Rust and CSV parsing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.burntsushi.net/csv/ <comment><USER2> > If you wanted to build your own csv-like library, you could build it on top > of csv-core.

It's pretty cool that Rust's dependency handling is so easy (thanks Cargo!) that even such a single-task library can come with a smaller, even more reusable library inside.

<comment><AUTHOR> AND...

* csv-core doesn't require use of the standard library. (Notably, zero allocations.)

* No use of `unsafe` and it's very very fast.

:-)

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on the zero allocation part? I made a CSV parser based on yours [0] before the 1.0.0-beta rewrite, and at the very least I have to allocate as much memory to hold a single field in the CSV (and then reuse that memory).

[0]: [https://github.com/AriaFallah/csv- parser](https://github.com/AriaFallah/csv-parser)

<comment><USER4> It's an iterator, so the parser will parse fields from the already-allocated raw CSV string and yield them to you as it reads them as slices borrowed from the string. It's up to you to store them in whatever structured format you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've looked through all the docs and there is no mention of RFC4180 compliance? That's one of the things a lot of people looking for a CSV library would consider highly.

<comment><USER6> RFC4180 is more helpful to _generate_ correct CSV files. It's not as useful for _parsing_ files since many (most?) csv writers will not have followed RFC4180 in the first place.

Or to put it differently:

 _" Be conservative in what you send {use RFC4180!}, be liberal in what you accept {parse broken ambiguous csv that was ignorant of RFC4180}."_ \-- from the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle)

It also doesn't help that RFC4180 is dated 2005 which is trying to enforce a standard 20 to 30 years after csv files have been created adhoc in the wild without a formal specification.

<comment><USER7> > Robustness_principle

A slight variation on this is important for security. Be liberal in what you accept, but _define_ what "liberal" means. It's important to define what counts as a valid input. If you don't have a validation/recognizer verify that the input is acceptable, you are probably creating a "weird machine"[1] waiting to be exploited in ways you didn't expect.

I highly recommend Meredith and Sergey's talk[2][3] at 28c3, "The Science of Insecurity", where they explain this from a language-theoretic perspective.

[1] [http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/wm/](http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/wm/)

[2] [https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en- the_science_of_insecurit...](https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en- the_science_of_insecurity)

[3] [http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/insecurity- theor...](http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/insecurity- theory-28c3.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Except that's not an interpretation of liberal anyone uses. That'd just be "by the spec". The robustness principle in practice has made things a nightmare. Consider SIP and HTTP. SIP explicitly encourages implementers to guess at the meaning of messages, and delights in how complicated their parsing rules are.

But even without getting crazy, simple line endings end up being a security issue. Some treat LF like CRLF. Or CRCR as a single line break. So you end up with a setup where your SIP or HTTP proxy will interpret a message one way, and your server interprets it differently. This lets you exploit things by sneaking in headers that your proxy would otherwise deny.

<comment><USER7> The point is it's important to _define a new spec_ if you are being "liberal" in what you accept. For example, while RFC 4180 defines line endings as CRLF, it might be reasonable to "be liberal" and accept files with just LF _if and only if_ you add a rule similar to

        <line-ending> ::= "\r\n" | "\n"

to your input grammar, _and_ properly recognize that the input matches that grammar before using any parsed values. It's an extension ("being liberal") to the official spec, but still strictly defined in the implemented parser.

> This lets you exploit things by sneaking in headers

In the talk at my previous [2][3], Serge specifically mentions Travis Goodspeed's packet-in-packet[4] exploit as an example of why you have to define what "liberal" means if you want to implement Postel's principle. (You should also limit input grammar's complexity to deterministic context-free, or the recognizer will be undecidable)

> in practice has made things a nightmare

That's what [2][3] is trying to fix. Stop using Turing Complete input languages, explicitly define your input grammar no matter what you're choosing to parse, and formally recognize all input against that grammar. The data either matches the defined grammar or it should be failed as invalid. Any allowances for sloppy input must be baked into that process.

[4] [http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com/2011/09/remotely- exploit...](http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com/2011/09/remotely-exploiting- phy-layer.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> don't forget to checkout xsv ! its the missing piece between standard unix tools and SQL, I love it.

[https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv](https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv)

</comment><comment><USER10> csv parsing on PicoLisp: [https://bitbucket.org/mihailp/tankfeeder/src/5a91a025d78eacf...](https://bitbucket.org/mihailp/tankfeeder/src/5a91a025d78eacf68655b6dbec5c2dd346624146/csv.l?at=default&fileviewer=file- view-default)</comment>


FDA issues emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma - <AUTHOR> https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-issues-emergency-use-authorization-convalescent-plasma-potential-promising-covid-19-treatment <comment><USER2> I've donated convalescent plasma for covid antibodies through the red cross twice now. In Boston at least, it's booked out about a month, so sign up asap if you can. From what I can figure -assuming your donation goes to the very sickest- you'll save a life roughly every donation, and you'll very certainly ease recovery for several people. Mine went to California.

One bit of advice, especially if you are shorter or skinnier- if you start feeling a little unpleasant (tired, cold, fuzzy), ask them to turn down the citrate (an anticoagulant they add to returning blood) sooner rather than later. It kind of takes off quickly after a certain point. The first time I went, I did fine until the last ten minutes, when I started falling asleep and they ended the procedure early. Felt like crap for several hours after.

The second time, I asked for the citrate to be turned down and it went great. No issues at all, finished the donation and was able to stand right up and leave. The donation process itself takes roughly two hours and you won't be able to use either hand while you're hooked up. Whole thing takes less than three hours. The red cross is also testing temperatures at the door, so make sure you're hydrated, cool, and well-rested, which can lower body temp several degrees. I had to reschedule out a month the first time, when I failed the entry check because I rode my motorcycle in on a hot day- even after waiting in the AC for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> My issue with Emergency Use Authorization is by how many people use that to mean "FDA Approved".

The public is not smart enough to tell the difference between something that passed 3 clinical trials and things that did not but are available for use.

The FDA brand is diluted now. I think this needs legislative intervention.

Another damaging thing is that this is used outside of the country, people who shouldnt care will look at the mere acknowledgement by the FDA as validation.

Its really shocking to me.

I've seen it ALOT amongst fly-by-night procurement brokers during the pandemic.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on your comment. Why is this controversial? Is it because it's in phase-3 vs approved or is it because there is hope but no concrete evidence that this treatment works?

<comment><USER3> Okay, its because the public cant tell the difference on the utility.

More prominent disclosure and terminology should be used such as

UNAPPROVED USE AUTHORIZATION UNDER THE WE ARE SCRAMBLING AND HAVE NO CLUE EXEMPTION

or

NOT TESTED USE AT YOUR OWN RISK COULD BE SNAKE OIL COULD BE WATER EXEMPTION

or

THE FDA HAS NOT REVIEWED THIS AT ALL INTRASTATE EXEMPTION

<comment><USER4> Thanks. From reading the announcement, it read like a PR piece for a co.

Your explanation creates better context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full title: "FDA Issues Emergency Use Authorization for Convalescent Plasma as Potential Promising COVID–19 Treatment, Another Achievement in Administration's Fight Against Pandemic"

Convalescent plasma has been used throughout the nation for months now. I've got my 6th plasma donation scheduled for Tuesday. The reason for this 'breakthrough announcement' is the part of the title after the comment. Pure politics.

<comment><USER6> To be clear, also: there's really sketchy evidence that it works. Just four days (!!) ago, the administrative decision was halted due to concerns within the department, see: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/blood- plasma-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/blood-plasma- covid-19.html)

Needless to say, no science has been published in the interrim. This was just the white house needing to get the announcement into the news cycle.

It's also worth pointing out the ironic side of this: the only reason that plasma treatment is a feasible option in the US is because of the distressingly large population of recovered covid cases. Had we done our jobs correctly last spring and early summer, we actually wouldn't have enough plasma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I missing something here? They've been using plasma ever since the early breakout in China. Why is this being treated as a breakthrough out of a sudden?

<comment><USER8> It was done so far with "right to use" exceptions, and I believe that now "emergency authorization" will broaden the usage and collection of plasma, while I am not sure how much that will change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the FDA site: _" Another Achievement in Administration's Fight Against Pandemic"_.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's unfortunate how (blatantly) political this announcement is written, as opposed to scientific. I think announcements from FDA/CDC etc should be about the science, not the politics. But maybe I'm just being naive.

<comment><USER11> It is absolutely a tactic of this admin and others to erode the trust of institutions they want to undermine.

It's working too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Full title of FDA's announcement: "FDA Issues Emergency Use Authorization for Convalescent Plasma as Potential Promising COVID–19 Treatment, Another Achievement in Administration's Fight Against Pandemic".

Note 1: "potential promising treatment" \- why the caveating?

Note 2: "another achievement in administration's fight against pandemic \- sounds like PR; trying to score points?

<comment><USER8> to 1, check the actual data available - it's not final since the clinical trials are still ongoing, but the benefits shown so far is significant enough to allow emergency use. This also happens typically for cancer treatments where survival rates look significantly better vs gold standard treatments. See the evidence from the announcement below.

