The good, the bad and the ugly standup - <AUTHOR> https://kristoff.it/blog/good-bad-ugly-standup/ <comment><USER2> I never understood why the standup cant just be an asynchronous chat room. The information is easier to review and follow up on, and people can check in when its not a disruption. My gut feeling is, at most places, 90% of the purpose is for the pm to feel like the captain of the ship, and 10% is an attendance check.

<comment><USER3> I'm a PM and (perhaps not like the others, but) in my mind the standup is not just the status update, the important bit is to convey any roadblocks or problems you're facing and the team or the PM can assist to resolve them. I think though, that many teams out there probably do not feel comfortable enough to talk about such things and the standup merely becomes the status update bore.

<comment><USER4> This installs a ridiculous mindset, what if a dev hits a block at 11am and your ceremony is at 10am?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been an engineer or in engineering leadership most of my life. Now CTO of a large company. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but what we really need to do is treat engineers with respect. Give them a quiet place to work and leave them the fuck alone. Agile is just a watered-down compromise. We still get to have project managers, we just call them scrummasters and they get to bother the engineers slightly less.

<comment><USER6> How cute. I tried your suggestion once. What I got was an overengineered, poorly documented delivery that matched the spec about 50%. Oh, it was also a year late. Sorry, but processes are there for a reason, and the reason is, broadly, that getting an average team of engineers to deliver on time, according to spec and without diving all the way down every overoptimization / navelgazing / random interest / flamewar / framework flavor of the day rabbithole there is is otherwise impossible. With process it becomes at least a tiny bit more akin to herding cats instead of just watching them run amok every which way.

<comment><USER7> > on time, according to spec

time, features, reliability: pick two

<comment><USER8> Typically, the triangle involves money on one of the axis.

In principle you could have those three if you throw enough resources at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Once had a daily standup with 30-35 employees, all different teams and projects, and no one enforcing brevity (going down the rabbit whole was common). The whole exercise felt like taking attendance. After the one senior person who insisted on them left, we dropped them immediately with no negative consequences.

<comment><USER10> > The whole exercise felt like taking attendance.

In my experience, almost anyone who insists on synchronous, in-person standups is doing so because they want them to function this way, whether consciously or unconsciously.

I also suspect that standups with no active brevity constraint frequently come about not because of a lack of leadership but because they're actually a means for disordered thinkers to feel productive, which I think goes part of the way towards explaining why you see such irrational attachment to standups even among ICs.

<comment><USER11> What is an IC?

<comment><USER12> Individual Contributor. Manager euphemism for a cog in the machine.

<comment><USER13> What is the alternative to being an Individual Contributor? An...individual non-contributor? Or a non-individual contributor?

<comment><USER12> Management and leadership roles.

<comment><USER13> And they aren't said to contribute? Odd terminology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kube-system I think that the people who don't like standups, are the people who have never been a part of one that works well. This isn't surprising, because most don't work well.

There are two critical things that a leader must do to run an effective standup:

1\. You must have a leader who is willing to enforce the rules in order to effectively extract the right information to support managerial tasks (and not arbitrarily, but through team buy-in), and

2\. They must be willing and able to understand most of the technical intricacies of the tasks taking place.

In my experience, most organizations' standups are run by people who fail at one or both of these.

Maybe they'll put in a PM who enforces the rules, but doesn't understand (or doesn't care to understand) the tasks the developers are doing with enough detail to be an effective facilitator. They act as a note-taker, letting the developers manage themselves ad-hoc, and don't ask questions unless someone specifically brings up a blocker. This can work with a team 100% full of self- starters who are comfortable with asking hard questions of each other, but that's your only hope.

Or on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have organizations that put more senior developers in that role. Then, you often end up going down design rabbit holes until you've run out of time, and you never end up doing the tasks that you actually needed to do: planning everyone's time effectively, and recording/communicating progress so that stakeholders expectations are correctly managed.

In both of those failure cases, you end up failing to deliver a quality product on time and/or fail to communicate expectations to stakeholders. In the first case, you made a plan, but it wasn't a full picture. In the second failure case, you had all of the right tasks figured out, but you failed to plan and communicate it.

<comment><USER14> If most people are unable to do it right, the act is too difficult. Saying "it works fine if everyone does as they should" just ignores that people don't usually do as they "should" and is not very useful.

<comment> kube-system I disagree. Most new ideas implemented in the workplace come with generational learning curves, even when history has shown them to be good ideas. This is just a cyclical skills gap.

Few people running software projects have formal study that spans both management and software. Many have _neither_ , in my experience. Sure, formal study is not a requirement for good performance, it sure helps to get everyone in an organization on the same page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yesterday I did a thing, Today I am doing a thing and currently I am or not able to do that thing.

For me the main problem with stand-ups, especially when they are more than 2 times a week, is that they make it impossible to do lengthy unstructured work. It's embarrassing to say that you worked on something and didn't get anywhere. My theory is that max task size becomes the length of time between standups in most orgs.

<comment><USER16> Same here. After working in academia with no agile process (worked well), in a startup or around 20 engineers using OKRs (worked great) and a big company following SCRUM (nightmarish) I could not agree more with you.

I believe weekly OKRs are the best of two worlds: they are restrictive enough to feel the peer pressure for ones committed goal and descriptive enough for any manager to get a grip on the current situation, while at the same time relaxed enough for engineers to not feel like they are trapped in a cage. One week is plenty of time to either finish some work that just needs to be done or write a small prototype. In fact I liked it so much, that I brought the idea of OKRs back to my research lab and everybody loves it!

Scrum is the worst of this for me. We've rotated through a couple of daily formats and it always feels micromanaged and pointless. In addition to that it takes away the personal feeling of achievement. My best work in this framework has been done when I ignored the framework as the whole...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As with anything "agile", it pays to stop and take stock of how your processes actually address the 4 key agile principals:

\- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

\- Working software over comprehensive documentation

\- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

\- Responding to change over following a plan

I personally interpret "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" as a warning against the snake oil and magic bullets that agile consultants sold / are selling to corporations.

Standups are not at all a bad idea, but I feel like most implementations are simply a response to a prescription rather than a symptom. Nor do I feel like the prescription is particularly effective: rather than using the structure of a standup you could just, of your own volition - when useful; take an interest in your teammates' work, talk to them, and collaboratively come up with a solution.

<comment><USER18> This website has an interesting response to the agile values:

[http://programming-motherfucker.com/](http://programming-motherfucker.com/)

Excuse the profanity, btw.

<comment><USER17> Haha. Love it! The satire; not the fact that it's largely in alignment with my experience in enterprise...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excluding QA wasn't a plus. Quality works better when there's an advocate from the beginning.

Problem is a lot of companies only engage QA for post-build integration testing. They try to phase it as a mini-waterfall within the agile cycles, which doesn't play well with agile and drags the process. At that point, leaving them to their own horizontal meetings seems like a plus, but there's a ton of opportunity cost for not having them in the primary conversation.

Other companies try to leverage QA for unit tests, but those really should be written by whoever wrote the interface as part of ensuring their intended contracts are fulfilled. That makes unit test writing not really a good QA role, other than making sure they're there.

The exception would be if you're going to pull QA in and pair-program/test TDD style--which is its own potential boondoggle. But you need real SDETs at that point, as opposed to scripters. Real SDETs aren't terribly common, and are not terribly cheap as they're niche specialists.

The best solution I've seen is to split the advocacy/short-term roles and the test/architecture/long-term development roles (even if it's two hats on one person), have them in the meeting for the former and have the horizontal run their own projects with milestone syncs for the latter.

At that point you can treat the short-term role as a team member, and the long-term roles as an internal vendor or external dependency (i.e. no expectation of control). Any sort of one-size-fits-all approach won't work.

<comment><USER20> Just curious - when you say "(real) SDET" can you expand on what that means for you? I ask because I started out as SDET, but my title is now QA Automation Engineer. I sort of see myself as a developer working in a QA role - I work on testing frameworks and the architecture of that framework and then write integration tests against whatever a company's product is - whether it be an internal API, an external-facing API, a single page website, or a complicated multi-page website. I was just curious if there were additional responsibilities or techstacks I could be learning that other companies' "real" SDETs do as well. In my near 6 years of work in this niche, I've only been at two companies and they let me do my thing, so I'm not really sure if I'm "missing out" on knowledge or something.

I am also curious as to what you mean by "Quality works better when there's an advocate from the beginning." In my experience, even when (or if) I am invited to an agile Sprint Grooming or Planning sessions, I am more there to report on how a bug works and how severe I think the issue is - no matter how well I document some bug I found or whether product is there (as they should be deciding severity). I'm not sure how to meaningfully leverage my QA experience into helping developers drive their design and architecture to create more bug-free, quality code. I do notice that once I join a company and find/report zillions of bugs, their code slowly gets better over time, but isolating an incident and then measuring my impact is nigh impossible.

Anyway, I know this has nothing to do with the topic, I just wanted to see what you thought because SDET/QA talk is rare to find on this website.

