'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/super-mario-bros-world-record/ <comment><USER3> >When Kosmic says he's tied with the TAS run at 4-1, that means his inputs are matched up exactly with the program's and he can't physically do any better.

It means he can't physically get a better time, but it does not mean his inputs are matched up exactly with the TAS. SMB1 level transitions are based around the "frame rule", which means you don't advance to the next level until the number of elapsed frames from the start of that level is a multiple of 21. This means it's possible to have slightly imperfect input on all levels except 8-4 (the last level, so no waiting to advance to the next level there) and still get the same time as the TAS (unless the TAS reached the end of the level with no frames to spare). The TAS aims to reach the end of each level as fast as possible even if it would mean no overall time saving because of the wait for the multiple of 21 frames.

I think this mechanic has been very beneficial for speedrunning, because it gives clear sub-goals. When you hear runners talking about "saving a frame rule", that means reaching the end of the level in time for an earlier multiple of 21 frames.

<comment><USER4> > It means he can't physically get a better time

... _using the same techniques the TAS does_.

It's possible (although unlikely) that a new glitch/exploit could be discovered that allows for faster times.

<comment><USER5> I thought glitches were not allowed?

<comment><USER6> Speed runner come up with different "categories" for runs.

The most common is "Any %," also the most basic, it means finish the game, usually anything goes, glitch away.

You can also have no glitches category, 100% complete, no warps, no powerups, all <game item>s, etc. Sky's the limit. The community creates the categories.

<comment><USER7> My favorite are randomized speed runs, where everyone gets the same randomized version and have to speed run it against each other. Normally these are done as real time races and the results of the randomization aren't known to the player until they start. Not all games support it (think games like Zelda and Metroid where you have to collect powerups to push get past obstacles to collect more powerups to get past more obstacles). The randomizer has to make sure the game is still beatable (so no locking a required item behind an obstacle that requires the item). It is also an area that TAS can't help and it has more to do with strategy than physical perfect button presses. Also, since every time you uncover a new randomized item it changes what is the most potential optimized path, it require a deeper knowledge of the game compared to speed running where there is normally a given optimized path that people compete against.

<comment><USER8> > Not all games support it (think games like Zelda and Metroid where you have > to collect powerups to push get past obstacles to collect more powerups to > get past more obstacles).

There is, however, OoT Randomizer[1] which is really fun to play and watch. You can get end stage items at the beginning depending on your seed.

[1] [https://github.com/AmazingAmpharos/OoT- Randomizer](https://github.com/AmazingAmpharos/OoT-Randomizer)

<comment><USER7> I just realized I worded that poorly. I meant that games like Zelda and Metroid do support it, other games don't because there isn't much to randomize (such as platformers, given these tools generally can't create random levels, just swap item locations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If anyone is interested in speed runs I really recommend this YouTube channel

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w)

Thy're a series of videos on how world records have been lowered over time on various games. It's fascinating watching particularity the one on Super Mario 64

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ePi38LnrA&t=16s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ePi38LnrA&t=16s)

<comment><USER5> Did you ever see this one?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A)

This guy literally has a PhD in SM64. It's insanely complicated, and surprisingly lucid.

<comment><USER10> This video is legendary. It's like sitting in on a university course on the technical details of the physics and programming in Mario 64.

<comment><USER5> I tend to skip around videos.

When it went from "exploit this glitch" to a graph of "registering p-q alignment", I knew I would have to slow down and watch the entire thing.

Boy am I glad I did.

<comment><USER11> Ditto! pannenkoek2012 is operating at a level that every hacker should aspire to. Piecing together that solution for that star in 0.5 A presses is a thing of beauty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is something amazing about artforms when the performers and spectators have an appreciation for the subtlest details. Mario speedruns are an oddball artform surely, but right now it has enough of a community to appreciate those details. For example, from the article I gather to "clip the wall to warp into the first level of world four" is a well-known and discussed precision move in the genre.

It reminds me a lot of classical ballet. There the moves and forms have been developed over centuries. As a non-expert I can go to a show and see they dance beautifully. An expert may be disappointed by the same performance -- were the hands poised just so; were the movements optimally precise?

It takes a lot of feedback between knowledgeable fans and expert performers to push an artform to its highest levels of excellence.

<comment><USER13> Naw, clipping the wall is taking advantage of a well known intentionally created bug where you walk through a wall to get to an area to skip levels. Every kid playing the game back in the 80s knew about it.

<comment><USER14> i think you're referring simply to the warp zones, which are accessible with normal jumps. With wall clipping you don't go on top the wall, you go through it. See 1:10 and 2:04 on his video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gum4GI2Jr0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gum4GI2Jr0s)

<comment><USER15> No, I think he's referring to the technique of wall clipping you can use toward the end of 1-2 before you take the pipe back out to the flag.

Back in the 80s/90s kids would show how you could clip through the wall to the warp zone for two purposes:

1\. as an alternative to jumping from the platform to the top of the screen.

2\. More importantly, to get to level -1. You can do this because clipping through the wall Mario can arrive at the first warp zone pipe before the game registers that pipe as one of the labeled warp zone pipes. If you instead walk to the warp zone from the top of the screen Mario has to go all the way to the left before dropping down. And that would trigger the normal warp zones everyone is familiar with.

What the speed runners are doing is understanding the mechanics of wall clipping on a much deeper level. Rather than doing it to make Mario "moonwalk" or reach a special warp zone, they do it to push Mario forward on the screen. This allows them to do stuff like "wrong warp" and shave some frames off of their time to beat the game faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is the video that explains how he did it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FQJEzJ_cQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FQJEzJ_cQw)

Incredible how many hidden tricks/bugs/calculations went into that world record.

</comment><comment><USER17> A great explanation of all the tricks used is this video here:

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

They basically go through Kosmic's (4:56.462 WR) run earlier in the year.

Showing a few replays explaining each of the tricks/techniques used.