> In these assays, an ID50 titer cutoff of 250 in the Broad Institute assay > was chosen to distinguish between high titer and low titer plasma. This > value correlated with an Ortho VITROS IgG assay signal to cutoff (S/C) of > 12. Based on titer data using the Broad Institute assay, the data submitted > in the EUA demonstrate the following findings: o There was no difference in > 7-day survival in the overall population between subjects transfused with > high versus low titer CCP. o In the subset of non-intubated patients, there > was a 21% reduction in 7-day mortality (from 14% to 11%, p=0.03) in subjects > transfused with high versus low titer CCP. o There was no apparent > association between neutralizing antibody titers and 7-day mortality in > intubated subjects. o In additional analyses of a post-hoc subgroup of > patients less than 80 years of age who were not intubated and who were > within 72 hours of diagnosis, a stronger relationship between neutralizing > antibody titers and 7-day mortality is observed. When titers are binned to > low versus high at a threshold of 250, the sponsor reports a significant > reduction in 7-day mortality from 11.3 to 6.3% (p = 0.0008). o In additional > analyses of survival using a Kaplan-Meier approach, the survival trends > observed at 7 days persisted over a longer time period, with significantly > improved survival in non-intubated patients (Figure 2, p=0.032) and a larger > benefit in the subset of patients not intubated at the time of treatment, > less than 80 years of age, who were treated within 72 hours of diagnosis > (Figure 3, p=0.0081)

<comment><USER12> Thanks.

I found the following explanation at [https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/23/is- convalescent-plasma-s...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/23/is-convalescent- plasma-safe-and-effective/)

"A study released Aug. 13 — but not yet peer-reviewed — suggested that using convalescent plasma to treat patients with severe Covid-19 soon after their diagnosis was associated with a lower likelihood of death. But the study had serious scientific limitations that make interpreting the findings difficult.

The Mayo Clinic study, which enrolled more than 35,000 patients, showed that patients who received transfusions within three days of their Covid-19 diagnosis had a seven-day death rate of 8.7%, while patients who received plasma treatment after four or more days had a mortality rate of 11.9%. The difference met the standard for statistical significance.

The study didn't include a placebo group for comparison, however, so it's unclear exactly how impactful the plasma treatment might be. The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and sought to broaden access to convalescent plasma, part of a so-called "expanded access" program not designed to definitively test how well the treatment works, but instead to quickly get it to patients.

More rigorous randomized, placebo-controlled studies of convalescent plasma are ongoing."</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: "Who Is Hiring?" Stats Broken Down by Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.gosmartsolutions.com/hn/?id=11814828 <comment><USER2> Some of these graphs display several non-exclusive (sometimes totally independent) things in a pie chart.

For example, the second one shows "on-site", "full-time", "remote", "intern", and "visa". Remote/on-site seems like a mutually exclusive pair, but full- time/part-time seems logically and practically independent from that (and "part-time" isn't shown in the pie chart); "visa" probably logically implies on-site; "intern" likely implies on-site in practice; and both "visa" and "intern" probably imply full-time in practice, but not logically; and I think "visa" and "intern" are probably logically and practically independent of each other.

And many jobs list multiple languages, multiple frameworks, and even multiple of the things in the "databases" category.

I suspect each datum is best considered by itself, as "N% of postings mentioned X". Could be displayed as a bunch of bar graphs or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently the charts only show counts that have 15 or greater results which is why part-time isn't showing. The table below the charts allow you to filter/search by part-time though. I will add a notation to the page that indicates the 15 count min.

I can group some of the different types together but after digging through the raw data I saw that there are a ton of different edge cases. I didn't feel comfortable implying anything because of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd be really interested in seeing a breakdown of locations, if possible. Naturally, most of these positions would be in California (from what I saw yesterday skimming through the thread), I was surprised to see there were fewer than 10 positions in either Denver or Boulder yesterday.

<comment><USER4> My thought exactly. And it's even more specific than California - I've been pretty disappointed with the number of positions posted for LA, and haven't noticed an upward trend. I would be very curious to see how % and # of positions in SF vs. other cities has changed over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It gets many times a framework called "flex", but it's misscategorized heavily. "flexible hours", "flexible working hours" and "we are pretty flexible" are just the first 3 examples I opened.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh! Thanks for pointing this out. Working on a fix right now.

<comment><USER6> I also saw "flex-time" getting hit.

I expect also stuff like "you can flex your hours".

IMHO, "Frameworks" is a strange column anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I am putting in a fix for flex right now. Parsing out the Frameworks is a challenge but I think it is interesting data to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing this, cool to see others analyzing this data. I've been compiling monthly trends for a few years[1] of languages, frameworks and databases too. I see you define the terms to search for as well. I need to do a better job of grouping, but here's the raw list I use[2]. What was the most interesting thing you've learned from the data so far?

[1] [http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring- trends/2016/...](http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring- trends/2016/may.html)

[2] [https://gist.github.com/ryanwi/6135845](https://gist.github.com/ryanwi/6135845)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool! I really like your "Rankings and movers" section and your compare feature is really nice. I was little surprised to see Python at the top and that a lot of companies are open to remote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The most important raw stat is how many comments are there by month, over time? That will give some insight into how the tech ecosystem in general is doing.

I graphed this by month from April 2013 to April 2015 -- if you were to add the #s to today, you'd see a downturn in early 2016, but back up to April 2015 levels by now.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vzSbLNZjV9pqFclnPwxM...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vzSbLNZjV9pqFclnPwxMlFzjfiaA4qPMWrzZlGtQuYY/edit#gid=0)

</comment><comment><USER9> I got excited seeing Rust listed as a language so many times. But almost all the results linked didn't have Rust. Just the word "trust" (which appears a lot...).

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh no! I will put in a fix for that. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be really interesting to see this for the "Freelancer? Seeking Freelancers?" posts. From what I've seen, people seeking work outnumber those seeking freelancers by something like 10 to 1. As a result it would take some aggregation to get an idea of the buy side of the market.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11814829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11814829)

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be interesting to see. Let me see what I can put together :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if you could boost the solidity of the language data by tracing backwards from framework. For instance, I see one posting in your data where the framework is known (Ember) but the language is not. Of course we know Ember is a JS framework, so you could answer both questions.

A big mapping of Python => (Django, Flask, etc.) Ruby => (Rails, Sinatra, etc.) ...

Just a thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a great idea!! I will try and add this to the next revision. Lots I want to add now based on everyone's feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great job. Two issues:

1\. There are problems with negatives. Example: no remote and remote not allowed are both matched as remote.

2\. The pie charts don't fit their box at some window width.

It would be nice to see a trend diagram over all the months, one for every pie chart. That could be a separate page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out the negatives. I will put in a fix for that.

I have it on my list to create some media queries to display the charts smaller on some of those smaller widths. Haven't gotten around to it yet.

The trend diagram is a great idea. I will work on that as time permits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Full Time Positions:

January, 2015: 179

May, 2016: 342

That's nearly double in 16 months.

Would be great to see these in charts to quickly visualize the trends.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think employers have gotten better with adding this information in some of the more recent months. Some of the older results lack a lot of data so it's not truly an accurate comparison.

As an example: May 2016 had only 74 results that were not matched up to a job type (full-time, remote, etc.) compared to Jan 2015 which had over 300.

<comment><USER14> Another factor is growing awareness of the Who's Hiring thread.

Anecdote:

My company isn't hiring any more or less people than they used to be, but we never considered the Hacker News Who's Hiring thread as a recruiting venue until I pitched it to upper management rather recently. So that's at least one example of new jobs appearing here that aren't necessarily new jobs in the economy, just new to Hacker News.

I'd be willing to bet other employers who began posting job ads here rather recently have similar stories. I doubt all the growth is strictly related to the tech hiring economy growing faster. Much more likely a combination of solid macroeconomic growth with Hacker News' (and similar venues') own growth combined with growing acceptance of advertising jobs this way by employers and employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree.

What kind of results did your company get from your HN post compared to some of the other venues?

<comment><USER14> Several of our applicants can be traced back to the Who's Hiring threads and I'm pretty sure at least one of our new hires in the last few months came from someone who found us via one of those threads. Not 100% sure; I'd have to ask the person on question if my assumption is correct.

But we only just started doing this a few months ago. Plus our hiring needs are pretty specific and aren't likely to align well with the majority of HN job seekers for a wide variety of reasons. As such we don't expect a flood of applicants from this venue. We don't need a huge amount of people though, so we're willing to be patient with it, keep posting our ad, and wait for the right handful of people to come along.

At the moment our highest ROI recruiting efforts are old-fashioned college recruiting events. We do a few different kinds at a handful of universities near us and found it to be a deep well of talented people eager to break into the field and we have a pretty solid training program to take entry level people and turn them into solidly productive engineers rather rapidly.

<comment><AUTHOR> "we have a pretty solid training program to take entry level people and turn them into solidly productive engineers rather rapidly"

Love reading that!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really wish the "Who is Hiring" threads had a more unified formatting, to make it easier to search (and collect data) for certain things, especially location.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fortinet Fortiguard* is blocking this website as malicious for some reason.

* Where do they come up with these horrible product names?

<comment><AUTHOR> Where are you seeing this? Is this virus software you have installed on your system?

<comment><USER16> Microsoft, China based corporate network. No idea why the firewall blocked it, it just said malware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are iOS jobs just not posted enought to make the pie charts? No Swift, Objective C, "mobile" etc.