<comment><USER21> Not the parent poster, but I would guess that when they say things like "(real) SDET" they are referring to someone who creates automated tests, creates scripts for testing, possibly uses white box / gray box approaches, creates test cases for sub-components and layers.

Compare to someone who only does black box testing and only tests from the standpoint of manually testing via a user interface.

<comment><USER19> It's actually more that an SDET has classically been the one who writes the tools and infrastructure that QA Automation Engineers would use to write scripts.

It implies an education/experience background equivalent to any other T&I Software Engineer, but usually with _additional_ experience in QA. Alternately, it could be a QA engineer who would be genuinely qualified as a general SWE in a promotion path, but who chooses to stay in quality as a domain. But either way it implies equivalent qualifications as a SWE at the same level.

The "real" bit is because over the last half decade or so, SDET has been blurred by title inflation. Scripters have been getting the title without any real experience maintaining longer-term or larger software projects, and who aren't qualified enough to be hireable as a SWE generalist.

That's one reason you still get "lesser than SWE" status arguments about SDET, when IME you actually tend to demand a little more in the market because of the need for experience in two separate disciplines.

My response to the comment above you has a lot more detail expanding on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How can you verify that your standups are effective? After the standup, take 2 random members and ask them to describe each other updates.

You will be surprised with the results.

<comment><USER21> This is at the root of my stink with standups - I've been on many teams where each individual is working on some part of the system and has essentially no overlap on a daily or even weekly basis, yet here we are all meeting because cargo cult development practices says we should. So it's irrelevant to me what Jane is working on anymore than it is to her what I'm working on. The naysayers will say that that's the whole point of us meeting, because there might be some esoteric overlap that will only come to light due to our over- communication, but for my money there are other ways to solve that without a lengthy daily meeting.

<comment><USER18> In the restaurant industry, they do similar meetings called pre-shift meetings, aka lineups. The purpose of those is to check everyone is on time, check their uniform, talk about current promotions/deals/offers, discuss potential goals/bonuses, etc. And it makes sense.

In software, standups make it easier for stakeholders to track that people go to the office, and do so at a reasonable time, although most people will not admit it because it sounds bad.

Of course, making sure that team members are making progress and they're not blocked is very important, but that might not be relevant for non- stakeholders.

Sometimes it's all unintelligible mumbling and serves no purpose other than cargo cult.

<comment><USER21> Right - but this gets to my bigger issues with how software development is done these days (and why I'm exiting as fast as possible after a 20+ year career...)... in theory we've got advanced degrees, are well-compensated, have to know dozens of technologies from the front end to the database, work twelve hour days, work weekends and nights on call, build systems that generate millions of dollars in revenues that keep the company running... but some project manager thinks they need to take roll call daily because I might not be responsible for myself? Gimmea break!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The primary purpose of a standup seems to be a forcing function. It forces developers to make progress. The embarrassment factor of having to admit you did not finish your tasks for the day is what drives these meetings. I've been through the grind on both sides: as a developer and as a manager. I thoroughly detest stand-ups. When I started my company, I decided not to do them. I have a one-on-one with each developer everyday to understand progress. I don't ask for progress reports, since I can see their commit history. This seems to more effective than wasting their time and mine in a pointless meeting. I still do stand-ups with sales people though. They seem to like the camaraderie of the big meeting.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd honestly take a pay cut for a private office and maybe 1x standups.

<comment><USER23> For a private office and minimal meetings, I'd probably never interview for another job again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Standups ain't that bad when they are short and to the point and honest. Being honest that something may take longer than it was estimated for should be okay. But people make it a big deal, that if it takes even a few days more, you are incompetent. So participants chose not to share that details and there is miscommunication or bugs or both.

Also, an important note. Even if there was a standup, it's ok to talk more in detail about the tasks/tickets after it, during a day. People seem to forget it and make the stantups far too long for everyone to hold one's attention until the end.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm in a software leadership role.

I'm currently involved in several, what I like to call, "dead standups". Zombie's could give an update and no one would bat an eyelash.

Stand up can be useful if there is an effective leader. I'm actively trying to identify these characteristics and implement on the teams for where I am involved with the goal to cultivate/develop/train people to make these stand up meetings useful. Because we all know a dead standup is where productivity goes to die.

I'll have to share my results. Tomorrow, I hope someone asks me for an update on my progress ; )

<comment><USER26> If the _teams themselves_ don't want a standup, you're probably gonna get a "dead standup". The actually-useful-to-the-team part of the standup is something a team that's been exposed to such will probably self-organize without some not-on-the-team leader or manager telling them to, _if_ they feel they need it for their situation/project. I'd say imposed standups are only useful for teams that aren't already familiar with them (the done-right version of them, that is) so may need an introduction to understand that it might be something they want to do, or as a simple micromanaging status meeting under a trendier name.

<comment><USER27> In my experience, if a team doesn't _want_ a standup (or some status update from their team members), they probably need rotated to something new. No process, or person, or tool can make a team member care about their project or peers.

<comment><USER28> Or maybe as part of their normal interactions they already get all the status updates they could possibly need? Or maybe these updates are tracked in some other way (tickets and the like)?

That's not the same as "not caring about their project". I care about my project, but I don't want to hear 30+ status updates for tasks which are progressing nominally.

<comment><USER27> I do not agree with this sentiment but that's okay. As I said, in my experience, what you're saying is absolutely untrue, but I'm speaking purely from my own experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> His Ugly and Bad aren't that bad! I'd be happy if those were my standups.

Right now for me, the project managers own the whole event. You are asked for an update on a task that is on the project managers list, you give your update, and then he moves on to the next guy. There is only one developer in the meeting (me). The rest are QA, BA, Product Management, Delivery Management, and Change Management staff.

The developers who work under me will get prodded randomly throughout the day by various other project managers for their updates.

This is what happens when your company is "project oriented".

<comment><USER30> It's called "status meeting". Usually, manager is not present at standup meeting at all, unless team asked him to participate.

<comment><USER26> I've seen a lot more status meetings going by the name "standup" than I've seen actual standups. A good clue is when there are people on _totally different projects_ in the same "standup". If a lot of the people in the room are very unlikely to give a shit what most of the other people say for their part of the standup because they're not even working on the same things, that's a good sign you're actually in a status meeting. If someone's likely to get on your ass for being more concerned about surfacing blockers and communicating usefully with your actual team members than strictly following "yesterday I... today I will..." format, or folks are often getting "OK, but where are you at on X?" or "how much longer on Y?" follow-up questions from a PM or manager, not a direct contributor for whom X or Y is relevant, you're likely in a status meeting.

<comment><USER31> IMHO a standup _is_ a status meeting. If I were blocked I would have said so, not wait until the next meeting.

<comment><USER26> Sure, in a sense, the difference being whether the form of the reporting is aimed at helping team-members coordinate or helping a project manager move a marker on a chart or otherwise send reports upward. Who's it _for_ is the key concern and makes the difference in what your standups are like, and who directly benefits from them.

Strongly agree that with certain teams you don't need a regular standup. That's part of why I think the decision to do a standup should be left to the team themselves, absent some clear dysfunction bad enough to require outside intervention. Otherwise you're probably just wasting everyone's time with 15+ minutes of boring crap that could just as well be a 2-minutes-to-write daily status update message or email to the project manager, assuming they can't get the status info they need out of Jira or git commits and skip the side-channel status updates altogether.

I guess another major tell aside from "multiple unrelated teams are in the same standup" might be whether, if every single non-manager/PM quickly checks in with the rest and they all conclude a formal standup's not needed that day (or the entire week, or whatever), a standup either still happens or else someone (a PM or a manager, probably) gets really bent out of shape if it doesn't. If so, you're likely dealing with a regular ol' daily status meeting. And again, that's what a majority of "standups" I've seen have actually been. They're not for the team, and however they manage to occasionally serve the team members' needs is accidental—they're just micromanagement and "agile" box-ticking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The whole point of a stand up (daily scrum) is to discuss how work is progressing towards a sprint goal. If it devolves into a card-by-card status update meeting, it loses its value.

It is nothing more than the dev team coming together to discuss how to move forward towards the goal. No one else should be at the meeting. If further detailed discussion is needed, save it for afterwards.

<comment><USER33> How many teams are actually organized in this way, though? I've never been on a dev team where there was a single, unified sprint goal that all developers were working towards in an interrelated way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good post, nice roundup of some of the ways standups can go wrong and right.

I do think it skipped a common severe corruption of the daily standup, which is a daily application of micromanagement and deadline pressures.

I've heard about successful daily scrum meetings but I now believe the inherent chemical instability of this practice makes it too dangerous for all but a few very disciplined teams and only when absolutely necessary.

To me, scrum is the nitroglycerin of management methodologies. People who think they can handle it safely probably can't. It's wildly tempting for managers or stakeholders who are concerned with deadlines to hijack the meetings

</comment><comment><USER35> I generally find that the duration of standups scales O(n^2) with the number of participants.

