mathematics I'm familiar with).

<comment><USER11> I guess it depends on one's field.

I've never cited a software I didn't write myself, simply saying _trust this software, here 's the reference_. I wouldn't trust a result from Sage any better than one from Mathematica, simply based on which system produced it. I'd trust that _x_ is a solution of an equation if substituting it back verifies it. I'll trust that two graphs are isomorphic if the software gives me a vertex permutation that makes the adjacency matrices identical. It doesn't matter how that isomorphism was computed.

When publishing work, I'll aim to make it verifiable this way.

I believe the vast majority of the use of these systems is not of the type when one needs to blindly trust the software and refer back to it in the paper. At least in my field (physics) it isn't. Yet I use programs like this daily, and I clearly depend on them for my work.

Most of the functionality available in Mathematica (or, I'd argue, most similar systems) are not of the type that one needs to cite. They either use standard and well known algorithms that are available in a multitude of systems (do you cite the methods for matrix multiplication or eigenvalue computation, and would it make a difference?), or the results are much easier to _verify_ than to _compute_.

In those cases when I need to rely on a published method, like you mention, the method is very unlikely to be a built-in part of any system. So I either need to re-implement it, or use the original code of the authors. If the authors implemented their method in Mathematica instead of Python, does that make their program less reliable? No. It's still a published method, anyone can verify it.

My point is that I hear this argument about Sage very often, and the typical generalization is: "if you used Mathematica for your research, that's wrong, because it's not verifiable". This is a fallacy. It completely ignores how these software are used in practice, and implies that results from open source software are somehow magically reliable (they're not) and don't need verification (they do).

I've yet to come across a situation where the argument _does_ apply at all: point me to a paper which goes truly wrong by citing Mathematica/MATLAB/Maple/etc this way.

<comment><USER11> Note that I'm not saying that one can claim that a result is correct, a theorem is true, etc. based on the fact that some undocumented algorithm produced it. That's clearly unacceptable.

Nor am I saying that it's never necessary to rely on an algorithm to get such a result.

What I'm saying that when people use Mathematica or other closed source systems, they do not usually commit these mistakes.

Also note that Mathematica programs can be open source and documented (many are). Several built-in packages have accessible and documented source code (e.g. Combinatorica). There's nothing wrong with using these to obtain such a result, and cite the (public and documented) program used to create it.

<comment><USER12> I think we're in complete agreement: most of the time you don't need a citation for a program you use because the result can be easily verfied. And I agree that what you call a fallacy is a fallacy, I was just pointing out that open source can be _citable_ in a way that closed source isn't and that _that_ is an advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting features, but I feel like it's a lost cause, as it's not worth investing in a proprietary platform.

<comment><USER14> What platform is not proprietary?

<comment><USER15> Octave, SciPy, etc.

I'm not aware of a replacement for Mathematica's symbolic manipulation that's even close. It's good enough that it's scared any pretenders out of the castle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know if Mathematica 10 is retina-ready for Mac yet? This may seem petty to some, but when you do a lot of data visualisation, it really does matter.

As an aside, I've been using IPython Notebooks a lot over Mathematica over the past year and have generally been really happy with the change – not least because I know I won't be locked out of my notebooks if I can't afford a Mathematica license in future! That all said, I recently revisited a Mathematica notebook I'd made in the past, and it reminded me why I started using it in the first place. It really is a great piece of software: great libraries, great performance, generally a pleasure to use.

<comment><USER17> > Does anyone know if Mathematica 10 is retina-ready for Mac yet? This may > seem petty to some, but when you do a lot of data visualisation, it really > does matter.

Yes it is.

<comment><USER16> Great! Thank you. Will look forward to seeing some of the new visualisation styles in high-DPI :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We'll see if they fixed the proxy so it can get through our corporate firewall, otherwise the alpha integration is useless. No other programs have a problem except Mathematica.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like to dump on Wolfram as much as anybody else, but tbh, these _really_ are nice looking visualizations backed with a nice set of general purpose tooling.

</comment><comment><USER20> £2050+VAT = yowsers.

<comment><USER2> 300 for non-commercial use.

<comment><USER21> Honest question, who uses Mathematica commercially? What industries?

<comment><USER22> There's some customer stories at: [http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/customer- stories/](http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/customer-stories/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What are some open-source tools like Amplitude and Kissmetrics? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for event tracking and a product analytics tool. <comment><USER2> Hey there,

Could you please explain your use-case? Depending on your use-case, there are multiple solutions that fit in different use-cases.

Plug & Play Solutions:

Matomo: It's basically on-premise Google Analytics, it stores the data on Mysql and provides pageview & event metrics. ([https://github.com/matomo- org/matomo](https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo))

Countly: It's the extensible version of Matomo on top of Mongodb. While storing the raw data might not be their best bet, if you're looking for event analytics dashboard with pre-built features, it's definitely worth trying out. ([https://github.com/Countly/countly- server](https://github.com/Countly/countly-server))

Self-service Solutions:

Snowplow: It's an enterprise level event analytics solution. It's really extensible and it supports many different data-warehouse solutions such as Elasticsearch, Redshift, etc. but not that easy to learn & maintain. ([https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow))

Rakam: Similar to Snowplow, it collects and enriches event data and stores it in your data warehouse. We support Postgresql, Snowflake, and Prestodb at the moment. Unlike Snowplow, you send the event data without defining the schema, we generate the schema on the fly for you which makes it similar to Amplitude. ([https://github.com/rakam-io/rakam](https://github.com/rakam-io/rakam))

Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer of Rakam.

</comment><comment><USER3> You may want to check Countly for product analytics and marketing. You can find it on Github ([https://github.com/countly/countly- server](https://github.com/countly/countly-server)), or get Enterprise Edition ([https://count.ly/product](https://count.ly/product)) in case you need support.</comment>