Very cool tho

<comment><AUTHOR> For the current month swift has 15 and object c has 10. Each chart displays the top 10 that have at least a count of 15.

I think I am going to change this to simply display the top 10 for each chart and remove the 15 min count requirement.

<comment><USER6> Do this instead:

Lump the smallest ones together into "other". The number you lump together is the minimum needed to make "other" be at least 1% of the total.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You left out the best:

machine code, a.k.a. hex bytes

assembly, a.k.a. assembler

C, a.k.a. C99, C11 (no, not C++, and "C/C++" is different too)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not that I left it out, it's just not in the data. Employers are not including this in their job posts.

<comment><USER6> It shows up in August 2015 at least, but doesn't make it onto your list or pie chart. There isn't an "other", so it just went missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Only 5 results for assembly so not enough to make it on the pie chart/list.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Island Test (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/island.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The Spanish translation is no longer available on the given link, but here it is curtesy of the WayBack machine:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080819144501/http://www.simpleo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080819144501/http://www.simpleoption.com/ensayo- test-isla)</comment>


The Human Log - <AUTHOR> https://neilkakkar.com/the-human-log.html <comment><USER2> In my opinion this is the entire selling point/core value of Augmented Reality and is why it's been a pursuit of mine since 2006 or so.

And for clarity, it's the world facing camera that is the most critical part of AR, in my opinion, not what is displayed to the user. The display simply gives me most compelling reason to the user to adopt the technology. The reason for this is because a world facing camera system is a tractable tangible thing that we can build and actually deploy today. The current state of object detection with CV, and the other long tail analysis you can do with it, allows us to get really really good at making inferences of world and user state, based on detected objects (+ some telemetry).

So today, you can get really close to a high resolution log, from strapping a camera on your head and building an object detection pipeline. The challenge here though is of course what you all expect, privacy, monetization, influence, control etc... The world where everyone is logging everything about themselves, which means they would also be logging their interactions with others, is the no-privacy world that everyone is terrified of.

You can't create Laplace's Demon and also preserve the virtues of privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing! This resonates strongly with me.

One thing I did (and fairly recently too: [https://github.com/alefore/edge/commit/6e93c2bb327f57d13d067...](https://github.com/alefore/edge/commit/6e93c2bb327f57d13d067b5d2ae19720526bb799) says just 10 days ago) is adjust my text editor ([http://github.com/alefore/edge](http://github.com/alefore/edge)) to keep a log per file of all the operations I do on that file. I expect to use this to generate reports along the lines of "what files did I work on last Thursday", "how much _active_ (for some definition) time have I spent modifying this file" or "on how many different days have I opened this file". Perhaps I'll also use this as a cluster to feed to the Bayesian filter ("I tend to edit file X whenever I edit file Y") that I use to optimize my autocomplete predictions/search history.

(I also plan to use this to see if I can find ways to optimize the types of transformations that I bind to my keys if I notice special patterns (e.g., when I do transformation X, I very frequently do transformation Y immediately after), but I haven't yet thought very much about how I'll do this.)

I'm somewhat curious as to how much value I'll actually derive from this. I tried the Quantified Self in the past but ... I think it suffers from the fact that reality tends to be too complicated to be predicted by ~simple models.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been thinking a bit about solving this same problem, but I feel there is too much overhead to log things manually.

What we need is better interfacing with computers so that we can just think "log my weight is 190 lbs" or "log I ate 1 small chicken breast and a cup of brocolli". Voice control and my phone are not sufficient for my needs so far. I also want to be able to have full control over my own logs in plaintext.

I want to be a cyborg already...

<comment><USER5> I used [https://open.nomie.app](https://open.nomie.app) when i had to take a medicine for several months and wanted to know how my body reacted and how the symptoms changed.

<comment><USER6> I used tickmate to track symptoms. It's a one bit journal for android.

[https://github.com/lordi/tickmate](https://github.com/lordi/tickmate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An old discussion on this article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795526)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this just a rebranding of quantified self?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious, can you give some details on this?

<comment><USER9> Quantified Self is basically about self-tracking and has been around for a while now (I heard about it I think 10+ years ago).

[https://quantifiedself.com/get-started/](https://quantifiedself.com/get- started/)

<comment><USER10> It's even older than that - that's just when it started to become more popular in part because smartphone / other tech made it easier to engage in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been thinking about this on and off and at the moment I'm feeling like automatically collecting log information is a good approach, at least for me, so that I can set and forget until I'm ready to explore. I really like the way that smart watches are making this easier.

I use an iPhone and I've been wondering whether there are any good tools that can automatically collect some information about my activities on the device, sort of like the screen time utility-- off the top of my head: * send an email * time notetaking * time and address of web pages visited...

Keeping a uniform activity log of what I'm doing on my devices would be something that I could use to go back over and figure out what I've actually accomplished, review it against my goals...

</comment><comment><USER12> Something I wrote to facilitate keeping a personal log: [https://github.com/dfhoughton/jobrog](https://github.com/dfhoughton/jobrog)

</comment><comment><USER13> > Every important system has logs since they're necessary to improve the > system over time. That brings me to the most important system I know. One > that we never designed - but use all the time. The human body.

I would argue that there are two more important systems:

\- Planet Earth

\- Human societies (and overall humanity itself)

Writing a similar essay but with these as the the subject would be a difficult but fun and potentially fruitful undertaking.

I wonder: how might one go about this, considering the complexity of the system?

<comment><USER14> Well we certainly log a lot of information about both of those.

The Seshat Global History Databank people are into this sort of thing (real- world psychohistory): [http://seshatdatabank.info/](http://seshatdatabank.info/)

( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29) )

<comment><USER13> Hey carapace!

Now this looks very interesting, I am going to give it a read.

If you have anything else along these lines up your sleeve, I would love to see it!

<comment><USER14> Ahoy!

These folks seem to me to be the least, uh, starry-eyed of the would-be Foundationites, but my knowledge is not comprehensive, eh? I only know about these folks because I'm interested in their underlying graph-based Prolog- implemented database, TerminusDB. ( [https://terminusdb.com/](https://terminusdb.com/) )

\- - - -

FWIW, I view the Internet et. al. as a kind of GAI with humans for neurons. From that POV Seshat is one of many ways in which we/it are becoming self- aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Why don't we have a log for the most important system ever?

Aw, c'mon! It's called _memory_ and our systems spend a significant amount of ATP on it.

<comment><USER15> If only it worked like a log, though. Unless you're a John von Neumann level outlier, you can't query your memory for "what's everything I did between 9 and 10 AM on October 12, 2017?"

<comment><USER14> What have you tried?

<comment><USER15> Nothing. Just saying memory alone isn't sufficient for most people. Most would need to rely on something else in addition, like remembering to manually make note of things in the moment.

<comment><USER14> First, let me say that I'm not against e.g. "quantified self" et. al. at all. It's fine. (IMO) And _writing_ has, in general, been a benefit, eh?

> Just saying memory alone isn't sufficient for most people.

I'm merely pointing out that the reason we (as evolving beings) have memory in the first place is due to the adaptive advantage of "logging" experience. ;-)

FWIW, memory _has_ been sufficient for most people: we're here, therefore every one of our ancestors did at least well enough to make a baby (who grew up to do at least well enough to make another baby, and so on right up until you, today.)

<comment><USER15> Right, I mean memory is sufficient for most sorts of things, but if you want to do the sort of retrospective debugging and analysis the article talks about, you either need to be born a savant or rely on some external system. Eventually, when we have good neural interfaces, I think this will be done automatically, but that may or may not happen in any of our lifetimes.

Natural selection is good for ensuring you make it to a bit past reproductive age, but for everything else it's really hit-or-miss. As one would expect. We're just the first known lifeforms that seem to have an imperative beyond replication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Useful article and I want to do this but happiness might not be the best utility function</comment>


Critical study of one-line BASIC program written for the Commodore 64 - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/collaborative-critical-study-o.html <comment><USER2> This will give me courage to finally release my book: print "Hello World"</comment>


City floating on the sea could be just 3 years away - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/09/floating.cities.seasteading/index.html <comment><USER2> If they can figure out how to be safe in large storms, and a solution to piracy, I'd absolutely be interested in living on one. I also am curious how they will take care of the fuel costs. (Cruise ships are some of the most fuel inefficient vehicles on the earth.) tidal power would be quite useful in this kind of system.

After all, people have already spoken about using cruise ships as offshore platforms...

<comment><USER3> Why would you be interested in living in a Waterworld city? No seriously, what's the draw? I'd feel pretty damn cooped up and imagine that it'd be like living on a houseboat in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER2> The advantage would be living with people who shared the same values as I do and not being obstructed by the federal laws most of us would find distasteful.

<comment><USER3> But you're going to have to have laws and taxes of some sort to keep the mini- society going - how do you know they'll be ones you don't object to? There's plenty of countries around the world without the same laws as the u.s. and I don't see a massive outflow of libertarian hackers to them, so I'm not sure there's really as much demand as the builders think.

<comment><USER2> It's much easier to find 10,000 to 250,000 people who have the same values as you and can create a new culture. While I wouldn't be interested in a libertarian society, I might be interested in a completely secular system with full equality for GLBT citizens and a culture much like San Francisco without the federal impositions on the culture. (I wouldn't mind moving to the Netherlands either.)