</comment><comment><USER36> Remember, it's a called a standup because it's a comedy.

(I genuinely thought the article was gonna be about comedy. I was disappointed.)

</comment><comment><USER37> The only workable way to do stand ups is not to stand at all, but make everyone hold the plank position. The meeting ends when the scrummaster collapses.

<comment><USER38> In a meritocratic organization the strongest programmers are rewarded!

<comment><USER39> with sick gains and a rocking core!</comment></comment></comment>


The Photographer's Ephemeris for Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://photoephemeris.com/tpe-for-desktop <comment><USER2> Sun Surveyor[1] is another similar app for mobile that I have been using for years now and have found to be fantastic for planning photography trips. Knowing the exact times and angles of sunrise, sunset, blue and golden hours, moon cycles and the path of the Milky Way center really is a game-changer for landscape and night sky photography.

If you're heading into built up or mountainous areas, the desktop version of Google Earth[2] is fantastic for trip planning too. You can turn on sunlight mode then set the date and time appropriately and interactively figure out and bookmark the best locations to be in, taking into account shadows cast by mountains and sometimes even buildings.

[1] [http://www.sunsurveyor.com/](http://www.sunsurveyor.com/)

[2] [https://www.google.com/earth/](https://www.google.com/earth/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see this on HN. I was watching the sunrise last week and I used this app to know where to stand to see the sun appear behind a church steeple. I mostly use the Android version but sometimes the desktop browser app.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure why this is on Hackernews, but I guess I'll take the opportunity to plug my own similar app (for Android only): [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.principiap...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.principiaprogramatica.sunpositionmap)

</comment><comment><USER5> I was just thinking about searching for an app for sun/moon rises. I'm glad I found it here. This is a life-changer.

<comment><USER6> I guess you'd love their Skyfire ([http://www.skyfireapp.com/](http://www.skyfireapp.com/)) integration which gives predictions for perfect sunset/sunrise light.

<comment><USER5> Sadly, it's not available on Android (yet). But it does look amazing.</comment></comment></comment>


Callbacks in C++ using template functors – Rich Hickey (1994) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tutok.sk/fastgl/callback.html <comment><USER2> how far C++ has come in .. oh heck, it's been 22 years since that article was written! Modern (C++11 and newer) approaches to solving this problem are made much better by language advances like variadic templates (no need to supply one template for each different number of arguments!), perfect forwarding, and of course lambdas.</comment>


Postfix Code Completion in IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/03/postfix-completion/ <comment><USER2> Looks like a nice implementation, and I really love JetBrains products, but for me I just don't 'get' this (or most code completion in general).

For me, and it is a personal thing, actually writing code - that is physically typing braces etc. is not the time consuming part of coding. Far, far more time is spent thinking about my code than actually typing it. Shaving off a few seconds when working in my editor feels like an optimisation too far, especially if it essentially means learning new syntax.

Like I said, it's a personal thing - I know others have good reason to love code completion tools. Now if someone could come up with something like this for when I'm writing in my notebook....

<comment><USER3> Autocomplete/parameter help isn't about "hey, look fewer keystrokes!". It's about context-aware lookup of what you need, and avoiding stupid mistaks (reordering parameters, typos in method names).

The time it takes to write a the first few characters of a method name and then hit the completion key is a tiny amount smaller than just typing the method name outright. But that isn't the point: if I didn't have autocomplete, I'd alt+tab to a browser with class documentation or start searching in the code for a previous invocation of a method with that name I only vaguely remember.

With autocomplete, I don't have to remember variable/property/method names, I can either list them or see a list that begins if I just remember a prefix. This is less unnecessary state in my head and thus more time to think about the actual problem.

It's an absolutely _enormous_ difference in time spent, and considering the time it takes to context switch back to where you were, I'd say it saves me hours every day.

<comment><USER4> This. Autocomplete is like GPS for writing code in the presence of large libraries and complex APIs. It has nothing to do (at least now) with saving on keystrokes, and intellisense marketing docs post 1997 exclude this as a selling point.

<comment><USER5> The flip side is that by lowering the cognitive burden it breaks the feedback loop nudging programmers to create simple/elegant apis. I suspect we would be seeing fewer complex api's if there was less of a reliance on IDE's.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure. You can look at dynamic language libraries and see similar increases in complexity (batteries included began with python), while they cannot benefit from code completion very much given a lack of static type info. The increase in library complexity is probably more related to demands on what we need to write where tooling is just a supporter.

<comment><USER5> Java and Python are good languages to compare here since Java appears to have the most money thrown at IDE's in the recent past. Python has a few IDE's but theyre nowhere as magical as Java based IDE's. The average python api that I have come across is usually much more concise than its Java equivalent and there is a strong culture of dwim in the Python community. How much of this is a result of the tooling support for either language and how much is a cultural artifact of the respective community is an open question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me want to have JetBrains' baby. Again.

If I had a baby for every time I've said that, I'd probably have a sizeable brood by now.

<comment><USER7> I think I've persuaded higher ups to get JetBrains licenses at 2 of 3 places I've been at now. There's hell to pay if I don't get my Reshaper/IDEA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> By the way, a similar plugin for ReSharper also exists: [https://resharper- plugins.jetbrains.com/packages/ReSharper.P...](https://resharper- plugins.jetbrains.com/packages/ReSharper.Postfix/)

<comment><USER9> They do credit that at the end of the linked blog post.

<comment><USER10> In any case, the author and maintainer of that plugin is also a JetBrains employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> JetBrains really does an astounding job.

Also it seem Chronon debugger is free with IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 Ultimate [http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/03/try-chronon- debugger-...](http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/03/try-chronon-debugger- with-intellij-idea-13-1-eap/)

<comment><USER12> Holy hell, that's awesome. I was reading through the blog and saw the headline, immediately went to check out chronon and was about ready to throw down the $60 for a personal license. Now I guess I don't have to :)

<comment><USER11> You can still drop those bucks if you need it for Eclipse and other IDEs :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What excites me is the fact that when IntelliJ gets something cool like this, that usually means its other language IDE's are not far behind (RubyMine for instance..)

<comment><USER14> And AppCode...

AppCode is the reason I still have hair. If I had been using XCode for the last 2 years I'd have it all pulled out by now. Or I might have given up on iOS altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is probably just me but...

I often write code backwards using the IDE capabilities. Say I instantiate an object, I'd write "[[Foo alloc] init]" (most of that auto-completed), then use the keyboard shortcut to assign it to an appropriately classed and named local variable.

It just seems redundant to write all of "Foo *foo = [[Foo alloc] init]". For one you're typing the class twice - clearly redundant. Secondly, this is a temporary local variable, it doesn't need a custom name. It shouldn't have a custom name.

It's not so much about typing speed, more like a general dislike of redundancy.

The theorem is the more redundant the language, the more IDE help it requires. Objective-C is the worst I know. Although they're adding more and more layers to the compiler to make it less so.

</comment><comment><USER15> First thought: great, main.cf is always a pain to write.

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny to conflate snippets with native methods. Looks like compiling smalltalk to lower OOP.

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought that this was going to be about auto-completion of config files for Postfix...

Neat idea, reminds me a bit of Reverse Polish Notation, Forth & friends.

Now it's got me wondering about a text editor built on RPN lines, kinda like an inverted emacs + ed...

</comment><comment><USER18> This is really cool. One problem (yeah I know, Vim and Emacs commands are useful here too!) I always had was going forward is easy in a text editor, but going backwards a few characters, or to wrap something like this, is inconvenient.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice. The most useful postfix completion I would be using in casting. It involves a lot more jumps over braces to wrap around couple of casts.

</comment><comment><USER20> This cannot get ported to PyCharm fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's amazing what hoops people are keen to jump through so they don't have to program in Forth.

<comment><USER22> When I saw the headline the first thing I thought was April Fools had arrived early in the form of a Forth IDE.

It is an appropriate name however. After dabbling in Forth for fun, I became very aware how fleeting and unnecessary local variables are.

Since then I use these kinds of 'completions' by using the extract variable refactorings, and various intent transformations - they added a syntax to existing tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> IntelliJ is great, but I personally have found this feature to be minimally helpful and non-intuitive. I hope others benefit more than I have. Perhaps I shouldn't knock it, but I think that the time could have been spent on more worthwhile efficitncy improvements.</comment>


Using Data to Help 125,000 Couples Get Pregnant and The Future of Wearables - <AUTHOR> http://techinboston.co/post/94111943666/gina-nebesar-ovuline

<comment><AUTHOR> Interview with Ovuline's VP of Product on what the future of health tracking and wearables will be, why she thinks there's big opportunities in Google Glass, and how she's helping to get more women into tech and engineering.</comment>


Study Suggests People Prefer Bing's Design To Google's, But Still Won't Switch - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/25/study-suggests-people-prefer-bings-design-to-googles-but-still-wont-switch/ <comment><USER2> What do you mean by "prefer?" It seems like people say that Bing is better in certain design criteria, but they still use Google. They use Google's design because it seems more familiar. That sounds to me like people prefer Google's design. I also suspect Google has tweaked its design to maximize this comfort and familiarity, so even if Google doesn't appear the slickest, they cultivate huge brand loyalty. Bing just feels generic, although nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just ask anyone who conducts taste studies for food companies: there's a surprisingly large discrepancy between what people think they enjoy and what they actually enjoy.

