Show HN: Courtside.me - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/myusuf3/courtside

<comment><USER2> I hope these keys are fake... [https://github.com/myusuf3/courtside/blob/master/courtside/k...](https://github.com/myusuf3/courtside/blob/master/courtside/keys/keys.py)

<comment><AUTHOR> Theses are old keys; I will have them removed from repository though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this concept a lot. NoFouls.com does something similar for basketball, but the regular games are never on there. It's always some guy trying to get a game by his house, emailing everybody in the city who is nowhere close to him. Hopefully this works out better. It's tough because most guys only know the times for one court. And so you'd need a lot of those guys to signup and post. However, there are some that make the rounds, getting those people as curators would be ideal. One guy I knew who did that went around recruiting for hoopitup tournaments to get the best teams and win $10k :).

<comment><USER4> Yea definitely. I signed up for NoFouls and found it to be of no use for me. A really good use for this type of app though is to find teammates for a rec league - especially in the winter weather; everybody has to play in a indoor league for soccer, basketball etc.

Problem is if you are not a sponsored corporate or church team, you are just a "free-agent"; you just get assigned and put on random teams. It'd be cool to pair people who are interested to sign up for a rec league team to figure out what kind of team they want to be in - kinda of like a "recreational sports speed dating."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great concept and very cool design! Two suggestions for improvement:

\- Let users play and organize before they have to log in

\- The home page was a bit confusing to me, as it didn't have a very clear distinct "call to action" (read "the big red fez" by Seth Godin to understand more about that, over 10 years old and still very relevant).

</comment><comment><USER6> You should lose the logins, it buys you nothing besides user friction which you definitely don't want at this stage in the game.

If you add an api I'll hook it up to impromptudo.

<comment><AUTHOR> if you look closely at the project there is an api already, keep an eye out in the wiki for api docs, coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been wanting something like this for my city for a long time.

The only problem for me is getting my not so tech savvy community to find/use this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont know; its pretty nice and user friendly. I am sure they are facebook too. it integrates with facebook and twitter. plus appeal to the athlete in them.

<comment><USER7> Facebook integration will definitely help. (I'm not on it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Once FB auth is working, double check that Facebook proxied email addresses don't break the app. Django's default email field is max_length 75.

<comment><AUTHOR> good catch; I would raise an issue so the maintainer can take a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Your web app looks great, congrats on getting it live!

We're tackling (pun intended) the same problem (it's an interesting one!) but from a mobile perspective and focusing solely on Soccer.

If you have an iPhone app and fancy giving it a try, you can grab the app (free!) from <http://www.ifives.net>.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should consider working with/pulling data from the Get a Game app. Their app sucks but they are doing a good job getting partnerships to pull in games from existing networks.

<http://techcocktail.com/get-a-game-app-2011-09#.TweHNZjaa2w>

</comment><comment><USER11> Just so you know: FB and Twitter auth doesn't work atm. Otherwise, it's a nice app.

<comment><AUTHOR> they had to be removed because the keys have been deauthorized. regular sign up should be working though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ravens Nest? This an Ottawa project? hehe. if so/add Ultimate as a sport. hehe

<comment><AUTHOR> yess!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love it, checking out the code so I can go ahead and see about hacking in my beloved "Hooverball" as a choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> excellent make sure to add icons and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is so cool. Thanks dude!

<comment><USER15> myusuf3: Beware; you appear to have been hellbanned from HN between 145 and 149 days ago. I can't figure out why, as you do not seem to have said anything objectionable in that time. This means that none of your submissions or comments in that time -- including your reply to this comment -- have shown up to anybody (except users like me with showdead enabled.) You can probably appeal the decision to pg; or you could just create a new account.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will let him know. how do you go about appealing the decision?

<comment><USER16> email: email@example.com

I was once hellbanned for 4 days, for no reason (they said it was a mistake). I was reinstated by sending an appeal to that address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome project!</comment>


How / where should I host a static site? - <AUTHOR>

I'm planning to move my site a static site generator (probably Jekyll) sometime in the near future.  I'm starting to think about hosting options.  My top requirement is for the host to be fast and reliable.  I'd also like to have great customer service in case any problems arise.  Beyond these factors, I'd like it to be as affordable as possible.  I'd love to hear your thoughts...<p>While we're on the topic, any suggestions around hosting of media assets would also be of interest to me.  Should I host these on the same server or would it be better to host them on a separate asset server?  What are the performance, reliability and cost concerns involved in this decision? <comment><USER2> i use heroku. Lots of markdown/ruby based frameworks to help you out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Geocities.</comment>


Public, Market Moving Data From the Fed Given Early to Private Investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4434.html#Update

<comment><AUTHOR> This link contains evidence that the Fed's FOMC statement released yesterday that pushed the markets significantly higher was available at speeds faster than the speed of light to some investors, implying that certain data providers had early access to the FOMC statement.

The scandal is over why private investors should have early access to publicly (i.e. taxpayer) funded data.</comment>


Virtual Environments Demystified - <AUTHOR> https://meribold.github.io/virtual-environments-9487/ <comment><AUTHOR> As someone that hasn't been using Python while the concept of "virtual environments" emerged I've always found how many tools for managing them exist confusing. Eventually I tried to just create a virtual environment without using any of those tools, which turns out to be pretty straightforward, and wrote a short article about it.</comment>


Ask HN: Keybase.io Invite - <AUTHOR> Hi, Does anyone maybe have an extra keybase.io invite code? I'd really like to try it out. <firstname.lastname@example.com> <comment><USER2> I would really need one? Could someone send me to marazzi.axel at gmail?:)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sent! I have 8 more if anyone is interested

<comment><USER4> I would really appreciate one: martin dot clausen at Googles email service

<comment><USER5> let me know if you still need one

<comment><USER6> I would greatly appreciate one. Been waiting ages and it seems joining without an invite is either impossible or taking longer than I have the patience to care for.

Although, to an extent, I feel this does harm the Web of Trust when people hand out invites to random people. I feel since I am not a name - merely a pseudonym - that who I actually am in real life is not a problem. Making it easier for people to confirm I am who I say I am is beneficial.

Email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you lxfontes!</comment>


Content Moderation at Scale Is Impossible; Naughty Kids in Wuhan Edition - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200308/22180044058/content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-naughty-kids-wuhan-edition.shtml <comment><USER2> Omnipresent content moderation is never the immediate goal even if it's on the wishlist. Censorship is about targeting a group enough to negate their momentum, sometimes it's rebellious citizens (China), sometimes it's child predators (everywhere), and sometimes it's metrics that conveniently correlate with the opposition (hatespeech against Republicans, transphobia against black comedians, family values against Democrats). The irony is that you can't even count on past beneficiaries of censorship protections (LGBT community, African Americans, the silicon socielities post-crypto wars, assorted denominations of Christianity, the ACLU, etc.) to protect them. After people win in the arenas that matter to their cause the ladder stops being valuable and it becomes more useful to silence critics who might slow you down.

Edit: Oh yeah, and the press who quit caring about championing speech rights when the internet started killing them.</comment>


The ambulance dilemma: Making the decision to call for one in the US - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/6109cf5f0262

<comment><USER2> Go to hospital emergency room with unbearable migraine headache b/c no over- the-counter pain killers work anymore... Get $4000 in medical bills in mail a couple of weeks later. What does $4000 get you there? An saline i.v. and a spoonful of morphine. Probably cost $2 in Afghanistan.</comment>


JavaScript features - <AUTHOR> http://js.codu.org/wiki/

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no Array.indexOf in IE 6 and 8, LOL. Thank god for Prototype and jQuery.</comment>


New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/06/striking-new-research-on-inequality-whatever-you-thought-its-worse/ <comment><USER2> This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_\(book\))

The point is that families transmit _something_ across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays faster).

How can the OP author honestly suggest conclusions about what this means for America without contrasting with Europe, and the known hypotheses? Indeed, Clark argues that multi-generational economic mobility is remarkably constant across vastly different political and economic systems.

<comment><USER3> It's genetics, why is this such a mystery? The whole point of evolution is that you pass on good traits. When people do well, they pair with other people who are good genetically, and through the generations, their children do well. Why is this such a mystery?

<comment><USER4> It's not only genetics. Parents who do well know how the system works and pass that knowledge on to their children. Children who come from poverty have a lot of learning to do and it's hard to do this without role models.

<comment><USER5> The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated.

One of my best friends who is very intelligent and successful came from a working class family that didn't emphasize sound personal finance education to say the least.

He kept his savings in HS in his "sock in a drawer" account.

I came from an upper middle class family that was the opposite. I was given a share or two of stocks for birthday gifts sometimes (often at my request instead of toys) when I was young to educate me on their value and was taught from a very young age to invest, save in a bank, build credit, and live below my means.

While my friend is doing well financially, you can perhaps guess at how much of his money is invested vs mine.

This story plays out in numerous other ways that also can lead to compounding effects with things like education, health, criminal activity, etc.

These things are picked up on by children from all parts of the family. If your family generally has their act together, knows how to be smart with money, etc. there's probably a good chance of that rubbing off on kids which sets them down a certain path in life that might be very different otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Did you want to say "The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated?"