Further, the laws can be more tailored for a culture when there are fewer than a million inhabitants. Common sense can work a lot better, and exile can be an option, making prison expenses much more managable. (After all, no one is saying that these would be granting citizenship.)

<comment><USER3> I see, so you like the idea of iteration on the policies that govern people, more than having specific freedoms. Makes sense, I wish we could open source bills for Congressional review, for example.

It's funny you should mention Holland - I visited during my honeymoon about 6 mo ago and thought it was gorgeous, especially all the clean graphic design, but read in my tourist book that there's a right wing resurgence and they're cracking down on a lot of the things Amsterdam is famous for, despite all kinds of studies showing that it's improved society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who now works for the Seasteading Institute, said floating cities are the perfect places to experiment with new forms of government."

There are no new forms of government. They've all been tried. There are only people ignorant of history.

<comment><USER5> So we should just stop trying? That's not very entrepreunial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keyword: Could

</comment><comment><USER7> Just thought of "The Raft" in _Snow Crash_.</comment>


A Cemetery That Showed the Way - <AUTHOR> http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/arts/kieron-long/cemetery-showed-way

<comment><USER2> The Images in the article does not do Skogskyrkogården justice. It is an amazing place.</comment>


5k budget for website - <AUTHOR>

$5k budget for www.swine.ly - give me your craziest ideas for what the website should be. This is entirely just for fun. Not looking to create a business. <comment><USER2> A website that lets you replace the faces/heads of people with pig heads. It should work on pictures and videos. Would definitely be hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER3> Create an "instagram for pigs"?

</comment><comment><USER4> Bacon recipe website, complete with user submitted and voted on recipes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mud wrestling?</comment>


The Things they Replaced - <AUTHOR> http://glassandwires.com/the-things-they-replaced

<comment><USER2> Very well written, although given that it's a commentary versus thesis I don't think it'll make it to the front page.</comment>


Top 7 split testing blunders you must avoid - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/split-testing-blunders/

<comment><USER2> I'm on board with every statement except the first one, "Test whispers instead of screams."

The author suggests that you should only test the big things that could be "grand slams," like a "radically different design."

There are two major problems with that statement. First, a radically different design is going to have so many differences that you'll never be able to pinpoint which element made the difference. If you're seeing a 10% lift, does that mean you might have gotten rid of something that was working great, and you could have had a 30% lift by just fixing the actual problem? What if the radical new design actually lower sales? Now you have to find out which of the forty-seven changes caused it, or just go back to the old design altogether. That's a lot of unnecessary and expensive work.

The second major problem is that by going for "grand slams," you're basically throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.

Instead, take the time to be analytical and form real testable hypotheses about what could make an impact.

Jared Spool tells a story in the book "Web Form Design" about a checkout process that started with a simple two-field input form asking users to register for an account or login before paying for their purchase. After looking at user data carefully, they found that almost all of their dropoffs were happening right there. They tried moving the login fields to the end of the checkout process instead of the beginning, and saw a 45% conversion increase, over $1.5 million in the first month.

A radical redesign wouldn't have fixed the problem - they needed to do user path analysis and give the issue careful thought before deciding where to make the change.

It's often a single usability issue that's causing the problems, and you can't find those by changing everything on a page and hoping for the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. This is a guest post on our blog but my opinion is that one should do a lot (and lot) of small A/B tests coupled with a couple of big, large scale tests. Interestingly, most of our A/B testing case studies have been about small changes leading to large conversion rate changes: <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php>

Although "grand slam" tests are essential so that you don't get trapped to local minima.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> (I left a similar comment on the blog as well)

"Let's just say you get a 10% bump. Well… if you then roll that out into the other 5 products, you can count on a 10% bump on each of those as well… giving you a total of 50% in total increased conversions spread out throughout your site."

That's incorrect. A 10% increase in conversions across all products on your site gives you a total increase of 10%, not 50%. Perhaps #8 on this list should be "incorrectly interpreting results".

</comment><comment><USER4> I think a more important blunder is failing to understand statistics.

"I've ran plenty of tests where one variation was the control, hitting 95% confidence, after just a handful of conversions ... Because you need to run your tests long enough to get accurate results! You need to get past what I call "random coin syndrome"."

Statistics don't work that way. A result is either significant (e.g. you can either draw conclusions with a 95% confidence rate), or it is not. If you reach 95% confidence after 14 conversions (10 vs 4), it either means your questions are too broad or you failed to control for external influences.

<comment><USER5> The flaw is more fundamental than that. By testing the confidence each time, you run the risk of vastly overestimating the true significance of your tests.

A previous discussion of this exact problem: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2368825></comment></comment>


The sad evolution of wikis - <AUTHOR> http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201009#01 <comment><USER3> I've been lurking on the c2 wiki (and occasionally posting, <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ScottVokes>) for almost ten years, and the culture there feels _completely_ different from Wikipedia. The c2 wiki isn't a blip on most programmers' radars, though, let alone the world at large.

Back when I was preparing to become a librarian (academic research or possibly a medical archivist; before I got sucked into the software engineering vortex), I spent a fair bit of time talking with my coworkers and professors about the relationship between rapidly-mutating secondary (tertiary?) sources, such as Wikipedia and blogs, and _actual primary sources_ based on _actual hardcore effing research_. The c2 wiki did not once ever come into the discussion, because nobody cared about HowComeLispAndSmalltalkAintPoisonYet or DoesRelationalRequireTypes. It was too alien a culture.

I think the author is on to something, that the Wikipedia culture of anal- retentive editing and (worse yet) knee-jerk "[citation needed]" has been bleeding the spontaneity out of the popular concept of wikis, so people are much less inclined to just post stub documents and collectively flesh them out as time allows. Often, the expectation that writing ends up polished prevents it from appearing in the first place. (Documentation or otherwise.)

I've successfully pushed for a wiki literally everywhere I've worked through the last decade (including the library system, which has a great and actively maintained collection guide, based on mediawiki). Sometimes it took offering/threatening to run my own server specifically to host one, and it's always taken some content-seeding and nudging to get things in motion, but the net results have always been positive.

<comment><USER4> mediawiki it also a very complex wiki, and as it somewhat became the standard, non programmer got afraid by it and didn't want to edit anything by fear of breaking something or not knowing how it work.

<comment><USER5> I had it explained to me that "MediaWiki's purpose is to power Wikipedia. Your personal wiki is a side effect."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I started MeatballWiki (<http://meatballwiki.org>) just over 10 years ago to wax poetically about wiki culture, codify it, and try to reproduce it in other environments since I thought it was superior. However, Wiki cultures have been difficult to keep sustainable let alone easily reproducible.

All non-reproducing communities need both openness to attract new people faster than people leave, but closeness to protect itself from negative people. Most wikis lack an ability to close themselves off in a non-hostile manner (i.e. 'turtle mode'). You may laud the wiki culture method of keep order, but I've helped hundreds of wikis defend themselves with "soft security" (<http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity>), and I found it is actually a cynical process.

In terms of keeping the culture going, since wiki process is based almost entirely in social custom, it requires a lot of human energy to teach newcomers and fend off attackers. Teaching requires more effort than physical- world communities because of the low bandwidth of communication on a wiki.

I think there might be a new evolution one day where some of the older wiki cultural principles will be reimagined, perhaps unknowingly, in media that has a better balance of human effort to community value. After all, healthy wikis are a wonderful experience so there is no reason they cannot continue to thrive and adapt.

<comment><USER3> You probably feel like you're yelling into the void of space, but I really appreciate what you've done with Meatball and Usemod. If you ever come through Michigan, I'd be happy to buy you excellent ales, coffee, tea, etc. (Beer is really our strong point, but I also know some _amazing_ coffee roasters, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> To me it sounds like the success of NitWiki was down to the culture of the 30-person team. I'm guessing this stemmed from some leaders in that group, and applied to more than just the wiki. I'm not sure that much has changed over time - it's just not trivial to cultivate the right kind of culture.

Re: the public vs private debate, if you want to make a great public wiki, then maybe you have to make "open" the default. This requires letting go of the fear of sharing too much, although my personal experience suggests we tend to be more afraid of this than is necessary (e.g. "stealth mode" startups).

</comment><comment><USER8> Before 2005 most Wikis used to be easy to use, considering the target audience at the time (computer literate people).

Nowadays, with 500 millions on FB, the audience has become "the rest of us".

Unless I missed something, I think that there is currently no easy wiki for this audience. Neither the older wikis, c2 style, nor modern ones, wikia or wetpaint style, for example, are simple enough.

I mean, what wiki service would you direct your kids or your parents to?

That's a sad situation. But it is also an opportunity.

I am working on a dead simple wiki, c2 spirited, but 2010 style. This is alpha software at this point. You may want to pay a visit (and, yes, WikiWords work). Sometimes it run at <http://simpliwiki.com>. Feedbacks welcome :)

<comment><USER9> Currently down:

        The following error was encountered while trying to
        retrieve the URL: http://simpliwiki.com/

            Connection to 126.96.36.199 failed.

        The system returned: (110) Connection timed out

<comment><USER8> It is now installed on an Amazon EC2 micro instance, much cheaper than the small instances, as a result I don't stop the instance anymore.

Thanks for trying, maybe another shot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe there are services that allow one to make annotations on web pages. Perhaps they allow one to control the degree of sharing; that might go some of the way toward what Mr. Pennarun wants. An annotation might link into or out of a private wiki.

