Psychedelics Could Trigger A 'Paradigm Shift' In Mental Health Care - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/psychedelics-mental-health-care_55f2e754e4b077ca094eb4f0 <comment><USER2> They can trigger a paradigm shift in many other areas, not just mental health care. Except it's so hard to explain this to a 'normal' person, who's never taken any.

"If God were to permit you a brief voyage into the divine process, let you whirl for a second into the atomic nucleus or spin you out on a light-year trip through the galaxies, how on earth would you describe what you saw when you got back, breathless, to your office? This metaphor may sound farfetched or irrelevant, but just ask someone who has taken a heavy dose of LSD." \- Tim Leary, The politics of ecstasy, 1968

It's similar to the 'overview effect' reported by astronauts who've been to space. Of course it triggers a paradigm shift and 'cures' depression or other mind-loops that we find ourselves in so often.

It's good to see that there are more discussions about psychedelics in the scientific community. I suspect there are many (more and more) scientists and academics who use psychedelics so I think we will see more and more material published on this subject, apart from the huge amount of anecdotal material available online.

I also suspect that people use more psychedelics now than ever in our history. And it's happening globally. And it's a good thing.

Because I believe psychedelics are the mythical 'love bomb' which can stop wars and bring peace to people and other species on Earth. And they could, in theory, cure cancer - certainly the psychological and spiritual effects of the disease, which could bring remission to it's physical manifestation.

So yeah, there's lots of research still to be done.

<comment><USER3> Eh this sounds like exactly what was wrong with the early LSD promoters. Psychedelics are the mythical "love bomb"? I do not think the evidence supports that. While I think the world would be far better off if everyone had tried it, I don't think it'd stop wars or anything. At best, it might get people to sit up and think a bit, and turn to rationality for explanations.

But in real life, seeing as how one's predispositions get highlighted with acid, we'd probably end up with a lot of people thinking they now know the answers. Or that their trip showed them that (Allah|Zeus|Quantum Democracy|Whatever) is the True God and go all nuts on that.

Leary and others made up these unsubstantiated claims about the effects of acid and really tried to sell it as something beyond what it is. It's a damn awesome molecule that does really nifty shit to brains, and certainly bears plenty of research and use.

But to say it can cure cancer? Come the fuck on man. That's just new-age heebie jeebie nonsense with no basis in reality. It's why a lot of pro-LSD people are simply not taken seriously, because they forget it's just a molecule messing with brains' perceptions.

(Unless you meant cure cancer in the "well it made you feel better, and feeling good is important to health so it might give you a better chance against some diseases", in which case it's not much of a claim and certainly shouldn't be phrased that way. Hey, Apple products can prevent street crime, because the metal bodies might slow down bullets and make an otherwise fatal shot survivable!)

<comment><USER4> These chemicals are tools, no more and no less. They should be investigated with intelligence and caution. Take drugs soberly, if at all. I know a few people who have basically ruined their lives though what I would call "abuse" of drugs including MDMA, LSD, cannabis, and nitrous oxide(!) (as opposed to the more obvious drugs like crystal meth, heroin, and crack.)

That said, I know of a few people who had cancer, and no longer have cancer, and the treatment plan they followed involved copious quantities of a kind of goo or tar made from cannabis plants. Those three items are _facts_ : They had cancer, they no longer have it, they used ganja and not chemo or radiation.

I have no interest in arguing with anyone about this, nor am I attempting to condone or evangelize anything. I offer the above as (admittedly anecdotal) data points for consideration. If you want to know more about this please do your own homework online, no one is hiding this sort of thing from anyone (but themselves.)

<comment><USER3> Those _facts_ , as you put it, really mean nothing other than maybe someone should do a study and see if there's any real correlation. How many other people had cancer, used plenty of cannabis, then died or continued to have cancer?

There's billions of people in the world. That means the frequency of "Bad thing, Weird thing, Good thing" will often be nonzero for all sorts of things.

<comment><USER5> You should listen what people have to say when they describe it as a "Love Bomb", as "Seeing God", etc -- sometimes a little less quantifying can go very far in resolving problems physical or otherwise; the trick is experience and an open mind. The testimonials describing these substances as powerful healing tools is endless -- there is validity in this fact.