There are quite a lot of places where you literally need to be perfect to the pixel to get a good run.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Explanatory comment from main r/speedrun thread:

[https://np.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/9ip34a/455_by_kosm...](https://np.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/9ip34a/455_by_kosmic_smb1_wr_attempt_number_9/e6lfgwl/)

</comment><comment><USER18> super impressive stuff. I'm generally unfamiliar with speedrunning, but I am familiar with the billy mitchell controversies, so I'm surprised that people accept the legitimacy of streamed runs. wouldn't it be trivial-enough to fake?

tangental: my personal favorite mario-related feat is sethbling injecting flappy bird into super mario world manually: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0)

<comment><USER19> To an extent I think that streaming has solved this problem, compared to the days of people just submitting videos that they recorded by themselves. Streamers might fake a single run to get a record, but it would be a huge amount of work to fake all the progression they had to go through to get there.

<comment><USER20> This just isn't true. Recently there was a Super Meat Boy cheater who was discovered due to analysis of a persistent animation across the game that wasn't lining up due to video cuts.

Pretty flimsy system (and far from "solved"), and it lets cheaters steal glory for the months or years it takes to catch them which threatens the legitimacy of the sport past a critical mass.

Moderators/judges are on the wrong side of a trapdoor function because of the amount of analysis it may take to verify a single video, and they aren't professionals in the field of video analysis.

I don't see how "all progression" is relevant here since you don't need to be a streamer to speedrun much less to submit a well-doctored video with a time that beats other people.

<comment><USER19> I know of the Super Meat Boy example (I've seen the Apollo Legend videos too). Was that run streamed live?

<comment><USER20> don't know, but my point is that it took a rather serendipitous global animation to expose them. There are people who think speed runs should require footage of the controller for the sake of a consistent analysis medium, and I'm sympathetic to them for the sake of the legitimacy of the sport at the expense of accessibility.

And to respond to your question, you can livestream a pre-recorded video so it doesn't matter. Some guy livestreamed a record breaking run of Yoshi's island or something but got cocky and streamed his controller, and someone trivially discovered he was miming it, pressing or skipping inputs after they were seen in the video. The Super Meat Boy wasn't doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a super interesting video about how things work internally - <USER2> fascinating.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FQJEzJ_cQw&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FQJEzJ_cQw&t=3s)

</comment><comment><USER22> The current world record in tool-assisted speedrunning is at [http://tasvideos.org/1715M.html](http://tasvideos.org/1715M.html) beating the game in 4:54.03 (RTA timing, measured from start menu) or 04:57.31 (TAS timing, measured from console power-on)

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone have a link to the explanation someone did to explain the 21-frame event callbacks in terms of a bus stop?

I thought it was pretty clever.

<comment> I-M-S [https://youtu.be/i1AHCaokqhg?t=10m47s](https://youtu.be/i1AHCaokqhg?t=10m47s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's a Half-Life 1 speed run (best time afaik): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtI5HM7GVGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtI5HM7GVGY)

I can't even begin to describe how much skill and movement precision is in this video :)

</comment><comment><USER24> On the video I see pausing of the timer on 0:36 (video time, not timer time). What's going on there?

<comment><USER25> In the top left of the video feed there's supposed to be an active input display (showing what buttons are being pressed on the controller). At this point in the video he fixes the input display, causing the capture of the timer to stagger a little bit.

As you'll notice by the end of the video the timer doesn't actually display 4:55.913, even though that's his record time - this is because the entire run has been re-timed (more accurately) after the record was set.

<comment><USER26> How did he know, live, that he'd beaten the time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had wondered about this too and asked about it in r/speedruns [0] I originally assumed that speedrunners used some kind of special software/hardware that provide the watch counters displayed during their streams, but apparently, the displayed timer is controlled manually, via something like a foot pedal, and is not meant to be the official time (which is verified later through analysis)

But for a game like SMB, in which there is a hardcoded "window" (the 21-frame rule), it seems like it's fairly easy for a speedrunner to know if they've performed optimally when they finish each level.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/9iturn/super_mario_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/9iturn/super_mario_bros_speedrunner_hits_nearly_inhuman/e6mn2bk/)

Helpful comment:

> _Additionally for Super Mario Bros. there is a thing called the frame rule > that basically means that you can only beat a level (except the last level) > on certain frames. If you beat the level before the frame rule then the game > waits until the next frame rule before starting the next level. It 's > something like every 20 frames, I'm not exactly sure. So for most of the > levels you only really need to know which frame rule you hit, which is > fairly easy even with manual timing. The end of the last level needs to be > measured precisely though._

<comment><USER27> Actually, the special software you describe does exist and is often used in speedrunning. It is called an autosplitter.

It works by reading out known memory addresses of the game. At bare minimum this would be "start of level 1" and "game completion" but you'll often find more elaborate "splits" as the more popular the game is.

See this for an example: [https://imgur.com/a/KDp7YFx](https://imgur.com/a/KDp7YFx)

It shows the last three missions, the timestamp when it was completed and a comparison agains this speedrunners personal best.

It also shows the current mission and the one after that, along with a timestamp of when it was finished in the speedrunners personal best run.

Beneath that it also shows a whole bunch of stats, what the best possible time is the speedrunner could achieve at current pace based on all the best times in the earlier runs, how it compares to the world record, etc.

This works really well for PC games and emulators but is a lot harder on real hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can't wait until I see new exploits!

</comment><comment><USER29> Is this an emulator run?

</comment><comment><USER30> How much time until it's proven he cheated? I give it one year.

(This comment is in jest, but that has been my experience with the speedrunning community thus far.)

<comment><USER31> Kosmic is a seasoned speedrunner. I highly doubt he's cheating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This trivializes my childhood accomplishment. I don't like it!

It blows my mind how speed runners learn to exploit the inner workings of a game, from timing hacks of the RNG to positioning actors on the screen to unlock design weaknesses. While it takes a lot of skill and many hours of practice to pull off these exploits, advancing through a game at record speeds through exploits takes away from the experience that was intended for play. Speedrunning is not playing the game better but rather playing exploits better.

<comment><USER33> It's a different game that uses the same cartidge. I don't think you should think of it as taking away from the experience, it rather adds another aspect of the game that you can enjoy.</comment></comment>


Linux network emulator (NetEm) example: Script for making DNS requests delayed - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/przemoc/d0c2c280a25e869dd5eda378b0e551e3 <comment><AUTHOR> NetEm seems to be rarely known and used traffic control feature available on Linux.