I'd like something even more modest: a better place than Wikipedia to discuss software. Wikipedia policies just don't allow what I want for current software. E.g., look at the near uselessness of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText> (if it's still there?) and then look at the discussion page and history to see all the useful content that's been deleted. Or just read the text next to the broom to feel the essential "Go away!" point of view. Is there a better wiki for software topics? Or are Google searches the best one could hope for?

<comment><USER3> Try the original wiki (<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FrontPage>)! It lacks the anal "[citation needed]" culture that wikipedia has acquired, and it's been focused on software since its birth. (I've been lurking and occasionally posting there for about a decade.)

They have obvious biases (a lot of the original content was written by Smalltalkers and XP / Agile people, for better and worse), but it's worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to think Wikipedia is neutral. Lately I've been kind of shocked - <USER2> don't know if this is a new development, but check out these two pages:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro>

Look at the tables of contents. If you didn't know better, you'd think Pinochet was more corrupt and murderous. But, Castro killed 10x as many people, tortured 100x as many, stole orders of magnitude more money and wealth...

There's 36 links in Castro's Wikipedia table of contents. Only four of them are mildly negative: 9 Controversy and criticism, 9.1 Human rights record, 9.2 Allegations of mismanagement, 9.3 Allegations of wealth.

There's 24 items in Pinochet's table of contents. 10 of them are very negative.

2 Military coup of 1973, 2.1 U.S. Backing of the Coup, 3 Military junta, 4.1 Allegations of fascism, 4.2 Suppression of opposition, 5 Arrest and trial in Britain, 7 Secret bank accounts, tax evasion and arms deal, 8 Human rights violations, 9.1 Demonstrations

If you didn't know better, you'd think Pinochet was a very bad man and Castro was a good man. But regardless of your politics, Chile is a much nicer place to live than Cuba these days, yet Cuba was a much nicer place than Chile before Castro came to power. Castro's policies destroyed Cuba. Whereas Pinochet has a mixed, but pretty good record. Hell, Chile just passed net neutrality laws last week.

A similar article is this one -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_surge>

By almost all analysis and objective metrics, the 2007 troop surge worked. Violence went down, insurgency went down, attacks went down, crime went down afterwards. But if you look at the article, it's loaded with criticisms, opposition, and things unrelated to that particular military campaign. Then there's a quick blurb, "Interpretation of the surge's results ... Whether the surge led to the improvement in Iraqi security, or other factors caused it, is disputed by some."

Wikipedia is not neutral. It's edited by people who have more free time on their hands are and are more tech savvy. People with more free time who are more tech savvy tend to skew demographically, which is sad, it should be a neutral resource and would be better if it is.

Compare the Castro and Pinochet articles if you want to see it in action, you'd never realize that Pinochet was a much better and more effective leader. They both did bad stuff, but Pinochet did less bad stuff and more good stuff. His country was worse when he took power, and better afterwards. Cuba was much wealthier, prosperous, and better off before Castro, and is much worse now. It's a shame that this is misrepresented in Wikipedia.

<comment><USER12> Both Castro and Pinochet were military dictators that killed and tortured a lot of people.

To compare how good or bad they were by comparing how prosperous the countries are is silly, one of the reasons being the external influences.

Pinochet's junta "disappeared" over two thousand people and tortured over 30,000 (people with names, not estimates). I don't see any credible source stating that Castro killed 20,000.

I actually see this type of Castro/Pinochet comparison as a test for Human Rights and checking if someone is inconsistent because of their right/left wing preconceptions. I find most people dislike or hate one while justifying more or less the other when they are both basically the same.

<comment><USER11> > I find most people dislike or hate one while justifying more or less the > other when they are both basically the same.

Fair enough, I'm not here to argue the merits of one murderous dictator over another. The point is that Wikipedia has 36 sections on Castro with only 3 slightly negative, and 24 on Pinochet and 10 of them are very negative. You'd agree there's a bias there, yes?

<comment><USER12> Well, I didn't make a comparison study between the two articles but I just read the first ones on Pinochet that you said were "very negative" (Military coup of 1973 and U.S. Backing of the Coup) and they don't seem negative to me at all, pretty mild if you ask me. This overthrowing of a government would be the equivalent of Castro's revolution so I don't get your point sorry.

<comment><USER13> First time I've ever defended Castro even partly. :-)

>>This overthrowing of a government would be the equivalent of Castro's revolution

Arguably, Castro overthrew a dictator. Allende was, afaik, quite democratic(?).

Castro did break promises about general elections. He took over and got military/economic support from other dictators.

The main difference is that today Castro+family are _still_ dictators of Cuba -- while Pinochet and his junta are gone since a long time, leaving a quite nice country.

And this is totally off topic for HN and the article, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Using wikis to manage a small team's internal documentation and shit is a PITA, particularly because you get into a situation where you need to _sort of_ replicate some formatting on a bunch of different pages but then, whoops, nobody knows how to use the template system in a sane way.

Live preview and some sort of not-shit WYSIWYG would make wikis for small teams _much_ nicer. Then what'd make it even _super_ nicer is lightweight macros and pre-made templates that could be stored in a per-user or per- category way. Like... github, but for wiki-stuff.

<comment><USER15> have you tried confluence? Anyway, even in the free/open world, a lot of wiki software come with simple wysiwyg editors and templates

<comment><USER16> As a Confluence user I have to second that.

For a small team Confluence is an even more "no-brainer" than MediaWiki, etc...

<comment><USER17> First time I ever heard something positive about confluence. (But I only heard about it, because we use it at work and people like to complain about it.)

<comment><USER16> Could you elaborate on what their complaints are?

To me its waaaay better than Sharepoint - which we also used. And it is way more suitable for "non-technical" and "non-wikisavvy" users than e.g. MediaWiki.

<comment><USER17> I have never used Sharepoint. Fortunately I do not work in a Microsoft shop. (Though we do have to bear Exchange Server.)

One minor misgiving about Confluence is its syntax: Opening and closing tags look the same. So {noformat} both starts and ends its environment. I haven't done anything fancy myself with Confluence, so I can't comment on the other complaints. (And we do use an ancient version, because we have some custom changes, and nobody has found the time to port them to the new version.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One paragraph stood out:

 _Unfortunately, outside of wikis, the world itself has also been busy evolving, and in a way I don't know how to deal with. The new problem is: teams are the wrong size now. Thirty dedicated, full-time programmers was an ideal number for NitWiki. But who has 30 dedicated, full-time programmers now? I mean_ really _dedicated? You can be a very successful Internet startup with way less than 30 developers. Maybe you need only two. Maybe those two aren't even working full time on the one project. And two people don't need a wiki._

Has the programming world changed so much in ten years that 30 person teams no longer exist? What do people think?

<comment><USER19> In a thirty-person team, you have smaller groups working on different things, all nominally coordinated by the manager who in practice heavily depends on capable developers to help manage the subgroups. Since every convenient method that exists in a large company will eventually be formalized and fetishized, it was inevitable that someone would seize on the idea of breaking up the larger team and formally replacing it with a set of small teams with fluid membership.

Now a large team is seen as grotesquely unwieldy, bureaucratic, and high- overhead, kind of a laughable concept compared to smaller teams, even though large teams were normally run as a set of fluid, informally organized smaller teams. With a single large team, a certain amount of mandatory overhead is incurred at the team level, and individual groups within the team can adopt as much or as little overhead as they think appropriate. One person can work alone, or all thirty people can work in concert. Informal groups within a team never have a formal existence, so they can form and unform at will. Everything depends on judgment and discipline, and the greatest risk is chaos. Sounds kind of lightweight and agile compared to an "agile" process like Scrum, where each small team has a formal existence, a minimum size, mandatory administrative overhead, and a prescribed methodology, doesn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Xanadu? Ted Nelson, not Olivia Newton-John. <http://xanadu.net>

<comment><USER3> I think I know what you mean, but could you elaborate? It's a non sequitur otherwise.

<comment><USER21> Xanadu was a pre-web attempt to create all that the web is and more. It failed because it was too ambitious and too complex technically. For example, links were two way, so from a document you could find all the documents that pointed to it. It supported micro-payments. I think it was going to support itself by skimming from the payments. It was pre-internet, so they had to invent a communications infrastructure on top of POTS. I visited Xanadu for an afternoon in the mid 80's. The programmers were talented and very dedicated, but it was obvious that they were having difficulty converging on something that was simple and worked.

Contrast this with the Web which had two simple protocols, HTML and HTTP, which could be implemented easily and extended by the multitudes.</comment></comment></comment>


Acquia Halts Non-competes for Employees - <AUTHOR> http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/05/ipo-contender-acquia-halts-noncompetes-for-employees/

<comment><AUTHOR> Executives still have to live by their non-competes, which seems to be the bigger competition threat.</comment>


Ask HN: Time to shelve that idea? - <AUTHOR>

We are in the process of setting up a new service/website.  We know that others competitors are working on the same idea.
Today, a competitor has released a service which is identical to ours.  They have much more experience, resources and have managed to generate an incredible amount of media coverage.  So far we have only spent a very small amount of money.
So the question is, considering that our competitors have beaten us to it and have a great product, do we cut our losses and run?
Oh, and in case you were wondering... our competitors are these guys:
http://zeebox.com/ <comment><USER2> All of these programs / apps / sites etc. are new things. I would say that zeebox.com actually validates your work so far by showing there exists a market for it already.