<comment><USER5> Doh, thank you for the catch and pardon my sleep-deprived typo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth. Things weren't much better for the middle class: Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.

Maybe I am a bit confused, but isn't 20% the exact right amount to move into the top fifth?

<comment><USER7> This is the problem with using a relative measure rather than an absolute. There can only ever be 20% of people in each relative quintile, but the percentage of the population above and below a given wealth line can change dramatically. If through some social magic, everyone was elevated above the poverty line, you'd still have a lowest quintile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a crazy thought that's illegal to think nowadays. If you want to avoid crazy, illegal thoughts, please stop reading.

Maybe - just maybe - we're not all equal cyphers at birth like we learned in school. Maybe _genes_ are part of the reason a successful person's daughter is successful. Maybe important character traits are heritable. Maybe the 20+ years we spend being raised is less consequential to our character and intelligence than who mom and dad chose as partners.

For example: IQ is highly heritable, and IQ is positively correlated with income, employment status, military rank, having a "socially desirable" job, etc. [1] Perhaps other traits are similarly heritable and correlated with the attainment of traditional markers of success.

Studies like this one on inequality are common - and useless. They ignore the genetic confound, the possibility of genetic influence on the object of study. In this case, why not look at identical twins of rich and poor parents who were raised apart in different environments?

My own suspicion is that our social rules play some role in inequality, but genes play a much larger role than is commonly accepted.

[1] [http://www.gwern.net/iq](http://www.gwern.net/iq)

<comment><USER9> This sounds like a testable hypothesis -- that the effects of genetics should be separable from the effects of upbringing via twin and adoption studies. In fact, I'd wager it's already been done.

<comment><USER10> From what I understand many twin studies _have_ been done, and generally they indicate a much stronger genetic effect than is generally thought.

But because these kinds of findings are so sensitive and have a long history of being abused, there's a tendency to downplay them or at least avoid discussing them. Maybe even a (slight?) tendency to avoid further research.

But please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of my thoughts on the matter come from one of Steven Pinker's books and I've never done a thorough review on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top > fifth over the course of their lives.

In an equal system, the middle fifth would be expected to migrate into any of the other four fifths equally. Which means _exactly 20 percent_ of them would head into the top as often as 20 percent would head into the bottom.

This is almost identical to the notorious Manager's Complaint: that 40% of sick days are Mondays and Fridays, insinuating employees aren't really sick because "so many" of them extend the weekend. But with a perfect random distribution of sickness (which is an acceptable assumption), precisely 20% would be on Monday and another 20% would be on Friday.

</comment><comment><USER12> _"...suppose you have a banker whose son decided to become a poet, surrendering a huge income in favor of a more fulfilling career._

 _" If you just looked at the poet and his daughter, you might think that economic mobility is alive and well in America -- she probably makes a lot more money than her father does. But actually, the daughter might be drawing on much older, preexisting family resources – such as financial resources, personal connections, or knowledge about how Wall Street works from her grandfather – that make it easier for her to become a banker than it is for the average kid."_

This sort of thing sounds like a plausible explanation for what happened in America during the 60's and 70's, when there was a huge social movement that rejected the materialism and self-centeredness of earlier generations. But then starting with the 80's, most everyone seems to have gone back to trying to make as much money as possible and "looking out for #1" (themselves).

</comment><comment><USER13> why does the article never consider IQ to be a factor in success? in almost every success story that i come across, the story is about someone who is obviously very smart. and rags to riches stories, stories where a successful person bootstraps him or herself out of an impoverished family, almost always begin with accounts of their gifted childhood.

also, is it not obvious that social mobility is fucked? without unskilled labor, you need capital to get a nice job _or_ start a business.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is inequality over generations.

If you seek to remove this, you remove one of the main reasons to strive for success, the means to pass down success to your children.

I don't understand what this study is advocating. Government run orphanages that raise all children so that nobody gets an advantage?

<comment><USER15> A study doesn't necessarily have to advocate a solution - it can just bring attention to a problem.

<comment><USER16> Is it a problem?

<comment><USER17> Yes, poverty is a problem, more so the seeming fact that people yet to be born is condemned to poverty.

<comment><USER14> The study mentions nothing about poverty, just how educational levels seem to be preserved across generations.

<comment><USER18> It's about social/economic mobility and inequality. Poverty is very relevant here

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure it is. If 100% of the population is above the poverty line, how much does mobility matter?

Similarly, if 20% of the population is always below the poverty line, zero sum mobility means that for every person rising out of poverty, someone else sinks into it.

I think the metric we should focus on is reducing poverty.

<comment><USER14> Even homeless people these days live better than Aztec kings a thousand years ago.

To be facile, if you want to reduce poverty to zero, merely reduce the poverty threshold to zero - as long as you're alive, you're not living in poverty.

Based on standards of living, nobody in the United States right now compared to the rest of the world throughout history is living in poverty.

<comment><USER16> I don't really agree with the claims made in your comment. idrios has a decent rebuttal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is anecdotal in some ways but I think some of my observations can be generalized and observed consistently as I've moved to various places.

I have (not a graduate degree but a Bachelors) a degree in Engineering from a top Private University but neither of my parents or their parents even graduated from highschool, much less went to college. I loved to read and learn from a young age, made straight As and thought Engineering would be cool because I liked math and Science but I knew being a Scientist meant long turn around times for learning cycles and now I do software dev because, learning cycles are fast! and I enjoy it, alot.

My parents lived in a trailor park, both druggies, I eventually got an academic scholarship to a private school while my Brother failed out of highschool. My dad has been in and out of prison and my mom would be at home drunk meanwhile I'm going to school day to day with kids who drive beamers to highschool and parents land helicopter to their kids crew meets.

It has been a bizarre experience to be able to be friends with people from my hometown in trailor parks who go to church and walmart and have babies at 17 (basically all of my cousins) and also know and become intimate and working peers with "the super elite".

I want to make a disclaimer that Yes, I acknowledge that some people start off in worse situations and that should be accounted for. This is not an opinion about who deserves what and what is fair and what is not. It's about observing issues people have when they are poor.

When it comes to trying to calibrate and be fair to historically economically disadvantaged ethnicities and demographics, the Government sucks at that.

My dad is full blood Native American (I'm half, and for those of you wondering already. nope. I did not put it on my college application, I left it off and wanted my perfect SAT Score and 3.986 unweighted GPA to be enough to get me into my dream school, and it was).

Welfare and closed off land for Native communities feels (and yes I say feel because I've LIVED in these places) more like a closed off culture for self perpetuating destruction from what I've experienced and also continued to witness from my extended family and their lives.

Issues of proper ways to calibrate disadvantaged people aside. Debates about whether people can get out of those situations and whether some deserve to be there aside.

For all people who are really poor in America, whether fair or right or how they got there, I've noticed that poor people across the board tend to have the following issues:

1\. Their economic neediness attaches them to other economically needy people to pool resources like ride sharing, furniture, food, childcare. Therefore, their social networks are closely linked to other needy people. If one person becomes less needy, the balance is offset, people notice and immediately try to maximize the other persons resources because they can benefit greatly from it, obliterating the gains the increased wealth could be used to invest in more long term purchases to set that person up for a more stable life.

It can be done, but usually requires being a black sheep and experiencing an extreme amount of social isolation.

We already know strong social networks correlate with less depression so this creates an incredibly hard to document relationship when it comes to someone breaking out of their network of other economically needy people.

2\. They don't realize this is happening. People who are the most self destructive tend to not realize when they are engaging in self destructive habits and with self destructive people. If this is how you grew up, it's hard to understand you deserve to be treated better, and that there are more productive ways to sooth yourself through stressful situations.

3\. It is not rocket science for me. I know firsthand there is alot of unintentional emotional manipulation from people who feel threatened by someone else doing better. If you are born to an economically needy and codependent family in an economically needy and codependent community who exists by pooling resources because they are caught in a cycle of being desperate to meet basic life needs and self soothing with instant gratification that is self destructive, it is hard to take increased wealth, keep it to yourself or use it for the good of the community to invest in long term benefits for yourself and the people around you.

4\. Investing in education is hard when you are poor, and trying to overcome the learning curve that other more privileged kids around me took for granted like connections to elite companies and institutions, having a dad who was an Engineer help you with your math homework, having a family who stays healthy and has healthy habits, took even more time.

When you are poor, being broke, dealing with stressful relationships and maintaining social connections to people who need you economically takes up time, time that you have even less of when you are making up for the learning curve just to calibrate to the elite.

Most people cannot overcome this even if they try because the emotional and cultural imprisonment, intentioned or not, can be soul crushing, and the guilt tripping associated with "thinking your better than everyone else" forces people in these intermediate situations to "choose sides" and some people don't make the best long term decision for themselves here.

For me, I moved far away for college, and have consistently relocated myself and each time associated with smarter people more aligned with my goals. If I still lived in my hometown and had people whose lives are going poorly around asking me for favours and wanting me to come to family events all of the time, I would not be as successful.

