Show HN: Site for musical artist recommendations (and anti-recommendations) - <AUTHOR> http://ifyoudig.net/?shn <comment><USER3> As an independent artist, I don't see any info on how you might get your own music into the site.

Services that rely on bigger services like Spotify (not sure where this site gets its music, that's just an example) create a bit of a barrier to entry for exactly the type of artist would would benefit most from a bit of extra exposure.

It seems that many new "discover new music" services I see these days have exactly this problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is really good because of how basic it is.

What's not so good is if you are a genre expert it doesn't do too deep of a dive.

For instance I love the roots artist Guy Clark but I know every artist that is recommended ([http://ifyoudig.net/guy-clark](http://ifyoudig.net/guy-clark)). I like the majority of them so the suggestions aren't off by any means but it would be nice to get more obscure (but still accurate) suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder where they could have gotten their data from. Their 'about' page says, "If You Dig's results are calculated from the music preferences of a whole lotta real people. Like, a lot."

I'd really like to know where this data comes from. The results are accurate enough, but how can I know they'll become more accurate or improve over time?

<comment><AUTHOR> New data comes in through [http://ifyoudig.net/page/contribute](http://ifyoudig.net/page/contribute)

To incentivize people to keep contributing, the plan is to build a notification service around your favorite artists, so you'll find out about new artists/albums/songs that are related to your tastes.

So the more popular the site gets, the more data there will be :)

<comment><USER6> Just picking some random favorites, I looked at "Symphony X", and then flipped over to "Least Likely". There are several artists there -- Adele, The Offspring, Johnny Cash -- that I quite enjoy.

IMHO, it doesn't seem correct to ask people for their "favorite bands". It would seem more accurate to ask them "when you're in a given mood, what bands will you most enjoy hearing?". At the right times, I'd be equally happy to hear Symphony X or Johnny Cash. But at any given time, I'm going to prefer one or the other. So why not just let the contributors spell out those similarity sets for you?

It seems to me that you're grouping things that are similar in some stronger sense than that they're the favorites of some people. And conversely, the way you're getting the data -- asking for _favorites_ you'd be missing out on a bunch of minor bands that aren't anyone's favorite, but still enjoyed by people.

<comment><USER7> This site finds similar artists to the one you search for. It has no reason to expect you'll like The Offspring when you entered Symphony X.

It's like telling a friend you like Band X, and they say "Oh man, if you like Band X, you'll probably like Similar Band Y! or Similar Band Z!" It would be odd if you said you liked Jay-Z and someone recommended The Clash because they're so different, even though it's not uncommon to like both.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly my point.

As the Contribute question stands, I might put Symphony X and Johnny Cash on my list of favorites, which would make the site more likely to recommend one in response to the other. But in real life, if someone asked me what I'd recommend to a Johnny Cash fan, there's no way I'd answer Symphony X.

And I propose that the way to address this is to not ask the user "what are your [unrelated] favorites", but rather, "pick a recent moment, and tell us what music you would have most enjoyed hearing at that time". That implies a stronger link than simply that the listed artists share a spot on my list of unrelated favorites.

<comment><USER7> Reading comprehension fail on my part!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty cool. I'm impressed with the quality of the recommendations and really like how simple the site is. Some info on how you calculate the recs would be interesting. (at least for this thread). I only wish the layout was a little better on my phone. (Sent from iPhone)

PS I also second the other comments that the type ahead could be a little more lenient.

</comment><comment><USER9> This does a really good job: [http://ifyoudig.net/dark- moor](http://ifyoudig.net/dark-moor)

Last.fm does alright: [http://www.last.fm/music/Dark+Moor/+similar](http://www.last.fm/music/Dark+Moor/+similar)

Last.fm puts Galneryus on page 3, and Galneryus is sufficiently different that I wouldn't trust the recommendations that score lower. Last.fm correctly places Stratovarius above this cutoff, but Helloween, Sonata Arctica, and Blind Guardian don't make the cut, and Ayreon is all the way down on page 10 with Van Canto and Turisas. Van Canto and Turisas are great, to be sure, they are just way less similar to Dark Moor than Ayreon is.

Of course, Last.fm is better than nothing: [http://ifyoudig.net/mohican- sandbag](http://ifyoudig.net/mohican-sandbag) vs. [http://www.last.fm/music/Mohican+Sandbag/+similar](http://www.last.fm/music/Mohican+Sandbag/+similar)

Last.fm just reads tags, so a lot of artists have multiple names. モヒカンサンドバッグ is the second result for being similar to itself! Last.fm also does a pretty awful job by putting ORANGE★JAM and 3L on the first page, with dBu closely following. Much more similar producers and circles like 和泉幸奇, Alstroemeria, or IOSYS are nowhere to be found. Izmizm and Shibayan on page 1 are sensible. So maybe Last.fm isn't all that much better than nothing...

I think this can be good, and I might even pay for it, but ultimately it will be just one of a handful of half-solutions that need to be combined to get quality discovery. Pandora and Google Music's instant playlist do better than I would expect any people-who-like-x-also-like-y similarity system to do. Unfortunately Pandora has like 7 artists in its library and Google Music's instant playlist requires you to already have the music you are discovering, which sort of misses the point.

<comment><USER10> I think the major problem with services like this is that they have things at the far ends of the popularity bell curve fall off. Jcore being one of them. Kind of a chicken and the egg problem where people who like any of a number of niche generas come to the site, find it useless to them, and don't contribute. perhaps some incentive for adding new artists could break this cycle? or even just a link in the "Not Found" page tot he contribution suggesting if they like that band to leave their favorites for others.

<comment><USER9> I wonder how much a 15 write-in ballot helps things D: [http://i.imgur.com/uT0X1HU.png](http://i.imgur.com/uT0X1HU.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like this site is good for finding stuff that's similar to something that I already like. What I really want is something where I can say: "Here's everything that I like, now tell me something completely different that I will also like".

</comment><comment><USER12> Great stuff! I happen to really like all recommendations that came in for me.

Some suggestions: this pure social graph approach could be vastly improved for music recommendation by aggregating tags, à la last.fm, or adding music- related features yielded by some waveform analysis.

For instance, I typed in Tame Impala and got these results in this order: Real Estate - Girls - Beach Fossils - Toro Y Moi - Washed Out - Wavves - <USER2> Blake. The first three relate well to modern psych rock of Tame Impala, but then things get a little strange: two chillwave acts, one correctly similar psych/noise rock act and a dubstep/downtempo artist!

</comment><comment><USER13> If you like Radiohead... "then you're LEAST LIKELY to dig..." Selena Gomez! - [http://ifyoudig.net/radiohead/opposite](http://ifyoudig.net/radiohead/opposite)

<comment><USER14> The LEAST likely button seems quite useful. Search for "Britney Spears", hit "Show LEAST likely". And you get a list of quality artists from a wide variety of genres.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looking at "contribute", it doesn't really reflect my listening patterns since I starting listening to music almost exclusively by streaming. Once upon a time I bought albums and had favourite artists, but now, for me, it's all about the song. I don't really _have_ a favourite band anymore, and the stuff I listen to most is one or two songs by this act, one or two songs by that act

It's not really a criticism, looking up stuff from the days I listened to bands rather than songs it seems pretty accurate, but I dunno how I'd use it in the present

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool site. What technologies did you build it with?

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://ifyoudig.net/page/about](http://ifyoudig.net/page/about) \----- Note for the nerds: the math is legit. We take sample size into account when calculating artist associations, and the likelihood factor is the lowest bound of a confidence interval. Everything is statistically significant. Results are real, yo. \----

</comment><comment><USER18> There's also tastekid.com for recommendations in general. It does a very good job with musical artist recommendations in particular.

I searched "Don Caballero" on ifyoudig [1] and got a few good results, but also some very different artists, like Mogwai and Aphex Twin.

[1] [http://ifyoudig.net/don-caballero](http://ifyoudig.net/don-caballero)

<comment><USER19> It's not trying to recommend similar artists - it's recommending artists that you will like!

I think Mogwai and Aphex Twin are pretty good recommendations for someone who likes the math rock/post rock that Don Cab play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The error message in an "alert" box when you don't select the artist form the drop down list is a bit surprising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, you're right. That is now #1 on my to-do list -- maybe just go straight to the artist page if there's an exact string match, or else try to suggest a list of closely-spelled artists?

Any algorithms anyone can suggest for finding close spellings, besides Levenshtein? Like, that are somehow indexable or easy to implement in a database?

[Edit: just updated it, searching now works on a direct string match, no more annoying alert box.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really cool. I'd love to see it calculate not just likelihoods but actual probabilities.

Right now I can see that liking Artist A makes me 10x more likely to like Artist B. But Artist B might still be really terrible, so it might work out to only a 1% chance I'll actually like Artist B.

</comment><comment><USER22> This and other music recommendation services tend to have a problem where if you try a popular artist, it will only return popular artists. I'd really like a service that you input popular artists and then it returns more obscure artists with similar influences.

