The Jenna Marbles Paradox: Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible? - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2013/05/the-jenna-marbles-paradox-why-are-youtube-videos-so-terrible/

<comment><USER2> The author assumes that there is a linear relationship between the amount of money that a creator has at their disposal and the resulting "production quality". So, once Jenna Marbles starts making some real bank, out come the camera crews and director and post-production effects and...

No. There is no path from Jenna Marbles to the traditional kind of television that the author is used to. They're just...different. Jenna has a specific way that she likes to create things and more money doesn't necessarily change that.

To make the kind of TV that the author imagines, you need to drop some money up front. Let's be charitable and say $300,000 for a pilot. Needless to say this is out of reach for almost 100% of the content creators on Youtube, so it's unsurprising that the content that has risen to popularity within Youtube has its roots in methods that cost essentially nothing.

Now, there are some interesting exceptions. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries [1] was nowhere near a "real" TV show in terms of budget but it had writers, production staff, and hired actors. Vice produces a lot of content that seems like it could fit into a normal TV program [2] -- almost. There are some other interesting shows that are sort of half-way there (well, more like 1/10th of the way there) in that they actually have production crews and do things like post-production (see: Wil Wheaton's Tabletop series [3]). I'm sure there are a ton of other examples.

So, the community is sidling up to high-quality content, but it's still unclear exactly how they're going to get there. By my estimation, to create a "TV-ready" drama, you'd need at the very least 100k subscribers paying $3/mo. Obviously no one is going to sign up for something if they're never heard of you, so you've got to make some free content that people love, then maybe make the jump via a Kickstarter? Or will true "channels" appear that bring the money and the subscribers and that then fund the shows of their choice? This is a really fascinating time for video content -- I'm excited to see how the economics end up playing out.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KisuGP2lcPs&feature=c4-ov...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KisuGP2lcPs&feature=c4-overview- vl&list=PL6690D980D8A65D08)

[2] (Warning: NSFW) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsUH8llvTZo>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4F80C7D2DC8D9B6C>

<comment><USER3> I think what you're really saying here is that these current YouTube stars will not make the jump from their current content to TV-ready content. But they do play an important role in creating the ecosystem, bringing the viewers, and showing that there is a market for content through this distribution medium. Hopefully that will make people more willing to drop the money on a good pilot, but it won't be the current generation of creators that will be doing it.

<comment><USER4> It's not that they won't make the jump, but that they're not trying to. Videos of the kind "YouTubers" make have evolved into a distinct media genre separate from episodic television. Your statement is analogous to saying "comic book authors won't jump to writing novel-ready content" -- of course not, or at least, not in a way that implies the latter is a progression from the former.

And a corollary: genre is distinct from delivery mechanism. "House of Cards" is a TV show and Jenna Marbles videos are (for lack of a better term) YouTube- style videos, even though both are delivered via the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have the feeling the author is elevating presentation over content. His definition of terrible is different than mine.

I mean, I think "Transformers 3: Pixels Making Grinding Noises" has insanely great production value, and made a bajillion dollars, but honestly I'd rather watch two hours of Jenna Marbles videos, and I don't even like Jenna Marbles all that much.

<comment><USER6> I think she's kinda cute. If I uploaded kittens playing with string people would feel safe admitting they're watching solely because they're cute, but we must pretend that young men watching a cute young woman must solely be watching for her amazing pair of literary values and production quality.

There is an obvious blind spot relating to narrowcasting in both your examples. Both hollywood action sequels and youtube videos have the hidden assumption that they're the dominant form of media, they are our culture, everyone participates, they're what makes us, us. The national pastime, or whatever. Insinuating that they're not would get a extremely harsh reaction from those socialized to respond that they are. Kinda like religion but I'm tryin to keep on topic.

In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free. You can be rejected by 99.75% of the US population yet get a youtube gold plaque for 1 million views. Given those real world facts, its no great surprise that the Venn diagram of a microscopic fraction of the US population who are Jenna fans does not have much coincidental overlap with the small and shrinking fraction of the US population who watch hollywood movies.

If your advertising message is you're the best individual example of the self described dominant form of modern media, admitting the truth that no one in the general population watches, even for free or near free, would really screw up the message.

Its a fun self awareness hack to evaluate someones worldview by asking them what percentage of the US population watches "Survivor" for example. Strongly bimodal, with the wrong answer being "almost everyone because it defines modern pop culture" and the right answer being "almost no one".

Another peculiar observation is I can walk down the street and notice that plenty of young men admire the young ladies with no hollywood production values at all

<comment><USER7> > In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free.

FWIW, Transformers 3 took about $350m in north America, which at $10/ticket (is that reasonable?) is 35 million viewers. Not all of those are in the US (but I think "north America" in context might just mean "US and canada", which is like 90% US), and some of them would be repeat viewers, but probably 5-15% of the US population paid to see that film.

<comment><USER6> That's what I mean. "fifth-highest-grossing film of all time" means ignored by over 90% of the population.

What we are told defines our culture, does not. Whatever the heck over 90% of the population did instead of watching Transformers 3 for two hours, defines our culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know that this author has his ducks in a row.

For example, in the USA, The Bell System provided an amazing quality of phone service. Uptime of the system was just astonishing, voice quality beats cell phones hollow. But clearly, the voice quality and reliability of the system wasn't all that necessary. Cell phone systems don't provide anywhere near the reliability or voice quality that The Bell System used to, and we're all overjoyed with it. It's just that a regulated monopoly could use some of it's wealth to provide geographic diversity, lots of human support and other things now considered crazy redundant.

Why not believe that the Media Monopoly (ABC, NBC, CBS) used their monopoly rents to make programming with lots of flourishes and quality? Just like The Bell System, radio and tee vee networks used to try to provide some reason for their continued existence.

Now that we can vote with our mice, we can pick the funny/weird/interesting content. We can choose the stuff that really matters to us, instead of just watching The Brady Bunch because the Thursday evening 7pm timeslot had 1 show that was bad, and 2 that were even worse.

<comment><USER9> > voice quality beats cell phones hollow

Really? Not in my experience.

> Why not believe that the Media Monopoly (ABC, NBC, CBS) used their monopoly > rents to make programming with lots of flourishes and quality?

It did for a certain definition of 'quality'. For a while, it raised the sitcom to a level of perfection few art forms ever reach, but if you don't like the traditional sitcom that means nothing to you.

Certain kinds of stories were told as well as they could be told, but the limitations of the funding model (mass media, so you can't piss off too high of a percentage of the general public; ad-funded, so you can't piss off too many potential advertisers; FCC regulated, so you can't piss off the vocal minority who whines to the FCC) prevented any other kinds of stories from being told well, or told at all.

<comment><USER8> _prevented any other kinds of stories from being told well, or told at all._

Exactly my point. Jenna Marbles and Ryan Higa and all the others with millions of hits and zero production sort of prove that point. Youtube viewers watch the stories they like, rather than choosing from the least bad ABC/NBC/CBS show that's on right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the article overlooks a large segment - that is, very popular YouTube producers who genuinely make cool videos with (what I think are) professional graphics and production quality like freddiew, wongfuproductions, ryan higa, kevjumba, mysteryguitarman and kurthugoschneider

The article also misses what traditional TV lacks that YouTube producers do - audience interaction. They will make videos based on their fans' comments, hold meetups in their location and actually respond on twitter/instagram.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's no paradox: people don't care all that much about production values.

People watch Jenna Marbles because she's funny and attractive. Whether or not she frames her shots well is much less important.

<comment><USER12> Agree with you, but it saddens me that people will listen to her just because she's "attractive." She's not _that_ good looking, she just wears a lot of makeup. I'd have a conversation with her in a bar, but since she's hundreds of miles away from me I don't have to pretend that she's interesting because I don't get anything out of it.

<comment><USER11> I put funny first for a reason - I think that's the primary reason for her popularity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Blaming the rules of the game is sometimes appropriate, but not in the case. This is a free market for entertainment if there ever was one. Much freer than TV or movies.

The high-volume clicks that the author reviles? These consist of millions of individual consumer choices. The viewers decide what they want to watch. Apparently, this is what people like. Maybe old media didn't realize that and was wasting their money all along, or maybe tastes have just changed. But either way, if you don't like what's popular on YouTube (which I don't), you probably just have different tastes. Fortunately, there is plenty of diversity of YouTube, so you're not stuck with what's popular.

Which raises a question about this article: What exactly is the author criticizing? Surely it's not the _lack_ of good content, because there is more of that than ever. It seems to be the mere popularity of bad content. But if bad content is popular, what of it? I don't mind. If it is truly bothersome, one can always take comfort in snobbery, which can be a lot of fun.

If Google were somehow distorting the market by deliberately promoting low- quality stuff, I'd blame the system. But based on the facts as stated by the author, I don't see any reason to believe that.

</comment><comment><USER14> > _The same can pretty much be said about the rest of YouTube's top "talent." > From Shane Dawson to Smosh, it's almost universally bad content, bad jokes, > bad premises, bad production value._

Oh, you mean just like regular TV.