The linked script allows you to delay sending DNS requests (IP packets with destination port set to 53) on given interface. Normally it is useless, but it may be useful for debugging some hard network-related cases in your software.

The script may also work as a base for other network-related experiments using netem. You can read more about it here: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man8/tc-netem.8.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc- netem.8.html)</comment>


I want to believe (in Lisp vs C performance) - <AUTHOR> http://www.imagine27.com/articles/2009-05-03-195227_i_want_to_believe_in_lisp_performance.html This essay will not focus on Lisp's powerful abstractions but on another practical concern of all programmers : performance, specifically compared with C. <comment><USER2> I had typed a reasonably long criticism, but Safari crashed and I lost it (and I thought it had become safe to actually start writing in browsers.)

Anyway: The graph is useless (don't use a log scale, please choose a better range)

The code is somewhat frightening (C implementation totally naïve, and I'm not much of a Lisper, but the nesting level there scares me)

 _It's 'bizarre' syntax, it's alleged ability to ... facing it's almost vertical cliff face of ..._ (I hope English isn't your native language; you should be using its, the possessive form)

 _Lisp being an implementation of Lambda Calculus_ (what?)

 _and a functional language_ (no?)

 _To sum it all up : The small factor in difference between C and Lisp really does not matter. As the Lisp compilers improve in the code that they generate over the coming years the gap will close without much work on the Lisp hacker's part._

Conclusion: [some banality]

Now, pretend I had written the above more eloquently and inefficiently, and I'll pretend Safari didn't die. Oh well :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Relax and don't be afraid (your language is safe) and always will be.

The C version is not fully optimized (yes it's naive) and this was intentional and stated in the article (perhaps not clearly enough).

A fully optimized C version would run in under 5 seconds for the 1000x1000 board on the same hardware using all the 'idiomatic' tricks using bit masks etc. A similarly optimized Lisp version would also run faster using different data structures and/or algorithms. You've missed the point.

Learn to read logarithmic graphs without prejudice, you may discover much useful information around you that you assumed was 'useless'.

Yes Lisp is an implementation of Lambda Calculus : horrific isn't it ? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)>

I don't know how many times I have to say this : Lisp is a functional language but also allows for imperative programming.

You're only valid point was the misuse of "it's" instead of "its". Good job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lisp is not, by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, fast. The key is that most applications aren't CPU bound anymore.

If speed is that important, use foreign function calls (or, better yet, Haskell).

And I say this as a long time CL coder who has written several highly perfomant lisp libraries. See, for example, polygon.lisp, color.lisp, and bitmap.lisp at <http://github.com/smanek/ga/tree/master>. In order to get decent performance you have to give up many of CL's advantages (not using half of CLOS's features, providing type hints, bit twiddling, imperative style, etc).

<comment><USER4> Indeed, the article doesn't really address anything. It basically concludes on the "sufficiently smart compiler" fallacy. Compilers only get better after you throw tons of engineering resources on them, and that situation only occurs after a language gains tremendous popularity for other reasons.

For example, both Python and Ruby have less-than-ideal implementations, and the avoidable flaws in their design are well known. Despite that, it's taken a long time to get to the point where anyone is even motivated to work on a reimplementation.

And on the other hand, Lisp has had scores of implementations, but it still can't reliably earn the prized "equal/better to C" benchmark scores. This if nothing else should inform us that performance considerations definitely do come into play at the language-design level.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mention that the reason for lower performance of Lisp vs. C has to do with a lack of motivation. This couldn't be further from the truth. Have a look at the source repos for SBCL, Clozure or any other dozen Lisp implementations or dialects.

In the next paragraph you state that because Lisp does not match C in performance this somehow proves that language-design directly effects the ability for a Lisp compiler to generate optimized code comparable to generated code from a C compiler.

This is a bizarre conclusion. What is your reasoning for this ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Such abstractions simply don't exist in most other languages, specifically the imperitave kind."

wrong

<http://iolanguage.com/>

Also, Lisps are imperative. setf, setq and the like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes yes but they are optionally imperative but were first functional.

"system maintenance" for the url that you posted.

<comment><USER6> <http://iolanguage.com> perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it have anything comparable to Lisp macros ?

<comment><USER7> Io ~= Self. It should be looked at as an Smalltalk dialect.

When one says "imperative", one hardly means "an smalltalk influenced, pure object oriented language", but more like a statically-typed Algol variant, usually a derivative of C, Fortran, Pascal or Ada.

I don't think the Io counter-example is valid, just as an Icon counter-example would be valid (yes, Icon is "imperative", but it's also an Snobol derivative with goal-oriented execution, generators and perl-like text processing prowess :-)

<comment><USER8> If someone with a functional programming background says "imperative", it usually includes all the Algol descendants and their cousins like Simula, Java, C++, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby etc. because they don't add much to the game, they are all structured around mutable state. They just put fancier labels on the same dirty stuff.

<comment><USER7> You just spoke of Smalltalk in that trollish tone. Hope you're happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> everything looks better on a log-scale

<comment><AUTHOR> exactly and this is clearly stated in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And now, the rest of the story.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hlls/i_want_to...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hlls/i_want_to_believe_in_lisp_vs_c_performance/c09b77i)</comment>


Book made of ocean plastic / Initial Book Offering - <AUTHOR> Book made of ocean plastic / Initial Book Offering - http://cryptic.fun <comment><AUTHOR> I am the founder. Please help me spread the word. Send in your suggestions and Ideas. We are starting from scratch.

#AR #OCEANPLASTIC #CRYPTO</comment>


Think Cancel Culture Doesn't Exist? My Own 'Lived Experience' Says Otherwise - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt-exist-my-own-lived-experience-says-otherwise/ <comment><USER2> Check out this Twitter thread for >200 examples:

[https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...](https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER3> Throughout the article the author repeatedly conflates sex and gender. He even links to "an editorial [in Nature] claiming that classifying an individual's sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics "has no basis in science."", which is actually titled "US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science".

Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.

<comment><USER4> The Nature article is correctly stating that sex is not as simple as chromosomes or genitalia, and that we should avoid classifying people into either gender or sex roles based on these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course it exists. It has always existed. People have been ostricised for holding "unacceptable" views for all of time. That hasn't changed. What has changed is which views will get you ostricised.