<comment><USER9> Pandora does this. A nice way to make money as a relatively obscure artist on Pandora is to be acoustically "adjacent" to some extremely popular band.

ifyoudig.net seems to have a very small popularity bias compared to e.g. Spotify though, so that's nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome. Typed in one of my favorite bands, found new bands I actually like so far. When I do that on Spotify, I get a bunch of crap that every service counts as "similar", but I hate, or bands I've already heard of a million times.

</comment><comment><USER24> One of the best sites I have visited recently.

Remarkable recommendations. My favorite artist is [http://ifyoudig.net/mike- oldfield](http://ifyoudig.net/mike-oldfield) and actually ifyoudig.net recommended some really interesting bands.

Way the go!

</comment><comment><USER25> Finding opposite for 'Justin Bieber' is like dividing by 0 - infinity.

</comment><comment><USER26> love it, very useful. my only suggestion is to accept an artist name if I type in the whole thing (rather than forcing me to select from the dropdown)

<comment><USER27> I'd echo these comments exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow this is really good, its funny I was literally just looking for a music similarity website since last.fm isn't very good and this nails it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like the simple, no-framework approach to the UI.

Sometimes it works much better than stuff you get with bootstrap/UIkit/Foundation/whatever.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sometimes for country genre the songs didn't match the artist FYI

</comment><comment><USER31> Jamiroquai but no Incognito? How do these people sleep at night? ;-)

<comment><USER32> It took me 7 tries before it found an edm group I asked it. LTJ Bukem and Dillinja don't make the cut.

These services are clever, but I usually know all of their suggestions. :-(

And yes, I'm trying to do better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd love more details on this. Where is the data coming from?

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome site! I'll definitely be coming back often.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice, I like it.

Need any help on the front-end side of things?

</comment><comment><USER35> This would definitely benefit from a .it tld

</comment><comment><USER27> Great site, great execution. I dig.</comment>


I Spent $6M on Google Ads Last Year - <AUTHOR> https://nicklafferty.com/blog/i-spent-6-million-on-google-ads-last-year-here-s-what-i-learned/ <comment><USER5> I tried Adwords for search again recently after several years. There was a decent number of clicks, and the cost per "action" seemed very reasonable, where for me, the action is clicking on the download link from the landing page to download the installer for our game. The only problem is that tracking the IP's, 90% of the traffic from Adwords that downloaded the installer never actually ran the installer. Organic traffic usually has much more than 50% of the people who download it, run it. Is it a bunch of robots driving clicks and then clicking randomly on links on the landing page? Seems really suspicious.

<comment><USER6> Do people still download "setup.exe" files from random sites on the Internet and run them on their PCs?

Maybe a link to some sort of "app store" (or whatever its called on Windows) would be more convincing?

<comment><USER7> ...yes.

(I should probably change my ways.)

<comment><USER8> (Microsoft could allow the store to be less terrible)

<comment><USER9> What's terrible about the store?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm skeptical of articles that talk about how well they did something but don't provide the actual numbers.

There is no mention of actual ROI, conversions, traffic, and so forth.

Overall, I'm pretty skeptical of the true return that marketing campaigns can generate. When you calculate the full cost not just of the marketing but you include margins and the full lifetime value of the customer then you get a real sense.

The thing that stood out to me is the first sentence, that the person had an unlimited budget. With that in mind, basically makes me believe they weren't that focused on the true profitability of the spend.

<comment><USER11> You noted a few interesting things that I wanted to call out as a marketer, like budget.

No one has a $3m Google Ads budget for something that doesn't work already. I've run campaigns for brands that lead the market and for new businesses that have no brand recognition at all--the difference is night and day. Should founders run to Gmail ads because of this? Probably not.

Assuming the campaigns are still profitable, doubling the budget is great. I hope they really did well. But what does this really tell us? What can a startup or small business founder learn from this? Not much.

<comment><USER12> I can assure you there's companies that spend a millions on ads with no idea what they are doing. In-fact there are products within business units, within large enterprises that spend >$1M per quarter, where the segment itself may spend $5M+/Quarter, easily.

The agency that runs the programs the the only people that win - after they pocket their 5+% commission.

Source: past roles where I saw a lot of people who do not know wtf they are doing with ads (yet they themselves are making 6 figures)

<comment><USER11> I originally had more nuance in my comment but wanted to keep it simple. In my experience, companies like the ones you describe have a really strong brand (so large volume of branded search) and/or really strong other channels, like SEO. At that point, paid search is a piece of the overall ROI (serving market share or other strategic objectives) and not channel-specific.

Adding even more nuance, that really only describes successful companies. Failing companies _think_ they are profitable, until they quickly aren't. Your experience is very similar to my own. You're 100% right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I enjoy reading posts like this because I've been blocking ads and avoiding "marketing tech" companies for so long that I don't even know what's going on in the ad world anymore. It's interesting to see that not a whole lot has changed in the last 5+ years with respect to platforms and strategies.

<comment><USER14> Same here - I glanced over the article and was confused why there was a part for Gmail. I thought to myself : "but gmail doesn't have ads?". Which makes me wonder even more why 75%+ of the population doesn't have adblock themselves?

<comment><USER15> This. People with adblock are living in a completely different online reality. I'm amazed how much time people spend on ad-ridden sites despite the terrible UX, with ads "slow loading" and replacing links you want to click on, full page overlays, flashy animated ads etc pp. People still tolerate it, the must _really_ love the content.

<comment><USER16> My personal theory is that this is one of the reasons FB, Google, Reddit are so popular as portal sites, since they have far better UX and actual performance teams to make the experience good. Nobody wants to go directly to news sites anymore.

<comment><USER15> Good point. And it's not just better UX, it's also predictable and unified, you know what happens when you click on something, you know how to like and share, and you don't need to figure out the layout & design for each site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's nice to see an adwords article that finally embraces CPA bidding. It really is king. I've been doing this for over a decade and was very hesitant to use it but it really beats everything out there.

One thing he doesn't mention is the landing page experience. It affects both your quality score which can have big impacts on CPA as well as your conversion rate.

Not sure why people have issue with "creative" as a noun, this has been the standard in advertising for decades. Hell, it's in the dictionary: [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/creative](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/creative)

Don't need to crap on Quantic and the like as much though, they do have some things that Google doesn't.

Some people are commenting on him not giving specific advice for making the creative. As some have pointed out, a whole article could be written about that, or more realistically, entire libraries of books. In short he is talking about ad copywriting, it's a whole discipline that takes years of experience and learning to get good at.

<comment><USER18> What's the difference between the Aquisition in CPA and the Click in CPC?

<comment><USER19> CPA is cost per action, not acquisition. Action is defined by you.

This bidding mode means you're taking less risk per auction, as you don't pay for impressions or clicks. You pay (sometimes 10x more) to reduce that risk, though, and your reach (how many people see your ad) can be adversely impacted if the Google Brain estimates your click through and conversion rate unfavorably to your auction competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to remind people how bad the "daily budget" is in AdWords.

The design of the budget system is in Google's favour, not yours, and if you don't understand that, you'll end up paying much more than you need to.

If you think setting the budget to half is a way to halve your ad spend and get half the number of clicks, you're right, but you're also naïve.

If Google thinks your current rate of spend is going to exceed the daily budget, they'll effectively deactivate your ad for random impressions, leading to less spend.

 _but that isn 't the best strategy_. The best strategy is to lower your bids to win fewer auctions if you want to spend less. That way, you can spend half as much, but get _more ROI_ , since the Google AI will be only showing your ad to those most likely to be interested in it.

<comment><USER20> A double digit percentage of AdWords campaigns are budget limited on any given day. I honestly can't believe how tens of thousands of marketing folk can't notice how much money they're throwing down the drain by using the budget limiter...

<comment><USER21> I agree with the broader point of view, yet I'm not sure if all you say makes sense. Most campaigns are budget limited because auto bidding is less ops intensive and, above all, sometimes works better than manual bidding (despite Google reducing the reach as you get nearer the daily budget).

Manual bidding is always preferable with fewer data points (low conversions, low clicks, no previous campaigns). Auto bidding is preferable as your GA accounts grow in conversions and the algorithms start to create a better profile of your customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone ever created a psychological profile of people who click on ads? I've never clicked on an ad, so I assume my psychological profile would show that I'm not the kind of person that would be inclined to do so. But clearly there must be people who do click on ads. Who are these people and what is their psychological profile?

<comment><USER23> 70% of Google's revenue is from their ads, so a lot of people click on them. The HN audience is a very small minority :)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising- reven...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of- google/)

<comment><USER24> A lot of _entities_ click on them. How many of them are people is debatable.

<comment><USER25> Unless the armies of bots out there started spending real cash for products after those ad clicks, I'm going to stick with "a lot of of people click on ads".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _" This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a small fee if you choose to purchase something."_

The author is spending $6M a year on ads and is generating substantially more revenue than that, they claim. Why are they bothering with spare-change Amazon affiliate links? If they can get revenue like that, they should be making tons of money with their day job. What's wrong with this picture?

<comment><USER27> Nothing is wrong with this picture. Your thought process boils down to "OP should be making enough money at their day job, why would they try to make more?" which is ridiculous.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. It's leaving easy money on the table.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hi everyone! Author here. I'm humbled that someone felt this was HackerNews worthy, really unexpected! I'll do my best to respond to comments, but if I don't get to yours feel free to drop me an email, link is on the website.