<comment><USER15> TV wasn't that bad 10-15 years ago. Formulaic as they were, 90s sitcoms used to always entertain, even if they didn't have much new to bring to the table.

Now, of course, we have mindless nonsense on TV, but I'm afraid YouTube is even worse. I have no subscribers on YouTube, and I never watch any of the producers listed in the article.

I generally use it for music (I listen to a lot of jazz, and Spotify has very little jazz music), and watching arbitrary YouTube videos that end up in links from Hacker News.

And the occasional technology video.

EDIT:

What's interesting about the article is the trail of comments left by top YouTubers, such as Ryan Higa, Tay Zonday, and Lamarr Wilson. Really entertaining to read their responses.

<comment><USER14> > _90s sitcoms used to always entertain_

They lost me in the 80s (I watched a ton in the 70s).

Never could manage to go back.

Edit: I came up with two exceptions

1\. Jon Stewart 2\. Pinky and the Brain.

For different reasons, both of those could get me to turn on a TV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In addition to the author's points about how the videos are constructed (thumbnail tricks, headline bait) to gain views, you also have to consider the basic mechanism involved in getting views: accessibility to a large population of people. If your videos are created at such a high level that only people with an IQ>130 can understand, you won't get that many views, and even fewer subscribers. If you target the crowd with average to below average intelligence then you have a much larger market. What do people with average/below average intelligence care about? They want to see people doing stupid stuff. They don't care about production value that much. They want to see someone looking like an idiot because it makes them feel better about themselves. This is the singular reason for low quality crap on YouTube and TV. The audience that can truly appreciate high quality shows is very small and can't sustain that much programming.

I'd also like to point out that not all YouTube channels suck. There is a solid community of educational YouTubers which make good stuff [1]. Also, SourceFed is where I go to get caught up on news that other people want to talk about and I only have 5 minutes to spare. Phil DeFranco's empire is an example of a business built on YouTube.

[1]Maybe that should be "who make good stuff" or "whom make good stuff." Maybe I should watch more YouTube videos on grammar and less about NASA.

<comment><USER6> "If your videos are created at such a high level that only people with an IQ>130 can understand, you won't get that many views"

That's a terrible specific example because you only need 0.25% of the American population to watch to get a gold plaque, but by the old standard of 95% of the population scores within 2 SD of the mean aka 70-130 IQ, that means your videos would appeal to about 2.5% of the population, or ten times as many people as you'd need to achieve the coveted youtube gold plaque.

I get what you're trying to say even if the example was not so good. The problem is no one watches youtube, so the small fraction of popular videos is pretty small if you compare it to the fraction of the population who are smart.

"They don't care about production value that much." Production quality is a DSW for professional producers and no one else cares. Attractive young woman I saw in the lunchroom today got plenty of attention from the guys despite not having rehearsed her lines and screwing up the joke punchline. And lighting and costumes weren't any good and none of us had much of a decent camera angle. Nothing in life that's memorable ever seems to be hollywood perfect, and no one minds but the professional production crews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article completely misses the point. It is not glossy fine hd quality that attracts, it is the soul and heart that youtubers put into videos. Be it Jenna Marbles showing an example of a strong woman, Shane Dawson who gives hope and inspiration to bullied kids across the country - you can't do the same if you will be just pouring dollars. And no, they have someone to be 'good' for - Jenna has 8,785,657 highly engaged subscribers on youtube only, who value her sincerity above video quality.

<comment><USER17> Agreed.

I watch only a couple YouTube channels actively and there's a common thread in almost all of them: the 'host' has an interesting personality. Sometimes that personality is completely fabricated and sometimes it's real - it doesn't really matter since viewers don't care. It's a lot like how the Stephen Colbert on 'The Colbert Report' isn't really the real-life Stephen Colbert. The videos also are typically more throwaway than TV - and that's why production is so low and the comparisons don't hold up.

It's the allure of a la carte TV, where if you want some girl talk, gun videos, a let's play, or funny cat compilation video, it's all there and easily digestible at any point in the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One thing we saw from that $100 million was that higher production values don't translate into more views. But really, why should they? What matters is content; I'm very happy for people to continue producing videos in their living room on their laptop, if the content is good.

</comment><comment><USER19> I suspect that this article makes more sense if you've read his book, which hits on the same themes with a lot more context, and a lot more history.

Youtube optimizes for grabbing attention in well-defined bite sized chunks that people think they can spare. A little dopamine hit, followed by another, followed by another, followed by..why didn't I get anything done today? The interaction isn't meaningful. It isn't rich. It doesn't improve our lives. But it is addictive.

If you don't see what is wrong with this, I recommend reading <http://www.highexistence.com/why-you-should-avoid-the-news/> until you think you understand it. Then re-read the article above with that in mind.

</comment><comment><USER20> Much of the blame for vapid content propogation on YouTube must also be assigned to YouTube's own content recommendations engine. This:

 _Won't accept no for an answer._ You can't select and item and say "never, ever, under any circumstances, show this to me again." You can't even delete it from the recommendations list.

 _Once you fall down a YouTube rathole, you stay there._ YouTube never forgets (or requires a severe amount of ass-kicking and browser/history deletion to be told to forget). Random crap content I've viewed long ago seems (and of course, I can't know for sure) to result in promoting the same sort of crap content. You've all ended up in _that_ corner of YouTube, and there's no way out.

 _YouTube promotes its own recommendations over what you've searched for._ When I look for content, rather than have the search results represented in the recommendations list, it's YouTube's own selections. Which are often ... not what I want. But don't be tempted to click (see "rathole" above).

 _Mass markets favor common denominators._ There's _amazingly_ good stuff on YouTube, for whatever your definition of amazing is. But often, that's going to be ver specific to who _you_ are and what _your_ interests are. The only thing I can guarantee is that the intersection of your interests with the rest of the world is likely to be at a pretty base level.

 _Eyeball economies favor vapidity._ We're seeing this in many areas (news, Web content, videos). Until user-selection tools become better at countering this, we'll continue to see the problem.

 _There is really good content with relatively poor production values._ Having an interest in fitness, Boris "johnny mnemonic" Bachmann's "Squat Rx" video series is _great_. It's a one-man production filmed at low (320p) resolution with spotty audio levels. But the depth of knowledge is excellent. Thankfully, it's filmed with a tripod and well edited. <http://www.youtube.com/user/johnnymnemonic2>

_Production quality doesn't translate to high-value content._ "Vsauce" is a highly-produced video series. The information content is virtually nil (and the energy level is beyond annoying). The "origional series" "Blue" is ... beyond stupid.

 _Production quality CAN further boost high-value content._ The TED Talk video series, and RSA Animate videos are excellent. If viewed from a production perspective, there's a lot of work that goes into them, and poor imitations are poor, though some other parties have used similar techniques well, see the Post Carbon Institute: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-J91SwP8w>

_YouTube handles spam / MVP poorly._ A popular video will be grabbed and repurposed by spammers and mindless video propogators / mindless viral propogators _endlessly_. It results in a huge duplication of content (often at increasing levels of video/audio quality degredation). See especially "fail" video compilations. No, it's a trap! (See: "rathole", above).

Chalk it up to my own boring interests, but finding micro-channel content relevant to specific areas is one of the huge wins of YouTube. Interviews, seminars, conference sessions recorded, and other informational content. Along with a bit of entertainment. The problem of course is that such content has very little visibility at scale -- it's part of the "long tail". And despite what some Cluetrainists would want you to believe, the real money is still at the head.

</comment><comment><USER21> Throughout modern history (certainly long before the internet) creative works that become the most popular are not necessarily that of the best quality. They're usually those that cater to the interests of the most people.

It happens to be that most people wish for regularly-updated pieces of entertainment that give them a particular emotional stimulus, regardless of their "quality". Aspects of human nature like these affect markets involving a macrocosm like the community of those that watch YouTube. Changing the pay model won't fix that. In the end, the number of people who want to view one's creative work determines how much the creator earns.

So really, rather than being a complaint about YouTube, this article is a general complaint about how things of "bad quality" are more popular than things of "good quality", which is a half-handed complaint about an aspect of human nature in the public macrocosm. This can't really be fixed unless one limits the audience in some way, and often it's a much more logical decision not to do that.

</comment><comment><USER22> All I get from that is that betabeat is pissed that the audience doesn't understand that they must care about production value and how much money is being spent to make those videos.

Don't get me wrong I find the Young Turks to be so badly produced that I can't stand to watch them -- but that doesn't mean that I get to tell others what they should value.

</comment><comment><USER23> What is being run, unintentionally by YouTube and its army of content generators, is a massively parallel search algorithm that evolves and optimizes itself to find every facet of human weakness. Networks effects on the internet allow it to run at an unprecedented speed and scale.

There is a certain ironic beauty to how destructive the system as a whole becomes. Everyone gains. The content producer, YouTube and the advertisers are locked in an addictive feedback loop. Even the users gain through the quantity and diversity of content.

Exactly like the housing bubble, everyone including the rating agencies did well right up till the end.

<comment><USER17> Unlike the housing bubble no one loses in the end. Sure, the Youtube revenue stream will dry up but that's the nature of the business. Either the content providers will move on to The Next Big Thing(TM) or will just be replaced by someone else. I don't think any of them believe that they can continue doing this for 30 years.