This study seems pretty well done, and there were some interesting findings I didn't expect. Still I find the idea of asking people if they would switch kinda dubious. At the end of the day, we just have to look at if they do switch.

<comment><USER4> I'd be interested in seeing the actual questions. The ones mentioned in the summary (how easy was it to find the shopping area? and others about the Explore Pane) seem biased towards Bing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even if I liked Bing, there's no reason why I should make the move and the trouble.

I use Gmail, Analytics, Adsense... so it's better to find search, all in one place.</comment>


Debuts at DEMO (34 new product photos/blurbs) - <AUTHOR> http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/03/0301_demo/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Where are all the startups doing news?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A few that stuck out to me:

Avaak - super-simple battery-operated webcams

CC:Betty - instant shared email spaces

GoView - Citrix's entry into easy screencasting

MyGuru - Symantec's entry into remote-desktops for casual computer support

Xandros Presto - a quick-boot linux with key net apps for laptops, even if they already have Windows

ShoutOUT - speech-to-text for iPhone TXTing</comment>


PidamosAlgo - The New Delivery Online for Latam - <AUTHOR> http://www.pidamosalgo.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice landing page, but I don't see any details whatsoever about what the site is or how it works.</comment>


App v/s Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.64notes.com/app-vs-business <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I really get what the author is trying to say by app versus business.

In terms of what Evernote (and Dropbox for that matter) did, there is a really simple term for this: execution. It is what separates those companies from their competitors in an industry that most probably saw too competitive. This video about Dropbox shows how they did it and I imagine Evernote's success story is no different:

[http://www.socrated.com/user_courses/226?content_item_id=168...](http://www.socrated.com/user_courses/226?content_item_id=1684)

<comment><USER3> I think I get his point. Not sure if app/business is the right terminology, but he's distinguishing between: building something "better" VS understanding how and why you will realistically win users/customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well said. I have been meaning to write a blog post about this but you beat me to it.

This applies to everything. How many times have you seen the 'dumbest' As- Seen-On-Tv-Gadget and think, ZOMG I could have made a better version.

Guess what, that one is selling like hotcake and yours won't. Some times it's not even about the problem/solution, sometimes it's about the market opportunity. Once it is exploited - especially ones that don't solve a problem - it is gone.

</comment><comment><USER5> More than app vs business it is idea vs execution. I say that because you might have an idea and build an app for it. The business prospects of it depend on the execution. On it's own no app or business is nonsense or brilliant, it is the execution that makes a difference. You can have the most tried and tested idea and execute it well by building the app and one day realise you have a business staring right in front of you. Especially in Consumer internet, the chances of someone setting off to build a business are lesser. What most people do is scratch an itch and sometimes that solution just works for everybody else. That is when you have a business. Not when you have mastered the art of selling to users. If that was the case every great business would have been made by the best of sales people. But as far as I know, Mark Z, Drew H, Sean P, Evan W are from from people who are good at selling. They are just great at executing.

</comment><comment><USER6> "in Evernote, but it's not convenient for writing. It's too cluttered and distracting for that."

To you. I think that is the key. You don't like it. But 5 million people do, apparently!

</comment><comment><USER7> > What is the problem that you are solving?

>> in Evernote, but it's not convenient for writing. It's too cluttered and distracting for that.

now, is the problem being solved identified or not? and can we skip to 'business behind it' part?

> And then sell the solution, I really don't have much to say about this since > I am also learning about this very part of the game.</comment>


25,000 People Sign Petition to Remove Aaron Swartz's Prosecutors - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-petition/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

<comment><USER2> Why not ask for an _investigation_ into her behaviour and its connection to the suicide instead?

I have little sympathy for prosecutorial overreach , but it seems somewhat ironic and counterproductive that she should face such harsh consequences without there being at least an attempt to establish the facts of the matter independent of the lynch mob that is now on her heels.

If we allege that she used her position to bully someone, we should at least not fall into the same trap ourselves.

<comment><USER3> _"Why not ask for an investigation"_

Lynch mobs have already done all the investigating that needs investigating.

Those grieving Swartz's death have my sympathy. Those fanning their natural anger to vengeance do not.

<comment><USER4> Looking at Carmen Ortiz's [track record](<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz>) of cases prosecuting involving corruption and organized crime, seems like this would be hurting one of the "good guys". No doubt she has enemies that must be gloating about the petition

<comment><USER5> Yeah, because the world is like a Batman comic, right?

When "good guys" screw up, they must take the same responsibility they ask of "bad guys". When "good guys" resort to bully or torture weaker opponents, they are as bad as anyone.

<comment><USER4> Well my point was simply here is someone with a good reputation. Perhaps it's worth understanding exactly what took place crying for revenge.

<comment><USER6> I definitely agree with that notion. I think the problem we're facing is that the general public at this time knows most of what was going on. She's had a good reputation to this point. But she finally picked the wrong person to make an example of. Prosecutorial overreach is a funny thing. In that, her career may have been built on it. If the number of previous people we're actually bad people, the same tactics would of been far more accepted. Since this was a clear abuse of her power, even if it's something prosecutors generally get away with. The idea of making an example out of her seems vengeful and almost hypocritical. But it's not without its grounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And thanks to the firebombing the petition's author has visited upon the English language, a government reaction to the petition will probably involve an immediate investigation of Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend.

<comment><USER8> Punk Rock Politics.

<comment><USER9> Punk Rock Politics?

<comment><USER8> Loud, angry, effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 34,995 and counting.

+50 in 30 minutes

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united- stat...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states- district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck)

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like Carmen Ortiz's husband is a douche, chiming in about the suicide on twitter to defend his wife:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/15/aaron- swart...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/15/aaron-swartz- husband-prosecutor-criticises)

</comment><comment><USER12> Petition to stop the witchhunt against Ortiz: [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/recognize- outstand...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/recognize-outstanding- work-united-states-attorney-carmen-ortiz/cWNlKfy7)

<comment><USER13> Total signatures on this petition: 1

Signatures required: 99,999

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And now they raised the threshold to 100,000

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57564203-93/white-house- rai...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57564203-93/white-house-raises- petition-signature-threshold-to-100k/)

<comment><USER15> Yes, but not for existing petitions:

"This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> there's a fine line between fighting bullying and bullying the bullies.</comment>


In July 2020, more visitors of Gov.uk used Safari (38.67%) than Chrome (38.18%) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1290218637400387584 <comment><USER2> Notably its visitors using Safari on iOS which has that 38.67% figure [0] and its more mobile users than desktop users in general [1]

[0] [https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1290218638788530176](https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1290218638788530176)

[1] [https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1290218641284243458](https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1290218641284243458)</comment>


Please tell us what features you'd like in www.hnwatcher.com - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> the only thing worth voting for would be a recommendation engine based on previous upvotes. i come on HN to explore articles, i'm not looking for specific keywords usually. but, my past voting history shows what type of articles i find interesting and getting notifications based on those would be nice. pricing would be a major factor as well, since HN works perfectly fine without a watcher.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good idea of service, but it is not the goal of HNWatcher.

The idea begin HNWatcher is to track keywords and users in order to: \- never miss an important news about your topic/startup/product/friend/blog/... \- upvote while the submission is not too old \- etc...

We also store the stories, so that you can find them whenever you need (hnsearch, running the search on hn, will give you only the last 1000 items). And we also track karmas of users.

About pricing: unfortunatly, hosting + emails ( via mailgun ) are not free, so at one point we will probably have to charge for the service if we have lots of users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Open new 'OfferHN' posts in a new tab for me, so I notice them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, not sure to understand</comment></comment>


Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html <comment><USER3> In October 2010, I authored my first Wikipedia entry[1] and it was immediately tagged for speedy deletion by an admin named Academic Challenger[2], a person who proudly proclaims "I have deleted over 10000 pages from Wikipedia that meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion." The problem is that he indiscriminately tags most articles for speedy deletion. As my article met the Wikipedia standard for "noteworthiness" I was determined to fight this abuse of power, which I did and through the help of another admin (who unsurprisingly was familiar with Academic Challenger) and restored the page, which is still up today and has been edited by many people who are not me.

Wikipedia clearly struggles with content review and creation, but it overall has been highly successful. The question seems to be, moving forward, how might maintain the ethos of Wikipedia in a changing world?

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Academic_Challenger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Academic_Challenger) Looking at the revision history, I do not see Academic Challenger's action in the logs of the talk page. Anyone know why?