<comment><USER29> Thanks, Nick! What are some of the most difficult actions to programmatically "prove"? Which actions seem like a good idea, but perform less profitably vs. other actions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> He mentions YouTube is cheap. I wonder if the existence of YouTube Premium is partly responsible for that? I would think the Premium users may be among the most desirable and those users have hidden themselves from him.

<comment><USER31> That's often a concern amongst publishers around implementing the ability to pay to opt out of advertisements however I think in this case the relative low cost of YouTube advertisements is because of the high cost of getting them right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > The difficulty and cost associated with creating video ads is exactly why > Youtube is still a hidden gem.

These days many top performing video ads are the ones that are made to look amateur/cheap. And it's not just the guru course ads. The native vlogger-style ad is often more engaging on a platform filled with vloggers. High production value "professional" ads have traditionally been created to lend credibility & authority to the brand. But if their audience now trusts "influencers" more than big brands, what's the harm in testing a TON of simple video creatives with clever scripts.

I've even seen this style now in offline commercials.

<comment><USER33> For anyone that hates "native vlogger-style ads" in youtube videos [https://sponsor.ajay.app/](https://sponsor.ajay.app/) is a godsend.

<comment><USER34> Do you think it is moral to use that? The creator is trying to make money off the video so they can continue to create. You are essentially stealing from them-taking the content they made without paying for it (watching the ad).

If you don't like "native vlogger-style ads" don't watch those videos.

<comment><USER35> There is no moral imperative that says you are obligated to pay for something you did not voluntarily asked for. Or do you feel forced to give money to every busker on the street or Subway?

> If you don't like "native vlogger-style ads" don't watch those videos

No. If the content creator wants to give access only to the people who can provide them income, then they should make this transaction direct and transparent. It is not on the consumer's job to ensure that the producer is paid.

<comment><USER36> > There is no moral imperative that says you are obligated to pay for > something you did not voluntarily asked for

Is that accurate? If you follow a link to watch a video, is that not asking to watch that video?

<comment><USER35> VHS and TiVO have already established legal precedent: watching a video does not legally bind you to also watch the commercials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The company I work for spends very substantial amounts( for its size) on Google Ads. It does the trick but it's like putting yourself on crack.You become dependant and somehow convince yourself that you are being very smart by doing so.

<comment><USER38> That's always been the case with ads. The problem nowadays just is that it's very concentrated on a few very big players. Companies just can't afford to not be present on Google, Youtube or Facebook (depending on the brand). The power has shifted, from the companies paying to the platforms. But marketing in itself was crucial for many companies to succeed already decades ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For anyone else here confused like me, and because I don't see an immediate explanation in the comments:

"Creative" in the context of an ad means the image, video, text, etc. Basically, the ad content that the user will see.

<comment><USER40> Is it just me or is "Creative" a really newspeak-y way of talking about ads?

<comment><USER41> Rosie the Riveter, Apple's 1984 comercial, the energizer bunny, Transformers. The amount of creativity that goes into advertising is both amazing and heart breaking. The creative part of advertising truely is creative, even if applied to such a dull task.

<comment><USER42> I've never seen data on this, but I often wonder if advertising is where artists generally find the best income potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wouldn't knock tools like Marin/kenshoo too bad. They really do help you scale if you're taking spend way past $6m.

The target market there is different though. Think instead of a single company spending $6m on their ads, more like an agency spending $60m++ on 10++ different companies' ads.

Major props to this guy for doing so well in house though.

<comment><USER44> I worked for Marin as a software engineer very early on and I'm actually still a shareholder (looking forward to it going to zero so I can declare full loss on my taxes). Their technology stack is tragic. That PA acquisition? They lost $1.1m on it. The company has never been profitable and the execs get paid a lot, yet do very little. I wouldn't give them a dime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > Or you pay an agency to make your videos

Hiring creatives to make your creatives.

</comment><comment><USER46> The fact the google ads doesn't allow to do a real location targeting but will show ads to anyone "interested" in that location is usually a non-starter for me.

Having people all over the world shown an ad for a specifically localized shop ? No thanks !

For more online businesses, the results are indeed quite decent !

<comment><USER47> It's my understanding that -- sadly -- "interested in location" is the default. But you can switch it to only users in or from the location.

<comment><USER48> I manually exclude every single area around the world that I don't want to advertise in. This is the only real way to get rid of bad clicks from out of the area. Especially since the ads I run cost around $25 a click...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Our company spent over $3mm last year and this article is spot on. On the Adwords side it really is that simple - test tons of creatives and use CPA bidding.

The third party services aren't much help. Google has a lot of great in-house support to ramp up your Adspend once you get noticed. Not sure what the target is, but we seem to get a new rep every few months who has new suggestions.

I have no experience with Youtube, but that is highly interesting.

If Adwords isn't working for you, there is a ton to dive into. Could be your website, could be your product. If you have a competitor obviously succeeding in the space with heavy Adwords spend the fault is probably on your end (unless they're just pissing away money, but how long does that go on for?).

<comment><USER49> On that note, expect to lose money initially while optimizing your website & waiting for enough CPA data to accrue. I give it at least a month and $5-10k spend before seriously considering killing the campaign (if starting from scratch).

Very different from taking something already successful but mismanaged - <USER2> can be a lot easier to ramp off if they're making big mistakes (like not actually mobile optimized, not CPA bidding, not actually actively optimizing the website's funnel/landing page).

<comment><USER23> This is spot on! When I first transitioned those campaigns from eCPC to tCPA there was a big learning period. As the campaigns scaled and collected more data the actual CPA started aligning closely with the target CPA, but it took some time. The more conversions you do the faster that alignment will happen. After 2+ years on tCPA (and many behind the scenes improvements to the Algo by Google), I could get that delta to match within 3-4 days of making a change to the target CPA. That was with thousands of conversions a day though, so scale absolutely helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Dumb question but does anybody know what is Creative ? Is that a software or a generic term for a creative edge - like getting the right slogans and correct catch phrases to grab somebody's attention.

<comment><USER51> The "creative" is, well, the creative part of an ad. It's the text, images, design, etc. It's the "sexy" part of marketing, compared with all the quantitative/analytic work like segmentation, user research, pricing, etc.

I somewhat disagree with the author that the creative is everything - <USER3> you already have all the other aspects locked on and creative is the only place for you to improve

<comment><USER52> Ok I have another question. On social platforms like facebook, whenever the creatives are refreshed, the ad set is put back into a "learning phase", which we're told to avoid.

So what is the best way to iterate on new creatives without re-entering the learning phase?

<comment><USER53> Ab test say 20 creative in an adset and let Facebook find the best creative for you in a cbo. Once set it is set and best not to change the creative just launch a new ad set with the new creative. You can change it but not ideal or how you should run Facebook ads with a proper account structure to maintain data transparency. Also with Facebook algo suspending and disabling ad accounts like crazy swapping creative after approved looks very fishy and can trigger negativr signals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> What's the best source to learn how to property target online ads (without spending $6M)?

Are there good online courses or blogs that you recommend?

<comment><USER23> It depends what ad platform you want to learn. Google has a great learning series here: [https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/](https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/)

If you want to learn Google Ads I'd recommend getting certified for Search, Display, and Shopping. If you want to learn Facebook and Instagram ads then that's a whole different animal.

<comment><USER54> Thanks for that! I'll check out the Google learning series.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I can't help but think this person was selling shirts without stripes.

</comment><comment><USER56> lol at all the devs bashing on 70 year old advertising terminology

to give you one back, my cringe dev jargon of the moment is PERFORMANT

<comment><USER57> what's up with performant? It's an adjective.

I used to be in advertising and "creative" referred to the _role_ of creative direction. "The creative" would be a person. Had never seen it used as a synonym for content.

<comment><USER58> Have you tried looking "performant" up in a dictionary?

<comment><USER57> As in something like the Oxford? [https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/performant](https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/performant)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Wonder if he is spending anywhere near a similar amount this year? I've heard Ads are way down

</comment><comment><USER60> I've also had a lot of success with Adwords in the past even though my monthly budget was low 5 figures only.

He is spot on about the landing page but there is one more thing I learned that played a key role and that is something called the keyword smell. Basically what it means is your landing page must match the keyword you're targeting. If you're bidding for "home windows for the elderly" but the landing page headline says "home windows" you will lose the lead. Plus google will also never optimize your ad for clicks. Even if they have to optin and go to another page just don't lose that smell. It can work wonders for your campaign.

<comment><USER61> I find this advice to be outdated. Unless the actual page offers real contect around the intent of the searcher, I find the quality of these leads and conversion rates drop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I've also spent millions of dollars on ads. My experience is that targeting, specifically highly targeted audiences and lookalikes are far more important than creatives.

<comment><USER63> I've spend hundreds of cents on ads, so take this with salt, but is it futile to pick "the most important thing".