<comment><USER23> When human weakness is targeted(unintentionally & uncontrollably) at such an unprecedented scale, users loose. people loose.

And like the housing bubble, "at the end", everyone is going to be looking at one another and saying don't blame us everyone else was doing it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No mention of Devin Graham's channel? High quality consistent videos: <http://www.youtube.com/user/devinsupertramp>

Comparing the quality of TV to YouTube is like comparing the design of a website vs the design of a newsletter. The expectations are much higher with TV shows and websites. With email and YouTube, as long as it's readable/watchable and the content is good, people will come back.

</comment><comment><USER25> I couldn't help but agree with a lot in this article. Youtube's video page tends to be too busy and distracting. It's more of an entertainment/pop culture platform, if anything. It's really hard for tutorial/educational content to rise, and since they don't reach that many page views many channels don't collect much revenue from youtube.

which is why, recently I launched a site called Starseed - it's a youtube-like platform just for tutorial/educational videos. Starseed.io was created so that tutorial authors can upload tutorials on any topic they care about – no matter how advanced – for free and start collecting donations on their video's page from day one. It's sort of like each channel on starseed is like the PBS network - getting funded by its viewers.

you can check it out at <http://www.starseed.io/>.

I hope, one day, educational channels can sit on a platform meant for their growth and not competing against epic meal time lol.

</comment><comment><USER26> I watched Idiocracy [1] last night for the first time. The story is very clever in parts. Certainly the description of a film that was considered the best because it was just a picture of someone farting. Is taking the style of Youtube to the extreme.

The original article is pointing to that future, where Generation C's attention is on the low brow entertainment and traditional production cannot sustain itself.

Like journalism today is fighting for survival (who's going to pay for a full time reporter when you can get information off twitter?), television production will also be fighting in 10-15 years time as the next generation of adult switch off the satellite/cable TV in favour of Youtube style content.

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Video production is a team sport. It's only going to look professional if you hire a crew of experts.

And buy / rent a lot of expensive gear.

Someone like Jenna Marbles needs to focus on her content. Writing, recording, and editing a weekly show is more work than you think.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's a few well known youtubers in the comments to that article ... kind of interesting to see their responses :) But yeah, I kind of agree. Youtube is a new thing, it doesn't have to adhere to conventional notions of "quality".

This is oddly inverted, but I remember a few years ago I was working at EA Tiburon when EA did the whole exclusive NFL deal. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over that, and people complaining about year after year releases of Madden, with few improvements ... but you know what? consumers buy it, and so the party continues. Same goes with youtube ... the content obviously provides value or entertainment for a large number of people. Don't fight it, just accept that it is what it is.

</comment><comment><USER29> HeadOn apply directly to the forehead.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is3icfcbmbs> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeadOn>

It works for some. Actually it works for a lot, and that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Most people go through the day without the intuitive eye for wit, great taste, and appreciation for production value that a media manipulator and PR strategist would have, but I wouldn't say that makes the world a worse place. What's good and what's effective can be 2 separate things entirely.

</comment><comment><USER30> The content is terrible because the audience is terrible.

We are stupid.

The content is therefore stupid.

It has to play to us. It plays to what we want.

This isn't hard.

</comment><comment><USER31> Its really arrogant to think you know what "good" is, universally. No matter how much you argue for why something (media, art, music-ish stuff) is bad or good, it really doesn't change people's minds- when was the last time you were personally convinced that you didn't like something after enjoying it?

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm just surprised that there's that much revenue in youtube videos

<comment><USER33> I wonder how much revenue these channels would produce if comments were universally disabled.

Nearly every popular YouTube video is its own discussion board. There are people discussing the video, other comments, and completely unrelated topics. You see comments like "Hey, I'm back. How are you guys doing?" -- which implies this is a person who treats the video as its own self-contained forum.

Then of course there's the trolls who perpetuate conversation by inciting others. It's ironic to think trolls earn video channels ad revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Alternatively, why are our standards so damned high?

Is there not a decent chance that many people watch what seems like "lower quality" stuff because it is more relatable.</comment>


What If Life Did Not Originate on Earth? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-if-life-did-not-originate-on-earth <comment><USER2> An interesting phenomenon I rarely see brought up in support of panspermia is the apparent universality of the genetic code. The fact that all known life shares a common genetic structure implies a common ancestor. The lack of competing genetic codes could be interpreted to imply that life only started on earth once, or that it only made it to earth once. Natural selection is a constant force, presumably new genetic codes could offer an advantage, e.g., robustness against damaging mutation, resulting in multiple competing genetic codes.

The notion of abiogenesis occurring only once on earth seems improbable considering complex organs like eyes have evolved independently several different times. Or the fact that convergent evolution "reinvents" similar species in response to similar selective pressures. Selective pressures constantly "push" life in the same directions, so it would seem that whatever forces gave rise to life would have happened so repeatedly, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence for that.

A clean explanation for this would be that life didn't start on earth, and earth may have never had the right conditions to originate life, hence no competing genetic codes. But it was still hospitable enough to maintain life, so one universal genetic code flourishes with no emergent competition.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't that just beg the question? If life originated on some other planet and made it to Earth, why did only the DNA-based lifeform(s) make it here?

If we assume that different kinds of life based on different nucleic acids can co-exist, then it seems unlikely that a single kind would have happened to be carried to Earth by a natural process.

If we assume DNA has some inherent fitness advantage (so that only DNA-based life survived the journey), than we don't need the additional assumption of panspermia: perhaps only the DNA-based life survived some early period in Earth's history.

Also, for abiogenesis, given that we still can't reliably reproduce something like that, and that we have never seen new kinds of life spontaneously appearing on Earth, we do have some circumstantial evidence for the possibility that it is an incredibly unlikely event, such that it might have only happened once in Earth's history.

Edit: There is also another simple possibility: perhaps given the resources available on Earth, either forever or in the period where abiogenesis was possible, perhaps DNA(+RNA) is the only molecule with the right properties to act as genetic material. Perhaps there is no common ancestor to all life on Earth, but a "forest" of inter-breeding, spotnaneously arisen original organisms, but they were all DNA/RNA-based simply because of the available resources.

<comment><USER4> It'll be easier to send a DNA without a life-form. A life-form is very expensive (need to eat and breath) and not necessarily adaptable to earth conditions.

A very well encapsulated and protected DNA will land on earth and create the most adaptable life-form there through mutation and competition. All of these life-forms have the trait of wanting to pass their genes, multiply as much as possible and then spread around.

So the engineers probably had that in mind:

1- Extremely small: Probably so that they can propel it through space at very high speed + propel lots of it.

2- No maintenance required.

3- Will create a life-form if possible that is adaptable to the target country.

4- The life-form has the property of multiplication, and spreading.

5- The new superior life-form will propel more of these DNA.

<comment><USER2> >A life-form is very expensive (need to eat and breath)

Not necessarily, many organisms can undergo cryptobiosis, where all metabolic activity ceases, and then restarts when conditions are appropriate (sometimes decades later).

<comment><USER5> Fungi & bacteria can turn into spores & travel through space. There was also recent article about fungus growing on the outside (!) of the space station.

<comment><USER6> There are also things like tardigrades [1] which are pretty much the epoch of survival evolution. And this is all just stuff on our little planet. It's hard to say anything about life on a large scale, since we are basing everything we know on a sample of one. But it's probably safe to say that we have not even scratched the surface of what's possibility through just plain old evolution alone.

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

<comment><USER7> There are still a few billion years left for earth to shine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Methane is not nearly as good a signal to look for life as larger organic molecules are. Methane can easily be created by abiotic processes and remain stable when not directly exposed to radiation or oxidizers indefinitely: this happens on earth, and we do have oxidizers everywhere. Larger organic molecules are less likely to have abiotic origins by any known process and are almost always much less stable.

On earth you can test whether methane has organic or abiotic origins by testing its isotopes. We can do this because we understand decently well how the geologic past of earth unfolded. We could probably do a similar thing for mars

>The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. And the universe, at least based on estimates from the Big Bang, is something like fourteen billion years. So, if life evolved somewhere else, that buys you about ten billion years of time.

Obviously I'm no expert, but you have to keep in mind, it took a decent amount of time for non-violent stars to become the norm / stellar neighborhoods to calm down and for overall metallicity to become significant enough to allow for the formation of terrestrial planets.

<comment><USER9> Pardon my ignorance, but the Earth is 1/3 the age of the Universe?

<comment><USER10> Yep, time is the universes only dimension the earth is not a tiny and insignificant blip on, so far anyway.

<comment><USER9> Yeah this exactly. Today my perspective of the universe changed a little.

<comment><USER11> What did you think it's age was?

<comment><USER10> I can't answer for them, but it's completely believable they knew the age of the earth and the age of the universe in the abstract sense and never really connected both ludicrously large numbers together. That's why we have tools like Sagan's squeezing it into a year calendar just so humans can understand it in relatable terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Even though we have only one datapoint, I wonder how much can be inferred from this planet's life characteristics.