And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals (not my view but an extant one).

<comment><USER6> The scale, speed, and medium is also different. Today it's not hard to seek out people with specific views and actively work to harm them economically and socially. My take is that the diversity of allowable view points is decreasing as a result of a minority of outspoken individuals.

<comment><USER5> > The scale, speed, and medium is also different.

I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt to create a quantitative comparison.

<comment><USER7> I figured scale in this case was not the size of people affected but rather the size of the area in which someone could be marked as a bad person. I wouldn't say that size is necessarily global now, but it is at least easy enough to mark someone throughout a nation the size of the U.S

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still don't understand what Cancel Culture is, as a concept.

My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital?

Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...

<comment><USER9> It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such a big deal and fuss, that it works. I think a perfect example is the young man who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the "white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media. And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is cancel culture.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly ambiguous.

And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.

[0][https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired- ove...](https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged- racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/)

<comment><USER11> >And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies.

If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?

<comment><USER10> >If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in?

Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture.

>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?

Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.

I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is _never_ considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.

<comment><USER12> And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's behalf?

By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...

<comment><USER10> > And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face > from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's > behalf?

Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own policies required it.

And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that investigation other than its outcome.

>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...

Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw this posted the other day: [https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/128806975173083...](https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/1288069751730831365)

which also provides examples.

</comment><comment><USER14> He didn't just express a _politically incorrect_ opinion. He did so in a fundamentally offensive and dismissive fashion, asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong.

This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and debate.

It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the phrase _cancel culture,_ whether you believe that's a real thing or not.

<comment><USER15> Real science is based on the results of experiments, the parameters and results of which are publicized and available to be reproduced.

Questions and debate are good. They don't invalidate the findings of previous experiments. No amount of tweets, articles, or outrage are sufficient to invalidate a scientist's work, and being uncomfortable with the truths* presented does NOT make it ok to "cancel" someone.

Disagree with the findings? See if they're reproducible. Do another experiment. Do some real science. Proceed seeking whatever the truth is rather than evidence for a previously held opinion.

* remembering of course these "truths" are to certain confidences, being open to being proven wrong by future science, and that the whole point is seeking truth.

<comment><USER14> The people arguing that gender is a social construct are arguing about a completely different field from human biology per se. Even his remarks about biology per se look ill informed to me. On top of that, he seems to make zero effort to make any distinction between sex and gender.

Him insisting he's right is sort of like someone dismissing Freud's theories based on "I have a PhD in physics, damn it!"

Good for you. And irrelevant.

<comment><USER16> The whole idea that gender and sex aren't synonyms looks very bizarre to someone who hasn't paid attention to this whole corner of academia. If someone said "Make a drop down that lets people specify their sex" I'd interpret that request in exactly the same way as if someone used the word gender: a radio button for male or female.

There seem to be people here arguing that if the request said "sex" the radio button is fine, but if it said "gender" then ... then what? A slider? What would it even say? Please select the place on the spectrum you feel you are, where one side is male and one side is female? I've never seen such a form.

<comment><USER14> That's a reasonable point. I was introduced to the idea that "gender is a social construct" well before I was introduced to the idea of transsexuals, so I had some opportunity to think about that as a separate issue from the idea of "Some people want sex change operations."

I was one of the top ranked students of my graduating high school class and I tend to speak my mind and do other things that tend to be socially acceptable for men, but not women. Women like me tend to get a lot of flak from the world for failing to "know their place" and they get a lot of flak in a way that questions their gender identity and that causes them to wonder about gender roles and their own identity and so forth.

So when I was younger, I wondered things like _If having an opinion and speaking my mind is "masculine," does that say something about my sexuality?_

So I found the whole concept of being a transsexual pretty confusing when I first ran into it. I wondered did that apply to me in some way and where do you draw certain lines.

I ran into someone online who talked about having "beard envy" and that was an Aha! moment for me. I have never felt that way and that was an incident that helped me feel clear in my mind about the ways in which "gender is a social construct" negatively impacts my life as a woman and really has nothing to do with things like sexuality or sex.

So I feel clear that, yup, "I'm a woman" and that's sometimes problematic and uncomfortable because of how the rest of the world would like to dictate to me what that means about how I should dress and how I should behave and so forth. And that fact is even more problematic for some people than it is for me because they are intersex or they feel their body is the wrong sex (etc).

So I fully get that it's a weird idea the first time you run into it and it can take some time to understand the distinction people are trying to make.

If you want to say "I have a PhD in biology, so I feel entitled to insist my (offensive) opinions about sex are right!" then I think you have some obligation to try to understand the distinction people are trying to make. He doesn't appear to be doing that.

If you are just a software engineer trying to figure out how to code up radio buttons on a website and not someone actively promoting your ideas about biological sex, eh, you may have no real need, personally, to spend a whole lot of time trying to parse these things. At that point, it makes sense to basically go "Well, not really something I'm interested in and since I don't have an informed opinion, I will largely leave it to other people to argue about this."

If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about. That same general standard should apply in this case as well. It's okay to not know everything about every subject, assuming you don't try to cram your uninformed opinions down everyone else's throats.

I will add that human categories are just that: human made concepts. Animals like the platypus didn't consult with human categories before they evolved into mammals that lay eggs, which humans have an issue with because it flies in the face of our nice, neat categories.

Nature is full of examples of things that fail to be readily categorized by humans in a way that is convenient for us. Our desire to categories things often runs into friction with actual reality.

At that point, you have to admit that the mental is defective rather than trying to insist reality is behaving badly and should stop doing that already.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the interesting comment.

It feels like what you're describing here is what I'd use the words masculinity and femininity for. You do indeed use that term in the third paragraph. If someone said "Please define a form where someone can specify their masculinity or femininity" then I'd consider the request rather odd, but I'd also immediately imagine a slider. As indeed, I'm sure everyone has met people who whilst possessing the anatomy of a particular gender behaved more like the opposite, in terms of behavioural stereotypes.