Plus, it is not a zero-sum game. You can both win (in terms of profitability, exit, etc.) If you are far along and will not need to spend much more money or time, go for it. If you have just started, maybe take a moment to think about it. Either way, you can just learn from zeebox.com mistakes and implement better with your own project.

You must be realistic to know when to quit and use your time more wisely, BUT most startups don't actually die - they commit suicide. Good luck

</comment><comment><USER3> No. Take it as a strong positive signal that there is demand and ask yourself how you can differentiate from your competitor. Will you have a better UI, a niche market to address, etc.?

The question is how you position yourself in respect to the competition.

If you believe that there is indeed absolutely no hope for your startup, then... there's not much to say. If you want to take this battle, you'll find a way to position yourself.

Edit: I just saw that your competitor is UK-only. Are you based in UK too?

</comment><comment><USER4> '9 Ways to Decrease Your Chance of Bootstrapping a Successful Company' - Number #1: Choosing a Market with Funded Competition

[http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2011/11/02/9-ways-to- decrease-y...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2011/11/02/9-ways-to-decrease- your-chance-of-bootstrapping-a-successful-company/)

Although yes it does validate the space and yes there can be room for more than one. Note 'decrease' not 'kill' :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Only continue if you are doing something different or better than your competitors. Obviously if you are just mimicking what they gave already created, that's no good but if you can improve on it, then their presence in the market may be helpful in terms of warming the market for you before launch.

</comment><comment><USER6> My startup might play nicely with yours, shoot me an email to my HN name @wikivideo.com, would like to connect

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should say that my answer is no... but I am interested to see what the HN community thinks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the thoughts everyone. I will let you know where we come out!</comment>


Google Named a Leader in the Latest Forrester API Management Solutions Wave - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-named-a-leader-in-the-latest-forrester-research-api-management-solutions-wave <comment><AUTHOR> Google named a leader in the latest Forrester Research API Management Solutions Wave

#GoogleCloud #GCP #Google #Cloud</comment>


Ask HN: would you use an app that helped you save up money for things you want? - <AUTHOR> http://forrst.com/posts/piggyBank_interface_design-HA1 I made this concept for an app that would let you make a list of stuff you want to buy and would help you save up for those goals. Would you or someone you know use something like this, or would it just be another productivity app that you'd rather not deal with? <comment><AUTHOR> I made this concept for an app that would let you make a list of stuff you want to buy and would help you save up for those goals. Would you or someone you know use something like this, or would it just be another productivity app that you'd rather not deal with?</comment>


Warren Buffett Makes $1 Billion Profit on Electric Car Maker BYD - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/warren-buffett-china-byd-electric-cars-plug-in-hybrids-investment-profit.php?dcitc=th_rss <comment><USER2> To be clear, he hasn't sold his stake yet, so this is still a paper "profit".</comment>


Mobile wallet offered to UK shoppers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13457071

<comment><USER2> Limited usability I think considering it applies to only Orange customers with Barclays accounts. Typically in the UK, it's virtually impossible to get any banks and/or mobile companies to standardise on technology (think debit cards: VISA/Switch/Solo/PO etc) so I can only see problems and more market fragmentation appear.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe the standardisation point is true. The banks came together to create the EMV (Eurocard - Mastercard - Visa) standards, which define eg how chip & pin works. The mobile industry is also very big on standards.

The issue is about who owns the customer. There's the one secure element (the SIM/bank card chip) - who should own that? Technically both operator and bank can coexist on the same card, but the commercial position is not so simple.

<comment><USER2> I was talking about before that with the old Switch/Solo junk that went on. I did a spell working for an e-commerce outfit and integrating with the merchant banks was an absolute nightmare.</comment></comment></comment>


A list of exactly what minimalists own - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-minimalist/so-what-do-minimalists-own-fe9b833e6c6f <comment><USER2> I wrote this a few years back on living out of two bags for 11 months:

[http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/](http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/)

A lot of people commented that they were hoping I'd mention what was in the bags. So the next time I took off, I did a video instead:

[http://khanism.org/perspective/return-to- minimalism/](http://khanism.org/perspective/return-to-minimalism/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's awesome! I'm going to PM you :)</comment></comment>


Hospitals have 1000s of networked devices and cybersecurity nightmares - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/defending-hospitals-against-life-threatening-cyberattacks-93052 <comment><USER2> I use Windows 98 every day when supporting medical devices. 98 is not the earliest version I support. There are a few machines in my care that run Windows 3.1 or some custom OEM build of Windows predating Windows 3.1. I recently had to fix a machine with an unknown release of early windows that has a monochrome touchscreen CRT display.

These machines are control computers for medical equipment. The scientific instruments do not get obsolete, so my clients continue to use them.

So, if you were thinking hospitals had merely old machines of XP vintage, think again. I not long ago fixed a GE MRI that ran on a Sun Ultra 10 powered by Solaris 2.5.1.</comment>


Search.xxx Porn Search Engine Launches - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/49212131

<comment><USER2> I always thought Google was the search engine for porn.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see a registrar cutting out the middleman by preemptively squatting on some good domain names.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap>

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't filter by video length :(

<comment><USER6> Have you tried <http://www.tubescope.com> ?</comment></comment>


Law Firms Removing Their Name From SOPA Supporters' List - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111223/09051617180/law-firms-removing-their-name-sopa-supporters-list-sopa-support-crumbling.shtml <comment><USER2> So not all of these are even second thoughts, many didn't even have first thoughts.

It's very interesting that it is turning out that many (most?) of the large number of names on the sponsors list were lies that completely misrepresented the positions of dozens of companies and organizations.

Isn't that fraud or forgery?

How many bills have been passed because of lists of sponsors that are fabricated? What an abuse of the legislative process this is.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention their dubious calculation of "lost jobs" or lost revenue, which many politicians seem to take for granted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I've said elsewhere the Committee's page is absolutely appalling. It gives no indication that there is deliberation going on. The page is nothing but propaganda.

I would have hoped that our legislators would be performing these actions, like holding hearings and debating, for the purposes of finding the best answers -- NOT to stage a kangaroo court, pretending that they are weighing the sides.

It seems that their web page is really nothing but media-industry-supported propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER5> The actual letter ([http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/Letter%20...](http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/Letter%20of%20Counsel.pdf)) is interesting reading: the closing statement says

In our considered opinion, the Protect IP Act and SOPA further the goal of free expression. Far from conflicting with the First Amendment, the proposed legislation will serve as an important contribution to ensuring an environment in which free speech and creative expression can thrive and flourish.

That doesn't sound like they were just agreeing with the opinion: that sounds like fully fledged support.

<comment><USER6> I think the main issue is that it's individual lawyers within these firms that endorse it, not the firm as a whole. In that case, stating that the whole firm endorses the legislation is deceptive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who's bright idea was it to antagonize a bunch of law firms?

</comment><comment><USER8> Lots of mouths are saying "no", but I am more curious about what the wallets are saying.

</comment><comment><USER9> More SOPA supporters are starting to have second thoughts. We just need some of those to be Congressmen.</comment>


Pavlok: A personal coach on your wrist - <AUTHOR> http://pavlok.com/

<comment><USER2> _Social support and pressure will keep you on track. When you hit a bump in the road, they 'll motivate you to keep going. Or, they'll punish you._

Ever get the feeling you're in one of those movies set in the future where they're showing commercials of the weird disturbing products?

</comment><comment><USER3> The name seems wrong: Pavlov is famous for the development of classical conditioning; that is, you train one stimulus to trigger another. As far as I know, classical conditioning is about involuntary behaviours.

Instead, the startup seems to follow the old law of effect from Thorndike: "Behaviours associated with pleasure and comfort are more likely to be repeated, whereas those associated with displeasure are less likely to be repeated".

Combining extrinsic motivation and punishment doesn't seem a winning strategy.

"Pink warns against contingent or 'if-then' rewards: if you perform, then you get paid, or if you do your homework, then you get cake. He shows how contingent rewards lead to a very short-term motivation, a higher likelyhood of unethical or risky behaviour (cheating), and poorer performance. Therefore, he recommends that extrinsic rewards be given only after the fact as a bonus, not as a carrot." – Dorian Peters, Interface Design

My guess is that the Pavlok would help for short term accomplishments, but it's not going "to create the conditions for people to motivate themselves (Edward Deci)".

I'm not an expert; It would be interesting to read an actual psychologist's take on the Pavlok product.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is crowdsourced motivation and behavioural change, plus optional electric shock :

      Willpower isn't enough. Habit change requires accountability.
      You won't have to make the journey alone - Pavlok helps you find a partner
      or join a team of your friends.

      Social support and pressure will keep you on track. When you hit a bump in
      the road, they'll motivate you to keep going. Or, they'll punish you.

      Choose your level of commitment. Pavlok can reward you when you achieve
      your goals. Earn prizes and even money when you complete your daily task.

      But be warned: if you fail, you'll face penalties. Pay a fine, lose access
      to your phone, or even suffer an electric shock…at the hands of your friends.

I strongly disagree with the electric shock in particular. The group pressure tactic strikes me as particularly counter-productive as, I assume, these changes have been set so as you would be improving your life; not be threatened into changing by embarrassment and peer pressure.