First, life came about rather shortly after the planet was able to sustain it. So this timing is either very unlikely, or biogenesis has a high probability of happening, or the initial life got seeded from off planet (from a very rare initial phenomenon).

Second, all the biosignatures from all forms of life are similar. For example, corality (left handed versus right handed molecules) is the same in all life examples we had. So that means that biogenesis happened only once. Otherwise we would have multiple unrelated examples (yes, there is the possibility that one form "ate everything else", but we have all kinds of variety instead of only one organism becoming dominate). So if biogenesis happened only once (for all of our bio examples), then it is either a rare event that just happened to occur very shortly after the planet cooled, or it happened sometime before Earth was hospitable for life and elsewhere in the universe.

Does any of this make sense? Or am I reading too much into the tea leaves?

<comment><USER13> Your tea leaves are sound.

I think this is why those of us interested in this are very much hanging out for results from our explorations of Mars. It's pretty much our only opportunity to see if life emerged twice in the same planetary system under similar conditions.

What are the chances?

On the positive side Mars had pretty much all the ingredients for life (chemically) and had a long enough period for at least _something_ intersting to develop. On the negative side, the environment was still different to ours (gravity, climate, whether, etc).

We still aren't clear on what conditions need to met for like to get going. This is why both positive or negative results on Mars are exciting.

My favourite theory is that life actually takes ages to get started so much so that it started on Mars and finished on Earth (from Mars being impacted and debris making it to Earth). Kind of like a passing of the torch.

Mars: "Crap. I'm dying. Hey Earth, can you take this thing I've been working on?"

Earth: "Yep. No worries. I got this. Will try to send some back in a few billions years. Take care."

<comment><USER14> _> It's pretty much our only opportunity to see if life emerged twice in the same planetary system under similar conditions._

You mean carbon based life. Methane based life may be a possibility, and you wouldn't have found it on Mars. You might find it on Titan.

<comment><USER15> Methane is an organic (carbon-chain) molecule: CH4.

Titan would have a low-temperature carbon-based chemistry, but it would remain carbon-based if focused on methane.

Alternative hypothetical biochemistries usually focus on silicon.

<comment><USER14> True. But a methane based lifeform would be radically different than the carbon based lifeforms found on Earth, and would have emerged separately.

<comment><USER15> Oddly, that wasn't your claim.

<comment><USER14> It was. Read the OP's claims about Mars.

Mars alone does not provide the answer about whether or not life evolved independently in our solar system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The question of where life originated will have no good answer until we figure out how to create life from basic components. We still don't know how to do that yet.

Yes, Urey and Miller showed that you could get simple organic molecules by passing an electric charge through gasses thought to be present around the early Earth.

But going from low molecular weight inputs to life is a vastly different problem. You could think of it as the most complicated bootstrapping problem in the universe.

Nobody has managed to do it in the lab, either. What can't be built from scratch can't be understood very well, and therein lies the problem.

If we had a stepwise procedure for building a self-replicating, self-feeding organism of any level of complexity from base components, we would know exactly what to look for.

Until then, the idea of sending a DNA amplifier to Mars isn't a bad fallback position.

<comment><USER17> If we succeed, it would be the most important breakthrough in the history of humanity, and would have very deep existential implications. It wouldn't definitely rule out a supreme being as the creator of the universe we live in, but it would make the gap between us and that being much smaller than millions of people on earth believe now.

<comment><USER18> > would have very deep existential implications.

I doubt that.

> It wouldn't definitely rule out a supreme being as the creator of the > universe we live in

Yes, that's exactly what the believers will tell you even then.

Think about it: the science _knows_ today that _every_ atom in our bodies is either produced 13.8 billion years ago (is it is H2) or in the explosion of some star. It's true for every element that you learn in the chemistry class. We know that the Earth is 4.7 billion years old. And we already know that humans share 99% percent of the DNA with chimps. And that 0.006 billion years ago on the Earth neither humans nor chimps existed, but their common ancestor.

Do people who believe in a "miracle" divine intervention that supposedly happened only some 0.000002 billion years ago (or even only 0.0000014 billion years ago) when only at that point their deity became involved with the believers, do these people in anyway feel affected by all that? No.

Compared to what we know today, their religious "messages from the deity" obviously prove that they were written by plain humans of older times, because these messages don't contain any knowledge we have today, but instead the "eternal" truths like "at the end of the day the Sun sets in the muddy pond" or that the Earth's sky is a solid dome: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament#Biblical_use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament#Biblical_use)

Do the believers feel affected by that? No.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The reason this news registered among scientists is that methane is often a > sign of life; although the gas can be produced by various chemical > reactions, most of it comes from animate beings.

This doesn't sound right at all. There are literally lakes of methane on Titan. The atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all contain significant methane--it's what makes Uranus and Neptune blue. Pluto has methane ice.

IIRC from the original reporting, some recent research suggested that there's more methane than contemporary geological models of Mars predict. Which likely says more about the [non-biological] deficiencies in those models than it does the likelihood of life.

I'm not an astro-anything, so feel free to correct me. But it's telling that the interviewee never comes close to confirming the reporter's claims; they're simply quoted as saying, "I think probably many people would like the idea of methanogens on Mars", and "the idea that they might be related to methanogens on Earth is not crazy." Isaac Chotiner is a name I'll try to remember so I can avoid his articles.

<comment><USER20> There is _ancient_ methane in those places. But something on Mars is _producing_ methane.

Methane breaks down pretty fast in Mars' atmosphere, and yet it reappears there occasionally. That can certainly have non life explanations. But they're fairly exotic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Minor fun fact: Fred Hoyle, possibly the most public proponent of Panspermia in the last few decades, also coined the phrase "Big Bang theory" to dismiss an alternative to his preferred Steady State theory of the universe.

Sometime champion of arch positions, he was once quoted as saying "it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right".

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

<comment><USER22> It is a pretty out there theory, but at one point the universe would have cooled enough from the very hot big bang origins to allow liquid water to exist everywhere, but not cooled sufficiently to cause everything to freeze.

If any rocky planets existed at the time, maybe that was the origin of life which was much more able to spread widely due to the small size of the early universe.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613](https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613)

<comment><USER23> This just sounds like a cool sci-fi setting/backstory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The idea life emerged long before Earth, and may be widespread in the universe, is fairly old:

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

I suspect that a formal, anonymous survey of astrobiologists would find that the idea is far more prevalent among experts than Ruvkin's estimate that "one per cent would buy into the idea of life spreading the way I'm sort of promoting it".

It's just risky to express, for cultural reasons, until there's tangible proof. Many scientists are temperamentally reluctant to speculate without conclusive evidence, especially given the penchant of the press to sensationalize any such theories. It'd raise difficult questions about our place in the universe, and possibly popular fears.

Thinking science had already settled on a consensus that simple life is everywhere might even paradoxically reduce funding for new missions to test the idea. After all, there have been tantalizing hints of life-processes on Mars going back to the Viking lander experiments of the 1970s – and yet we still can't seem to send a lab package that'd definitively answer the question! But the hope of figuring it out motivates new missions.

(As should be clear, I'm strongly in Ruvkin's camp – and regularly comment to that effect here on HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gojomo%20panspermia&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gojomo%20panspermia&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment) )

</comment><comment><USER25> There was this interesting article posted here some time ago that plotted the complexity of life found on earth vs time, and by using the right methodology and logarithmic scales, it arrived at a nice linear line over many data points and several billions of years. And the line converged to a 0 point, but that point was a few billion years before earth was created 4.5 billion years ago, adding more credibility to a panspermia theory. Can anybody remember that article and its url?

<comment><USER25> Update: found it. Apparently the theory is contentious, with accusations that they cherry-picked their data points. Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580334)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What if life is a fundamental property of a sufficiently complex universe and a stable energy gradient?

That's where I'd put my money.

<comment><USER27> Hm. Also, money could be a fundamental property of a sufficiently complex life.

<comment><USER26> I understand the downvote, but I also agree with the statement.

IMHO money, markets, even democracy seem to me to follow directly from the challenges of living in a complex society which follows from the benefits of working at large scales.

They even seem to me to be simply abstracted versions of more naturally evolved systems baked into life on Earth a billion years ago, i.e. ATP metabolism and multi-cellular life

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have wondered if panspermia could have occurred in the Sun's birth cluster. This cluster would have had a very high density of stars, with gas around them to slow and capture material ejected from their neighbor systems. And the asteroids in orbit around these stars would have still be warm enough to have liquid water in them, so life could potentially have been seeded in a wide variety of environments.

This possibility, if true, means SETI might be worthwhile even if the actual origin of life is astronomically rare, much less than once per observable volume of the universe. SETI would look at the other stars that were in that cluster. Even if the rest of the universe were devoid of life, they (like the continents of Earth, or planets in our solar system) could share the same origin event.

This scenario might also explain why life apparently originated so early in the history of our solar system: this sort of natal panspermia would statistically amplify origin-of-life events that happened early on, by multiplying the number of systems they'd affect. This amplification would occur even if OoL was extremely rare.