You want to believe that everyone will work as hard as you to make their lives better but the truth is alot of people are scared, don't believe in themselves and American poverty is comfortable enough that its easier to surround yourself with other people in that situation than experience the soul crushing isolation of trying to make yourself better without the full support of your community while also entering into a new community and trying to overcome the inferiority complex.

I'm a female Engineer Age 26 and now I make 6 figures, almost done paying off student loans, which were steep going to a private university, don't tell my family how much I make, live far away from them and am doing freelance software on the side outside of work, working 70hours a week to make passive income and invest more in software and bring those skills back to my niche industry so I can increase my salary even more.

Alot of people tell me "all you care about is money". No, you obviously have never lived on food stamps, lived with a single working mother whose father is in prison, and been sent to live with aunts and uncles when your mother couldnt afford to have you. Being broke is stressful and all consuming and forces you to be dependent on other people who are stuck on making short term economic decisions because they can't save up enough (for whatever reason, legitimate or lack of planning or putting in enough effort, stress, too busy working long hours at min wage etc) to invest in a better life.

Screw you. It's not about the money, its about creating a stable life so I can invest and focus on what I love to do. If I love what i do and I invest in that, I'll get a job doing something I really like, and I will be good at it and want to spend my time doing that, and I'll have the opportunity to work on big problems that help alot of people, and I won't be distracted by my lack of ability to take care of myself or pay my bills.

I've had fake hipsters who are Art Majors "living at home" buying a $5 latte not realizing what an economic luxury it is to sit a coffee shop and "contemplate" life, tell me all I care about is money has never really been poor, and thinks backpacking and asking people for money here and there is a cool socioeconomic experiment (that can be cushioned by crashing at your parents house when it doesnt work out), has idea what they are talking about.

<comment><USER20> This is an incredibly interesting story. I haven't been through nearly anything as bad as you, but my insight onto the issues of my family were similar - poverty and lack of knowledge and hard psychological issues. Because our society doesn't consider (yet) psychological issues to be "real" in the sense that any other illness is, we get this dumb talk about how "you can get out of it if you want". Yes that might be true, and you are the proof of it. But there is a huge denial going on in our society about how psychology actually works and how bad it can really get before you get marked as a "clinical" case. Society is bleeding people to cure them, to make the analogy with an old medical practice that we now know is insane.

<comment><USER19> Yeh, I think people underestimate the power of influence and people do not correlate it or study cause and effect enough in studies.

The influence your community has on your personal decisions and how that impacts your personal wealth is significant.

Weve already witnessed highschool suicides tend to happen in clusters. Weve witnessed it as a nation at Gunn Highschool in SanFran and other areas. If one kid does it, the two others who were seriously considering it are more likely to follow through.

This is also a root cause of the housing foreclosure crisis. Wired Magazine did a piece. One of the missing pieces of analysis was the correlation noticed when one person on your street forecloses on a house, how much the likelihood goes up that other people on your street will too. They retroactively did that analysis and found a huge correlation.

We should do this type of correlation in alot more studies, particularly ones dedicated to trying to understand socioeconomic mobility.

I say correlation because correlation is not causation. The causation we can't know right away but it might be helpful to first look at some significant correlations and then try to understand if there is a cause and effect relationship. Or at the very least come up with some likliehood statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this headline not the very definition of scare-mongering? I'm all for a rational discussion of inequality; but my experience with similarly-titled articles suggests I will find just the opposite therein.

<comment><USER22> _"...conventional measures of immobility, which just look at parents and children, have underestimated mobility by 20 percent compared to looking at three generations or more"_

20 percent of anything is a pretty big difference. If the study has merit then the news could be called "striking".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No surprise in social mobility being unequal, but isn't years of education a poor measure to go by in the first place? They also mention 5% of the bottom 1/5th making it to the top 5th and 20% of the second fifth making it to the top fifth. Wouldn't a better measure be to feature the % of people that move up at least one fifth? That would tell a completely different story

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone have a link to the complete study?

I would love to know how they link 3,4 And 5 generations, being an amateur genealogist.

Speaking personally, Family pressure to obtain degrees came from gggGF. But "women don't go to college." meant the females went only After their mother paid. (And could). Marrying "up" was the only obvious decision looking back on female members of our tree (from 1853-1946)

<comment><USER25> There is a link in the article - [http://www.nber.org/papers/w22635.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w22635.pdf)

Seems like they used a PIK number created by the census bureau to track individuals and same address to create parent-child link.

<comment><USER24> Thanks. But I got a denied Access.

What is a PIK?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A diverse society over time will converge to where people's abilities are.

As t -> infinity, social mobility -> 0

<comment><USER26> Is "ability", or market value, static over time? I don't think it is, wrt both an individual's ability to change learn and grow (short term), as well as natural changes in the market (long term).

This doesn't disprove your statement--social mobility can still go to zero-- but I think it's something that people can, should, and do strive to make as large as possible, be it individually, through legislation, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://paulgraham.com/sim.html](http://paulgraham.com/sim.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> The irony of WashPo publishing this article when Bezos has been under fire for near-servitude conditions in AMZN facilities for years, is palpable.

It's common sense that certain people are predisposed to learning certain fields quickly, especially given a family tradition.

I mean, consider a family where the husband is a carpenter. Then, one day his son decides that he's going to be a carpenter, but his dad has retired so he find another carpenter to apprentice under. That very same day, the carpenter actually hires another apprentice from a family of bankers. Which apprentice would be MOST LIKELY to become the superior apprentice, learn quicker than the other one, complete more satisfactory work, etc?

Multiply that by a hundred years or so, thousands of industries, millions of families, and there it is. Maybe the banker-family-apprentice has a knack for it, and becomes a carpenter one day. If he sticks with it long enough, surely he'll figure the work out. That's what mobility is all about anyways, being able to adapt to new circumstances.

I don't really buy in to this idea that there's shame in coming from a family that has done well. Now, this is from someone (me) who comes from a "family" that has done very poorly, and I've done sorta kinda good. The banker- apprentice has as much chance and opportunity to become a carpenter as the other one, since they were both chosen in the first place.

Knowledge isn't some heirarchical weapon that only the privileged elite can obtain.

 _" – such as financial resources, personal connections, or knowledge about how Wall Street works from her grandfather – that make it easier for her to become a banker than it is for the average kid."_

What about the library? The NYPL SIBL has an entire section of FREE textbooks. You want to learn about Wall St? Free. You want to take the series 7? Free. You want to take the series 66? Free.

The phrasing of "surrendering a larger income to write poetry" or whatever it was, is some sort of prose gymnastics that I think is trying to imply that people are "destined" to become poets, and that there's some boogieman to point the finger at and scream about inequality. If you wanna get rich, maybe you should think twice about writing poems. If you want to create art and have some sort of impact on the social sphere, maybe you should think twice about sacrificing your life for FINRA's sick amusement, - I mean premiere regulatory excellence.

Anyways, this was an OK article. I chuckle whenever I see WashPo trying this pandering to try and convince ambitionless people it's the rest of the world's fault, somehow.</comment>


Andrew Chen: Is your site really viral? Viral Branding versus Viral Action - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/06/viral_branding_.html <comment><USER2> you are so awesome and viral.</comment>


Hitting the Sun with Nuclear Waste - <AUTHOR> https://datagenetics.com/blog/september22020/index.html <comment><USER2> This article is like a joke that never reaches the punch line. The author does, in one sentence, mention the physically important fact "you must cancel the tangential part of the velocity (almost) completely" but never bothers to say what the delta-V of that mission really is, what kind of enormous mass ratio is required.

Instead there are pictures of real spacecraft with science-fiction-movie visual effects.

We'll either be telling our grandkids that we used to have a world wide web but we lost it because of content marketing like this, or we'll build a culture that sends this junk into the heart of the sun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that the article should have gone into the details, but I take issue with how you immediately dismiss this as "content marketing" and "junk". This is a genuinely lovely blog, worthy of more attention than it gets.

<comment><USER2> Honestly I am withering under the assault.

Until last week I was using Bing instead of Google, but they just did an update to bing that removes real sites ("Grid layout css specification") and replaces them with content marketing sites. ("Here is a garbled explanation of three properties involved with CSS grid layout with injected factual errors and lots of folksy talk about warren buffet and 'your' smart phone")</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Interactive device control from a browser - <AUTHOR>

I just launched a landing page for my startup CNTRLLR.
http://cntrllr.com
In a few words, CNTRLLR is a new open platform for device control. Its similar to what you can do with AMX and Crestron except that our platform is built using web standards so apps run directly in the browser. We are working on a low cost hardware controller along with the system software.
We are still working on the product but we want to gauge the market interest and start collecting emails from potential customers and anyone interested in joining the project.
I'm looking for feedback on the landing page and any advice from anyone with experience at this early stage. <comment><USER2> The hardware is the tricky part, has always been the tricky part. $20 a node is cheap for these things - in some cases, unrealistically so. "Control everything" is that with a big multiplier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just signed up. Love the "try it" feature on the landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I figured the best way to explain the concept is to give an example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Signed up too. Love the idea</comment>


RxDB – a real-time database on top of PouchDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> The concept or RxDB, being able to iterate observables of your change stream, is great. Centering on schemas and typescript is as well. The broadcast channel based leader election also solved the common issue with Pouch where you can't respond to real-time changes and update your UI if a separate tab was watching too.