As there are already words to describe this spectrum and the existence of it is uncontroversial, I struggle to understand why there's an academic attempt to redefine the word gender. It feels abusive, like the behaviour described in 1984 or Animal Farm, where people play games with language in order to create artificial crimes they can accuse their opponents of. If all these people mean by "gender is a social construct" is "there are masculine women and feminine men" then why don't they just say that?

Over the years I've come to learn that people who are paid for their production of ideas are often tempted to obfuscate their language in various ways, or at the very least, aren't bothered by their field redefining standard words in ways that have unintuitive meanings. This behaviour isn't organised or deliberately malicious, it just arises from the incentives they have to carve out an intellectual space in which they make the rules and other people find it hard to enter. It's difficult not to conclude this is happening with the redefinition of the word "gender".

 _If you don 't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about_

Actually I have told people with PhDs in maths things to that effect ;)

Cryptography is essentially (semi)applied maths. Mathematicians and theoretical cryptographers do have an unfortunate tendency to redefine standard mathematical terms and operators to mean something different in different contexts, or sometimes even things that are misleading. For example they like to say, "we have proven this scheme correct in the generic group model", which means a proof has been provided that assumes attackers can only solve a very small set of allowed equations and thus doesn't prove much of anything. Yet to anyone outside the field it sounds very impressive, like if there is no flaw in the proof then the proposition is completely true. They also like to redefine the meaning of + and * in some contexts, like when working with elliptic curves, such that equations that look like normal math actually mean something totally different. They could use different symbols or even words, but, they don't.

There's often no need for this. Jargon is unavoidable in any technical field but often phrasing things in plain English loses no precision and can only illuminate. Gender/critical theory seems to be filled with bizarre redefinitions of terms to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, like the way they pretend racism means something else such that their obviously racist statements, by their definition, aren't, and statements that aren't racist by their definition are.

I've found over time that I prefer reading papers from corporate research teams, as they tend to engage less in this sort of obfuscation.

<comment><USER14> There are lots of terms in the world that get used differently by different people, sometimes to mean the exact opposite of what other people mean. One example is "decriminalization" (of prostitution). I have taken to stating up front which way I mean that because it's so consistently misconstrued if I don't.

I don't think masculinity and feminity really works to express the desired idea here. In the past, I have been told that I read as very feminine. A lot of that is behavioral and is rooted in things like body language.

More than a decade ago, I cut my hair very short for health reasons. I continued to be interpreted as clearly female.

Then I spent some homeless. I began wearing men's t-shirts and sweatpants for practical reasons, including the fact that a man's t-shirt gives better coverage when I am braless.

Initially, I continued to be read as female. But after a year on the street, people sometimes called me "sir " especially if they were seeing me from the back (and I think the lack of a bra helped convince people I was male -- you can see the outline of bra straps through clothing).

I don't feel less feminine. I can't tell you what I'm doing differently. Whatever it is, it isn't conscious and intentional.

As far as I can tell, I still have the default character traits that are 'typically' feminine that probably helped get me read as extremely feminine in my youth. But something about my demeanor changed in ways I cannot pinpoint.

And, yet, the social construct of gender continues to get in my way in many important ways and interfere with me making my life work. I still do not feel I have escaped that prison and the poverty it helps impose on my life.

Life constrains people by what other people expect of them and de facto insist on as a role they must play. I think this is a separate issue from masculinity or feminity. I think it is reasonable for people to try to invent language to talk about such ideas.

I did qualify my remark about math with "probably."

I'm okay with having this discussion with you. Many people knowledgeable about this topic wouldn't be.

You will notice other people here talk about "this is a standard trans excluding tactic" and I've said no such thing. People who are negatively impacted by certain practices tend to conclude that they are being intentionally and consciously mistreated and excluded.

I generally don't make that assumption. I tend to believe that much friction of this sort is genuinely due to some people honestly not understanding what the issue is and why it matters to some people.

I don't make that assumption even for things that do directly negatively impact me. And that's not the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mental note: never click a Quilette link again.

<comment><USER18> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well- meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.</comment>


Reverse Engineering Birds' Beaks into Dinosaur Bones - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/science/reverse-engineering-birds-beaks-into-dinosaur-bones.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesscience

<comment><USER2> Now we just need to apply a couple of tweaks like this to cassowaries and we'll really be getting somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> This again? Click-bait</comment>


C++ Internals: STL Vector, Part 3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gahcep.com/cpp-internals-stl-vector-part-3/ <comment><USER3> I know this is a nitpick, but "auto main() -> int" seems weird to me. "int main()" is not only more understandable, but also shorter.

<comment><USER4> And just a few lines below that: "for (auto item : { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 })". Why?? It's an almost comical abuse of C++11 for the sake of it.

<comment><USER5> > And just a few lines below that: "for (auto item : { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, > 9 })". Why?? It's an almost comical abuse of C++11 for the sake of it.

This comment is very interesting. His syntax reminds me of Python syntax of:

        for i in [1,2,3]:

Isn't that what the future C++ is trying to achieve? Simplified syntax?

<comment><USER6> > Isn't that what the future C++ is trying to achieve? Simplified syntax?

I think your question was rhetorical, in any case the answer is yes. In fact the proposed C++ pythy syntax tries go even further [http://pfultz2.github.io/Pythy/](http://pfultz2.github.io/Pythy/) . IIRC its Clang only. Its author hangs out on HN sometimes and would be able to provide more information

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The scrolling experience on this page is awful on my retina MacBook Pro.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious why anyone would reimplement scrolling in a webpage when the browser already does it. It's not even an interesting problem...

<comment><USER9> Not sure it reimplements scrolling; it just looks like there are CSS styles applied to browsers supporting ::webkit-scrollbar-* selectors and coloring/thinning the scrollbar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Once one ignores the broken english, there's a lot of useful info here - <USER2> really anything new, but still useful.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, this is a brilliant series of articles. I really enjoyed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author (gahcep) and Stephan (STL, stl maintainer for microsoft) are on r/cpp.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/3gd29t/c_internals_stl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/3gd29t/c_internals_stl_vector_part_iii_custom_allocator/)

<comment><USER13> It's amusing to see somebody going through work I did 8 years ago!