<comment><USER4> Wikipedia admin here. Re your question, that's because you've accused the wrong editor.[1] :-)

Looking at the article at the time it was nominated,[2] there isn't much of an explicit claim to being notable under Wikipedia's policies.[3] However, it was nominated for speedy deletion all of seven minutes after you created it—pretty quick, something I never like to see for articles that fall into a grey area.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&diff=38...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&diff=388029379&oldid=388028975) \- the actual editor was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Terrillja](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Terrillja).

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&oldid=3...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&oldid=388028975)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credible_claim_of_si...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credible_claim_of_significance)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I have remembered incorrectly. I am far out of my depth of knowledge, so I defer to your information. Also please excuse my conflation of notability and "noteworthiness". As you can see and I think we can understand, as my first entry, I didn't know exactly how and what to do.

In spite of this, I have this distinct memory of AC being a problem, I will look through my change log (Tlow03) and see if perhaps the article was moved or renamed from my original attempt.

Also thank you for this clarification and you're right I think it probably was a grey area, but I do think the compound in question is a novel hand sanitizer that is the only of it's kind I know of.

DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation with the company at this time, a friend once worked there, but I do not and never have had any financial interest.

Update: Yes the "boom your contribution is gone and doesn't belong here" almost the moment you write it feels very hostile.

<comment><USER5> That post didn't look particularly noteworthy to me, but I remember creating a similar page regarding a casual wear company (called "Lost..." if I recall) that I got distracted with one time. I saw their logos in my local mall in every department store. I spent a lot of time researching and writing up an article on the company. Then it got deleted. Probably not particularly noteworthy either, even if at one time it was a national brand.

I also wrote up a thorough discussion of various kinds of permanent life insurance contracts (I was a financial advisor at the time, and I had spent a lot of time studying them, and wanted others to have that information). I think the bulk of my contribution managed to get redacted at some point, but it lives on in the version control, forever.

There's a lot of stakeholders to Wikipedia: the subjects of articles and their followers, hawkish community members who try to control new and changed content, and consultants who charge money to change the framing of subjects on the site.

As a result, pages tend to be flattering of their subjects, unless the subjects don't have a lot of followers who speak the language that the page is written in. And new pages are likely to be deleted unless you have the cooperation of community members who will advocate for it when you start focusing on something else.

Now I mostly write up Python on Stack Overflow, where I get credit for my answers in terms of valuable internet points, which reflects my reputation in the community.

Perhaps Wikipedia could learn something from Stack Overflow. But unfortunately, it looks like they have incentivized deleting content and creating value for subjects over creating value for readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anyone's interested I've got thoughts on how to improve wikis here: [https://housejeffries.com/page/4](https://housejeffries.com/page/4)

My main issue with current wikis is that if you make a contribution and it's deleted, it's gone from the web. I think that if you're making heavy contributions to a page they should start on a personal wiki and then be pulled into the main wiki "pull request" style.

That way if some over-aggressive editor deletes your work it stays on the internet, just on your personal wiki instead of the main site.

<comment><USER7> I think this is not going to work on any large scale. Say you are a domain expert in some tiny little plant on some tiny island. Like, you wrote your PhD thesis on that plant. Sure, this is not very 'big', but it merits inclusion into the Wiki. Telling people that want to contribute, that are the domain experts, that have read and debated all the sources of which they may be the definitive source, that they have to go figure out how to set up their own wiki somewhere and then try to figure how to 'pull' and 'push' things to Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis because of some bot's deletion bias is the best way to make certain that Wikipedia is only written by insane people.

<comment><USER8> The point is that the article is likely to be deleted, so if anyone sets up their own wiki it's a net win, since the information won't be deleted altogether.

<comment><USER7> I understand the point, what I am saying is that most of the contributors will have no idea how to implement this idea nor the technical chops to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://deletionpedia.org/](http://deletionpedia.org/) is a small project to cope with this in a positive way. A couple of years ago, when I was frustrated by deletionism once again, I wrote a bot that automatically copies articles that are about to be deleted.

<comment><USER10> My experience was that the prime criteria for deletion was that the Wikipedia editors be unfamiliar with the material.

1000 pages on Pokemon? Great!

2 pages on obscure technical subjects, of interest to tens of thousands of IT admins world-wide? Nah... get rid of it.

I stopped contributing to Wikipedia when my edits were nuked as often as they were made. When spammers and people making _negative_ contributions had their changes last longer than people making positive changes... well... Wikipedia is no longer of interest.

<comment><USER11> Wikipedia (with it's current edit culture) is an example of what bikeshedding looks like when scaled up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hm, I've been patrolling my only big contribution to Wikipedia, another niche article:

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

Woohoo, someone just made a nontrivial edit to it!

But other than that, it seems to be mostly flying under everyone's radar. I hope it doesn't get deleted, but it might for being too niche. If it does, I guess I'll have to find a statistics wiki to move it to. Most of Wikipedia's deleted niche content ends up migrating to wikia or similar.

<comment><USER4> It shouldn't get deleted—on a quick read, it looks like it meets Wikipedia's notability policy.[1] :-)

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

<comment><USER13> Historically, that's not much protection for a short article. The Deletionists largely won the war, and plenty of acceptably-notable articles get tagged with "en-encyclopedic" or other bases.

<comment><USER14> If you think the deletionists won, you should try hitting Wikipedia's "Random Article"[1] link a few times.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random)

<comment><USER15> This is like saying "well, our side lost 90,000 out of our 100,000 soldiers, but the fact that you can still find 10,000 soldiers on our side means the enemy didn't win!"

<comment><USER16> Depending on the objectives of the military engagement in question, the casualty count is not necessarily the determining factor when it comes to who "won" said engagement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article has since been restored. Look at the history and the copy-paste from a book:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&oldid=764679803)

How does an experienced user (he has 14k edits!) make an edit like that?

EDIT: TIL article history page is not necessarily accurate on deleted articles

<comment><USER4> Wikipedia admin here. The edits that added the copyrighted material have been deleted, so this diff[1] isn't exactly accurate.

That said, I've just fixed the history page so that the deleted edits actually appear, even if you can't read the material in them.[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&diff=...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&diff=764679803&oldid=740559466) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&action=history)

<comment><USER15> And yet this probably only happened because it was getting coverage.

I did my time as a Wikipedia editor. I've watched others do it, too. It's exhausting. You end up obsessively checking your watchlist multiple times a day, then every hour, then multiple times per hour, because you never know when someone will get you in their sights. And then you have to be prepared to obsessively watch talk pages and project pages and noticeboards 24/7 to be ready to come back in and copy/paste sources and arguments and the appropriate WP:IMEMORIZEDWIKISPEAK links over and over and over again to try to defend something. And even then you probably won't succeed.

Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it. The effort involved in creating and preserving a piece of worthwhile content is orders of magnitude higher than the effort involved in deleting it, and people who get stuff deleted also get rewarded for doing so, while people who create and maintain get comparatively very little recognition. Eventually Wikipedia will have only two articles, someone will propose merging them, and them someone else will speedy-delete the last one for breaking various rules. And that'll be the end of it.

<comment><USER18> Yep. I too tried to edit wikipedia, and then gave up. The experience was unpleasant and exhausting.

> Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it.

Oh yes. The smugness cannot be underestimated, and in some ways is the worst part of the whole process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A few points, as a sometime Wikipedian.

1\. Yes, Wikipedia has its challenges, there are flaws in the underlying assumptions of its originators, and it's not perfect. _But it is better, in general, than any other resource to date_ , and is widely transparent to boot.

2\. Conflicts over editorial content are nothing new, nor are they distinct to open collaborative projects. A few months back I turned up an instance from 1874, in which the British publishers, and American printers, of _Chamber 's Encyclopaedia_ had significant differences of opinion on a number of topics, including on the topics of free trade, (economic) protection, slavery, and biographical details of Elizabeth I and heirs. It's a rare in sight to the process.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/)

Another set of conflicts of which I'm recently aware concern Joseph Needham, biochemist and sinologist, whose research and writing were emperiled by his naive participation in what turned out to be a Chinese- and Soviet-led propaganda campaign. Documented in Simon Winchester's _The Man who Loved China_.

3\. I've authored or contributed to a number of Wikipedia articles myself. In some cases, particularly in noting the blatant disinformation campaigns of Koch Industries and Libertarian partisans in particular, especially on global climate change, I've been rather frustrated. I've originated a couple of articles. One, on the present NPR president Jarl Mohn, was slated for deletion on numerous grounds when I first submitted it. The result of working with other more experienced editors was a substantially improved and strengthened article which still stands. I'd created the article after being surprised to find it didn't exist at all.

Yes, camping out on and watching articles may be useful to avoid more serious disruption, particularly on contentious topics. And Wikipedia _does_ have a problem, _as does all media_ , on ideologically-tainted topics. No, the truth doesn't always win out.

But it does pretty well, all told.

<comment><USER20> > But it does pretty well, all told

The main problem IMHO is that it stands largely on inertia from a bygone era, the pre-2007 period where most of the existing basic content was put in place by a swarm of highly motivated volunteers with a few loose rules.