A bit like is exercise more important, or diet? Well if you are eating only lard and running every day, then diet is important for you, and if you are eating really healthily but sitting in a chair 14 hours a day, then doing more exercise is the impactful thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Would love to see more information on creative, since the author touts it as the most important. I'm sure a whole post could / has been written on that though.

<comment><USER65> I work in digital marketing, and can tell you that it's not very exciting. The best performing paid ads are text-only and served to the user on the search results page and usually not on third-party websites. They're the ones that can be A/B tested the fastest, and the 'creative' part of it is very much metrics-driven. That's where the bulk of ad spend goes, as it has the highest ROAS.

Plus, users who are actively searching for something are more primed to respond to an ad that appears on the results page, as opposed to an ad that pops up in the middle of a news article they were reading. Users for the most part don't seem to like stuff with animations, or heavy graphics in their ads as they're distracting.

I have noticed more interesting ads on newer mediums (media?) like Instagram stories or Snapchat, which are image and video-centric. The targeting so far seems quite good, as I usually see ads for online courses, creative stuff, design tools.

<comment><USER64> Interesting. Thanks for the information!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Affiliate link for Supermetrics. I see what's going on...

</comment><comment><USER20> Not all the "optimizers" behind the Google Ads dashboard are as advanced as you might imagine.

One notable one only ran once a day, and simply used data from your account to adjust other things in your account. And it used a crude algorithm to do so.

You literally could do better with a shell script running hourly after reading a couple of papers on the multi-armed bandit problem.

</comment><comment><USER67> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, getting people to click ads. I just don't see how this isn't a massive waste of money, abusing psychology to encourage people to buy things they don't need. No one is better off in this situation except Google, and they absolutely don't have our interests in mind.

<comment><USER68> I understand where you are coming from but it's not always about trying to get people to buy things right away, advertising can be used to create brand awareness as well. A positive brand image is worth a lot more than just making a couple bucks here and there off if impulsive shoppers.

If you have another solution apart from google ads, I'm all ears. Seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> For anybody else that spends most of their budget on advertising for your own trademark because your competitors do...

the solution is to inform your audience how they should forcible disable ads and to switch to a search engine that can turn off ads.

</comment><comment><USER70> >> Gmail Ads Can Scale

Does Gmail have ads? I know it used to, but I can't remember the last time I saw one. Looking at my Gmail inbox now, and I don't see a single ad anywhere on the page. I'm not running any kind of ad blocker.

<comment><USER23> Gmail ads show up in the promotion tab! If you have a unified inbox you won't see any ads.

<comment><USER70> That would explain it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Legit question: do you ever feel conflicted about the impact of this kind of advertising on the world? And do you ever hear your peers in the industry feeling conflicted or remorseful like this?

</comment><comment><USER72> Would be cool to read about how the 6 mil was split—i.e. ratio between spend on YT ads and say, Google display, over 3 month span

<comment><USER23> Almost entirely on search! I'd say 85% search, 10% Gmail ads, 5% Youtube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Is there any open source software that pulls out statistics out of those ad platforms into a spreadsheet or any other format?

<comment><USER74> AdWords has a rich API that allows reports to downloaded in CSV format [https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/repo...](https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports)

Disclosure: I work on the team that builds the client libraries for this API.

<comment><USER75> Any idea if this API can pull a keywords searched and price paid for the report if the customer is using 'smart campaigns'? I will dive in if it can..

The other day I spent some hours trying to find reports to show where this friend spent his adwords money and just about every report in his dashboard was blank. He has been running this campaign for about 2 months now - so there should be some data.. I only found one report that showed any data, the rest blank - so then I went to help, then chatted with adwords support - <USER4> the problem, what I was looking for.. told to wait some days for a response cuz covid.. okay. Got an email forwarded to me saying that you can't get that data with 'smart campaigns'... "I would like to inform you that, you can view your search phrases performance (impressions, clicks and status) in the campaigns dashboard, however, cost option is not available for smart campaigns."

So... this is disturbing - and then there is this "You may use the search terms report to see how your ads performed (clicks, impressions, CTR, cost, etc) when triggered by actual searches within the Search Network. "

Yet I have clicked virtually every link in the dashboard and I find nothing of the sort.

I feel like I can put about 2 more hours into this - and then my advice will be to just to cancel adwords it's too opaque.

So should I spend 2 hours learning this API thing, or trying to re-learn adwords to switch off smart campaigns, or a secret how to use reports with campaigns doc or what, I don't know how to get the info needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I'm more interested to know what kind of product they are selling with that much of Ads marketing dollar.

</comment><comment><USER77> I wonder if Google does anything to accurately reimburse something like ad- naseum* clicks. I imagine the probably take up a non-insignificant amount of spend at the $6m level

*[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

<comment><USER23> Google automatically refunds advertisers for fraudulent clicks each month. It's not a lot (maybe $1,000 refund on an account that spends $600k to 800k/month), but it's a line item on the invoice for sure. You have to trust them for what is a 'fraudulent' click though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Best place for non game app Installs for US?

</comment><comment><USER79> Nobody here watched Mad Men I guess.

<comment><USER80> > Nobody here watched Mad Men I guess.

I have seen a few episodes but I feel very weird about taking anything from it other than entertainment. Problem is if you are already subject matter expert, you can distinguish the information from the entertainment but you already know the information so it might be a refresher at best. For example, doctors and other medical professionals watching House, MD or Grey's Anatomy might be able to relate with some of the things when the show has some basis on reality and laugh at things when they are off base. Similarly, people in marketing/advertising business might be able to tell what is what but from the outside, I can't tell the difference between information and entertainment.

<comment><USER39> It would be like taking business information from the show Silicon Valley, though that might be a worse analogy than I intended, since the show is so spot on...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> didn't know Gmail has ads .. so they basically use ML to substitute random spam with their highly targeted spam.. _innovative business model_

<comment><USER82> Billions of people have ~unlimited free email and you've boiled it down to "substituting random spam with highly targeted spam".

This isn't an unusual mode of commentary for HN, but one of my resolutions is to point out when social cynicism has far out-stripped reality.

<comment><USER81> It isn't unlimited as far as I know, but yes sure it is indeed very much free. We should be grateful for this opportunity to save 5 dollars a month.

<comment><USER83> I have an acct from the dawn of gmail and I'm still only using 25% of the current quota. I don't know the exact numbers but I imagine it's basically the case that 99.9 percent of inboxes never run out, and a significant fraction of those who do are abusing it with gmailfs or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Man, gotta get me some of that "creative". What a cynical expression.

</comment><comment><USER85> I don't understand the use of the word creative in this context as a noun.

<comment><USER86> Go ahead and give google a whirl with "creative noun".

<comment><USER85> Did you consider that I had done that and it didn't help? Your suggestion wouldn't have helped anyway, so your only intention was to attempt to ridicule me. I don't think that's a particularly good goal to set with making a comment.

I was being genuine in my first comment. In a time of a pandemic and global depression, I guess you really should just expect the worst from people.

<comment><USER87> Both sides in this thread could have improved communication.

E.g. instead of saying LMGIFY, the response could have said that a creative is the thing that is the audio, text, picture or video part of an advertisement. Or as M-W puts it, "creative activity or the material produced by it especially in advertising".

Your question could have been improved by saying what exactly you didn't understand from the first few Google results, especially since there's a clear definition of how creative is used as a noun in the first couple links.

A good question includes the context of what you've already considered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> > Youtube is also great for conquesting your competitors. In the SaaS space > I'm in right now I pay over $20 per click to bid on my competitor's search > keywords.

I hate the modern internet. Platforms are holding developers hostage. Because if you don't pay for ads for YOUR PRODUCT then they'll show your competitor's ads.

It's anti-consumer hostile. If I search for a thing I want to see that thing. Not a different thing that has a bigger as budget.

</comment><comment><USER89> From an outsider's perspective "Creative" seems to be the same as saying "Get good, bro".

<comment><USER90> Well, no. "Creative" in this context is jargon and means the part that people would generally just refer to as "an ad": art, design, text, sound, video -- the combination.

What he is saying is that nailing the actual ad trumps everything else (targeting, keywords, platform, etc) when it comes to being effective in advertisement.

<comment><USER89> Apologies for the trollishness. Still seems a little tautological (to be good be good). If the core of what you are doing doesn't work (Creative), what you are trying to do with your core (Advertise) won't work. Since nowhere in the post do I learn specifics of how to make "Creative" work, and "Creative" is the only thing that works, my lesson learned from was is "get good" at "Creative". Clearly it should have been "Creative is all that matters".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I really hate seeing "creative" as a noun like this. I know it's entering common use but it sounds wrong grammatically. More importantly, it feels like another word would be better here -- "content" or "art" or "copy" or anything more descriptive.

<comment><USER13> The problem is it's all of those things. For a text ad, the creative is the words. For a display ad, it's the imagery + text. For a YouTube ad, it's the video. Content is the _other_ stuff on the page where your ad is being shown, so "creative" has become the standard term to encompass the stuff in your ad that you make.

<comment><USER92> Sorry - isn't 'creative' as a noun just replacing 'ad' in this example?

It's a gussied up way of suggesting this is more highbrow than 'ad' which tends to have a pejorative connotation.