It's wise of them to also support pulling data from GraphQL. I built the first version of NoteBrook on top of couch/pouch, and the biggest pain points were:

1\. Pouchdb was before async/await and typescript. The typings can be inconsistent, and it's very difficult to properly manage the lifetimes of local databases because of the promise chaining.

2\. A database technology for Real time replication Needs ACLs on a per- document basis. I built provisioning scripts to manage separate databases per user, as suggested, and it's very cumbersome. It prevents me from lots of data sharing models like promoting one record to public view, or sharing a record with another user in a different tenant.

3\. Personally I feel that the naming / marketing of the product is poor. It does not feel professional ( couch, futon, fauxton, pouch, couchbase) do not feel like professional grade products I can depend on to run a business.

I think it would be good for RxDB to support its own backend technology and move away from PouchDB, and in the meantime, de-emphasize the relationship with PouchDB. The RxDB product doesn't require you to use PouchDB and at this point it's got a lot of buzz around it and doesn't need that tie to PouchDB to continue.

I feel an ideal library would offer a real-time and offline client db, user auth, and billing, tied to a backend database of my choosing (eg. Postgres, MariaDB). The data layer should allow me to specify the durability requirements of each write (down to the specific entity type) and enforce an atomic commit on all related records in one transaction at the level of the most strict entity in the commit. It should be trivial to shard because the syncing protocol the clients use itself should be available to the server. Multitenancy should be built in. It should support real-time ephemeral in memory data for collaboration/chat scenarios, with optional durability that's eventually consistent. Schema definitions and migrations should be built in to the product.

If you have similar ideas and are interested in working with me on this project, or hearing more, drop me a line.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the long term plan is to move away from pouchdb. Before the last major release [1] I decided to make RxDB useable with other frontend/backend databases but then found out that I first should refactor some pain points.

[1] [https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb/issues/1636](https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb/issues/1636)

<comment><USER2> That's great to hear! Are you pubkey? If so you should put that in your profile!

I hope you know that I think RxDB is a great lib and going in a good direction! I recommended it to the Supabase team a couple weeks ago. I am less long PouchDB, it feels like an old generation of this tech and not the best way to solve these problems in 2020.

<comment><AUTHOR> I updated my profile. I do not know supabase, is it similar to hasura? They spend quite some effort [1] to make the RxDB graphql replication working with their backend. Maybe supabase can use a similar wrapper over GraphQL.

[1] [https://hasura.io/learn/graphql/react-rxdb-offline- first/int...](https://hasura.io/learn/graphql/react-rxdb-offline- first/introduction/)

<comment><USER3> Cool! I was just thinking that RxDB + Hasura would be pretty nifty for an offline-first MVP and here the legwork has already been done :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks amazing. I always loved how Rx composes with IO on the client side, this looks like the missing half. I hope it survives.

For people who are soon to be choosing a stack for their projects, please be careful. In 2015, we adopted RethinkDB which had very similar ambitions as RxDB and was open source. Unfortunately, RethinkDB is now abandoned (kinda). Many promising subscribe-able databases are still experimental. If you are thinking long-term, you may want to consider more boring options.

<comment><USER5> Subscribe-on-update databases are, almost by definition, problematic to use at scale as a generic storage solution. The fundamental problem is that they do not solve many real world problems efficiently enough to warrant the significantly higher running cost. Of course there are exceptions but it'll be hard to launch a MongoDB type of product that uses a subscription only model (see Firebase RTDB and its problems and lack of adoption in this space)

The reason developers gravitate towards subscription/rx based paradigms is because it results in very clean architecture and code. Unfortunately it comes at a cost which increases rather than decreases per client/user when volume increases. Some companies or projects can absorb that cost but not all, and typically less so when the project or its userbase grows.

A subscription based model will do work whenever data changes for each subscriber whereas more traditional pull based architectures only do work when a client specifically needs the data. This can be mitigated to some extent by being micromanaging subscriptions but that kills most of the value of the model.

There are also plenty of issues with this model if multiple clients are allowed to write to the same data which every single example project seems to try and do. There's a reason master-master updates, consensus algorithms and CRDTs all come at significant cost. It's usually hard. And when it's easy you probably don't need it subscribe-on-update in the first place.

<comment><USER6> I think you're oversimplifying it. I was on teams that participated in architecture design for this stuff at Twitch. If we had 100,000s of clients polling at the same moment, that would absolutely knock over the server, the canonical "stupid easy" fix is to add jitter, which can be done on either client or server.

In fact the pull based approach is doing work all the time to process all the polling. A push based approach only does work when needed (when data changes).

I'm not saying it's not new or hard to scale. I'm just saying objectively that push based is more efficient at least in terms of raw data sent down the wire

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the idea of couchdb, but the ecosystem centers too much on pouch, which doesn't have consistent maintenance. If Ibm was smart they'd sponsor it in a big way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes pouchdb does not get the love it deserves. But it is still actively maintained, the last bug I had was timely fixed by the community and merged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've experimented with RxDB in a side project of mine, a spaced-repetition web app that is designed to be usable offline, with background sync between clients. The offline-first requirement meant using something like IndexedDB to store state client-side, which is where RxDB comes in.

Overall I like the library. It makes the hard task of interacting with IndexedDB a lot more pleasant. The GraphQL support is also a nice touch. Coupled with something like Hasura, it took me like a day to get sync working.

My one criticism with RxDB specifically is that the documentation around writing queries can be a bit hit-or-miss.

</comment><comment><USER9> Title probably ought to be "a _reactive_ database". Though, used properly, you should be able to reduce latency it doesn't make any guarantees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and no. Read "realtime" not like "realtime computing" but like a marketing keyword introduced by firebase which means something like live-replication. [https://firebase.google.com/docs/database?hl=en](https://firebase.google.com/docs/database?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Saw RxDB before but it feels too heavy for my small projects. Would try that if it can support leveldb/sqlite as storage backend in the future.

My typical approach is directly logging onto fs with replaying upon restart for small projects, with fs based json store / leveldb for more demanding tasks. For non-trivial scale projects, RethinkDB is a fair choice.

</comment><comment><USER11> What's the advantage of this over triggers in a relational database? Or even notify/listen in PostgreSQL? (assuming these triggers are connected to the API, of course).

I guess it's probably a matter of scale, but I really don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> It runs fully on the client and is offline first. A listener to PostgreSQL will not work when the device goes offline.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, so what about triggers on a sqlite db on the client?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a big difference between having a changestream of writes to the database, and observing results of multiple queries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't see any authentification related suff like pouchDB have, like create an user with password hash, auto handle cookie in the browser, restrict document to user or group.

</comment><comment><USER14> But is it really "realtime"? I thought something should have consistent millisecond or even microsecond latencies to be called realtime, but it's probably not possible for JavaScript application.

<comment><USER6> If you wanted to be pedantic, nothing is real-time not even what you see with your eyes due to photon latency. The word is clearly being used colloquially

<comment><USER14> It is used clearly in a misleading way since this database is nowhere about latencies and time at all.

<comment><USER15> I know few people that use "realtime" to mean it in the "realtime OS" sense. It's usually used in layman's terms to mean "happening live".

RxDB isn't being misleading, it's another valid usage of the term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this different from Firebase RTDB? And perhaps more importantly, does it address the scalability and consistency issues associated with Firebase RTDB? Google introduced Firestore to Firebase specifically because RTDB has limited usability for larger real world applications that go beyond "sync device state to DB".

Even the offline first paradigm is fundamentally flawed in general and certainly when it comes to offline data manipulation. Either you can afford to mutate your data on the local device and sync it when possible, in which case you clearly don't need subscriptions to real-time mutations of remote data because within that scope you are the source of truth. Or, you're interested in mutations of real-time data from multiple clients in which case you need to deal with conflict resolution (mutually exclusive changes of data) which is not reliably possible with this model and scalability (linear increase in pub/sub * increasing query cost = exponential scaling).

Are there any large projects or companies that currently have this in production?

<comment><USER16> In-flight business objects for major airlines is probably considered scale: [https://www.couchbase.com/customers/united- airlines](https://www.couchbase.com/customers/united-airlines)

<comment><USER17> that's CouchDB, not PouchDB. PouchDB is a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB.

<comment><USER18> That's also Couchbase and not CouchDB. They forked off CouchDB many years ago.

Cloudant (API Compatible with CouchDB) has a number of case studies you can reference for production success with the Couch API/ecosystem.