<comment><USER14> As someone that uses Microsoft's STL, I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work. Stepping through the STL (whether on purpose or via accidental F11 instead of F10) has made me a better programmer. I mean it sincerely!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Using a custom allocator with standard collections can be highly useful, as the article points out. I do recommend defining your own container deriving from a type such as std::vector using private inheritance, and exposing the base definitions via the "using" keyword and replicating applicable typedefs/constructors.

Doing so will help prevent "interesting" behaviour and help expose assumptive template definitions in a code base.

</comment><comment><USER16> The link to simple_allocator.hpp is a 404.

<comment><USER17> Fixed.</comment></comment>


"Obnoxious Hipster Startups Must Die" (re: Xobni) - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/09/obnoxious_hipst.html

<comment><USER2> This seems like a riff on MTV Cribs, albeit not a very good one. It's the nature of the show to focus on the inconsequential toys and perks while ignoring the hard work that got them there. It's also de rigeur to try to seem cool by using vaguely hip-hop slang, often to hilarious effect.

It's anybody's guess whether the trivial, silly nature of something like Cribs says more about the celebrities or the people who watch them. Taken at face value this video is stupid fluff, but it's meant to be stupid fluff. I don't know what else the author of this article was expecting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very obnoxious uptight corporate behaviour is dying.</comment>


Only the fastest finger will survive, tower slash - <AUTHOR> http://marduken.net/towerslash/

<comment><USER2> Hey guys I'm Tower Slash creator, I'm available for any questions you have</comment>


Why SQL is neither legacy, nor the wrong place for business data logic - <AUTHOR> http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/notes-from-the-lab/why-sql-is-neither-legacy-nor-low-level-but-simply-awesome <comment><USER2> The problem with the "Fallacy #5: The database is the wrong place for business logic" bit is that, even if you accept that there are things your DBMS can do better than your application tier can, if you shunt the logic for those things into stored procedures or the like you're splitting your application into two parts, each with logic written in different languages and stored in different places. Which makes it hard when problems arise to easily run down what their source is, since you can only follow the breadcrumb trail so far before it disappears into the black box of the other part of the system. And unless you are the rare unicorn developer who is as skilled with your database as you are with your programming language, that means having to rope someone else in to take it from there, which slows you down and introduces the potential for communications problems that complicate things further.

None of which is to say that you should _never_ put business logic into the database, just that if your priority is to have a small team where everybody owns large chunks of functionality and iterations are rapid, taking a notional performance hit to avoid overcomplicating your architecture is a valid tradeoff.</comment>


New anti-piracy software blocks illegal content from displaying on your monitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/10/new-anti-piracy-software-scans-and-blocks-illegal-content-from-d/ <comment><USER2> I'm flabbergasted that a piece of software that apparently does a small (less than 76 bytes per frame) hash can detect _illegal_ "content".

Just think: we can let NEC's software determine legality and do away with all these messy and expensive judges, juries and attornies! All nuance, neatly captured in 76 bytes per frame.

Wow, just wow.</comment>


Psychology of music preference - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_music_preference

<comment><USER2> This article might be quite nice example for why so many people angrily reject calling psychology a "science". All that stuff is pretty much obvious in the sense of "this is what one would assume about others music preferences", it's all too ambiguous and, honestly, results of any "study" of that short may change drastically, depending on expected results and research methods used. The worst part of it is I very much believe there are some studies, that "show" these results (I didn't bother to follow the links).

Of course, I haven't done any "psychological studies" on that matter, but I dare to say that unbiased reality is much more prosaic and quite obvious for anyone who has experience of, well, _communicating with people_. The psychological portrait of a teenager who doesn't actually know about most of music outside his favorite band/genre will correlate with the genre, because he didn't really chose the genre: it is just part of subculture he belongs to, which is obviously related to person's nature and culture of his time/location. It doesn't have to (and probably even doesn't) depend on music itself.

The same stays true about a person, that this teenager became after growing up. Obviously, these guys will be majority of any study of the sorts.

Finding some relationship between music preferred and psychological portrait _could_ be interesting among a group of individuals, who have broad knowledge of music, and can name preferred genre, which they listen the most. These are always a minority, and unsurprisingly, any stereotypes about relationship between music preferences and personality just happen to be wrong to the point of being hilarious: such big is incompatibility between "what this guy should be listening to according to stereotypes" and "what he actually listens". Even more often, though, anyone who has broad enough knowledge of music to _chose_ a genre, fails to _name_ a genre, because he really just has favorite _songs_ or _albums_ (for about any possible mood), not _bands_ and _genres_.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found it interesting how extraversion and openness to experience were separate here. I've always parceled those two together, and anecdotally there seems to be some correlation there.</comment>


What are some of the best materials for homemade face masks? - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/616404146577358848/materials-for-homemade-face-masks <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/20...](https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2020/april/the- best-)

Full study article:

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252)</comment>


Let me StackOverflow that for you - <AUTHOR> http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> Please don't upvote this site. Adding more snark to the world on a nice Friday morning doesn't help anyone.

On the contrary, go visit SO and find a few questions you can help someone with. I'm going to after I get some coffee. Help some others out, just like people have helped us out on so many occasions.

<comment><USER3> Can't agree more. I can see benefit in asking technical questions (no matter how dumb) because you can educate and communicate one another, not the sort of questions LMGTFY deals with. I wouldn't enjoy working with the person who came up with this site...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last time I was given a snarky lmgtfy link, the search results didn't actually produce any useful results. I had already tried google-ing the exact words before asking.

<comment><USER5> I can see that becoming a problem in a couple of years:

Step 1) Go to stackoverflow and search question. Step 2) Answers only point to letmegooglethatforyou. Step 3) Search using letmegooglethatforyou. Step 4) Find only results pointing to letmestackoverflowthatforyou.

As a matter of fact it has already started.

<comment><USER6> This is why LMGTFY is banned on Stack Overflow. If you see it, please flag it for a moderator to delete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The links generated don't work. There's the "/" at the end that's screwing things up.

For example, the link generated for "hello world" is:

[http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello%20wo...](http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello%20world/)

Which doesn't work. (don't click on "preview". Copy and paste the link (which is what your "victim" will have to do)).