<comment><USER31> An advert is the creative and context — i.e: a photo on an influencers Instagram story is a different advert to the same photo on a billboard.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should genes be patentable? A patent lawyer analyzes arguments before CAFC - <AUTHOR> http://ipwatchdog.com/2011/04/19/cafc-aclu-and-myriad-oral-arguments/id=16558/

<comment><USER2> Thanks grellas!</comment>


Ask HN: Basic Tech Concepts for non-tech people? - <AUTHOR> What are some basic tech concepts that non-tech people need to understand before they learn how to code or interact with our tech savvy world? What things would it be useful for your sales/marketing/business department to understand about you or your job before interacting with you?<p>Here are a couple I've already come up with:
- Binary numbers
- How it sometimes takes a long time write simple things in code since you have to write every piece of it.
- How the internet works. <comment><USER2> Learn what a web-service is. If you don't know what a web-service is nobody will take you seriously.

Furthermore, I think sales people and the like should know what a virtual cloud environment actually is. Ie. baremetal server running virtual computer instances that take X amount of RAM and CPU which takes X amount of dollars per instance.</comment>


Child's Play takes in $3,512,345 - <AUTHOR> http://penny-arcade.com/2012/01/04/proven-strategies

<comment><USER2> [http://childsplaycharity.org/news/post/2011-an-incredible- ye...](http://childsplaycharity.org/news/post/2011-an-incredible-year)

For a bit more context.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations to Penny Arcade, a smile is an important ally when you're healing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only grinch who looks at a number this big and wishes some of it was used to pay for children's medications that their parents can't afford or some other patient care? It's very noble to want to reduce pain and suffering but I care more about saving lives or improving quality of life long-term.

<comment><USER5> There are already many charities and government programs to do just that.

For example, in 2010 Seattle Children's Hospital took in $10.7 million in donations. That is one hospital in one city in one year, and it's more than what Child's Play has raised in total since 2003. I think it's fair to say that that aspect of charitable giving is pretty well covered and it's safe for Child's Play to keep its focus on making childrens' stays in the hospital more bearable.

<comment><USER4> I like your rationale because it's the same argument I use to not give to any charities: somebody else is already doing it so I don't have to.

I can't help it. I'm a grinch. I know video games are fun and kids everywhere get lots of innocent joy out of them. I know that the kids who probably need video games the most are those who have no other activity they could do that would distract them from their situation and let them have fun. But.... something about the idea of collecting a bunch of money to buy video games... it just seems misguided to me. I know, i'm supposed to say "yay they're trying to help kids in the hospital, go them!" and ignore this weird voice in the back of my head. But is it really the best thing that could be done?

I mean is it _really_ the _best thing_? Or is it not just a nice idea someone had that really took off and now that it's slowly becoming this huge thing that nobody anticipated there's the potential for greater good? Look, nobody's going to change Child's Play, that's obvious. It's a huge success and hopefully it continues in its success. But there must be a way to replicate its success into directly supporting children's needs in a long-lasting and constructive way. If you agree that trying to help kids feel happier while in the hospital is important, _you have to agree_ that giving them a life to be continuously happy for years to come is even more important. I don't know what kind of charity that would be, or if there even is one. But there are 13 million children living in poverty in America. Thirty nine percent of America's children live in "low income" families, or $40K for a family of four.

Giving to hospitals is important for precisely the preceding reasons: the children's families don't have enough to cover the rest. I just know that after the toys have been bought, there's still more help that is needed. And to me that's a big issue. That's all i'm saying.

<comment><USER5> <http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The First Female Doctor in Britain Spent 56 Years Disguised as a Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-first-female-doctor-in-britain-spent-56-years-disguised-as-a-man <comment><USER2> Strange how Atlas Obscura does not mention the doctor's letter regarding their observations of James' body to issue a death certificate.

Given this information is on the first search result for "James Barry doctor" which happened to be the Wikipedia entry for Barry, it makes me wonder why this was left out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_\(surgeon\)#Death)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a beautiful story. Some people will say there is no discrimination anymore. Personally, I don't buy that - and I'm speaking from personal experience.

Even in the most enlightened places like HN, it is helpful to impersonate on line the kind of person that others readers would expect me to be, vs. being who I really am.

You know the old saying- on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!

<comment><USER4> _Some people will say there is no discrimination anymore._

Who's saying that? There's discrimination everywhere you look, and it doesn't have to take the form detailed in the article.

<comment><USER5> I feel that the younger generation has very little to no feelings of prejudice towards ethnic or sexual groups. I'm talking as a teenager myself. It's more the older people that generally discriminate.

It's possible that, over time, the problem will solve itself.

<comment> nommm-nommm This actually seems to be moving in the other direction...

[https://hbr.org/2016/09/why-more-american-men-feel- discrimin...](https://hbr.org/2016/09/why-more-american-men-feel- discriminated-against)

>Perhaps more important, though, researchers have found that men are prone to seeing discrimination as a zero-sum game. That is, they believe that discrimination against one group necessarily benefits another group and vice versa, so any policy that benefits African-Americans, for instance, harms whites, and any policy that benefits women amounts to discrimination against men. Fifteen years ago, younger men — and women of all ages — overwhelmingly rejected this view, but recent data shows that _younger white men_ are now about as likely as older men to see discrimination as zero-sum.

<comment><USER6> That might be because, in a lot of ways, it i̶s̶ can be true. If I (a white man) don't get selected for a job because of a diversity program that requires that _x_ % of workers be a PoC, it does actively harm me because I would have (possibly) otherwise have been chosen for that job.

I'm not saying that this is always the case (or even that it usually is), but this scenario wasn't true 15 or 20 years ago.

<comment> vertex-four For the record, as a social justice type, I think that the solution to diversity issues in the workplace isn't to enforce percentage figures - it's to figure out why the workplace isn't attracting members of X group, change it so that it is, and actively seek out applications from diverse communities. If you're doing everything right, you should almost naturally wind up with a diverse workplace. Of course, guess which of these choices is the cheapest and requires the least amount of change in culture. One can also be imposed top- down while the other requires cultural buy-in in the first place.

<comment><USER7> _you should almost naturally wind up with a diverse workplace_

That's a factual claim which implies that different groups of people are uniform in their preferences and thus you'd find equal representation of people across all fields. A lot of people find this to be an absurd proposition with a mountain of evidence to contradict it.

If cultural and workplace issues were the explanation for disproportionate representation in different workplaces then we would expect to see the countries which implement the most solutions to those issues have the most equal representations. In fact, what we see is the opposite. The Scandinavian countries have the best policies (generous child care, long parental leave, extensive anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training, board quotas) and yet they have even more gender self-segregation by occupation than other developed countries [0].

[0] [https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender- socie...](https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender- society/occupational-gender-segregation-pay-differences)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While everyone discriminates, I think the older generation is more in touch with egalitarianism than your generation. I'll give you a few examples,

Today, people refuse to acknowledge that domestic violence has male victims. This has NEVER happened in history. It's a modern phenomenon to reject victims based on gender. Perform a Google search for the entire year of 2015. You will not find one single picture of a male victim of domestic violence. Yet, ABS puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male. Some Australian politicians have tried to legislate DV based on gender!

My local magazine has pictures of only girls on the front cover almost every issue. 50 years ago, you would almost always have a girl standing next to a boy.

We refuse to talk about suicide rates (80% male) or homelessness (75%+ male). In fact, most Australian media will only talk about homelessness of women. [http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/2049.0Mai...](http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/2049.0Main%20Features22011)

[http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting- suicide/...](http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting- suicide/facts-and-stats)

A government organisation in Australia called 1800respect bombarded the TV with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence was young boys "it's a boy thing" was the catch cry. They purposely targeted the demographic with the highest suicide rates who are most vulnerable to criticism.

Or Hillary Clinton's exit speech. What about this gem that not one media outlet commented on. Hillary's message of exclusion was clear. If you're a young boy you are not even worth mentioning.

"And to all of the little __girls__ who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams." [http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton- conces...](http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton-concession- speech-full-transcript-2016-presidential-election)

These are all legacies that have been created within the last decade. Never in history have we played such nasty gender games. It is the older people that are banging the drums saying "what the hell is going on?", not the younger generation. I am yet to hear younger people chime in to the conversation. I've had some doozy arguments with younger people who talk about revenge (to which I say "for what?") or "no, that's OK, that's equality".

Now, you could argue that it's not the younger generation that's controlling the media. However, there are a lot of young people on Facebook and Snapchat. Where's the outrage at the extreme prejudice we see today from the younger people? It's just not there.

What may surprise you is that I don't support a men's movement because of how toxic feminism is as a gender based movement. What I reject is the extreme gender prejudice that is so popular today. Almost every media in the western world is in the collusion and there appears to be no bar too low they will stoop to.

When I see young kids in droves calling out The Verge, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, BBC News, Fores, Vox, Vulture, Beast and all of the other prejudiced media outlets, I will know that you are right. Until then, I will assume the majority of people who give two hoots about egalitarianism are the older generation of men and women.

<comment><USER9> > _In fact, most Australian media will only talk about homelessness of women._

Horseshit. This Australian sees most public discussion of homelessness as not mentioning gender either way.