This is completely different from the current situation, where the bureaucracy has been ossified into a neverending rulebook designed to protect the precious content from vandals and good-willed naive newcomers, in the hands of a shrinking and overworked zealous user base.

The original drive that got the whole thing up is gone. The only regulars are equally split among inclusionists and deletionists, but by its very nature deletionism will prevail in the long term - it only takes succeeding once to get rid of an article forever, while people defending interesting content from removal need to keep an active watch and regularly spend effort in fighting for its survival.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the periodic outreach for donations on Wikipedia would be more successful if they earmarked some portion of the funds to identify and remove harmful volunteers.

<comment><USER22> .. and didn't fight net neutrality in 3rd world countries.

<comment><USER23> source?

<comment><USER24> Seriously? In addition to having been fairly big news, and having been covered and talked about on this website numerous times, it took me all of three seconds with a single generic Google search to get a high-profile news result that focusses on the issue. Knee-jerk challenges to source things should be limited to things that are at least slightly difficult to find sources for and which are also difficult to believe.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2014/11/25...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2014/11/25/wikipedias-complicated-relationship-with-net-neutrality/)

<comment><USER16> Not the GP, but while I'd give you credit for the "at least slightly difficult to find sources for" part of that, "difficult to believe" definitely applies (at least for the average person) when it comes to a claim that Wikipedia, of all organizations, acts deliberately to undermine net neutrality.

Not that you're wrong, of course; only that asking for a source for such a claim is by no means unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I watch topics that interest me, especially if i know nearly nobody else cares about them:

\- takes 2 seconds every day to check the list (on speed-dial, next to HN) \- 30 seconds to read a diff \- and 1 second to click 'undo' (or a couple minutes of research/learning for an edit)

What's nice, is that there is a dispute process that the community takes pretty seriously, and you can always ask for assistance. As another user pointed out, the article has already been restored :)

<comment><USER26> I find it ironic that the author of this article bemoans the incompetent wikipedia admin who deleted the article, yet she didn't bother spending the 30 seconds necessary to post a comment on the talk page.

Wikipedia works through volunteers, and if you don't bother giving up a little bit of your time to improve it, you don't really have any right to complain.

I see regular articles on HN prophesying the death of wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

<comment><USER27> Presumably, then, someone who bothered quite a lot and _gave up a lot of time to research and write the beginnings of an article_ very much _does_ have the right to complain.

<comment><USER26> Not if they didn't expend the 30 seconds of time necessary to prevent the deletion. It really doesn't take much effort...

<comment><USER20> The whole point of the article is that those 30 seconds (for reviewing the deletion request and possibly oppose it) need to be multiplied by the several thousands of stubs that are proposed for deletion every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wikipedia was the original fake news. For instance, someone might edit an article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the plughole. The entropic heat death of information.

I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are now disasters. Full of bowdlerisation, inconsistent style, and false snippets of information. I think the abusive nature of many Wikipedia admins, and the hostility of Wikipedia itself to knowledge, will eventually just make it a 4chan with pretentions.

<comment><USER29> Since the election I've seen pretty much every major news and reference information source disparaged as "fake news" by comments like this. It begs the question: if every major source is untrustworthy, if it's all a chain of lies all the way down, how does anyone know anything? Can those who have seen the light please point the rest of us to the untainted source of pure truth you've cross referenced against to confirm this?

It seems like there are plenty of people in the world who manage to act productively on the information they have, but maybe it's all just a big conspiracy - nobody has ever known a single fact.

<comment><USER30> Everything becomes much clearer once you realize that everyone is for themselves, and that includes mass media who report stuff in a way that increases the clicks and the views.

The majority of us have been conditioned to worry, actually worry, about stuff that we have absolutely no control nor expert knowledge. The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that order. Turn on the TV or open your facebook and you'll that the hierarchy is completely reversed.

<comment><USER31>
        The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our
        immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that
        order.

In response, I'm just going to quote Martin Niemoller:

        First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Socialist.

        Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

        Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Jew.

        Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Your approach rules out collective action on any kind of scale that can change the direction of a nation. There are always concerns at the family and local levels. What we need to understand is that sometimes concerns at the larger levels (country, planet) that outweigh our local concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm far removed from Wikipedia's social/cultural realm and yet I've only ever heard negative things about the deletionist culture there. Is the deletionist rationale that fewer articles == fewer spots for vandalism to occur?

<comment><USER12> I think people had a hard time taking Wikipedia seriously when there were more articles about Wookie culture and light sabre colours than there were about chickens or water. So, the deletionist culture seems to be about pride, focus on the serious business so that Wikipedia can be taken seriously and have a better reputation.

<comment><USER33> Perhaps, but it's also a database and it doesn't really hurt anything. We can point at pretty much any article and find a strange influence of geek male culture all over the encyclopedia. "In Popular Culture" (which I think is now supposed to be removed from articles) all too often simply contained links to video games and obscure anime.

Personally, I find the shift to wikia troubling. Mainly because it came down from Jimbo to purge the articles and move them to wikia, which _ahem_ Jimbo runs and profits from.

<comment><USER34> "In popular culture" sections almost never add anything, yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Uh, I really disagree with this article's premise. The author identifies a page he added that was deleted, and his contribution was lost (on more than one occasion), and cites this as evidence of wikipedia's inevitable demise.

Though such inefficiencies are unfortunate, and discouraging, I think they only slow progress. I think evenutally an article on Hemovidin will be written and not deleted, and I wouldn't be surprised if most encyclopedias don't even have such an entry.

There is some clunkiness around wikipedia, but compared to academia (which almost everybody without journal access and fluency in english is restricted from reading) it's by far superior. In fact, I can't think of another better source of reliable information that is freely and widely accessible.

<comment><USER36> It's part of a larger trend described here that turn the site into what's essentially maintenance mode vs thriving with new content:

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of- wik...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/)

It might survive but not the way intended.

<comment><USER37> I've been reading "Wikipedia is about to die! Everyone is about to leave!" articles for almost a decade. It's still there. Similarly, the low-hanging fruit has already been done. Maintenance-mode was always going to be on the cards.

The centrepiece in TFA is about a two-paragraph, four-sentence article. It's a _terrible_ article, and should be rolled into another one. Any article that could be given in two tweets is a trivia-night factoid, not an article - <USER2> fundamentally disagree with TFA that it's "articles like this that make Wikipedia great". These kind of brief factoids are the type of content that shitty clickfarms have.

TFA even uses Britannica as a defense, saying that it has an article... but click on the link, and "Britannica does not currently have an article on this topic". Hemovanadin has, however, been rolled into another article - 'cell pigmentation'. Not exactly a sterling defense for the author.

\---

I always see this happen with these bitter predictions of WP's death. People are either complaining about disagreement on an obviously subjective topic (like a politician's bio), or their chain-of-evidence is suspect, like in this case.

Here are the stats: [https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_activity_levels)

Look at the blue columns - number of editors per month/quarter with 5 and 100 edits - and it's been pretty consistent since 2010. Yeah, the heady days of 2007/08 are gone, but again, low-hanging fruit.

<comment><USER20> > Similarly, the low-hanging fruit has already been done

That's a popular reply to criticism of the poor status of the Wikipedia community, but it's largely false for anything that is not an US-centric vision of popular topics on Western culture.

As I've written elsewhere, the toxic culture and ossified rules would make it impossible nowadays to bootstrap the collaboration efforts needed to fix the well-known biases in coverage. The same policies that keep the current content to crumble from bots and advertisers prevent us from regaining the original drive of the original writing effort.

> It's a terrible article,

That's how all articles in Wikipedia started.

> and should be rolled into another one. That's a non-sequitur. If it's a > notable independent topic, it should exist on its own, unless there are good > reasons why it should be included only as part of a larger article where > it's a natural fit.

Most often that not, there is no other place where that content would make sense as a section of a larger topic, so that mindset will ultimately lead to deletion of notable and well-referenced content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Wikipedia went from people writing an encyclopedia to people writing rules > about writing an encyclopedia, or writing bots to defend an encyclopedia, > but without enough safeguards to save content from deletionists.

Sounds like another example of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> This reminds me of the very insightful article "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths"[1] posted on hn a couple of years ago.

I'm not sure to what degree it can be mitigated, but it sure seems like something to account for when engineering social content communities.