Changes in habit are what counselors, life coaches and motivational instructors are for. The impersonal app-based, "hyper-reminder-motivator", seems threatening to me and thoroughly de-motivational and ultimately inhumane.

</comment><comment><USER5> Being automatically paired up (groups of two, maybe more) with another user and getting shocked if the buddy does not complete his/her goal could be an interesting way to help learn how to motivate others, and perhaps then yourself. This then adds an element of randomness to the shocks (if the deadline for a buddy's task is unknown) which may not be present for the non- paired-user scenario.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love this idea, but I can't help but wonder if the very first habit it will instill will be an aversion to wearing the wristband. That would be a negative result, I think.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm the founder of this! We break bad habits with shock too.

also, [http://youtu.be/Q2VA5EKC5gE](http://youtu.be/Q2VA5EKC5gE)

</comment><comment><USER8> "suffer an electric shock…at the hands of your friends"

This seems to be confusing masochism with self improvement. There are ways to reinforce a routine without putting on a twitter-enabled shock collar, and I'm not sure being Pavlov's dog is a psychological ideal many people aspire to attain.

</comment><comment><USER9> '...that _you can 't take off!'_

This sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi story.

</comment><comment><USER10> None of the links at the bottom lead to anywhere (team, blog, etc...) is this my browser or a sign that this is a gag?

edit: I guess it's real, but still not sure why the links are broken :(</comment>


Show HN: Photolive - <AUTHOR> http://www.getphotolive.com/

<comment><USER2> I can view a lot of albums which are not mine; and I can view them because people are confused about how the privacy settings for photo viewing facebook. Does that mean that I should be able to download them? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think that is the way it should work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, as kefs already said, if you can view it you can download it (your browser also does it every time you view one). Our app is merely to zip it together.</comment></comment>


What happened to millions of Creative Commons-licensed photos in Flickr? - <AUTHOR> http://bryanalexander.org/2015/04/06/what-happened-to-millions-of-creative-commons-licensed-photos-in-flickr/

<comment><USER2> Slightly OT, but I overheard a few developers discussing online photo services and one of them, a 20yr-old, asked "what's Flicker?"

I knew Flickr had lost a lot of mindshare, but I didn't realize the situation was that bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> "a 20yr-old, asked 'what's Flicker?'" Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A bug on the explore page. [https://twitter.com/FlickrHelp/status/585182093593804800](https://twitter.com/FlickrHelp/status/585182093593804800)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what they tweeted at me. So, good news: the CC-licensed photos are still there. Not so good news: the bug was there for 5 days w/o being noticed or fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's a bug, which appeared around April 1. Fixed now.</comment>


The Blockchain Might Change the Music Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6655915/how-the-blockchain-could-actually-change-the-music-industry <comment><USER2> What a nonsense. On the technical side, why build this on top of Bitcoin or some other block chain? Why not just a good old database? It does not sound like they are planning to build a completely distributed system and so those companies will be central authorities in some way or another anyway, so why not also host the data?

On the music business side - and I admittedly know nothing about it besides the bits and pieces from articles about royalties, DRM and whatnot you read now and then - it seems totally impossible to me that a small startup would have a chance notably larger than zero to have any large or even transformative impact.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr made-up Bitcoin hype, promising the utterly unfeasible to people who don't understand the technology. My response: [http://rocknerd.co.uk/2015/07/23/putting-the-record- industry...](http://rocknerd.co.uk/2015/07/23/putting-the-record-industry-on- bitcoin-why-this-wont-work/)

<comment><USER4> Spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is merit in using Smart Contracts for managing royalties, etc. however building a streaming service on top of it seems a bit misguided, it should be abstracted out.</comment>


Hacks Into Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19Essays-HigherEd-t.html?_r=1

<comment><USER2> Quoth the article: _People used the left elevator more than the right one_

This makes me wonder: Did people choose the left elevator; or was there a single-elevator-call button which they pressed, upon which the elevator- control program preferentially dispatched the left elevator? I wouldn't be surprised if the elevator-control program always handled the situation with two equally close available elevators by dispatching elevator #1 rather than elevator #2.

Is anyone here familiar with the Tisch School of the Arts?

<comment><USER3> The office building I work in has three elevators; my observation has been that when I call an elevator at high-traffic times such as lunch-time or 5PM I might get any elevator while at lower-traffic times I tend to be allocated the left or middle elevator.

My mental model is that an elevator with scheduled destinations (buttons pressed inside) is 'allocated' and an elevator travelling to service a call is 'allocated', while other elevators are 'free'. If you press 'down' and there are no elevators above you going down, or if you press 'up' and there are no elevators below you going up, the left-most free elevator will be dispatched.

It makes sense to wear out elevators unevenly: If two or more elevators were evenly used, it's more likely they'd break down at the same time, leaving your building with no elevators at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This same logic could apply to everyone; everyone should be hackers.

I really believe we should be educating middle and high school kids about how to use computers for more than the internet and document processing. Given the way computers and the internet are everywhere and are used for so much, computer use / programming / scripting should be a required class like history and science are.

<comment><USER5> Completely disagree. That's like saying mechanics classes should be required, since everyone has a car and other machines. Most people can't, or are incredibly not interested, in being at the level of even simple scripting.

There is only one solution to letting more people do more things with computers: make things easier. Things that were once impossible are now incredibly easy for a lot of people, because interfaces are getting better all the time. _That's_ the way to get more people comfortable with computers, not forcing them to spend time learning a skill they're not going to learn anyway.

And as a nice side bonus, making interfaces easier to use ends up saving everyone time, even people who _are_ technically inclined, and makes much cooler things possible. So everyone comes out a winner.

<comment><USER6> That analogy doesn't hold up. If you learn mechanics you can repair and maintain your car, and even build a new one. But you'll never get your car to drive your kids to school without you sitting behind the wheel.

But you can do the equivalent of that if you're programming literate. We're moving to a digital culture, and if you don't know how to program you'll increasingly only become a consumer of other people's solutions, without the ability to solve your own problems.

Some people are calling this "procedural literacy".

As an aside I'd argue that computer interfaces have actually gotten somewhat worse while getting more friendly to newcomers. I think the last major leap in computer interfaces was cron(1). Unlike most modern interfaces being produced today you can use it to tell your computer to produce periodic reports and things like that.

That's where we should be headed with UI's, not aiming to have a monkey banging at the terminal at all times, but giving the monkey the ability to dictate things to the computer so he doesn't have to bang at the terminal.

Real computing power is being able to say: "Computer, I'm feeling under the weather today and I think I'll sleep in. At 9am please start playing 'Daddy's sick, get up and go to school!' on a loop in the kid's bedroom at 75 dB, and continue producing noise until they get out the door, engage!".

You can implement those sorts of things if you're a programmer.

<comment><USER7> There sure is some truth in that procedural awareness should be higher. But I think the analogy holds. You should not teach mechanics, but you should teach natural sciences in a way that principles are transferable to mechanics, and to building, and to a lot of other things.

I think it's deeply wrong to try and raise procedural awareness by forcing the technicalities of state of the art programming on the common man. You should find a way to teach algorithmic principles so that they are generally applicable.

<comment><USER6> I think you need to teach these things at an early age, and teaching "algorithmic principles" while sound in theory is probably also a good way to make an entire class of children ignore you completely.

The best way to teach people procedural awareness is probably to teach people to tinker with something they can start using right away.

Things like automatically programming your phone to reply to your parents via SMS with some plausible responses when you're out drinking, use the Facebook API to get info about your friends that they thought wasn't accessible etc. Show how you can use rtmpdump to download your favorite music from some closed video site, or write a script for uTorrent that'll have downloaded your favorite TV episode by the time you wake up.

The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be worthwhile for them in their everyday life. It's easy to demonstrate that, and it's actually true for most people, unlike other some other subjects at school which'll probably never be pertinent to the average student.

<comment><USER8> > The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be > worthwhile for them in their everyday life.

Make knowledge acquisition both a) fun and b) timely. Add a motivating situation that leads people to want/need to learn, and they will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who was struck by the unqualified use, in a general-audience publication, of 'hacker' to mean 'programmer' rather than 'one who breaks into other people's computers over a network'?

<comment><USER10> a "hacker" is closer to a programmer that think "out of the box"

than to a "cracker" that "breaks into other people computers"

the media has given this defintion to the word "hacker" and I always rejected it!

<comment><USER11> Yes, but it's rare seeing it used in the media as we use it outside the media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Knight News Foundation has been trying to stimulate this market for hybrid programmer/journos for years. I think it's a great idea. Too many stories have gone to print without any facts to back them up. Many more haven't even been reported because nobody has the skill to discover them. The Foundation is funding a sector that the industry has been largely ignoring much to its detriment.

Most of the information out there is largely electronic. The volumes of it are too much to handle by a single human. Why not use a computer to parse, munge, and analyze it?

</comment><comment><USER13> The elevator fallacy follows. If you put a lot of sensors in a city you find many weird things, as there is not a prior hypothesis about what you are testing what you see as weird is not so much. In order to say that "people use the left elevator more than the right one" you should start a new experiment for testing it not using your data for making the hypothesis.