</comment><comment><USER29> Based on nothing but faith and an irreducible cynicism, my money says we end up going full circle, from "Earth is alone in the universe in regards to life" to "Life is a fungus, found anywhere the most basic of conditions are met" (at least over periods of millions of years at stellar scales)

People forget that this discussion is not necessarily related to life. When various European explorers went out, in many cases they didn't know what to expect. When they met strange peoples, most of them refused to believe these were actually human.

It takes a good long while for humans to recognize other lifeforms like us. We naturally think that we're unique, that wherever we call home is special and the center of things. Combine that with galactic distances and it might be a good while before we realize that the universe is actually full of aliens that look just like humans only with bumpy heads (Obligatory Star Trek joke)

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe we could test this someday with petri dishes in orbit. Outfit satellites with catch basins that funnel into various potentially habitable pods and see what grows. Park them in a lagrange point for better isolation.

But if panspermia is true such critters in the cosmic wind would be cousins of life on earth, and it would be difficult (impossible?) to distinguish an alien microbe from domestic contamination. If it's false we see nothing, and wonder if it's because space is sterile or we're just not yet offering it the right primeval soup.

<comment><USER31> Panspermia doesn't only work (if it works) by microbes floating in space. Rather the idea is that microbes are embedded and somewhat protected in asteroids which then land somewhere habitable. The occasional close brushes between stars and their asteroid clouds provide the medium where microbes could be transferred between stars quickly enough to launch and land before the radiation destroys any hope of survival (like 20 thousand years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My biology knowledge is admittedly weak, but a question for those who might know: a lot of the discussion here is about how we only know of "life" based on nucleic acids (DNA). However, prions seem to replicate themselves without the help of nucleic acids. Could this in some way be seen as a competing form of "life"?

<comment><USER33> Prions don't synthesize themselves, they just self-assemble. RNA can encode it's own information while also catalyzing self-replication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It always seemed to me that the biggest argument against panspermia is the relative hostility to "life" of space versus a planet like Earth. The heliosphere protects the solar system from a significant amount of interstellar cosmic rays and x-rays, Earth's magnetosphere offers additional protection, and our atmosphere, particularly the ozone layer, offers additional protection while also protecting against UV and high energy particles from the Sun. Ionizing radiation and short wavelength EM radiation are destructive to life and really the persistence of any large complex molecules. Combine that with the vacuum of space and temperatures barely above absolute zero and life originating via panspermia seems significantly less likely than originating natively on Earth.

<comment><USER35> I'd say the biggest argument against panspermia is that the organisms responsible for it need to be successful locally and universally, at the same time. Reproduction is expensive and intrastellar reproduction is incredibly low yield. So organisms would need to have evolved to both capture an entire ecosystem AND waste a bunch of energy blowing their seed into the solar system.

The idea just doesn't jibe with my understanding of evolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What if we began a 'seeding' experiment, suppose there could be more life but isn't because life doesn't spread well in the vacuum of space. What if we began sending bacteria and other micro-organisms to potentially habitable planets via tiny spacecrafts. If we were to seed as many planets as we could possibly find, then eventually (in a million years or so), this entire galaxy could be teaming with life and the fermi paradox will be refuted as there will be no way not to see the life that is out there. We may still not be able to traverse the stars by that time at least not without generation ships but our descendents could at least wave from afar and maybe communicate across vast distances with intelligent life that we today helped seed/create.

<comment><USER37> I'm not really on board with the idea of just blindly infecting all habitable planets with Earth life. We should look but don't touch until we have some clue what the heck we are doing and why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What I find more interesting is the potential frequency with which new life from origins other than earth has been mixed together with what is here. A lot of stuff falls into our atmosphere and I doubt we know where all of it comes from.

I commented today on a bit of dermatological discussion where they claim our skin has a biome of bacteria. This is in addition to the gut biome that is starting to look like it contributes to a wide array of human health issues. Part of me wonders how much of those biomes (e.g. how many bacteria within that biome) are from sources outside our planet.

<comment><USER39> Well, if they did, then the fact that the basic DNA machinery is the same implies that we and the alien bacteria had a common ancestor somewhere back there.

<comment><USER38> > implies that we and the alien bacteria had a common ancestor

My intuition suggests that wouldn't be necessary. For example, if I saw a snowflake like structure on another planet I wouldn't be surprised since that kind of structure is a result of the physical properties of the elements involved. It could be the case DNA is very similar in that respect, a mathematical necessity given the properties of hydro-carbons. I suspect the science on that issue isn't settled.

<comment><USER40> Not a biologist, but my impression is that the concepts involved in DNA/RNA, and especially the machinery around it, are so complicated and have so many degrees of freedom, that snowflakes, which are rather simple crystallizations of only water, may not be an apt comparison.

Maybe it's closer to, say, someone having just learned the basics of analogue electronic circuits (but nothing beyond that), going into a basement, and coming out with a fully formed IBM-compatible PC with USB ports.

Again, not my field, and I'm happy to be taught otherwise on that one.

<comment><USER41> If you're saying that DNA is too complex to have evolved on earth, where else would it evolve? Panspermia just puts the origin of life in another location in the universe. It doesn't answer any questions about how that complexity would evolve.

<comment><USER22> Thats not what is being said, hes saying that if life evolved twice, it would be almost certainly completely different and "incompatable" at a molecular level.

Consider the design of processor architectures and operating systems, similar design goals but typically one cant run code from the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish he had posited a theory for how life from Mars would have even gotten here. Some comments have said an asteroid hit Mars and then redirected to Earth with early life on it? Is that possible/likely?

<comment><USER43> Yes, it happens. There are about 200 meteorites found on Earth that are known to have come from Mars: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Don't know if anyone has ever considered this (ignoring gross simplifications), but as depictions of aliens are typically conceptualized from creatures we see on earth. Is it possible that if we are the only living creatures that have (yet) gained heightened consciousness, then spreading the DNA of all life on earth across the universe in a similar fashion to how our microbial life arrived on earth is how we ensure that life truly goes on if we fail?

</comment><comment><USER45> "...what if it started here and then spread elsewhere? And so we found some sort of DNA on Mars, but that's because it spread there from Earth. Is that possible?

Yeah, but that sort of places us at the center of the universe, and all the force of history is to say, "Don't think of us as the center. We're nothing.""

What kind of argument is that? Sounds like some kind of anti-geocentric dogma, not an actual argument.

</comment><comment><USER46> And what if life did originate on Earth? That's one of those hypothetical questions where the answer wouldn't make any practical difference, if we even had an answer. If and when we find extraterrestrial life, maybe we can come up with questions where the answers would be of practical value.

</comment><comment><USER47> James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww- sBPg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg)

</comment><comment><USER48> >It just seems like, once it evolves, it spreads.

Hence why I draw exactly the opposite conclusion. It's my thinking that if life existed throughout our 13 billion year old galaxy it would have evolved to saoience and consumed all available resources long before the rise of humanity. The fact our planet hasn't been strip mined or colonized is, absent hard data, good reason to believe we're alone.

<comment><USER49> There's a big difference between microbial life and intelligent life.

Bostrom and others have argued that, based on how long evolutionary milestones took on Earth, the "difficult step" is actually complex multicellular life.

<comment><USER48> The timeline implies that but experimentation indicates it may not have been that hard.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8)

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous- transition...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous-transition- multicellular-life-may-not-have-been-so-hard-after-all)

<comment><USER49> That's interesting.

I agree with your conclusion that Fermi's paradox simply means there is no other intelligent life, though I think the jury's still out as to where the filter is.

<comment><USER48> Indeed. There's quite a lot of debate surrounding it and a couple of mathematicians arguing we haven't hit the filter yet, but I maintain hope we're past it. It wounds my sci-fi loving heart to say this but humanity is probably better off alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've wondered for years if maybe the idea of life originating on Earth might be the final geocentrism.

<comment><USER51> We haven't yet collected evidence that says terrestrial life originating on Earth is impossible or even unlikely, nor has anyone produced an alternative explanation that doesn't involve introducing additional external factors. It may indeed turn out to be incorrect (although I wouldn't be on it), but it's in no way comparable to geocentrism which simply couldn't be reconciled with experimental observation.

<comment><USER52> If you lived on Long Island, and didn't know where humans came from, but you knew about how big the earth was, would it be rational or in accordance with Occam's razor to assume homo sapiens originated in your vicinity? Most people would in fact be wrong if they even assumed humans originated on their _continent_.

I feel like people get sidetracked into talking about evidence, when the issue is that life originating on Earth should not be the _default_ assumption. I feel like someone more lucid than me could make a good Bayesian sort of argument.

<comment><USER53> It's not exactly the default assumption though. Historically the default is that life was magicked into existence or came here from a previous world or some other creation story. The current abiogenisis story of molecules->proteins->cells->Life is relatively recent.

The other thing is that because we have a fairly... ?linear record of evolution: if life did originate somewhere else it got to Earth in something like prokaryotic single cell form 3.5 billion years ago. Which means we can't use the idea of panspermia to tell us anything. It's neither predictive or explanatory. It tells us nothing of how or where life _did_ originate or how life got started on Earth or what or where we should look for or expect in the rest of the Universe.