[1] [https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops- sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

</comment><comment><USER40> i may have posted this before.

when i use to be active on wikipedia editing mainly video game and sports articles, i stumbled upon a large sockpuppet that was constantly adding incorrect pieces of information to articles pertaining mainly to video games, espn, wrestling. this sockpuppet had a very clear M.O. and did the same actions, and even if you made changes, the person would go about and revert them.

getting all these accounts for this one sockpuppeter was a huge pain in the ass though, and finally i was exhausted dealing with it, so the next best thing for me was to reduce the surface area he could troll around. so i began looking at articles he had created, there was an article about a nintendo ds bratz game. he had created the article, filled it with random information and had left it. so i nominated it for deletion since it wasn't really a notable video game.

now this was before deletionists were a huge thing on wikipedia. i myself am not a huge deletionist but at best this game is a small mention in an article about bratz merchandising.

but almost immediately a huge flood of people came in to say that it was a notable game, with links from ign.. they weren't actual articles about the game, just literally the computer generated page they had for the game.

i think i made a couple comments arguing why it didn't deserve to have its own page but in the end i just gave up. not worth my time when i was honestly trying to improve the quality of the site.

so i guess my whole point writing this is the problem isn't with deletionists, it's the entire bureaucracy of wikipedia. i remember going through arbcom so many times because people disagreed with me about how a video game article should be written. or how alicia keys birthday is incorrect (she was born in 1980, not 1981) but because _everyone_ references wikipedia and cites it as the ultimate source, you can never get it changed because people ACTUALLY monitor and turfwar her wikipedia page.

<comment><USER41> How would deleting an article he had created "reduce the surface area he could troll around?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Deletionist culture is also a big problem in the Gnome UI. For a long time they were deleting features like crazy. Same goes for Systemd.

I think people like deleting features because it's easy and seems like progress. It's a bikeshedding phenomenon.

The solution to this is to have a flexible module system so people can have their almost nothing "non-bloated" system and other people can have features. Same could work for wikipedia. You could have the core wikipedia and the alt hierarchy. It could work like usenet.

<comment><USER43> Its rampant across FOSS these days. People should from the hilltops how many lines of "old" code they have eradicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wikipedia should never have existed.

Encyclopedias exist to provide (a) access to information, (b) organisation, and (c) some guarantee of expertise. It's easy to take for granted how amazing it is to have a world of information at our fingertips, but the Internet itself provides greater access to more information than any encyclopedia ever could. (And of course Wikipedia deliberately eschews original content anyway.) We already have tools to organise and find information on the Internet: it's called Google. Or DuckDuckGo. Or etc. How much authority an encyclopedia has depends on how much you trust its editors to be, or be able to find, experts in the relevant subject matter. A search engine doesn't provide any guarantee of accuracy in its results, but then neither does Wikipedia — most people point out that it's up to you to follow the references and evaluate them. The things Wikipedia is good at are the things that the Internet itself is good at; and the things that the Internet on its own is bad at (e.g. vetting accuracy) is not something that can really be fixed short of turning into Britannica Online.

It's not quite that simple, of course. In theory, anyone can throw up a webpage on hemovanadin for the world to see, and it is relatively easy to do so, but it could be easier. What isn't so easy is collaborating — Wikipedia's greatest strength is also its Achilles' heel: anyone from anywhere in the world can contribute, constructively or destructively. But easier collaboration is a technical issue. There's no reason in principle that a centralised body should be required to manage all that. It's just that the availability and user-friendliness of the necessary software currently provide too much friction to ignore.

<comment><USER23> The thing that makes Wikipedia so special is the fact that the community strives to follow the guidelines they have set forth:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold)

I'm not saying that every Wikipedia article adheres to them, but generally speaking, the quality is good and bias is severely frowned upon. "Random" web pages on any given topic miss out on these guidelines and are generally non- collaborative.

Full disclosure: I'm a big fan/consumer of Wikipedia... absolutely love the philosophy behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wikipedia is a very useful resource for some things, especially as a starting point for a number of scientific and technical topics. I would never rely on it though, as a sole source of information.

<comment><USER46> what would,

you rely upon,

as your sole source of information?

<comment><USER47> Hacker news comments.

<comment><USER45> Truly not a bad answer, if you had to pick one source. This is a contentious crowd that likes to cite sources and present fully fledged arguments. At the very least I like to use the comments to quickly assess the article, and whether it's a dud or not. Beyond that, sometimes the comments here on good articles still manage to exceed even the articles they're commenting on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It seems that several of the WikiProjects that are currently being worked on are aimed at improving stub articles ("an article deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject"). From the screenshot of the article the author references, his article was a stub. My guess is that someone tried to improve it, thinking that a book's coverage would be deemed encyclopedic, then when it was deleted, the person who deleted saw that it had previously been a stub and didn't look further into it.

<comment> guard-of-terra It seems that copy paste from book and the insertion of copyright violation banner were made in the same edit. Why on earth?

<comment><USER4> I've just fixed the article history to make the sequence of events clear.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&action=history)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> He could post his deleted articles on his blog too meanwhile.

</comment><comment><USER50> In 2004, I wrote the first article about a well-known but not very popular brazilian singer in the portuguese Wikipedia. I spent the whole weekend on it, citing references, finding dates, listing albums, etc.

A few years ago I went back to find the article much bigger... but it was utter crap. The text was nowhere near unbiased, barely touched facts and seemed more like a bedtime story about flying saucers than a wikipedia article per se. There was more content indeed, but most data was obscured by something that didn't looked at all like an encyclopedia article.

</comment><comment><USER51> For exactly this reason I stopped contributing there. Flagrant admin abuse all over with their new speedy deletion tool.</comment>


How Gauss Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/curvature-and-strength-empzeal/ <comment><USER2> The author's point that "curvature imputes stiffness" conflates several different and distinct mechanisms, and offers an inadequate explanation.

For the examples of the pizza, the leaf, and the corrugated sheets, the stiffness is due to the fact that the bending moment of inertia of the cross- section increases when we fold the pizza or the sheet in a particular way [1]. The Theorema Egregium shows that such a structure can be made from a flat sheet of material, not that this construction imparts stiffness to the structure.

The example of arches show the well-known arch action in mechanics, where forces are carried through pure compression without any tensile stresses, which makes it appropriate for using stones to make the arch [2]. In principle, one could make a triangular "arch", i.e. part of a truss structure, where we use two straight rods joined together at the top [3]. This shows that its not really the curvature that is giving the stiffness.

The example of hyperbolic paraboloids shows arch action in one direction and beam bending in the other.

The examples of the egg and the can show that it is hard to break a surface when it does not have stress concentrations [4].

So the point is that there's a lot of classical solid mechanics at play here, of which the author seems to be unaware.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truss)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration)

<comment><USER3> This is silly. Every math textbook that teaches Theorema Egregium includes the same pizza example. That's how I learnt it as well. In my case we had an animated math professor who chose to bring a slice of pineapple pizza with canadian bacon to class, but during his demonstration the pineapples combined with the bacon and turned all gooey and started dripping on his shirt, so Theorema Egregium had to take a backseat to the practical realities of maintaining spotless formal attire in the classroom in front of a hundred giggling freshmen.

But seriously, this Theorema Egregium => Eating Pizza example is straight out of recreational math[1] & is very popular.

standard numerical geom text [2]:"In our everyday life we encounter the Theorema Egregium in a pizzeria..."

another riemann geom text[3]: "There is an interesting real-life application of Theorema Egregium...Notice that when you hold the pizza in one hand, the principal curvature of the crust is much smaller than along the direction of falling toppings."

third complex analysis text[4]: "Gauss defined Theorema Egregium in 1828. He defined principal curvatures to be maximum and minumum values k1 and k2...He then defined Gaussian Curvature K = k1*k2. k1 & k2 are not intrinsic but Gauss discovered K is intrinsic. Pizza has K=0 so we introduce a non-zero k1 forcing k2 to be 0 in order to preserve K because K is locally isometric. For this reason we bend the sides of the pizza to stop the free end from drooping"

[1][http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5450/cocktail-party- math](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5450/cocktail-party-math) [2][http://tosca.cs.technion.ac.il/book/index.html](http://tosca.cs.technion.ac.il/book/index.html) [3][http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/pz229/Teaching_files/GR.pdf](http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/pz229/Teaching_files/GR.pdf) [4][http://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Complex-Analysis- Contemporary...](http://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Complex-Analysis-Contemporary- Mathematics/dp/0821848097)

<comment><USER2> You can always roll up the slice into a cylinder with the crust on the straight edge, and that also is an example of the theorem. It says nothing about the mechanics of the problem, i.e. how much will the pizza deform. It is quite possible to fold up the pizza as recommended and still have the tip sag - this depends on the material of the pizza and the self-weight, i.e. the mechanics rather than only the geometry.

<comment><USER3> Tomato tomaato. You formulate equations of motion s = ut + gt^2/2 by essentially ignoring air friction. You formulate kirchoff's voltage law L(di/dt)+1/C(integral(i)dt) + iR = V, by ignoring voltage losses across the rest of the circuit. You formulate the heat equation du/dt = laplacian(u) by assuming no lateral heat loss across the rod. Almost all equations in stochastic calculus in finance make the assumption that trading fees are zero & there's an unlimited pool of equity derivatives so you won't move the market when you buy & sell. Including real-life considerations like weight of the pizza & the specific toppings it has & so forth only leads us away from the beautiful math that underlies this problem. As you know, Gauss was so thoroughly impressed by the theorem he called it "Theorema Egregium" \- the Remarkable Theorem! It is consistently voted one of the ten most beautiful theorems in geometry[1].