> _Yet, ABS puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male._

Yes, men are subject to 30% of domestic violence, and it's an under-reported problem. But the women cop _much more severe_ violence. The male victims don't need refuges in the proportions that females

> _bombarded the TV with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence > was young boys "it's a boy thing" was the catch cry._

This is a gross misrepresentation of the DV ads. The core message of the ads _wasn 't_ "it's a boy thing", but "we socially train boys to disrespect women, let's do better".

> _Never in history have we played such nasty gender games._

Nah, places like the US and the UK simply didn't give women the vote until _a couple of centuries_ after men had it. Or let women own property freely, or so on and so forth. But since you're just talking about people saying 'girls' instead of 'kids', well, fuck, men/boys have been the default in public announcements for so long that it's ridiculous.

Yes, men have problems that feminism doesn't really recognise well (if at all), but you have a chip on your shoulder that is distorting your perceptions. It's bizarre that you get so worked up over a single utterance of Clinton's, yet pretend that the long history of "boy's clubs" excluding women from positions of power simply doesn't exist. As an Australian, are you aware that women were legally paid 2/3rds the rate of men as late as the mid 1970s? Or that as late as the 60s, women weren't allowed to secure loans without a male guarantor? Hell, in some states in the US, there's no such thing as rape if the couple are married. All of those things are a bit more than "girls, you can do it!"

By all means, raise consciousness for men's issues, but don't take the petty passive-aggressive swipe at women's issues in the process.

<comment><USER10> > _Horseshit_ > _you have a chip on your shoulder_ > _It 's bizarre that you > get so worked up_

Your account has a pattern of posting uncivil comments on HN, which we've asked you many times to stop. It's not cool, regardless of how wrong or annoying someone else is. It's also not cool regardless of how right your views are. Indeed, you discredit those by being a jerk, so if you care about these things, that is an extra reason to be civil.

Please fix this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _It wasn't until after Barry's death in 1865, that the doctor's secret was finally discovered._

1865 was the year the American Civil War ended. In 1867 Dr. Quinn (Medicine Woman) started her practice in Colorado Springs.

Coincidence?

<comment><USER2> Appear more likely that if Dr. Quinn (a fictional character) was based on someone, it would have been this person: [http://twrpcactusrose.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-life-dr- quin...](http://twrpcactusrose.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-life-dr-quinn- medicine-woman.html)

Also might be worth noting that "While in London, she lectured extensively and became the first woman to have her name entered in the British Medical Register." \- which appears to conflict with the facts provided in the article that's the subject of these comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now that the pendulum has swung to the other side with female doctors outnumbering male doctors in NHS. There are questions being raised if this "too many female doctors" phenomenon is contributing to doctor shortage faced by NHS [1].

1\. The Problem With Female Doctors [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the- probl...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the-problem-with- female-doctors/#51fa7c3b3080)

<comment> vertex-four Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that means making sacrifices re their work - as women do. Otherwise, we're still clinging onto the old concept of the man being the breadwinner and the woman looking after the children, just in a new age where it's not economically possible to raise children on one wage alone, and that's bound to cause issues as we see in that article.

<comment><USER13> _Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children_

The Nordic countries have been pushing hard to move things in that direction. For example, in 2013 in Sweden, 25% of the parental leave days reimbursed were taken by men.

The thinking is that if both men and women end up taking as much parental leave after a birth, it evens out the "will this person suddenly disappear because a kid came into the picture" hiring equation.

<comment><USER14> I can't see this working in americas cut-throat corporate culture, where people are already afraid of taking vacations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop Drawing Dead Fish by Bret Victor - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/64895205 <comment><USER2> This is probably one of the most amazing talks I've ever heard. At its core it lets you understand just how unexplored the computer is as a medium.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not opposed to Bret's ideas but also feel he has never looked into how artists use code and design interactions. Many like programming environments that are visual (like max/msp) with immediate feedback while other prefer the austerity of code. There is something very satisfying when going from code straight to simulation. It often feels more like materializing ideas than noodling around with guis.

Canonical example: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQhoe_hJIZ8>

<comment><USER4> It's true some artists can already work with interactive media through code, but I think his greater point might be that we're selling every other artist short if they've got to express themselves in code instead of geometrically.

So while there are some who are currently exceptional to that rule, we're still leaving out a ton of potential art by limiting interactive art to code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> tl;dw:

* "Drawing dead fish" refers to using a dynamic medium (the computer) to make static images and unchanging animation.

* Games represent the promise of dynamic media: things on the screen have behaviors.

* Dynamic behaviors are generally defined by code. We should break that association and design tools that allow more direct, visual manipulation of behaviors.

* Code thinking is like algebra. Tools demonstrated define behaviors more like geometric construction.

* Key takeaway: dissatisfaction with Photoshop, After Effects, and other digital art tools that don't take advantage of the media.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are other submissions of this - you might want to check them out in case discussion arises there first. This one is the first, the others are here:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5634668>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5634677>

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminded me of many hours exploring The Geometer's Sketchpad before my coding days (and before that, a straight edge and compass). Ooh just found <http://geogebraweb.appspot.com/app.html>

I like being able to code in different paradigms and switch between them.</comment>


Making inheritable objects in JavaScript without objects - <AUTHOR> http://skilldrick.co.uk/2011/08/making-inheritable-objects-in-javascript-without-objects/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read. If you wrote inheritance for js closures or a small interpreter for a DSL, I can't say for sure though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers. I guess you could call it an internal DSL, but I wouldn't call it an interpreter - all it's manipulating is the arguments object, it doesn't manipulate any strings. I'm sure string manipulation isn't the only thing that identifies an interpreter, but it doesn't seem like that to me.</comment></comment>


Javascript Tips for Non-Specialists  - <AUTHOR> http://omniti.com/seeds/javascript-tips-for-non-specialists <comment><USER2> Good tips overall.

I'd recommend a couple of changes though.

"Don't Touch the Doc (Unless You Have To)"

This should say, "Don't Touch the DOM (Unless You Have To)". The reason is that it's almost never referred to as the Document, and always referred to as the DOM. If you have programmers new to js, they will find much more info when using the correct terminology. Since we're in the spirit of education, lets teach the right things.

I'd love to see this less in paragraph form and more in code form. Programmers are used to skimming through code. Eyes start wandering when having to extract programmer concepts from dense text. This is, of course, my own opinion and totally subjective.

<comment><USER3> On that same note, as a performance tip I would expand it to "Cache your property lookups." Caching _obj.property_ in a variable is much faster if you're going to reference it more than twice.

<comment><USER4> Is this still true on modern browsers with optimising js engines? And if so, why?

<comment><USER3> Well, according to this answer (<http://stackoverflow.com/a/7701264>) V8 is about the same speed as accessing variables, however I would bet looking up properties higher up the prototype chain would take a performance hit.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking more that if you repeatedly access a property, regardless of where in the prototype chain it is, the optimiser would cache the value, so it would be equivalent to saving it in a local variable. If I'm not mistaken, this is a common feature in optimizing compilers. I don't know how aggressive the JIT js compilers are, however.

<comment><USER3> Hmm that's pretty interesting. I don't really like to depend on the engine for optimizations because you never know what JS engine people have, but it's good to know they do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're a developer, this is what you need to know when writing javascript:

<http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/>

It's not that long and it covers all the major points of confusion.

Edit: Also, ignore point 4 of the linked article. Selector performance is an area that used to matter but is now a non-factor.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the JG link. Just checked it out and it's exactly the kind of modern JS resource I've been trying to find for the last few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never understood the vehemence against inline javascript. From the article, how is this:

       <button id="my_btn" onclick="doThis();">Submit</button>

Supposed to be worse than:

       <button type="button" id="my_btn">Submit</button>

combined with (usually located in a different file or several hundred lines away):

       document.getElementById("my_btn").addEventListener("click", doThis);

It seems like the latter is much more difficult to maintain. Sure inlining much more than a simple function call get's hairy, but for a simple action inlining always seemed much cleaner and easier to maintain to me. It's much nicer than a whole bunch of addEventListener's or bind calls in your JS.

<comment><USER8> The article provides Argument A against inline JS: "Show me all the dynamic JS that gets loaded for this page" is a more important case to optimize for than "show me exactly which JS statement is tied to this button".

This is particularly true because, in your example, having onclick="doThis();" in the HTML isn't all that helpful if you need to know exactly what doThis(); is doing. You'll _still_ have to go find the actual block of JS that's defining doThis(), and that will still be someplace else.

Yes, it might be nice to have that short descriptive name associated with the button, but that's what class="does-this" is for.

Other arguments against inline JS:

It's harder to test the case where JS is turned off.

It's harder to ensure that all buttons of class "play" have the "playMe()" function attached. Doing it one button at a time is very un-DRY; you are going to miss one during some edit or other. Similarly, if you decide that buttons should call playMeLoudly() instead of playMe(), you have a lot more lines of code to change.