Cabify - [https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/cabify- cloudant](https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/cabify-cloudant)

Ticket Fairy - [https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/the-ticket-fairy-cloud- clou...](https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/the-ticket-fairy-cloud-cloudant)

We.Trade - [https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/wetrade-blockchain- fintech-...](https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/wetrade-blockchain-fintech- trade-finance)

Disclaimer: I work for IBM Cloud</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do ye deal with 'customer service' that is designed to tire you out? - <AUTHOR> I've been noticing a serious trend here in Ireland, and recently in the US, of customer service agents having mastered the art of putting you on the long finger.
They ignore bulleted lists of questions, take days to get back between responses, ask pointless/inane questions, and purposefully hold back vital information, among other things.
Being referred to their supervisor hasn't worked. Social media these days is basically fucked. They act with seemingly no shame, and I have no doubt that there are strong incentives for them to focus on the company's short-term bottom line, rather than actually helping.
Have any of ye found methods of getting actual service? Have ye all noticed this trend as well?
I am not looking for examples of stellar customer service to balance my point - I'm only looking for tactics and strategies that have had some success with getting these assholes to actually help. <comment><USER2> Heh... This makes me sad because part of my job is designing these systems, and the reason is because most times the company might not have an answer for you..so they just hope you go away.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a ring of truth in that alright. Thanks for the insight :)

Since you design these systems - how developed are the standards for customer service? Are there watchdogs on the practice, or is it basically left entirely up to the company?

I have seen customer service depts go to astounding lengths to avoid helping, even when it means their company would make money.

An example:

Me - "I don't want a refund, I just want my account to be charged. Here are all the details."

Large company everyone knows - "Sure we can do that, we're just going to dick you around for three weeks first. Actually we can't do that, even though it's the major step in how we make money" \- followed by multiple requests to rate their customer service.

It also feels like these issues are far more common when being overcharged rather than undercharged. I can't help wondering how the incentives are really balanced for some companies customer support teams.</comment></comment>


Computer games industry threat to downloaders: 'pay up or we'll sue' - <AUTHOR> http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article4569180.ece <comment><USER2> _This week Isabela Barwinska, an unemployed mother of two, became the first person in the UK to be ordered to pay damages to a manufacturer. She must pay more than £16,000 to Topware after downloading Dream Pinball through a file- sharing site._

That's disgusting. I won't condone software piracy but the punishment must fit the crime.

</comment><comment><USER3> Usually downloading isn't a big deal: the more popular the product, the more it's downloaded, but:

"..it sold 800 legitimate copies but was illegally downloaded 12,000 times.."

That's not sustainable.</comment>


Y Combinator raising $1B for new fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/y-combinator-raising-1-billion-for-new-fund-2462693141.html <comment><USER2> Isn't it risky to selectively back particular YC companies? There's always a negative signal when your lead investor doesn't participate in future rounds - if they start doing that more regularly with this new fund, then it might become a negative signal for a YC company NOT to have Continuity/YC as a follow-on investor (which sucks b/c the firms are so early stage).

Anyone know how VC firms that invest in all early-growth-late firms deal with this dilemma (realizing there are only a few cases)?

<comment><USER3> YC has explicitly stated they won't lead Seed or Series A rounds in order to avoid this conflict.

They are intentionally leaving economics on the table in order to better support their founders. At the stage Continuity invests ($15-$50M rounds), YC's early signal is far less important than the actual fundamentals of the business.

<comment><USER4> It's even better than that too, given their commitment to invest pro-rata. So the money is there if you can get another firm to lead. Because this policy is public, there shouldn't be signalling issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who like game theory:

By doing this they don't have to consider if startups are suitable for follow up investors and thus avoid the Keynesian beauty contest problem of not selecting the "prettiest" startup: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest)

> "It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's > judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion > genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we > devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the > average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the > fourth, fifth and higher degrees."

<comment><USER6> I hadn't heard of that before, but I'll keep it in mind for sure.

I was going to say that the obvious solution is to not play -- to buy and hold based on fundamental value, and specifically seek out promising but undervalued stocks -- but then, that solution doesn't offer the kind of growth that VC wants, or that a Keynsian beauty contest offers when you win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please don't become a typical VC. I love YC for what it does so well

<comment><USER8> What in your view, distinguishes a typical VC from YC?

<comment><USER9> What I got from reading Paul Graham's own writing on the genesis of YC, was that his key insight was that VC's should be funding more companies, and earlier, and giving founder's much more control.

The other key innovation was funding in batches, in classes. This created a close-knit ad hoc community with shared goals, and one in which teams whose ideas were not finding traction could join teams whose ideas were.

<comment><USER10> Paul Graham's own writing and advice is not really followed by YC though.

As an easy example, look at his recent post about naming your startup, versus the names of the companies allowed through in a recent round of seed funding.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html)

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/22/y-combinator-demo-day- summ...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/22/y-combinator-demo-day-summer-2016/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know too much about the VC world but could this be seen as negative signal?

What is the purpose of combining the funds? The only thing I can think of is to obfuscate some of their losses.

Also, is the new round of funding because YC's assets are illiquid and they need a cash infusion?

</comment><comment><USER12> I believe it's possible YC has overextended themselves such that top AI companies - the most valuable companies in the future - are going to first try Gradient Ventures or more specialized funds, and it may cost them their future. I understand they want to be a destination for AI, but I have a tough time imagining it. Maybe when they opened the floodgates to 100+ per cohort was when their brand became "the best anything and everything of startups," and if a rich, connected AI veteran launched his own AI fund, I'd be more excited to knock on that door first, if not an AI fund from an org intimately tied to a top AI shop.

<comment><USER13> > AI companies - the most valuable companies in the future

To me that's like going to a state fair 150 years ago, seeing the vendors of snake oil, and concluding that the most valuable companies in the future will be selling bottles of secret potions.

For "artificial intelligence", I see no actual _intelligence_ and a lot of emphasis on _artificial_. The best of it is at its core some fairly traditional applied math and/or electronic engineering.

Instead, there're huge sections of the research libraries for pure math, applied math, physical science, electronic engineering, and computer engineering, and in comparison so far the best of AI is hardly more than a few books on one shelf.

How to do applied science, engineering, etc. hasn't changed; AI hasn't changed how; the only way to have

> AI companies - the most valuable companies in the future

is just to call all the most valuable companies, or safer yet, all new companies, AI. Silly talk.

A claim like

> AI companies - the most valuable companies in the future

will be part of what we've seen before: AI winter, AI spring of new hope, AI summer of scam, AI fall of failure, AI winter again. Get your warm clothing while it's cheap now because the next AI winter will be darned cold!

E.g., look up the little game of, say, matchsticks called Nim. Let AI _learn_ to play it. Against just a common man in the street, it might do well. Against me, it will lose at least half the games if we first flip a coin to determine who moves first. Just why and how I'm winning, the AI program won't figure out; figuring out such things is so far just not what AI does.

Or, teach AI some high school plane geometry. Then consider the problem, given triangle ABC, by Euclidean construction find point D on side AB and point E on side BC so that the lengths AD = DE = EC. To do this, need to be a little creative; that is, need some actual intelligence. The people who taught the AI geometry program likely didn't teach how to do that, and, then, for the solution, the AI program won't know how to do it, won't figure it out, and won't do it.

Net, AI is not "intelligent". Chase down big trees in chess, checkers, Go, etc., play games against itself, accumulate a lot of statistics, and, then, play and often win -- okay. Be "intelligent"? Nope, not yet.

Or, one day I got via e-mail a specification of a problem in 0-1 integer linear programming. A first example had 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables. Some people had tried "simulated annealing", ran for days, took the best results they had so far, results of unknown distance from optimality, and stopped. Drop that problem into a lot of integer linear programming (ILP) packages, and won't get very far. Write some software to do what such ILP packages do and call it AI, and again won't get very far. So, instead, need some new ideas, that is, from some actual intelligence. So, I put my feet up, popped open a cold can of diet soda, reviewed a little, thought a little, did some derivations in non-linear duality theory (early in that theory there are some darned cute results, e.g., get some surprising, useful convexity), designed and wrote some code, and in 905 seconds on a slow PC found a feasible solution guaranteed to be within 0.025% of optimality. Figuring out how to do that for that problem took some actual intelligence.

Here's one: I was in an AI group monitoring server farms and networks. So, suppose we are given instances of one or both of those and collect data, say, _points_ , where each point consists of numerical data on each of several variables, say, 50, and where we get, say, 100 such points a second.

Now we want to define and detect in essentially real time _anomalies_ as, really, a reason to start diagnosis and see if there is a real problem. For this, we want, and are quite serious about, false alarm rate: We want the rate adjustable in advance and, then, in practice to get that rate essentially exactly.

And when we get an anomaly, we want the lowest rate of false alarms at which the data would still be an anomaly.

Okay, AI/ML machine, how the heck to do that?

The answer needs some intelligence, e.g., borrow some from ergodic theory, get a finite algebraic group, sum over the group, etc. For that work, the current techniques of AI/ML won't even pass the giggle test.

Sure, taking my work, could program that and call the result "artificial intelligence", but really just programmed some pure/applied math. And, sure, will need an algorithm to make the computations fast, and that will need more genuine intelligence.

AI "intelligent"? LOL.

> AI companies - the most valuable companies in the future

More LOL.

<comment><USER14> > To me that's like going to a state fair 150 years ago, seeing the vendors of > snake oil, and concluding that the most valuable companies in the future > will be selling bottles of secret potions.