[1][http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1eoo1p/q_what_are_the_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1eoo1p/q_what_are_the_10_most_beautiful_theorems_in/)

<comment><USER4> Except the beautiful math of the theorum only holds if distances between points on the pizza remain constant, which is manifestly not true for real pizza in particular and real materials in general. Force applied to a pizza curved width-wise will cause it to curve length-wise, changing the value of K. The remarkable theorum predicts that the pizza will not bend regardless of the radius of curvature and length of the slice, however, in practice, insufficient curvature relative to length will result in failure. Thus, the remarkable theorum hypothesis of pizza strength is falsified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Oatmeal provides a very nice illustrated pics about the Mantis Shrimp and its killer claws [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp)

</comment><comment><USER6> I totally call bullshit on not being able to crack an egg. Next time I see an egg, I'm trying it.

<comment><USER7> I've done it before and found it surprisingly difficult but not impossible to break the egg. In order to break it, I had to put more pressure on the egg with my fingertips, which should probably be considered cheating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> More of an engineering problem that uses a bit of math. Unless you can state what the weight would be to cause the surface to collapse, you're just wanking off in math space.

See Second moment of Inertia (or area depending on who you talk to) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_area_moments_of_inerti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_area_moments_of_inertia)

</comment><comment><USER9> Dont the hyperboiloid chimneys have something with maximizing its surface? I think i remember sth like that from a course, but it is too far.... can someone confirm/reject?

<comment><USER10> A couple of years ago I got really interested in the shape of cooling towers after hanging out inside a couple of derelict ones. I couldn't find a solid answer as to why they are hyperboloids, and in fact not all of them are, but the most common explanations were:

1) the throat at the top could be the optimum shape for creating cooling via the Venturi effect

2) they can be built entirely with straight diagonal structural members, as each section of the Shukhov tower illustrates, but only the very earliest ones would have been made this way and they're certainly not any more

3) they were the only suitable shape that could be analysed on paper, before the advent of computer-based structural analysis

4) uniform structural stiffness with no particular points of failure, as in the above article

Even a thorough literature review from the period after some collapsed in storms was inconclusive... from the proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Natural Draught Cooling Towers: [http://books.google.com/books?id=6j5nuvAd44QC&pg=PA3](http://books.google.com/books?id=6j5nuvAd44QC&pg=PA3)

I highly recommend a look inside one, the acoustics and general enormity are quite something. Being inside an active one looks to be even more of something from these pictures: [http://www.foantje.com/active-cooling- tower/](http://www.foantje.com/active-cooling-tower/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> why oh why do I keep falling for wired linkbait. I didn't learn this from a mathmatician, the pizza just sluffed in my had the right way one time and it stayed.

</comment><comment><USER12> Huh, why does the original Wired article say "19th century math genius" instead of "Gauss"? Is Gauss really that unknown to Wired's audience?

<comment><USER13> Rules of Clickbait Headlines: never use one specific word where four vague ones, with at least one indicator each of antiquity, exulted discipline, and grandiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Next week in Wired: How Newton taught my dog to catch rubber balls.

</comment><comment><USER15> you know how i know you all are not from the northeast?

<comment><USER16> right?

"Best way" implies there are other correct ways. There is only one way to hold a slice - you fold it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> He used a knife and fork?

I found the article very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've noticed this article is amongst a growing trend of articles that purport to solve 'non problems'

From wired, no less.</comment>


PayPal Bans Major File-Hosting Services Over Piracy Concerns - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/paypal-bans-major-file-hosting-services-over-piracy-concerns-120710/

<comment><USER2> Has Paypal had a recent change of management? What's with this whole trend of censoring stuff at Paypal lately? Or are they just getting a little too arrogant being the main payment processor online?</comment>


Ask HN: Which tablet should I buy for aging parents? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Wow, no responses? I guess it depends what they will use it for. IPads are probably the easiest, could save some money with an older or refurbished model. Or get a cheap Kindle Fire tablet. Both are good enough for email, Facebook, and some basic gaming.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I think the concerns of the elderly is not exactly hn front-page stuff!</comment></comment>


Dropbox Apps Removed From App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112527627/dropbox-apps-removed-from-app-store/ <comment><USER2> For the curious, this was resolved in a new Dropbox SDK that didn't include any links to the Dropbox website

</comment><comment><USER3> old article. (may).

<comment><USER4> Yea, that plus the thing has already been resolved, the apps are back on</comment></comment>


Patch for Oil Spill is being deployed. No Time for Staging. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gIXWYBTpLtSayJtg41LKXpxSxVPAD9FHSPT80

<comment><AUTHOR> Could we fire off a bomb to rattle the ground where the hole is? Depending on the ground texture this might seal it.

Hey guys, this is a pretty big deal. If you guys come up with ideas to model / visualize the situation, and propose solutions, I'll contact the EPA and get the ideas out.</comment>


Spark 2015 Year in Review - <AUTHOR> https://databricks.com/blog/2016/01/05/spark-2015-year-in-revie.html <comment><USER2> Really interesting to see the offset of languages (probably largely influenced by Scala being the primary Spark language). Is there any effort to increase support for R?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author of the blog post here. Feel free to ask me anything about Spark.</comment>


Ask HN: feedback on my idea? Pull HN comment thread onto target blog post. - <AUTHOR> Like disqus, but collaborative sort of. Somehow pull the data from the HN comment thread onto the page of the post that it links to. Can't some JavaScript whiz whip up a demo in about 19 minutes? ;-)
EDIT expansion of idea:
Who knows, maybe even a service like disqus which provides embedded discussion, but instead it shows a curated list of back links to the page so people can go to check out where this is being discussed.
Maybe disqus could invert and provide an HN style page integrating all the discussions it is hosting round the web. <comment><USER2> The discussion is here because the community is here. Most websites do not have the ability to produce sufficient content to draw sufficient audience as to have it's own large community and the commenting that goes with it. Some of the current benefits of posting it to HN is that provides traffic. I find that I occasionally get comments directly on my blog when something posts to HN but the comments there are a bit different from the discussion here. So I think of them as being fundamentally different.

Managing a community is a job in itself and is fundamentally different from producing good content. I don't see this as a bug. It's a feature. Though I have started wondering if I should start putting a link to the HN discussion in the blog post. For now, I did recently add a page listing FPP-Worthy posts that generated real discussion and putting the HN links there. I am still trying to figure out what the hell I am doing and largely figuring it out alone since I have no mentor or similar.

</comment><comment><USER3> How would you have people comment? Would they need to log in to HN? If so, would you do all the cross-site authentication?

I'd be interested to see a sketch of all the things that need to happen to make this a genuinely useful thing. Simply pulling the HN discussion and plonking it on the page seems a bit too minimal, and a waste of an opportunity.

To the OP - how do you see it working? Have you thought about it at all, or was t an idle whim?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just an idle whim. Whilst jumping from HN to blog post again and again and again etc etc it occurred to me that the content lives one place, the discussion of that content another place. Maybe it's a commercial opportunity somehow for someone to reconnect distributed discussion around the net back to the page containing the content being discussed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The low-rent way of doing it would be to just iframe the HN thread, but a quick experiment in JSFiddle indicates that HN denies framing.

I don't think there's an RSS feed for the comments, so doing this would probably require some type of scraping.

</comment><comment><USER5> Scraping HN and building, say, a JSON blob out of a thread page wouldn't be difficult - if I can do it with curl and PHP then anybody can do it. My biggest concern though would be how HN itself would react to that - and of course if you want it to be more than read-only and completely seamless you have to do what essentially amounts to cross-site request forgery to make it appear the login and posting is being done on your site and not the other - and it looks like HN uses a csrf token in the form.

So probably the least painful way of doing it (apart from an official JSON API) would be to scrape the site periodically (not so quickly as to be banned, obviously) or use one of the existing services which acts as a proxy api, save locally to your own backend and then do whatever.

Personally though, I think it's slightly unethical, unless you're going to clearly mention that the content is coming from HN and you have their permission. What do they get out of you using their resources to lead readers away from their site, after all?

<comment><USER4> There might also be some copyright issues. When you post a comment on HN you're implicitly giving HN permission to display the comment on HN, but not necessarily granting permission to redisplay the comment on other sites of which you might not even be aware.

Godwinized example: most of us wouldn't want our names and comments displayed on, say, a Nazi site, especially if it looked like the comments were being posted directly on that site rather than being copied from somewhere else.</comment></comment>


Facebook to Offer Free Version of Its Slack Killer - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/04/06/facebook-free-slack-killer/ <comment><USER2> Yet another chat platform. Just what we need!

On the other hand I wonder if Slack will be able to live up to the expectations as the (enterprise) chat market is getting more and more competitive, with more and more big fish entering.

<comment> Mk-0 Yet another app/idea for Facebook to imitate.

What are some other Slack alternatives that are on the rise/worth checking out?

<comment><USER3> RocketChat ... [http://www.rocket.chat](http://www.rocket.chat)</comment></comment></comment>