But "[http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello%20wo...](http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello%20world") will work (will be changed to "[http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello](http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello) world")

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't see how this is better than let me google that for you. Google is a far better search engine for searching on SO ( and you can get non-SO relevant hits), unless you decide to use tags, which letmestackoverflowthatforyou doesn't use.

<comment><USER6> Stack Overflow's search automatically converts search terms to tags if they happen to be a common enough tag, so that's taken care of when the search is submitted to SO. (Try searching for "Java String" for example.)

The problem I have with this is that the world didn't really need yet another snarky "Let me X that for you" site. This doesn't make the Internet better. LMGTFY links are banned on Stack Overflow because they fail at being either clever or useful. Using Stack Overflow's name and logo for this strikes me as rather dickish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always found it a lot more effective to sit down with someone and find the answer together, no matter how simple the question. If our technique works well, I've found they'll generally try it again the next time they have a question.

Unlike sending this link, figuring out things together doesn't leave teammates avoiding and dreading interactions with each other.

</comment><comment><USER10> hey everyone -- I'm actually one of the three developers-in-training who wrote this app. We just finished week four of Dev Bootcamp, and this was just a (admittedly stupid) project we invented to practice our abilities in html/css/javascript/sinatra/rspec/heroku. We built it in four hours late on thursday night, basically on a dare.

Also -- we love helping people! sitting down and walking someone through a problem is the best way to help them learn something and to crystalize the concept for yourself. Hell, thats basically the motto of DBC. And of course it's against the ethos of the programming community to belittle others who ask for help, since we're all going to need help at some point.

This site is just meant as a joke. I would hate it if someone actually used this on a curious and well meaning junior developer.

</comment><comment><USER11> This was yesterday for me. Had a developer come to my desk, asked how to perform an action (set a timeout on a ajax request), I pulled up Stackoverflow and had the answer in about 10 seconds.

<comment><USER12> So you helped them, and showed them a tool they could use to help themself in the future. That's good!

This tool on the other hand, would help you belittle and alienate them so that they are afraid of asking for help in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to note that Dash is awesome, and easily searches and displays docs, google, and stackoverflow:

[http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash)</comment>


The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/american-worker-less-vacation-medieval-peasant-2016-11 <comment><USER2> Americans have an unhealthy relationship with work. It's as if we live to work instead of the reverse. Our attitudes toward work seem to contribute to the irrational fear a lot of Americans have of some poor person getting something they don't deserve via the welfare system. It contributes, I think, the our attitudes toward the justice system. We tend to seek vengeance over other considerations. Making one be punished is paramount. All work and no play not only makes Jack a dull boy it makes him angry and gives him an unhealthy perspective on life.</comment>


Announcing Confluent, a Company for Apache Kafka and Realtime Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141106180403-2945786-announcing-confluent-a-company-for-apache-kafka-and-realtime-data

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that LinkedIn is an investor in a startup consisting of its former employees.

[http://confluent.io](http://confluent.io)</comment>


How we got our Stripe account back - <AUTHOR> https://ultimatemember.com/got-stripe-account-back/

<comment><USER2> How can you say you'd recommend them, when the only way you got any real support was via public shaming?

And for the account to be closed based on multi country logins, without any kind of verification with you, is absolutely insane.

<comment><USER3> Agree. It seems obvious that Stripe does not care much about their merchants. This is the same kind of behavior that has given Paypal a bad reputation.</comment></comment>


Writing tips from the CIA's ruthless style manual - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/231110/writing-tips-from-the-cias-ruthless-style-manual/

<comment><AUTHOR> Original PDF here: [http://www.nationalsecuritylaw.org/files/received/CIA/DI_Sty...](http://www.nationalsecuritylaw.org/files/received/CIA/DI_Style_Manual.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting note on comma :)

There is a general tendency to use too many commas, but the sin of omission is almost as common as the sin of commission.</comment>


Dutch hackers broke into Trump's Twitter account in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://nltimes.nl/2020/09/11/dutch-hackers-broke-trumps-twitter-account-2016-report <comment><AUTHOR> > The hackers said they found Trump's password because of a LinkedIn data > breach involving a database of 117 million username and passwords.

> The password 'yourefired' \- the catch phrase for Trump's reality show The > Apprentice - turned out to also work on his Twitter account.</comment>


Incubator RoundUp 2008 (YC, TechStars, DreamIt, LaunchBox) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/9932346/Incubator-RoundUp-SeptDec-08

<comment><USER2> Many of the YC startups listed there have had more than seed funding. They just didn't announce it. Two others haven't bothered to raise money because they were already profitable and didn't want the distraction.

<comment><USER3> Being profitable doesn't mean you not should raise money. If anything it's an opportunity to raise money on favorable terms as you don't need VCs.

<comment><USER2> Four were (ramen) profitable by Demo Day this summer. Two of those did take money from investors. The other two might still at some point. All four have had offers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also note that for several of these (like Frogmetrics, Picwing, and others), pageviews aren't the best metric of "success" because the website isn't the product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Note that this is not the most up to date compete.com numbers. The latest came out today.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes only compiled public info.</comment>


Building Self Discipline - <AUTHOR> http://www.dragosroua.com/building-self-discipline/ <comment><USER2> This article came off, to me, as an individual quest for self discipline. Unless I missed it, the author doesn't discuss the influence of other people on your attitudes and motivations. One addition that I think would help someone gain more self discipline is to associate with people (in the same field of interest) who have great self discipline.

As an example, I'll point to myself. I am not the most self-disciplined person. I had planned to do a lot of things this past summer which, frankly, I couldn't force myself to do.

However, about a year ago when I went to college as a freshman CS student, I joined my school's gymnastics team. Now, I've been a gymnast for most of my life, and I've generally been a lazy gymnast. When I first started practicing with my new team, though, I was incredibly motivated to attain the skills of my teammates, and to surpass them. Someone who was to become a good friend of mine asked one day during gym, "Why are you working so hard? Take things at your own pace, and you'll make progress before you know it," to which I said, "No, I need to keep working out like this. Otherwise I won't be able to contribute to the team."

Before joining that team, I had only really been working for myself. Men's Gymnastics, prior to college, is incredibly individual. Yes, there are teams, but before college the age range at a normal gym is 5 - 18 years old. There are tons of conflicting levels of maturity and motivation, and it isn't rare that someone will quit halfway through the season. Thing is, before college, this can help you more than it hurts you, because one more competitor is out of the way, making it easier for you to win.