The current theory suggests life could pop up extremely quickly, which itself already implies life is likely to exist in the rest of universe on some level so panspermia doesn't even mean anything with regards to how likely life is anywhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> What if this entire universe is an organism?

</comment><comment><USER55> Given the complexity of DNA I think it is near obvious life did not originate on earth. If you assume it did not originate on earth that gives you at least another 10 billion years to work with.

<comment><USER56> No, it really doesn't; it took a few generations of stars exploding and slamming into each other to make all those heavy elements we kinda consider important. You _might_ be able to move it back another 3-4 billion years, which is admittedly a good long time.

But really there's nothing yet that even remotely necessitates an extra- terrestrial origin for life. The problem is that, each time there was a "winner" in the very earliest more-chemistry-than-life arms-races, it essentially obliterated all record of what the competition looked like. It's not until pretty late in the game that no one new strategy obliterated all its peers - at that point we got the biological domains (prokaryotes and eukaryotes (which subsumed other prokaryotes as mitochondria and chloroplasts)) and viruses. From then on, the arms-races have been at higher levels of abstraction and the fight over the basics of biochemistry is 'settled'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wasn't there a movie about this?

</comment><comment><USER58> "It could be that I've never had a religious thought in my life."

The very idea that life has to originate from somewhere/somewhat and cannot just happen sounds like a secular reformulation of a typically religious statement.</comment>


The Random Number Grand Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.kaggle.com/c/random-number-grand-challenge <comment><USER2> Waaah! ... several minutes later and I realize what it is by glancing at the start-end date/timestamps.

Even the book they linked to seems odd, including all the review statements.

<comment><USER3> The book is real ([http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html](http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html), [http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/...](http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418/MR1418.deviates.pdf))

It is the reference set of random digits.

<comment><USER4> I tried implementing a Mersenne Twister, and the numbers I got were completely different from that book. Didn't I use enough entropy? Where can I get some from?

<comment><USER5> Did you get Numberwang?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It took me way too long to realise that was a joke...the prize allocation is pretty special though :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I always thought the best random number generator was:

Take a large Pseudo random #, & add that (in hours) to your current time. Pick a large enough pseudo space to cover 10+ years. Then, read that combined time in microseconds. This combines a real randomness (your current microseconds) that spans all space.

That would cover a very large space in a very random fashion.

The attacker would have to know your computed time to narrow it down, but couldn't narrow it down much at all, since it's combined with the large pseudo random #.

The problem with most Pseudo's is that they are sparse, leaving too much space unhit.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am feeling so stupid right now. I thought I will use artificial neural networks to predict random numbers. Cringing so bad...

</comment><comment><USER9> "If there is one thing the working data scientist can do, it is extract insights from a sea of randomness."

</comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory: [http://xkcd.com/221/](http://xkcd.com/221/)

<comment><USER11> Also obligatory: [http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And it begins. I hate April Fools Day. I have never understood why deceiving someone is comical.

<comment><USER13> Follow the money.

These days, April Fools has turned into a marketing gravy train. Do something cheap and mildly amusing, and the press will lap it up for free.

<comment><USER14> No no -- as someone who works in marketing, let me assure you, 99% of attempted April Fools jokes go, for the benefit of everyone, completely unnoticed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> April Fools finished 4 hours ago for me so I don't really find this funny at all.

I feel kinda annoyed that I looked at what superficially looked like a interesting problem. Can you find the algorithm given pseudorandom random numbers? Can you find any sort of pattern? Interesting stuff that's all within the realms of the possible.

I understand why people in the Kaggle community would enjoy it, you visit their site and see a funny joke, it helps build community.

Not so funny when you get sent straight there.

<comment><USER16> Because it ended for you means noone else finds it funny eh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics;the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well... Right in front of me... hiding behind the numbers. Always has been.

<comment><USER17> This comment had an interesting score trajectory.

It's a quote from the movie "Pi", which has a protagonist who goes mad trying to find order in randomness. Which is kind of the point of the linked story, too.

The comment went up to 6 when I first posted it, and it's now at negative 2. Maybe morning folks think April Fools is serious business.

(Admittedly it's a fluff comment that I would not normally post but on the other hand it's no more fluffy than the story itself.)</comment></comment>


Dr. Nakamats, the Man With 3300 Patents to His Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dr-nakamats-the-man-with-3300-patents-to-his-name-179976641.html?c=y&story=fullstory&device=iphone

<comment><USER2> its not true</comment>


GM says you don't own your car, you just license it - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/gm-says-you-dont-own-your-ca.html

<comment><USER2> Can we link to the original article, since it has way more information?

[http://www.autoblog.com/2015/05/20/general-motors-says- owns-...](http://www.autoblog.com/2015/05/20/general-motors-says-owns-your- car-software/)

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a recent article in WIRED of a similar situation regarding John Deere tractors. [http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john- deere/](http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/)</comment>


Scala at Yammer (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://eng.yammer.com/scala-at-yammer/

<comment><USER2> You can read the leaked email in this gist [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1406238](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1406238)

I don't know how many of these problems have been solved in the last couple of years.

<comment><USER3> (Full disclosure: we're currently working with Typesafe to write up a case study of our experiences with Scala/Akka/Play)

SBT has improved quite a bit since the 0.7/0.10 days. Still a bit of a mess. That said, we have an SBT project with multiple subprojects, multi-JVM testing and lots of other stuff and we don't feel that our Build.scala has gotten out of hand. That said, many others feel differently.

IMO, the collections libraries have also improved. The problem of the collections library details bubbling through the API has been largely fixed though others may disagree. Can't attest to performance as I haven't profiled the Scala collections.

Most of the Scala we write is within the context of Akka where idiomatic patterns are well established. Plus, the community is quite strong with most (all?) of the Akka devs active on the mailing list.

There are still some poorly designed libraries popular within the Scala world. The Dispatch library is a good example of this. OTOH, there are great alternatives. Play's HTTP client library is very straightforward, for example, an HTTP GET: WS.url(myURL).get(). None Dispatch's periodic table gobbledygook.

We're quite happy with Scala. An example: originally, our backend was going to be in Java but I convinced one of our founders to give Scala a shot. In one sitting, his first time writing Scala, he wrote the first pass of our analytics service and it was _correct_ the first time it compiled.

<comment><USER4> The notion that a compiler makes your code more correct is absurd. Also your emphasis on "correct" makes me wonder what your trying to say...all compiled programs are correct whether they work or not.

<comment><USER3> Okay, I didn't use "correct" in its CS theory definition. My point is it worked, correctly. As in satisfied our requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the original leaked email, great observation on the need to dig into library code:

        . . . engineers need to have an accurate mental model
        of how these libraries work or they shift into
        cargo-culting snippets of code as magic talismans of
        functionality.

</comment><comment><USER6> From 2011.

<comment><USER7> Surprised Yammer still exists.

<comment><USER8> Why's that? Enterprises want internal social media to promote communications (or at least the appearance of communication) but they don't want to pay for infrastructure (or spend the time) to support it. Enter Yammer.

There's a whole galaxy of apps out there that to consumers seem redundant, but cater to enterprises. Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., etc. all have competitors that are targeting the enterprise market they have either ignored, abandoned or burned.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting, though. I've watched conference talks from about 5 years ago where Yammer is commonly referred to as a medium for internal communications by SMB types (Business of Software, I think? Sorry, can't find a link at the moment.) Those same recommendations now go to Hipchat. Is their marketing the only difference? (ie. was Yammer once more palatable to small businesses for their marketing, and have they now changed that, with Hipchat filling the void? Or is it more than that?)

I don't know the space well at all, these are just observations from a distance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NSA Has 50,000 'Digital Sleeper Agents' Via Computer Malware - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/23/nsa-has-50000-digital-sleeper-agents-snowden/ <comment><USER2> There must be an another way that the spying software was loaded other than fake emails, that shit is getting old.. no way can it fool 50,000 people.

<comment><USER3> What do you think the exploits given to them by Microsoft, way before they even start working on fixing them, are used for?

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies- said-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap- data-with-thousands-of-firms.html)

The excuse that they are doing that to "give them a heads up" is BS. I think it's a very immoral thing to do by Microsoft. They've giving NSA knowledge about early exploits which they _know_ NSA and others will use them offensively. That's an extremely dangerous, and again, immoral, policy, and it needs to stop.

Microsoft shouldn't even _dare_ to argue against "full disclosure" of bugs from now, when we know that if developers do "responsible disclosure" as they call it, they're just going to give them to the NSA first, before fixing it - which is actually _very irresponsible_ of Microsoft, as it puts _all of their other customers_ in danger of an imminent attack from a very hostile agency. At least with a public full disclosure, they have no chance but to fix the bugs as soon as possible.