With inline JS you are always one missing quote character away from a security incident. As I know from having played the awesome Stripe-CTF game, <script> tags are not your friend! They are very scary and should be very boring and kept away from your markup and edited as little as possible, and script-tags- in-disguise like "onclick" attributes should be regarded with suspicion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good article, all important things to know when starting out. Semi-related I have a question. Does anyone do extensive js caching? I've kind of gotten into the habbit (for highly interactive single pages that would normally have a lot of ajax calls) of loading my page with a start chunk of my dom elements into a hidden div. Then I ajax load the rest and clone the dom/objects saving them in a cache. I've noticed it speeding up my apps (minimizes http request, also clones only occur once) anyone have any thoughts here or better methods?

</comment><comment><USER10> Good tips. Specially comparison operators.

The fact Javascript has both "null" and "undefined" is not just a stupid idea, but might be the biggest source of stupid bugs. You need a long, repetitive construct everytime you check a variable:

        if((typeof banana === "undefined") || (!banana)) {
            banana = "banana";
        }

But instead you see code like:

        if(banana == null) {
            ...
        }

Argh!

<comment><USER11>
      if(!window.banana) banana = "banana";

<comment><USER12> I generally prefer:

        var banana;
        if (!banana) babana = "banana";

or

        var banana;
        banana = banana || "banana";

I have a strong dislike for implicit globals — even at the toplevel — and the global object isn't necessarily `window` (it's not in the Spidermonkey or Node shells for instance, I'm not sure it is in Web Workers — there's a WorkerGlobalScope object but i don't know if it's bound to a global called `window`).

If `undefined` has to be checked for explicitly (because `null` or `0` or `""` are valid values), check `banana === undefined` (or `banana === void 0` if your coworkers are assholes)

<comment><USER11> I don't disagree; it was just the briefest example, which assumed that window was the scope -- couldn't really think of a reason I'd warrant an inner scope to have uninitialized vars.

So, to the OP, you can always check that your var is a member of some object, including window. The typeof example is bad form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think points 4 and 5 are just premature optimization.

$('input[name=firstname]') is better than $('#firstname') because with the latter you don't know whether you have an input, or some div containing a label and an input. The speed difference is meaningless.

The example in 5 doubles the amount of code and only provides a speed benefit if you are constantly setting a value to the same thing which indicates there is some other problem with your strategy. #5 is a code smell to me.

<comment><USER14> _I think points 4 and 5 are just premature optimization.... The speed difference is meaningless._

There's no such thing as premature optimization or meaningless speed differences. Would you say the same thing if the code was in Java/C#/Ruby etc?

It may appear to make no difference on a site with hardly any JS interaction, but throw in a few plugins, a decent amount of AJAX and more than a handful of lines of JS and all of a sudden all those milliseconds have led to a delay of a few of seconds while your page finishes rendering.

<comment><USER15> Yes, many programmers would say exactly that in those languages. Code readability is very important.

This is a debate that flares up every year or so, but a lot of programmers generally consider premature optimization to be a complete waste of time and bad for your code. They would tell you to write clear code and use a profiler to find actual bottlenecks, not spend time fixing imagined ones.

<comment><USER14> Fair point, and I'd agree with you - I'd defo go over clearer code than something purely for premature optimization... except I think the examples given were MORE readable afterwards, at worst you've ended up with optimised code!

Problem with JS is that there is not as many optimization tools, aside from Firebug that I can think of. On top of that, personally, I'm a C# guy that does some JS and most people I know are like me. The other guys that do JS work for design agencies that are more front-end/HTML guys. Most of us aren't tooled up like in the C# world for optimization and rely on optimization tips - it's a lot easier to do these as you go along rather than retrospectively like you can with server languages. (I may well be missing a whole toolset here somewhere - be good to find more resources)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Expanding on the first tip, this is a pretty good piece on scope and execution context in javascript - [http://davidshariff.com/blog/what-is-the-execution- context-i...](http://davidshariff.com/blog/what-is-the-execution-context-in- javascript/)</comment>


The all-conquering Wikipedia? - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/encyclopedic-knowledge/ <comment><USER3> Wikipedia reminds me of Web 1.0: plain, informational text with minimal formatting, and liberal use of hyperlinks.

But it's better than the old web. It has revision history, proper licensing, suffers less from link rot, uses consistent and readable styling and, of course, it is collaboratively edited.

Shame about the centralisation, though.

<comment><USER4> Except it does suffer from link rot, and often citations are to inaccessible sources.

<comment><USER5> I want them to cache atleast pdf version of the page, just in case. ( I think legality might be involve, but still, wish is a wish. )

<comment><USER4> It's not their content, it might fall under fair use but I'm very doubtful. And that doesn't help with restricted content, where they are almost certain to get a DMCA takedown notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wikis in general will be a part of human culture until, more or less, the end of time... but Wikipedia specifically feels like it's already begun a slow decline of bikeshedding, endless reverts, and territory claims by predatory editors.

<comment><USER7> This claim is nearly as old as Wikipedia itself, and it is mostly false. There are over five million articles on English Wikipedia, and approximately 10,000 highly active editors (editors who make 25 or more edits a month). There is too much territory and too few claimants for your description to be true.

I don't know what motivates people to repeat this trope, when it is simply untrue. I think it stems from the fact that many people expect editing Wikipedia to be easier than it is. It is in fact quite hard. Some of the difficulty is essential (writing good, well-sourced expository prose is challenging) and some of it is inessential, the result of technical and social debt.

But most worthwhile things are difficult, and on balance, the rewards of editing Wikipedia are quite large in comparison to the effort required. You can go from a complete novice to a lasting (small) contribution to the project of civilization in an afternoon. You can't same the same for playing an instrument! And it can be hugely satisfying, really. Try it!

<comment><USER8> What makes people repeat it? Personal experience.

I have experienced first-hand how my edit (purely factual corrections, with sources) were reverted by an editor who has edited most of the lemma for most of the time, just because it is "his" lemma.

<comment><USER3> If you disagree with the editor, you can revert their reversions with justifications and bring it to attention on the talk page, though.

<comment><USER9> But that's the point. Here we're talking about a good edit. If someone makes a good edit they shouldn't need to defend it - other editors should see it's good and defend it themselves.

By asking people to defend their edits on the talk page you're just saying that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anybody with enough time can edit.

<comment><USER10> I think its a naive view to expect two or more people to work on something without conflicts. How do these get solved in real life? Do people just keep pushing and pulling until one side cedes? Perhaps, but the more effective and optimal solution is to actually discuss it instead of creating a tug-of-war. [0] This way the results reflect a consensus, even if its a compromise, and this way Wikipedia can be host to multiple opinions. There's a really good reason every article is paired with a talk page. Just because it's called "The Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit", it doesn't mean that its obligated to take anyones edits or that all that hard work won't be entirely rewritten in the future. [1][2]

Lastly, what makes a "good edit". I've seen someone write paragraphs for a film on their personal interpretations of the protagonist's feelings. No doubt they thought this was essential information for someone to understand the film, but this went completely against Wikipedia's rule prohibiting original research. [3]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discuss_cycle) [1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Competence_is_requir...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Competence_is_required) [2]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content) [3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research)

Edit: I said nothing about time in my comment, but addressed conflict resolution and the parent's comment about good edits. If taking the time and effort to discuss something is too much for you, maybe it's better that you don't try to work on a _collaborative_ encyclopedia project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > As Lynch rightly notes [..] "Wikipedia, despite being noncommercial, still > poses many of the dangers of a traditional monopoly, and we run the risk of > living in an information monoculture." Large parts of the media demonstrably > use Wikipedia as their major or sole source of factual data; as a result, > false or half-true claims (such as are found in any encyclopedia) can spread > and take root with extraordinary speed.

I used to have a teacher who used to say: "A single source is no source at all". I often wish I had a second encyclopedic source (in addition to the original sources cited in the encyclopedia). What I often do is read the article in another language, but this is just a workaround.

Is there any alternative to Wikipedia?

</comment><comment><USER12> >An army of anonymous, tech-savvy people – mostly young...

Bah ageist humbug. The 2010 survey had 51% over 30 and at Wikimania in London last year the biggest group were retired over 50s. I think because it involves tech people just assume it's youth.

(I note the featured article today is The House of Plantagenet (1154–1485) and you have to scroll down half the page before you hit Justin Bieber.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wikipedia is a toxic mess. If you try to contribute anything even slightly controversial and one of the page patrollers decide you are obnoxious, or wrong, then your work will be eviscerated.

The funny thing is, even when you know the policies and follow them, it's irrelevant. For example, I was told by several people that primary sources are entirely verboten. I did a search to verify the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) company ownership of a number of companies, which is entirely non-controversial, I was told this was violating WP:OR, or more specifically [[WP:PRIMARY]] as this disallows primary sources. This, however, is a shortcut to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources)

This reads:

 _Policy: Unless restricted by another policy, primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia; but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge._

When I pointed this out, there was silence and my work was removed.