Point is, once I joined my college team, I gained new reasons to continue to train. In college, no one quits mid-season, save for medical reasons and other emergencies. It is unthinkable to quit mid-season. Why? Because there are other people depending on me to do well, so that the team as a whole does well. There are people coming to me with questions and a desire for help, and I feel obligated to assist them and pass on any advice that I have. I feel obligated to be at the same level of skill as my teammates _at minimum_.

More than that, we keep against each other so that through competition, we will all become better at what we do. If we weren't in a team environment, it wouldn't be possible for us to have even half of the motivation to do well. If we weren't a team, then each of us would walk a lonely path to our goals.

To wrap up, being part of a group or team can have enormous benefits to your self discipline and motivation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. I only saw it the other way around, as a source of interruptions, hence the chapter on how to avoid interference. But you're totally right: being part of a larger group does help a lot in building self-discipline.

Thanks for the comment.</comment></comment>


Popularity Growth Patterns of GitHub Software - <AUTHOR> http://mtov.github.io/github-popularity-growth-patterns/

<comment><USER2> Though it's hands down my favorite language... JavaScript's position is hardly surprising given that many applications have a web front end component, and often the JS outweighs the backend language used.

I really like JS/Node.js but imho if there's more than 2-3 files in a language other than JS, the repository's language credit should probably go to that other language.

That said, go JS!!! node/io.js forever!

(P.S. I know that node/io.js are reconciling)</comment>


Will Photos Help Twitter Make Money? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/05/31/photos-are-great-but-will-they-help-twitter-make-money/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this the sort of feature they should have added two years ago? When you look at Facebook they don't blink, when they see something they don't ask permission and grab it. Twitter on the other hand seems to hesitate until after the answer is obvious.</comment>


T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM vs. Sanity - <AUTHOR> http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/09/t-paamayim-nekudotayim-v-sanity

<comment><USER2> I think I would have a heart attack if I was this person. The silliness of this entire thing is just off the charts. Jeez.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I'm not sure what to think here. The PHP team's voluntary naming convention violation, people who can't be bothered to RTFM or that I actually read the whole rant in its entirety.

This little quirk's been famous for so long, and PHP has much bigger issues than this, frankly. Still a butchery of consistency. I wonder when PHP will start selling official T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM t-shirts? Does someone else do it already?</comment>


Ask HN: Will there be "coronavirus parties"? - <AUTHOR> Like those "chicken pox parties" for kids, but with the intention of having better access to medical care before the system gets overloaded. Looking at the charts, like the NYTimes one I posted about earlier, it's a pretty obvious conclusion that timing will affect outcome if you get a bad case of this. <comment><USER2> Per the other thread on this[1], this is in general a terrible idea, not least because the people intentionally infecting themselves with COVID-19 will be the ones overloading the system by artificially accelerating its spread.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22565408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22565408)

I'd also suspect that if the system becomes overloaded, perhaps because of an artificial increase in the number of cases generated by 'coronavirus parties', people that admit to intentionally infecting themselves in the hope of being at the front of the ICU queue will find themselves at the back.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not see the other thread :( What's the protocol? Should I delete this one? Copy your replies over?

<comment><USER2> Think it generally just drops off naturally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Like I read in a post in LessWrong, it's much better to try to avoid contagion until after the peak of the pandemic, so that there are more resources freed up (hospital beds, respirators, etc) and the doctors and health workers have more experience in dealing with this particular virus, maybe there's existing drugs that have proven effective with this virus unlike on the early stages where they don't know what drugs to use (apparently some HIV drugs could potentially be useful against SARS-CoV-2). Not new drugs specifically develop for this virus, that could be years from now. So, social distancing, try to avoid crowds, try to stay at home, clean your hands (follow the protocol to clean them), clean and disinfect surfaces, WFH if possible, and so on... Anecdotally, I think the UK strategy of letting the virus run its course so that the country gets some sort of herd immunity it's a very dangerous bet... Lots of elderly people in the country will die, and it won't guarantee any immunity as people have gotten the disease twice. Maybe they are counting on lots of elderly people dying to save on pensions and healthcare costs (healthcare is public and free in the UK).

<comment><USER4> _I think the UK strategy of letting the virus run its course . . ._

This is not my impression of the UK strategy at all. Until now, there has been very aggressive contact tracing and testing. There has been no need for mass closures and restrictions. The strategy is now shifting. I suspect those closures and restrictions are coming. There is danger in doing it too early, however, and definitely no point in isolating people who in all likelihood are perfectly healthy.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-12/british-government- wants...](https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-12/british-government-wants-uk-to- acquire-coronavirus-herd-immunity-writes-robert-peston/)

"The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact of Covid-19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity"

[https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11164977/millions-uk- coronavir...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11164977/millions-uk-coronavirus- herd-immunity/)

If you search about this you'll find many other sources...

So basically the UK wants to acquire herd immunity as a country, which I assume is at the expense of all the elderly people who will die as a result...

Also relevant

[https://twitter.com/daverooney/status/1238359192249008128](https://twitter.com/daverooney/status/1238359192249008128)

<comment><USER5> The point I think is one of delaying things "Letting it run its course" implies no action, which would be not correct.

Herd immunity is desired but with change in the nature of the epidemic so that old people don't die as much as if they did nothing.

Also herd immunity.is not 100%, you just need a certain high proportion. If you can protect those most at risk also then it could work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understand what you mean, it is much better to be contaminated before the system is overwhelmed, however if you are in Europe or US, that ship has already sailed.

The time you'll get symptoms in about 5 days, the system might be already overtaxed, and getting voluntarily exposed to the virus will only stress the system more.

And God forbids if everyone got that same idea at once.

<comment><USER5> Also, once you have symptoms the worst stuff might happen after these fever and coughs end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22565408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22565408)

</comment><comment><USER8> Much longer term there will be a vaccine, so if someone is worried about developing immunity they have other options later on (if somehow they aren't exposed anyway).

In the meantime getting infected before a peak that occurs at an unknown time seems much riskier than doing so long after.</comment>