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239477/Google_engine...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239477/Google_engineer_bashes_Microsoft_s_handling_of_security_researchers_discloses_Windows_zero_day)

No, you can't assume they're doing it just to "terrorists". We already know that with their "collect it all" mission, they'll try to infect and have backdoors into _everything_ , so they can turn _anyone_ at _anytime_ into a target, with the flip of a switch.</comment></comment>


PayPal now a checkout in-store at 1,200 Foot Lockers - <AUTHOR> http://www.sneakerwatch.com/article/017533/foot-locker-adds-paypal-check-out-in-store/

<comment><USER2> Interesting news, especially given their consideration of adding bitcoin support. That would be huge for the BTC!</comment>


Show HN: EKco – Sell your videos online in minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.myekco.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We're currently in Beta. Appreciate any constructive feedback/input from the community. Thank you in advance.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone deployed NodeJS web site for 10+Million users? - <AUTHOR>

We are building a NodeJS based website with estimated 10M unique users daily. A user is defined as someone who has account on the site.
We want the backend architecture to be cheap (requires fewer servers), best performance, fault tolerant, and scalable. I would like to find out if someone has experience in deploying such a solution and may be wants to share their strategy + architecture?
Here are some further details, which I've come up with so far:
system will be deployed on CentOS on Amazon EC2 run multiple versions of NodeJS separate from one another use NginX as load balancer between multiple NodeJS instances (also does gzip compression) MongoDB for storing account information mongoose or NginX for serving static files <comment><USER2> this is not a direct response to your question but..'estimated 10M unique users'? this is an estimate for business you are starting? or are you building it for someone who already has traffic and expects to grow? if it's the former, I wouldn't worry too much about the scalability just yet..by all means use nodejs if it affords you luxury of using available resource skills and meets your feature needs..if it's the latter then it all depends on what is currently being used (for the tech stack) and why that's not good enough to scale

</comment><comment><USER3> Why NodeJS? I'm not being pedantic, just really interested as to why choose something new over proven options.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to the SO question: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20734835/scalable- nodejs-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20734835/scalable-nodejs- website-for-10-million-users)

<comment><USER4> it has been removed

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you done some load testing on you site. how many users can't a single Centos machine support without issues? Have you tried to optimize your code? Where does your stack spend the most time? are some of your assets static?

</comment><comment><USER6> You might try to make contact with these guys:

[https://github.com/walmartlabs](https://github.com/walmartlabs)</comment>


Introducing Shadow DOM API - <AUTHOR> https://www.webkit.org/blog/4096/introducing-shadow-dom-api/ <comment><USER2> DOM is such a crufty old API/data structure to work with and with CSS, computationally it's a pig. Anything we can do to isolate bits and bobs on the page from one another and make DOM easier for the browser to render and emit events for, the better.

I just think the Shadow DOM and Web Components are too complex to work with as designed. The componenty composability of React definitely seems real to me, whereas I don't have such optimism about Web Components.

All I would want/need is a lightweight version of iframe whereby it functions like a javascript security and css styles sandbox, call it a subwindow. A subwindow could load html/css/js independently from the parent page like a Web Worker does, or it could borrow from assets the parent page has loaded and its HTML could be inlined as innerHTML statically/dynamically from the parent page (at creation time.)

A subwindow would have an independent global/window object from the parent window. And, you could postMessage/onMessage communicate with the parent window if you needed. It could be constructed with its own dedicated DOM thread, or it could schedule on the parent's thread if you didn't want another thread spawned. Paints would have to be synchronized between the DOM threads, which could be a bummer.

I just want an inline iframe, which I know is like saying I want an "inline inline frame". ;)

<comment><USER3> Isn't that how normal frames used to work?

Before they were deprecated for iframes?

<comment><USER2> I don't want to partition the page the way frames/frameset did, I want to sandbox code and content the way iframe does, just in a more lightweight fashion. If I could couple that sandboxing with a component factory library like React, that could really be something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At first I was gung ho about web components. I was so excited I used Mozilla's X-Tag for one project and Polymer in another project. I am now no longer in favor of using them and it makes me sad, actually.

Web components are simply too heavy. They add latency to download (yeah you can combine them but I've never found tooling (including Vulcanize) that worked very well). Also the shadow dom's separation makes styling more difficult across multiple components requiring awkward shadow dom hacks in the CSS and / or duplicating / adding more CSS to components themselves. Same with using JavaScript and third party libraries not expecting to use the ShadowDom though this isn't so bad.

When I'm working on something that needs to be optimized for low bandwidth / high latency I go as lightweight as possible and I concat as much stuff together as I can. I want web components to work so badly but they're way too slow for me to use anytime soon.

<comment><USER5> The other terrible side effect of web components is that it gives the standards group an excuse to never update HTML anymore. "Why do we need HTML6 when you can make anything you want with big, heavy Javascript-based web component that takes expert programmers to make?" Indeed.

Just say no to web components. Say yes to upgrading HTML specs directly.

<comment><USER6> That's the exact opposite of the reason why browser vendors are implementing web components. It's so that they can get direct, real-world feedback from actual users of a feature before baking it into standards and making it impossible to remove from the web. The intent has always been that the most frequently used webcomponents will end up getting baked into the browser, and then into the HTML spec.

We used to write web specs speculatively, without having feedback from real- world use, and it was a disaster. Take a look at the list of W3C standards:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#Stan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#Standards)

How many of them do you _actually_ use? Remember when everything was XML, XPATH, XSLT, the semantic web, and we were going to replace HTML with XHTML?

<comment><USER5> _The intent has always been that the most frequently used webcomponents will end up getting baked into the browser, and then into the HTML spec._

That's nice in theory, but what's happening in reality is that no component is going to be standardized, and HTML remains stagnant for another 15 years.

<comment><USER6> It's a little hard to make that argument when _web components themselves aren 't standardized yet_, and are fully supported natively in only one of the major browsers.

There's pretty ample evidence that common webdeveloper behavior _does_ make it into the spec, eg. JQuery => querySelectorAll, Javascript animations => CSS transitions & animations, long-polling => websockets, common layouts => <header>/<footer>/<main>/<nav> elements, dropdowns => <details>/<summary> elements, the addition of date/datetime/color/number/range/tel input types, etc. If you're still coding HTML like you did in 2000, you are now very obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty excited about what this will do for web components development. Polyfills have come very close, but deeply nested components can become a tangled mess in no time.

If anyone is interested in getting started with web components, I recommend taking a look at Google's Polymer[1] library. It's a fairly opinionated approach, but has a relatively small learning curve.

[1] [https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/](https://www.polymer- project.org/1.0/)

<comment> david-given I rejigged my personal website using Polymer and was thoroughly impressed. It's pretty heavyweight, mostly because I'm too cheap to precompile and minify my Javascript, but the modular approach means that I can now, finally, apply _actual software engineering principles_ to building websites.

The documentation could be better, and you pretty much have to like Material Design, and there could be a richer set of standard widgets available, and it desperately needs a CDN, but other than that I found it really pleasant to use.

What I _haven 't_ tried is building any kind of reactive interface. It's got some support for binding elements to data, but I didn't explore that much. Anyone care to comment?

<comment><USER8> > actual software engineering principles to building websites

What are the actual software engineering principles Polymer enables developers to apply?

<comment><USER9> Separation of concerns and better variable scoping as well. In a webcomonent inside a shadow dom, you can do something like input id="mainInput" or some other generic-named DOM id, without worrying that some other third-party library or component will create another node with the same id.

Similarly for CSS selectors and class names - I mean, BEM and SMACCS and stuff are cool and all, but it's also nice to know that my CSS styles won't leak outside the component, so I can just do div class="main" or something and not worry about how other developers name their classes on other branches of the DOM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like webcomponents, but they still statefully update the UIX, just like most native ui frameworks.

React solves this by giving a declarative functional approach to webdevelopment.

Would it be possible to combine both react with webcomponents? If so, are there any demo"s out there? I couldnt find anything.

<comment><USER11> That depends on what you are doing inside of your web components. You can load any JavaScript you want in there, you know. If you want to use React, that's fine. Web Components is just a set of extensions to the DOM standards to allow encapsulated custom elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The things I'm curious about with Shadow Dom:

\- How does it affect performance, if say, a large application is composed of many shadow dom elements, each containing a large amount of redundant CSS?

\- Will there be a way to let certain css styles "leak" through while encapsulating others? Or is any type of native inheritance gone?

<comment><USER7> Because a template would define the styles once, but be stamped multiple times, there should be minimal redundant copies of the styles themselves. How this performs will remain to be seen, as it would be up to the browsers to implement the spec optimally.

You can "pierce" the shadow DOM with the ">>>" combinator (previously /deep/), allowing you to style elements from outside of the shadow DOM. This is discouraged in the case of web components, however, as a component is supposed to operate as a black box entity. Instead, a component can expose APIs for styling, such as with CSS variables: [https://www.polymer- project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/styling.ht...](https://www.polymer- project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/styling.html#xscope-styling-details)

Edit: This article[1] has details on performance and styling options.

[1] [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web- component...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/)

<comment><USER13> The last I had read[1], the intention is to deprecate shadow piercing combinators altogether.