The project is now completely impossible to contribute to in any meaningful way. There are literally users who do nothing but watch the incoming edit stream and revert or tweak edits as soon as they get made. Often they make mistakes or make it impossible for an editor to do any sort of extensive contributions. One editor I interacted with did this to me, and when I reviewed what happened after I found I couldn't go on further I realised they have made over 98,000 edits since 2009, yet there is literally no article they contributed to in any significant way whatsoever! It's all reverts, page moves, typo fixes, wiki link changed or the creation of small article stubs (they claimed to have created 500 articles, but when I checked they created over 500 pages, but about 450 are redirects or pages moves, and nothing else. Of the rest, about 25 article are 1 sentence stubs, albeit with a reference, and the rest are still very basic and not deeply researched articles - <USER2> really much better than stubs.

It's really a lost cause now. I certainly know the quality is degrading very rapidly. Unless practices are drastically changed, it will degrade to the point where traditional sources will come back into fashion.

Jimmy Wales once stated the grand vision of Wikipedia was summed up by asking people to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." [1]

That was the goal, and for years that was what I and many others worked towards. For whatever reason, the project has now stagnated and that is no longer occurring consistently. This grand vision has been lost, and I don't see that there are any moves to bring it back.

1\. [http://m.slashdot.org/story/48267](http://m.slashdot.org/story/48267)

<comment><USER5> If agreeing what ever being said, is there an alternative way things can be improved ?

<comment><USER4> Sure, I think firstly editors can treat each other with much more kindness and respect.

Secondly, administrators should be refreshing their understanding of policy. Any editor who tries to be a wikilawyer and force their viewpoint even when it is contrary to the very policy they say another editor is violating should be warned and told to carefully read the policy.

Editors who deliberately hide discussions via tricks like adding collapse tags should be warned then sanctioned. That's deliberately being disruptive and preventing consensus based contributions.

BLP accusations should be more carefully analysed - a lot of what I was being accused off had nothing to do with a violation of BLP and huge swathes of non- controversial material was removed under the BLP policy, even though Much of it was no a violation at all.

Admins should not accuse editors of not discussing things on talk pages when in fact that's what they have done.

And lastly, editors who are page patrollers only should not be given more weight than new editors who make substantial contributions to Wikipedia. Those new editors should be encouraged and a polite message should be given detailing what the issues are when material is contributed. If they ask questions in the talk page and the page patroller refuses to discuss things further, then the page patroller should entirely disengage from the article - especially those who have not shown any skills in research or even the slightest attempt at getting any article to good article start us, let alone an attempt at making the article a featured article!</comment></comment></comment>


The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects - <AUTHOR> https://www.theuncomfortable.com <comment><USER2> Those are only for fun, but real stuff are designed to be deliberately inconvenient (e.g. against homeless people): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture)

<comment><AUTHOR> There really is a very sharp relief between security and tasteful design

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very much reminds me of Jacques Carelman's "Catalogue of Unfindable Objects", one of my dearest book memories. A Google search gives some examples of objects from the catalogue [1].

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=Catalogue+d%27objets+introuv...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Catalogue+d%27objets+introuvables&tbm=isch)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a nice touch that the website itself is horrific to negotiate, at least on mobile. (Yes, of course when I zoom in on a picture I want all the non picture stuff to expand and cover all the pictures. Who wouldn't want that?)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. The site itself is uncomfortable! It's _meta_.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Brave" UX design choices - I'm looking at you!

</comment><comment><USER6> You could add most of the APIs I've ever had to use to this list.

</comment><comment><USER7> I know it may sound silly, but looking at these too long actually causes a minor stress reaction for me. As in, they make me uncomfortable. I think it's because I imagine trying to use them and the frustration that would ensue.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice!

Previous work by Jeremy Hutchison:

[http://www.jeremyhutchison.com/work/project47.html](http://www.jeremyhutchison.com/work/project47.html)

[http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless- objects/](http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless-objects/)

[http://www.erratum.co/products/](http://www.erratum.co/products/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do I have this feeling that most of these objects could be used to document the developers experience working with 'enterprise' Java constructions?

</comment><comment><USER10> Clever, and driving my OCD side mad. The uncomfortable mug doesn't look too bad though, I can imagine a mittened hand slipping through the handle.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the design of that double wine glass; I imagine that it'd only make sense for two headed ogres :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is one of those rare things on the Internet (startups included) that you just "get" instantly.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like this. It reminds me of that blog about things fitting perfectly into other things. (except the opposite)

</comment><comment><USER14> Not totally useless. Still can be sold as motivational posters and meme material.

</comment><comment><USER15> The ones that are usable and broken are good, like the elongated teapot.

The things that no human would possibly design are just silly.

Would love it if they had a site with just the purposefully poorly designed, but still workable objects.

<comment><USER16> Two words: headphone jack.

<comment><USER17> I'll bite: What is wrong with the headphone jack?

<comment><USER18> The Moto Z, iPhone 7, LeEco LePro3, HTC U Ultra, the Essential Phone, and probably a lot of others ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack, in favor of various wired digital and wireless headphone options. They're referring to the perceived impracticality of those design choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately, none of these things have that subtlety of terrible designs which makes them so insidious.

<comment><USER20> The biggest anti-pattern is the stateful VCR-like digit displays with a couple buttons.

They're somewhat going out of style because more stuff has touch screens or can be controlled by a smartphone. But lots of audio equipment still uses this "pattern". And thermostats have it.

I'm a programmer and I still have problems figuring out that their state machine is without the manual. I just bought a $20 clock with the same issue. It doesn't help when one of the actions is "hold a button" either. There's no feedback as to what action you performed -- did I hold it for long enough?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Reflection.app a Better Way to Journal - <AUTHOR> https://www.reflection.app <comment><AUTHOR> The purpose of Reflection.app is to provide a simple and delightful framework to help guide you through a meaningful reflection practice. A practice that naturally builds on itself by using your entries to guide your reflection, at each step making the next milestone in your life more enjoyable and meaningful. Reflection.app does this first by helping to identify your Highlights, Lowlights, or Free Write. At the end of each month, you will be guided through your highlights and lowlights to understand what brings you joy and to learn from or find peace with the past reflect on the 6 key dimensions of Mind, Body, Soul, Work, Play, Love When the time comes to complete your annual reflection, you will have most of the hard work already done, allowing you easily synthesize the most important moments of your past year. In short, your daily entries help build your monthly review, and your monthly reviews help to build your annual review.</comment>


It's Not About the Syntax – Why Language Doesn't Matter - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/07/15/language-doesnt-matter/#.VaZrzkLdxVk.hackernews <comment><USER2> Spoken like someone who has only learned languages from a single paradigm. "Programming languages are built on a common conceptual foundation." This simply isn't true. The conceptual foundation of Java is quite distant from the conceptual foundation of APL, which is itself distant from that of Haskell, which is itself distant from that of Prolog. If you know one, you don't automatically know the others.

If you're only talking about mainstream OO languages, the point holds, but those are really more like accents than they are languages. Speaking in a British accent won't let you communicate in a fundamentally different way, but speaking in Mandarin actually will.

In short: It's not about the syntax, but it _is_ about the semantics.

<comment><USER3> Spoken like someone who only knows one natural language. As the article stated all languages are about communication. Each language has its own syntax (ie words and word order) but the concept of a rose or money is the same, the concept of an action is the same as is the concept of a pronoun otherwise people would not be able to translate between languages. The semantics of a language are often tied up in the culture of the language.

When it comes to computer languages similar principles are at play. The concept of a list or array or matrix of values is common across a wide variety of language types for OO to Functional to Declarative. As is the concept of IO. The need to communicate with something outside of the program. The fact that some languages point out the and IO operation is about to occur does not mean that the paradigm does not use or need them.

In short: Speak English when you are in Britain, yorkshire when in Yorkshire, cockney when in London, and Mandarin when in China. Use the appropriate language for the task at hand or get an interpreter.

<comment><USER2> I speak four natural languages. I don't love the analogy, because I think differences between computer languages are more significant than differences between natural languages. That said, there are still more differences than just who you can speak with. Example off the top of my head: if you think in Mandarin, the future is behind you and the past is in front. You mention actions being the same, but the way you think about actions will be very different if you think in a language with few tenses (Mandarin) compared to one with many (Romance languages).

Obviously both computer languages and natural languages have some things in common, but they also have significant differences.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should I sell my software? - <AUTHOR>

I've been running a side-business selling end-user software for the last five years. Sales are a bit too variable to rely on as a full-time job, but it certainly pays some of my bills. Unfortunately, it feels like the company I use to process sales is stuck in the dark ages.
Firstly, I feel like they are ripping me off with high commission rates (6.9% + $1). My conversion rate has dropped through the floor over the last few months and customers have emailed me saying that the billing pages won't load, etc. The last straw was a missing wire transfer of my payments from the service. I have no problem paying someone a cut of my sales to deal with this, but they need to make it worth it for me by making sure that I never lose customers because the cart fails.
FWIW, the big players are out for me I think. I'm scared to do things over PayPal - I couldn't afford to deal with the time and hassle of a frozen account. Google Checkout won't let me sell from my country.
Any suggestions for places to move my business? There are a number of new payment startups that have appeared and I feel like there must be a better way to sell this software.
[apologies for the throwaway -- it's my side business] <comment><USER2> It sounds like you're base in another country (not US) from the description. It would probably help a lot for people here to provide advice if you actually list where you are from.</comment>