That actually would've been a good investment hypothesis though, and continues to be:

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ABC/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ABC/)

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CVS/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CVS/)

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/Ko/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/Ko/)

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BAS.DE/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BAS.DE/)

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOW/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOW/)

Fully agree with your point about AI though. People always gloss over the transition from "can be made good at things, with effort" to "general purpose intelligent" as if there's not actual magic required there.

<comment><USER13> You definitely win the free bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham's!

From what I've heard, some of that stuff had heroin and cocaine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just guessing, but 'going global' may factor into this. Not as in more than one meeting center, rather, globalizing the marketing for startups. There is an interesting 'snowball effect' of successful exits growing the number of investors, and YC, even with the huge number of applicants it enjoys today, may be seeing quality diminish and therefore need to establish more permanent presence in other founder hot beds around the world. Perhaps that such a move is independent of this raise, but in order to invest the money, they'll need to keep the building the flow of recruits.

</comment><comment><USER16> YC edging to become more like a typical VC?

<comment><USER17> I am starting to wonder if they are falling into the growth trap a lot of companies seem to fall. Instead of staying at a certain size and having a nice sustainable business, they grow too big and lose their character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My guess is they will fund some Startup School founders with a small amount of money like they did with the Fellowship. Then again it's all up in the air. They raised 700M last year or so. They could also be piling up cash for bad times to keep YC companies private for as long as possible.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm wondering if this is related to scaling Startup School. A clear business purpose for YC isn't visible in startup school, yet--could this be related?

<comment><USER20> The article says it's for Continuity Fund, which does investments in YC startups (and, apparently, non-YC startups now as well).

<comment><USER19> Shortly after that, it goes on to say they are all being merged, so I don't put much stock in that as an indicator of the purpose.

<comment><USER20> It says Continuity and Early Stage are being merged, not that everything in YC is being merged.

<comment><USER19> To clarify, when I said "everything" I meant stage-wise, early and late are being co-mingled, which to me, implies that this isn't necessarily related to continuity, which is late stage.

I'm not trying to imply that the overall corporate structure is changing. I was assuming that startup school would fall under the early stage rubric, but maybe not?

<comment><USER21> IIRC YC does not invest in startup school companies at all (but invites them to apply for YC Core as they do any startup).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm amazed at how YC has successfully executed the ultimate startup by funding startups.

Going from investing 15 in 6 companies to have a one billion dollar fund.

I wonder how this will alter the market considering they'll have first option from the very first check. Will other VC firms look at how they can go down the pipeline?

Kudos to them!</comment>


Muslims Makers During Ramadan - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ramadan-makers <comment><USER2> I joined this community and the members are truly inspiring me. Thanks for gathering awesome individuals there :)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank absyah! we are indeed small. Happy to have you in the community</comment></comment>


Youtube Live Epic Failure (Plaintext DB Password Exposed) - <AUTHOR>

From: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/youtube-live-streaming/
The widget embedded is rendering this on the page:
Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 511, in __call__
    handler.get(*groups)
  File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/event.py", line 69, in get
    evs = get_rows()
  File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/event.py", line 9, in get_rows
    client = gdata.spreadsheet.text_db.DatabaseClient('email@example.com', 'projectmetal')
  File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/gdata/spreadsheet/text_db.py", line 106, in __init__
    self.SetCredentials(username, password)
  File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/gdata/spreadsheet/text_db.py", line 127, in SetCredentials
    raise CaptchaRequired('Please visit https://www.google.com/accounts/'
 CaptchaRequired: Please visit https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha to unlock your account. <comment><USER2> One guy's password getting out, in the grand scheme of things, is perhaps not an "epic failure". I mean, it's a screwup all right, but perhaps some perspective is in order...

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is more towards developers/sysadmins. Outputting error handling is an epic failure in any production environment.

<comment><USER2> If that's "epic", what about those companies that lost tons of credit card numbers? Or the Therac that killed people? You'll run out of superlatives if "epic" is putting some debug information on the screen in a production environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> And how do you suspect those credit cards were lost? Bad practices? This would be one of them. The semantics behind the the title doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, its just a bad idea.

<comment><USER2> No one is saying that it's not a bad idea. I'm just quibbling with the superlative-inflation going on in the headline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Slightly off-topic, but I wonder what is their versioning strategy. 1.344714172147360500 is pretty bizarre. Does anyone know how / why it's used?

<comment><USER4> Looks like a high-resolution timestamp (the first 32 bits make up a time_t for last Saturday).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's why you should never expose tracebacks in a production environment. But plain text? Really?

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the time php.net went funny and started outputting all their PHP as text/html - they kept their DB credentials in a file included from their public_html directory and we were able to read the host details and username and password for their CMS.

Never ceases to amaze me that even big sites make little mistakes like that!

<comment><USER7> Using PHP is not a little mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That is one embarassingly trivial password

<comment><USER9> Really? It's two words that aren't commonly found together. The only way I can see it being trivial enough to comment on is if the guy is related to something named Project Metal. But I don't know who he is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't google docs support OAuth? That password should never have been in the code to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER11> ... has anyone told Kieran?

<comment><USER12> No

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Have you reported this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just out of curiosity what Python web framework YouTube uses?

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope kieran changes that password if he uses it elsewhere.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The widget has since been removed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Widget is back. (Working)</comment>


LIVE: Red Bull Stratos - freefall from the edge of space - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIxH6DToXQ

<comment><USER2> <http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/></comment>


Show HN: Indexed, relational JSON store for Node.js using flat files and LevelDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/scrollback/objectlevel

<comment><AUTHOR> About the use of flat files to store the actual JSON: Each object is stored with multiple keys in general, and LevelDB has no native support for values with multiple keys. I considered duplicating the objects, or having a "primary" key (say the ID) that all other keys would resolve to, but finally settled on an external data file and storing the file reference and byte offset in LevelDB.</comment>


What recent books should I be reading? - <AUTHOR>

I remember the big impact that books like "The pragmatic programmmer", "Hackers & Painters", "SICP", or "PoEAA" cause in me.
What recent books about computers, hackers and entrepreneurship should I be reading?
Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that we are talking about books published in the last 2-3 years. <comment><USER2> Ted Nelson's _Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way_ (2009) is an interesting read, though of a particular variety. It's fairly negative and contrarian, as usual with his stuff, and also pretty disorganized and rambling, not really well edited. Some of his opinions aren't really backed up, either. It's sort of like someone had taken notes on a long interview with him asking: what do you think about the entire history of computing, and why are things the way they are? But, it's got a lot of thought-provoking stuff buried in it, if you're the kind of person who likes the idea of Ted Nelson going on about all of computer history in an opinionated way for an hour or two.

link: [http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/geeks-bearing- gifts/43...](http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/geeks-bearing- gifts/4312837)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like Clean Code [http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software- Craftsman...](http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software- Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291168526&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER4> Being Geek: [http://www.amazon.com/Being-Geek-Software-Developers- Handboo...](http://www.amazon.com/Being-Geek-Software-Developers- Handbook/dp/0596155409/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291224404&sr=8-1)

A review I wrote: <http://terrordome.ca/reviews/being-geek>

</comment><comment><USER5> seems like delivering happiness, by tony hsiesh, the ceo of zappos is getting a lot of buzz. although i haven't read it.

</comment><comment><USER6> You are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier.</comment>


Why you hate Comic Sans - <AUTHOR> http://designforhackers.com/blog/comic-sans-hate/ <comment><USER2> The article is really the antithesis of a good critique.

The comparison to Helvetica and Garamond misses the point of Comic Sans, which is to be a casual, friendly and playful (as opposed to professional, austere, serious, business-like) font that looks more handwritten than typographed (like the handwritten captions in pulp comics of yore).

Even the kerning and height issues they point can be explained for that. Perfect kerning and proportions would ruin the illusion of it being handwritten and childlike.

As to why all the hate, it's easy: middle class people with any "artistic" or "creative" inspirations (and I use the term loosely) will jump at the first chance to feel more sophisticated than the great unwashed masses. And designers are the very epitome of that crowd [1].

And most will just jump on any bandwagon related to such a cause (notice the hundreds of anti-Comic Sans blog posts, articles, even t-shirts), without thinking the issue thoroughly and trying to understand neither the original intent nor how and why people actually use the font in practice (which is even more important).

The real question to ask is not why designers and hipsters "hate" it, but why the huge "unwanted masses" adopted it with such eagerness. But that would imply that the average designer also has something to learn from the people, instead of preaching his dictums (which most of the time are not tied to any science or real world observations at all) of "what should work" and what "they should like" to them.

[1] The same people that, in their web incarnation, blathered on and on about "semantic markup", missing the point of both "semantic" \-- a word that they repeated as parrots from one another after they learned it from a few misguided trend-setters -- and "markup", which is not supposed to be where you convey semantics). This, now mostly subdued trend, kept the web 5 to 10 years behind -- thank god for SPAs, flex and grid layouts and the like.

<comment><USER3> You must have worked with some pretty bad designers in the past to have that much contempt for them.

<comment><USER2> I don't have "contempt". I just try to understand their behavior, like I do for other fields, including my own (which might also exhibit similar behavior in other issues).