[1] - [https://www.w3.org/wiki/Webapps/WebComponentsApril2015Meetin...](https://www.w3.org/wiki/Webapps/WebComponentsApril2015Meeting)

<comment><USER7> I guess that would make it discouraged in all cases, then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm sure Chrome/Opera and Firefox will tweak their implementations to match the updated spec soon, then all that's left will be Edge, and they've expressed intent to implement!! [https://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/shadowdom](https://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/shadowdom)

<comment><USER15> Well, we need the custom elements spec to be figured out too

<comment><USER16> This is true. But custom elements are quite easy to polyfill, especially compared to shadow dom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm extremely excited about this. I have been playing with stock Web Components for the last year and a half or so. Polymer I have been hot and cold for. I prefer to learn the standard to start. Overall I am very happy with this development.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. While Polymer is a neat project, I honestly think it's kind of hurt the adoption of web components. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's tried to learn about web components according to the standards, only to run into a ton of Polymer stuff on the web and get turned off by the heavy, opinionated, framework-like nature of it. The underlying web components APIs are much less off-putting to me, once you can dredge them up through the SEO swamp.

<comment><USER19> Polymer is really not that opinionated. All they do is provide sugar that you would eventually write yourself after you get comfortable with web components and start to notice where the boilerplate lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One step closer to XAML...

<comment><USER21> or XUL ;)

<comment><USER22> Finally! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I, for one, am not excited about this.

It's a "oh, that's neat" feature visible only to developers, but it is not enabling anything groundbreaking for the end users, so it isn't making webapps more competitive with native. We still need iframes for 3rd party embeddable components, and for 1st party components we have good enough solutions, and the tendency seems to be abstracting the DOM away.

Web Components keep taking a lot of spec and implementation effort that could be spent on something with a bigger impact (ServiceWorkers in iOS? Transactional DOM that doesn't jank/layout-trash? Activities/Intents/Scopes for native-like sharing?)

<comment><USER24> A solid platform gets better gradually, it may not excite you but it's an important step in the right direction.

Indirectly it does impact the users, because polyfills for browsers that do not support shadow dom have performance issues, not counting the time developers spend maintaining them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Without Microsoft adopting this too it remains in a "sort of kind of useful but not really" status.

Where is Microsoft in this adoption cycle?

And are there any incompatibility across the existing implementations, namely, Chrome, FF and now Webkit?

<comment><USER26> MS: [https://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/shadowdom/](https://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/shadowdom/) "we intend to begin development soon"

FF: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1205323](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1205323)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Stop writing frameworks" by Joe Gregorio [OSCON 2015] is a nice intro to html imports, shadowdom and other aspects of web components, although his knock on frameworks goes too far for me, especially since some frameworks can use web components as well. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMWAHzXQnNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMWAHzXQnNM)

</comment><comment><USER28> I have always been skeptical about Shadow DOM. It tries to solve different problems under one solution.

Say you want a static page without scripts but with CSS encapsulation. You cannot achieve that. Instead you have to use Shadow DOM and get it in package with other unneeded things.

CSS encapsulation could be solved with special attribute, new HTML tag or even with new CSS rule, and it would have been more flexible than Shadow DOM is.

<comment><USER6> You're looking for "<style scoped>", which is in Firefox, used to be in Chrome, but was eventually removed in favor of Shadow DOM.

[http://html5doctor.com/the-scoped-attribute/](http://html5doctor.com/the- scoped-attribute/)

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=style-scoped](http://caniuse.com/#feat=style-scoped)

[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/bl...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/blink- dev/scoped/blink-dev/R1x18ZLS5qQ/Bjuh_cENhlQJ)

I think the main reason webcomponents won out over scoped styles is because usually once you need to scope your styles, you find you also need to scope your querySelector calls, and your DOM traversals, and your IDs....and pretty soon you have shadow DOM. It's unlikely that you need style namespacing if you're just a single dev working on a static page, and it's unlikely that you _won 't_ need JS & DOM scoping if your product grows beyond that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great to see such a progress. I hope within a decade or two HTML will finally allow us to create convenient reusable building blocks.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've working with Polymer and it's been a great experience. This is great news as it will make polyfills less needed.

</comment><comment><USER30> Compose all the things! It's definitely reassuring to see that this is the attitude of the people who are building the standards for the future of the web.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can anybody tell how this relates to [http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/164131](http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/164131) (discussed in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243122))?

New API, new implementation, or both?

<comment><USER14> New API and new implementation. [https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2015-September...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2015-September/027661.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really like this as a React dev. Recently there is a trend to use inline CSS to do CSS modularization in React, but I feel it's not really a clean approach. With Shadow DOM you can mount the whole React App onto a Shadow root and have perfect CSS encapsulation. Hopefully we can see Shadow DOM supported by major vendors' stable channel soon.

<comment><USER33> Shadow DOM is not the solution for CSS isolation for components. You'd have to mount every single component into its own shadow DOM which seems unnecessarily complex (and most likely has significant perf implications).

The answer to CSS scoping is much simpler: CSS Modules [https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules](https://github.com/css- modules/css-modules)

<comment><USER32> No I wouldn't mount each component into a Shadow DOM. For example if I have a React App with 2 major parts developed by 2 teams, I would just mount them onto 2 Shadow DOMs so each team don't need to worry about CSS classes collisions or whatever else that's on the webpage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The template element looks very useful. Basic support in old browsers should be possible by simply setting it to display:none.

<comment><USER7> There are some key features of template that hiding it would not accomplish, namely that the contents like scripts are guaranteed not to execute until they've been cloned/stamped.

Fortunately there are already polyfills for that: [http://webcomponents.org/](http://webcomponents.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What gonna happen to all those engines/framework with Shadow DOM Views technologies? In short is the end of React?

<comment><USER36> React's virtual DOM is an implementation detail - its real power is in how easy it makes it to write composable components. If Web Components are ever a faster render target than the DOM, you can trust that ReactDOM will be upgraded to comply (in the same way that Ember aped React's virtual DOM as Glimmer).

That said, I have a feeling Web Components add complexity (and weight) to the render path. I doubt they will be faster than DOM diffing in the near term (although with any new web tech, there's always the possibility that they'll make available performance optimizations that can't be supported in the traditional DOM).

<comment><USER37> I agree there will probably be a performance lag for a while, but long-term I think the WC model wins out because it brings encapsulation and reuse into the formal suite of W3C specs.

That's not a big deal for any one web app, but a huge deal across web development in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They're fantastic for a lot of purposes. I've been experimenting with web- components for a couple of months now. It's not really "prime-time" ready, IMHO, but it's cool to see how quickly it's progressing now that Mozilla is more on board [1] and Microsoft's Edge is implementing core features [2a] and supporting WC's generally [2b]. (PS Vote on the MS's Edge website for implementing WC features! Seems they actually look at the votes some to determine features).

One of the biggest hangups for my team has been Firefox/Mozilla opting not to enable HTML imports (it's implemented) which causes quite a bit of annoyance when developing and using piece-meal web-components. They list there reasons [3] but their perspective seems to be driven from a "Javascript" first mentality with HTML being second class. My code is all driven by web-compoents though. The difficulty comes from getting the WC polyfills to load before Firefox tries to load your dom-modules (in Polymer terms). I want to separate out my HTML into modules and not require loading polyfills _before_ I can include static HTML pages that might not even have Javascript in them.

There will probably be a lot of resistance, or rather, misuse of web- components for a while unless web-developers start switching to a "data first" mentality which is gaining traction from React and ClojureScript. It also feels pretty very heavy-weight if you're using Polymer currently.

BTW, anyone know how the shadow DOM affects performance of the entire browser window? Mainly, I'd be curious to know if updates to a shadow-DOM is isolated from causing Light DOM updates (e.g. updates to the shadow DOM could be isolated to generally not affect the parent window, or could be batched). This would yield much of the benefits of React's Virtual DOM. Just not sure where to look in the Webkit docs to find where this would be documented.

[1]: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web- component...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/) [2a]: [https://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/templateelement/](https://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/templateelement/) [2b]: [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/15/microsoft- edg...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/15/microsoft-edge-and-web- components/) [3]: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/mozilla-and-web- components...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/mozilla-and-web-components/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Isn't this React???

 _Shadow DOM, in particular, provides a lightweight encapsulation for DOM trees by allowing a creation of a parallel tree on an element called a "shadow tree" that replaces the rendering of the element without modifying the underlying DOM tree._

<comment><USER39> It's similar in some ways, but not exactly the same. This allows an element on a page to contain a whole tree of elements while still appearing as a single element from the outside (i.e. for the purposes of DOM methods, CSS, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So when can we use it?

</comment><comment><USER41> This is a nod to ReactJS

<comment><USER42> The ShadowDOM spec has been in development since at least a couple of years before React was announced.</comment></comment>


StartX Kicks Off Its Summer 2012 Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/startx-the-startup-accelerator-for-stanford-students-kicks-off-its-summer-2012-demo-day/

<comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested, the (no longer) live stream is available here:

<http://www.justin.tv/start_x/b/331303892></comment>


Farewell OmniFocus, welcome org-mode – Pt. 1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.osomac.com/2013/06/03/farewell-omnifocus/ <comment><USER2> This a 2013 post. He moved to Todoist in 2014.</comment>


Dio programming language website has been updated - <AUTHOR> https://diolang.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I gotten complaints about it so I simplified it, add syntax highlighting to the code (dark mode) and updated the information</comment>