<comment><USER14> True, but it's no worse than traditional journalism based on press releases or people you meet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern offers a scholarship with goals similar to the new program at Columbia:

[http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=5...](http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=58645)

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting article, and a great concept. I'd imagine that reporters / journos would be quite adept with technology, but I wonder if a lot of them have the ability to be good hackers / programmers. It sounds like their professor has two very complimentary skills.

</comment><comment><USER17> imagine the increased quality of news coverage for technical products if more journalists could code, it would be awesome and they could validate firsthand a lot of things that have be fed to them by PR agencies (who also struggle a ton, and would benefit from being more technical)</comment>


GitHub battles largest DDoS in site's history, targeted at anti-censorship tools - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/github-battles-largest-ddos-in-sites-history-targeted-at-anti-censorship-tools/

<comment><USER2> > with the DDoS specifically targeting two GitHub projects that are designed > to combat censorship in China: GreatFire, and cn-nytimes, a Chinese language > version of the New York Times.

"Hey guys, let's eliminate censorship and citizen awareness by carrying out the biggest DDOS attack in the history of the internet against two projects we feel threatened by! People will abandon the projects and forget all about anti-censorship if we do that!"

My guess is these programs end up living somehow (surprise, surprise!) and if anything this will dig heels in for anti-censor proponents and conjure the Stresisand effect for these two programs in particular.</comment>


FUTURE OF CRIME FIGHTING IS FAMILY TREE FORENSICS - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-crime-fighting-is-family-tree-forensics/ <comment><USER2> THIS WAS A GREAT ARTICLE, THANK YOU FOR POSTING THE LINK.</comment>


There's nowhere to hide if your name trends on Twitter. Is there, Trafigura? - <AUTHOR> http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/theres-nowhere-to-hide-if-your-name-trends-on-twitter-is-there-trafigura/ <comment><USER2> What this article seems to portray is that retweeting is the same as marching in front of Parliament. The fact is in spite of the heavy retweeting, although it gained the attention of people for a short time, its actual impact is not much more than #MUSICmonday or #Followfriday. The idea that changing the world happens by copy and pasting is something ridiculous - look at Iran for example. I fear that social change over social networks will just be style over substance, further adding to the soundbite culture we live in.

It's good that such an issue is brought into the limelight but the fact is on twitter with just 140 characters there's such a detachment to the realities of a serious issue that it all becomes trivial.

<comment><USER3> > The fact is in spite of the heavy retweeting, although it gained the > attention of people for a short time, its actual impact is not much more > than #MUSICmonday or #Followfriday

Normally yes, but in this case it nudged other news outlets such as the BBC to report on the story and prompted a debate in Parliament on if these gag orders are too easy to abuse. I would say that's some positive outcome, even if it does little to help those who were affected by the toxic waste.

<comment><USER2> _Normally yes, but in this case it nudged other news outlets such as the BBC to report on the story_

The BBC reported about the Trafigura case in depth on Newsnight* many weeks ago. Inevitably journalists would have had to mention it as it's something affecting their profession.

*One of the few good news programmes around in my opinion along with World Service news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes! Twitter has singlehandedly changed the game! Before twitter, people didn't communicate online. And you couldn't leak stuff and have it indexed by google.

Of course now everyone, law firms, governments, corporations monitor twitter all day, and base policies and legal precedents on what is trending and what isn't.

It's only a matter of time until we do away with the outdated elections and vote using hashtags.

<comment><USER5> What do you get out of snarking towards things that really aren't worth snarking towards? There is no live search as valuable as Twitter's. Google doesn't do live search. Stop making up shit that the article said and then making fun of it, especially when so many TechCrunch articles _are_ saying stupid shit.

<comment><USER6> Though you say google doesn't do live search, it took less than 18 minutes for it to get this post.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen- US%3Aofficial&hs=sm6&q=%22techcrunch+articles+are+saying+stupid+shit%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=)

<comment><USER5> It indexes quickly, but that's not live search. I can't pick a name and see what people around the world are saying about it. Google's just never designed anything to do that. Twitter has. So while the Internet's existed for a while, this live feedback has not.

<comment><USER4> Difference is, twitter is often far less useful, since it doesn't have any notion of trustworthiness (yet). No PageRank. (Although afaik they're working on something like that). Also automated tweets are more of a problem than with Google. (PageRank also does well to get rid of the automated spam)

The trending tags on twitter just mean lots of people re-tweeted something. It's the equivalent of emails that say you should forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. In this case it was "You should be outraged by this, re-tweet it!". But the effect is the same.

Or it could just be twitter bots doing the retweeting.

<comment><USER2> _The trending tags on twitter just mean lots of people re-tweeted something. It's the equivalent of emails that say you should forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. In this case it was "You should be outraged by this, re-tweet it!". But the effect is the same._

That's a very good comparison in fact.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily. There is a lot of talk about Trafigura that's not just retweets. Check out our charts:

<http://trendistic.com/trafigura/carter-ruck/_24-hours>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what. Some random facts: The CIA did very bad things in Guatemala, Shell did very bad things in Nigeria, Nestle did very bad things in Venezuela. Those are just 3 small examples. Many people know. But nothing happens.

Twitter is not going to change the world. You have to take action.

<comment><USER9> Twitter is good for feeling like you're taking action. Every tweet can be its own mini-protest. Only I expect that a bunch of people chatting on the Internet is a lot less menacing than picketers, rallies and demonstrations.

<comment><USER10> In the past people chuntered under their breath .. now they tweet: difference to political process, none.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a little confused on the story behind this since I originally read it: Trafigura dumped toxic waste and tried to reach a settlement regarding the dumpage. There was something that happened in Parliament and for some reason the Guardian wasn't allowed to write about the actions in Parliament because of a gag order.

If someone could be so kind as to answer the following questions:

Why was this in Parliament?

What was the question about this in Parliament?

Who requested the gag order?

Under what precedent was the gag order issued?

Would the courts likely have upheld the gag after an initial hearing?

<comment><USER12> 1\. An MP tabled a question about the affair to be asked on Thursday.

2\. See here [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/13/trafigura- carter...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/13/trafigura-carter-ruck- gag)

3\. Carter-Ruck, on behalf of Trafigura

4\. An injunction prevents publication on any number of grounds, usually pending ongoing legal cases

5\. An appeal -- the Guardian were set to appeal this afternoon until Carter- Ruck pulled out -- would almost certainly have gone in the Guardian's favour. But had the Guardian published before the injunction was lifted, the courts would definitely have upheld a prosecution against them, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still taking potshots at Sam Sethi and UK Laws... Nothing less could be expected of Techcrunch, I guess...

<comment><USER2> He never mentioned anything about Sam Sethi. UK libel laws are a serious issue.

<comment><USER13> I was reading between the lines I guess...</comment></comment></comment>


Seattle gaming startup Offbeat Creations acquired by Playdom - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/03/playdom_buys_social_media_gaming_startup_offbeat_creations.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Offbeat was one of my customers at my old application management company, BitPusher. We've seen a good number of our Facebook gaming customers go through acquisitions recently as that market grows and consolidates. My most sincere congratulations to Chia, Robert, Tom, and everybody else at Offbeat that we've worked with. Great job guys!</comment>


Ask HN: choosing Web framework, again - <AUTHOR>

Just when I was choosing to go with Django for my startup app, I read here that
http://www.mutualinformation.org/2010/03/why-i-switched-to-pylons-after-using-django-for-six-months/
it's not very appropriate when you have more complex sites, etc.
Are there any guidelines for choosing a web framework? I'm language agnostic, but would avoid verbose languages if possible. The framework will be like a bank website, if you want a reference. I want to start web programming but I'm growing more confused every day.
I now heard about Rails, Django, webpy, Grails, Pylons, Lift, Play, Seaside, Ocsigen... <comment><USER2> I think the best advice is just to pick something and stop worrying. Analysis can be a form of procrastination.

That said, I use and recommend Rails. Rails 3 is nearly ready for prime-time and introduces a suite of changes that make it faster, more flexible, and infinitely configurable. The part I have always liked about Ruby and Rails is that even when you are stretching beyond it's intended use-cases, it bends rather than breaks.

<comment><USER3> Forget the project (for the moment). Start messing around with Django and see what works well. Do the same with Rails. Getting into a framework is like testing out the waters - feel comfy, nice beach, nice people... Stay there.

That said, Django does have nice admin - you can extend it nicely with Grappelli. Rails ain't too bad itself - here are some variety of Rails Apps (with source) [http://jetpackweb.com/blog/2009/10/14/high-quality-ruby- on-r...](http://jetpackweb.com/blog/2009/10/14/high-quality-ruby-on-rails- example-applications/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Should I learn SQL alone first?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Saying Django is not appropriate for complex sites is just plain wrong. For whatever reason Django was just not a good fit for that author, but I think there's thousands of Djangonauts developing complex sites that would completely disagree with him.

Definitely don't pass on Django because of one guy's opinion.

<comment><USER5> I'll agree with this.

Pylons is a win when:

1\. You need SQLAlchemy. 2\. You're not really leveraging the Django admin. 3\. You don't need anything in pinax or the rest of the django apps.

I actually prefer the various wsgi options over Django (I was a TurboGears committer for a number of years) but Django is better for banging out sites where you need to implement common features since there's a fairly large pool of django apps to draw on. If you're doing something more complex, then there's no real technical (dis)advantage to Django but you'll have an easier time finding people who know the framework and the docs are better.</comment></comment>