And what I see is often a contempt for the designer-ignorant layman.

All the usual caveats apply: what I say is not applicable to absolutely, no exceptions, 100% of designers, but mostly to the particular subculture/demographic we talk about here: Western/US designers from the young/urban/hipster population (which makes for the majority of those of them posting their opinions on design issues on the web).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We shipped a game called The Sims that used Comic Sans all throughout, that sold pretty well in spite of the font. In case you can't stand to read Comic Sans with your eyes, I also made an external screen scraping utility called Simplifier that reads Comic Sans text off the screen, and catalogs and recites the product descriptions with a speech synthesizer. [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8&feature=youtu.be&t=3m15s)

</comment><comment><USER5> I really don't mind comic sans. I notice it, because it's cool to hate it and it gets a lot of attention. But really I don't find it terrible.

Edit: kerning, small text readability, etc are all stretching it a bit. The main reasons are -- overuse and unprofessional look. I wouldn't use it in a resume, but otherwise I don't hate or even mind it.

<comment><USER6> No, no, the cool thing to do now is to defend it. You claim that critics just don't understand its purpose, even if they mention it multiple times and are only criticising misuse. Then you use it ironically in your professional presentations to show that you are above the hoi polloi, both of today and of 15 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You know what I also hate? Popovers on websites asking for my email address. I get it, you read somewhere that you're supposed to build an email list to grow your audience. Just let me read in peace.

<comment><USER8> I also hate Youtube embeds that won't fullscreen without watching the video on Youtube.

<comment><USER9> I assumed it was a YouTube embed, but it wouldn't load because I don't have flash. I guess I'll never get to see this guy's amazing presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I simply cannot take anything written on a "design" website seriously when it's filled with 1 full page pop up and another half page pop up.

</comment><comment><USER11> One of my CS professors had us writing papers, and we got extra points if it was in comic sans. I had to specifically install a ms fonts package for it. Ever since I've liked it, but don't actually use it. I think the whole thing surrounding comic sans is incredibly strange and I'm pretty sure I'm missing some context or something.

<comment><USER12> It's the same as with Java, PHP, ketchup, strip malls, pop music, professional wrestling, etc. which are usually criticized with minimal mental effort. The opinion is used as a signal that you're not "one of them," that is, a commoner, though to a thinking person they establish you as exactly that, somebody who is incapable of nuanced thinking.

<comment><USER13> This is too true. Best is when the opinions on these are formed with no previous experience with it. I have to use Perl at work and whenever someone finds out they say "I'm sorry that you have to use that terrible language!" Sure, I would prefer to use Python, but Perl has some useful features that other languages don't do as well which is why I use it. Conveniently, nobody who comments to me about Perl has ever actually used it. Same with when I have used Java in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Designer Craig Rozynski has created a new version of Comic Sans, which fixes many (most?) of the typographical problems pointed out in this article: [http://comicneue.com/](http://comicneue.com/)

There's a good interview with Rozynski on the subject: [http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/the- neue-...](http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/april/the-neue-comic- sans/)

<comment><USER15> Eh, the bold is alright but I think the regular version loses one of Comic Sans' most important qualities: it doesn't develop weird/anemic proportions when used at large sizes or in all caps.

and personally I think the 'e' is too aggressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmmm, I think the premise is way off-base here. People don't even hate Comic Sans... they hate how often it's used inappropriately.

The article tries to construct this huge overwrought analysis of the font itself, but the font is fine. It's the tone-deaf way that people _use_ Comic Sans that causes ridicule.

<comment><USER17> No, lots and lots of people really do hate Comic Sans, independent of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In my opinion, the real reason Comic Sans is bad has nothing to do with the actual design of Comic Sans. The simple fact is that it gets annoying to read significant amounts of text if they are in fonts if they deviate too far from the normal standards. Fonts that try to emulate handwritten cursive, for example, are even more annoying.

It's just that of the fonts that most people have pre-installed, Comic Sans may be unique in terms of being in the danger zone where it's almost normal enough that people try to use it for actual documents, but different enough that people forced to read those documents get irritated.

This article is more along the lines of "Arial is bad," which may be true in terms of font design, but isn't the sort of thing normal people are going to go around wearing t-shirts about.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd give a simpler answer - because it looks like a kid's handwriting.

<comment><USER2> That's the intent though, which completely flew over the "critics" (and I use the term loosely) head...

<comment><USER20> No, not really. The problem is people using it in places where a kid- handwriting font makes no sense.

<comment><USER2> That's what you say the problem is, and I could agree, but TFA never makes such a distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Because we're social creatures and we like to belittle out-groups to make ourselves feel special?

</comment><comment><USER22> Comic Sans is a terrible font, even when used for its intended purpose. It has a really off-kilter awkwardness that doesn't evoke any sense of youth or playfulness.

The perfect argument against Comic Sans is Chalkboard [1], a font created by Apple to have the same look but fixes everything wrong with it. Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans, uses it as an example of how great Comic Sans is, saying "if Comic Sans is bad why make something similar." [2] But they made something similar because it was bad and needed fixing. Chalkboard shows that the concept of a casual handwriting/comic font is valid, it's just that Comic Sans blew the execution.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_\(typeface\)) [2] [http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm](http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> I get it, Comic Sans is tacky. But so is the fetishizing of Helvetica.

<comment><USER4> At least Helvetica has a whole movie about it! [1]

"It's hard to evaluate it. It's like being asked what you think about off- white paint. It's just there. It's hard to get your head around something that's that big."

"And most people who use Helvetica use it because it's ubiquitious. It's like going to McDonalds instead of thinking about food. Because it's there. It's on every street corner. So let's eat crap, because it's on the corner."

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkpYgjbYRg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkpYgjbYRg)

<comment><USER24> I knew Design[tm] had won the world when a generic fast food joint near me had words like "Burger" and "Chicken" styled in classic designer fonts and sandblasted into frosted glass on its windows.

Definitely no Comic Sans.

<comment><USER4> And there's the dystopian generic food of Repo Man [1].

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/w6ODNaQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/w6ODNaQ.png)

<comment><USER25> The most entertaining bit about the movie _The Host_ (based on the Stephenie Meyer novel) was the fact that in a world ruled by Souls -- alien beings who possess humans and are incapable of dishonesty -- you go to a store marked "store". You pick up a bag of potato chips marked "potato chips", a jug of milk marked "milk" and a can of chicken soup marked "chicken soup". You walk out without paying for anything because the owners of "store" know you won't take more than you need and are providing for everybody.

Oh yeah, all the labels are in Helvetica bold. Anything fanvier might be a way to get a dishonest advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> sorry in advance for posting a contrary opinion, but this runs contrary to "both sides" of what I hear in the debate and I feel like it's worth sharing, I can't be the only one...:

if you want to make a "warning" sign, like "Caution: electrical hazard", my claim is that it will get noticed MORE and serve as a better warning if you display it in Comic Sans. Reason, it looks like an actual person went to the trouble to warn you, as opposed to some overly cautious liability dodging corporate (or OSHA or insurance company) warning.

And I'm not saying it's perfect or doesn't have a lot of other fails, but it's my goto font for signage because it's ubiquitous and it gets the message across. I'm mystified by people who only wish to be warned in ... in what, serif or sans, I don't even know?

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't hate Comic Sans and never understood all the hate, it a rather nice font actually.

<comment><USER28> It's my goto font when typesetting speech bubbles for my dank memes. Or when I want to give another designer an aneurism.

People just need to chill out. The more people use Comic Sans, the better a pro-designers work looks against the "corporate-but-also-fun powerpoint" background radiation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've never before seen someone making the mistake of saying 'Legos' go so far as to capitalise it and append a registered trademark icon. LEGO is a trademark; 'LEGOS' is not.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it just me or is Comic Sans such an easy target that it seems silly to be elitist about it? It's like if a bunch of film critics kept bringing up how bad Batman and Robin was.

<comment><USER31> Well, the internet critics like to bring up how bad Batman and Robin was as a movie. There's a reason 'Bat Credit Card' became a meme back in the day.

But yeah, it's an easy target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Meanwhile, over in Lobsters, the OpenBSD devs claim responsibility for the recent wave of Comic Sans attacks:

[https://lobste.rs/s/0dxurz/new_hat_request_system/comments/p...](https://lobste.rs/s/0dxurz/new_hat_request_system/comments/phl1qg#c_phl1qg)

</comment><comment><USER33> This was a really long, un-needed technical way of saying "it was cool once but it got tired with the times."

Just because this designer thinks that Comic Sans sucks, doesn't mean it didn't have a place all those years ago.

<comment><USER20> The writer said quite clearly that it did have a place all those years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> [http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans- asshole](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole)

</comment><comment><USER35> Used it for years for a child care related newsletter - it is a nice readable informal font. Worked well for the audience.

</comment><comment><USER36> there's nothing funny about comic sans

</comment><comment><USER37> in my experience, people hate it because it is used so often in places where it is inappropriate.

a lot of the analysis here is authoritative but off the mark as well... that e is the most readable letter when blurred to me, and its the properties which are criticised which make it the case.

that is it, nothing more complicated than that.

</comment><comment><USER38> I couldn't continue reading this article after the third popup on mobile. Idiotic site design.

</comment><comment><USER39> I hated it since I knew it was wrong when I used it for an paper in 3rd grade

</comment><comment><USER40> I love comic sans, I find it very readable.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's a font.

</comment><comment><USER42> Comic Sams actually shipped with Internet Explorer 3-5 and Win98+. The font was meant for Comic Chat which came with IE3-5, an IRC chat application. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat)

You have to install IE on Win95 to get the font. IE4 included the Win95 shell upgrade which meant it turned Win95 to look like Win98. So a lot of people installed it.

</comment><comment><USER43> This was the funniest thing to me, CERN released the Higgs boson finding in Comic Sans [http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists- com...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-comic-sans- higgs-boson)</comment>


Twitter Engineering Manager Leaves Company Because of Diversity Issues - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/twitter-engineering-manager-leslie-miley-leaves-company-because-of-diversity-issues/#.6qjorz:qgN9 <comment><USER2> Their VP seriously wanted to analyse ethnicity by last name? Among other things, way to completely ignore the existence of people with parents of different backgrounds, or women who took their husbands name, or anyone adopted. And then there's the fundamental problems with it...</comment>


Your idea sucks now go do it anyway - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyway.html

<comment><USER2> It's better to act than not act, because action brings knowledge: imagine shooting a target in the dark, and can only hear how close you were: _Ready. Fire. Aim._ (and repeat). It's also literally what you do to find and then correct for a mis-calibrated sight.

It's the notion that seeing reality helps _a lot_. Once you know what is there, you can have ideas that can help. Whereas ideas that are not based on reality are very unlikely to work.

minor e.g. I find that my problem solving works best once I've started trying something. With each thing I try, I notice more: similarities, patterns, gaps that could be filled, things that could be connected; and I have ideas about how other things at hand could be used to do that. These are often obvious in hindsight; but I didn't think of them at all beforehand.

Of course, one might not succeed anyway - the pop. stat. is 9/10 businesses fail. But not discovering reality has even worse odds.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you know your idea sucks this means you need to change it, revise it, pivot or whatever you want to call it.

Every success that started with a lousy idea became a success because they recognized their idea sucks and changed it, not kept perpetuating failure. It is a very dangerous attitude to just dismiss legitimate feedback, hope everything just magically fixes itself and lull yourself in the sense of complacency that "it will just work out". Hope is not a strategy.

Of course it is inspirational to know that even if you start with a lousy idea you could be able fix it. But don't assume the solution will just fall in your lap and do the hard work pivoting your product and business.

</comment><comment><USER4> While these stories are inspirational I wonder how many complete failures are hidden behind survivor bias. I think a lean methodology would have served those companies well without so much spent effort in their initial products.

So I guess I still agree you shouldn't sit pontificating on business ideas, but you shouldn't just dive into building a complete something either. There is a rich middle ground.

<comment><USER5> Reading the article I remembered...

For a while I was fascinated and amazed at projects pursuing absurd mega- goals, attempts to get something off the ground so big it was nigh unto stupid. A floating city configuring an independent libertarian utopia nation. A billion-dollar indoor ski resort just outside Atlanta. A bridge from Spain to Africa sporting a 5 mile suspended span. A world-class [fill in the blank, how much ya got?] facility annex to a super-mall in "why would anyone move there" Syracuse NY. And so on, one project after another with big flashing "ain't gonna happen" signs over them.

Then I realized. It wasn't success of the project that was the goal, it was keeping a small team of creatives employed in a perpetual state of promotion and study-funding: find someone with deep enough pockets, and they'll shell out a livable fee to be able to say "hey, look at this..." to other deep pockets. No way that Atlanta ski resort would happen, but the idea was exciting enough to elicit enough funding for studies to pay the bills (at least until the vital-to-snow-making nearby lake almost dried up) for a few people in modest offices. You can make a nice living promoting stupid ideas.

And if the stupid idea actually pans out, takes off, and succeeds, well, the possibility of success is awesome enough to keep trying.

<comment><USER6> There is an impressive ski-resort in the mall downtown in Dubai, where it's about 110 deg F (43 deg C) in the summer.

<comment><USER5> Dubai is about the only place that can support such crazy mega-projects (and is now finding the hard way that mega-development requires mega-maintenance).

The Atlanta ski resort was planned to be 4 times bigger than the Dubai one, and it hits 100 in the summer here too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what I finally decided two weeks ago about my "dumb app idea" Trollaroid. I put a workable version on the Android market and had a few people use it, and since then I've already had more good ideas from feedback than I had for three months mulling it over. The fact that it's now out in the public has also been a force towards me actually working on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I liked the article because if you wait a magical idea then you will get stuck. I think that is better a mediocre idea well executed than a awesome idea inside your head.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool, a screenshot from Game Never Ending! It had never occurred to me that those might be out there. Turns out there's actually a museum:

<http://www.gnespy.com/museum/>

<comment><USER9> Huh. It turns out Glitch, Butterfield's current company, is just Game Neverending 2.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Better to get your bubble burst early when its only a pop, rather then later when its a crash. From my experience people who dream too much or dont wanna loose face cause they told everyone how great their idea is, are the ones that crash and dont progress.

joke about your idea and test it, and you will suceed more likely could be the message here

</comment><comment><USER11> Completely agree with the article.

My idea... well it doesn't suck, but it was more work than what it needed to be. After a few thousand customers I realized what needed to be done. Now it's better but not quite where I want it to be, still need to pour more $$$ in to get it there.

Problem is you need at least a few hundred customers before you start noticing the cracks in your idea. If your idea sucks so bad that you can't get a few hundred people to believe in you enough to give you $$$ then it probably is so bad that you shouldn't do it.

(no, i haven't submitted to ycombinator yet, I'm waiting for a swift kick in the ass)

</comment><comment><USER12> Reed Hastings articulated it pretty well recently - "Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly."

[http://blog.netflix.com/2011/09/explanation-and-some- reflect...](http://blog.netflix.com/2011/09/explanation-and-some- reflections.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the single most important differentiator I've found between people wishing and dreaming to start a business. I always encourage the get it done mentality but people find reasons not to instead. More for me I guess...

</comment><comment><USER14> Stop thinking, start doing. Rule 1: Hustle. Rule 2: Pull the trigger and just do it.

<comment><USER15> define: hustle (in this context).

<comment><USER16> Run ahead. Doesn't matter which direction you're pointing in when you start, you'll still get some SEO juice at the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also, just to be nitpicky, I think Facebook's photo repository is much larger than Flickr's.

<comment><USER18> Article is from 2008.</comment></comment>


Major Release of OpenSource Content Management System Nodebeats, v1.0 - <AUTHOR> The Nodebeats Team is very pleased to present you a Major release version v1.0 of Nodebeats, the Content Management System built using MEAN Framework. This release includes the angular-cli implemenation to make building angular code extremely easy and  fast, responsive html template integration using handlebars, database backup restore feature and reduce the number of files by significant amount, by code clean up and project directory structure changes. In the next major release version, we aim to introduce install setup wizard and some other features to make Nodebeats even more flexible and easy to use and also we will create and deploy the docker image of Nodbeats in docker hub so that you won't have go through the hassles of configuring the deployment environment. To know more, Go to www.nodebeats.com  for official website and https://github.com/nodebeats/nodebeats for github repository. <comment><USER2> Could you tag this with a "Show HN:"?</comment>


Heroku builds & API are down - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/

<comment><USER2> Again.

This is really starting to feel like a weekly occurrence. I use a few services to scale up and down my job workers so when this happens I end up with a huge back log and processing issues on time sensitive jobs.

They still more than make up for the hassle with the other time I save so I'm not going anywhere yet but this is getting ridiculous.</comment>


The Real Estate Market, Explained in One Graph - <AUTHOR> https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-home-for-200400-dollars <comment><USER2> Now if you overlay this graph with red state vs blue state there is a story there as well.</comment>


Debian – The Universal Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://pthree.org/2009/11/17/debian-the-universal-operating-system/ <comment><USER2> I guess both programming languages and operating systems are susceptible to the Blub problem.

<comment><USER3> What is the blub problem?

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blub#Blub>

Found via a variant of "try the simplest thing that might possibly work." In this case, just enter 'blub' into Wikipedia (search the simplest thing that might possibly get a hit).

<comment><USER3> Found the original article by Paul Graham :

<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Skeet: An Open-Source Twitter Client for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/omijijcbapdmibhiocmmlonegoehgigb

<comment><USER2> Wasn't aware that Lil Jon knew how to develop Chrome extensions...

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=skeet>

To the window! To the wall!

<comment><USER3> I was gonna say something about that too. I don't know anything about the product, but whoever came up with the name should have done more research!</comment></comment>


First Look at DigitalOcean's Kubernetes Engine - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/digitalocean-kubernetes-engine/ <comment><USER2> Nice write up, I have been playing with k8s cluster at home for a while, and have been targeting GCP, but I decided to finally give DO a chance and I like it. The just need to build something like Google's global load balancer and I'll never envy GCP.</comment>