<comment><USER6> No, there isn't. There is validity in the fact that the substances make people think that they are healing tools.

Until or unless there is actually a quantifiable effect it is not a fact that they can be said to heal anything.

<comment><USER5> A single trip report could be worth a thousand peer reviewed papers, and a thousand trip reports could create a new science -- if you're willing to listen.

<comment><USER6> >> A single trip report could be worth a thousand peer reviewed papers

It really couldn't, you know. It's subjective experience.

>> and a thousand trip reports could create a new science

A thousand may contain useful data if corrected for confirmation bias etc, but no, not a whole new science.

>> if you're willing to listen.

I have tripped. Many times. I know it well. It's not about being willing to listen, it's about being objective.

<comment><USER5> Not everything needs to be objectively verified in order to be agreed upon as useful or valid. Sometimes objective validation comes, by necessity, later.

I would recommend watching this documentary from Alejandro Jodorowsky's son, Christobol. Its important to watch it all the way through. In it he discusses Psychomagic and Psychoshamanism (two fields his father developed) and the relationship between ritual and healing, and how belief plays into the psychological or subconscious mechanism that promotes recovery. That's all I meant by my obviously rhetorical comments above, that there is an enormous amount of power within the belief centers of being.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOya- MersYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOya-MersYs)

<comment><USER6> Sorry, no time to dedicate to watching fanciful bullshit.

And yes, it does need to be verified before it can be said to be useful.

<comment><USER5> Welp

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Psychedelics are a lot like taking a vacation. You may have an experience which will impact your life in some (perhaps significantly better or worse) way. You may gain new perspectives on life. You may gain insight into yourself and travel companions. You may develop an ugly tendency to be that annoying person who always talks about their trip to ___ and always find a way to interject it into conversations.

<comment><USER3> That's a risk for just about anything that's interesting. Reading up on a new (to you) philosophy. Finding a new (to you) diet, or exercise or yoga. Learning a new programming paradigm. And on and on. People naturally want to share experiences they found exciting/stimulating/useful/etc. I don't think that really provides much judgement or insight into whether a specific activity tends to be good or bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Support MAPS (Multidisciplinairy Association for Psychedelic Studies) [http://www.maps.org/](http://www.maps.org/) or the Dutch OPEN Foundation to promote research in this area. [https://twitter.com/FoundationOPEN](https://twitter.com/FoundationOPEN)

</comment><comment><USER9> Pretty tangential, and i've no idea yet as to it's accuracy, but i loved the idea that the human race's "emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestors encounters with visionary plants". From an ironically, as otherwise i probably wouldn't have stumbled on it, Ted Talk by Graham Hancock:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0c5nIvJH7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0c5nIvJH7w)

Out of interest, are there any other theories as to what might have caused this "leap"?

<comment><USER10> Here's one: it's not actually much of a leap. Save for the fact that your brain has a bigger language center, you're no better than any other ape.

<comment><USER11> There are numerous ways in which we're similar to apes and other organisms, and then there's also numerous things that have nothing even _close_ in the animal kingdom(that we're aware of, anyways). So if nothing but a larger language center explains that, then it's a far bigger difference than you make it sound:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s)

<comment><USER10> If you're looking to say humans are categorically different from every other animal -- that is, that we have something _none_ of them do -- then you're operating with such a level of granularity that it's necessary that you overlook small differentiating factors. The issue is not "why are humans unique, just like every species is unique" but "why are humans unique in a way no other species is?"

And if you take a human and ignore their facility for language, you will essentially have a regular ape. If you take away our capacity for culture and technology, you don't have an animal that rules the world uncontested. Whatever other differences we have are moot in comparison. (Take Stephen Hawking as an example.)

<comment><USER11> I suggest you watch the talk either way. It's well-paced, witty and above all extremely fascinating. It centers around both the things that we previously thought were unique to humanity(but discoveries have shown we're not), as well as the ways in which we are unique("why are humans unique in a way no other species is?").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If LSD is this safe in a black market environment: [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210)

I don't see how if it was clinically manufactured and administered the risks couldn't be acceptably mitigated. The interviewee seems confident the government is on board and things are going down a new path though so I guess this could be a thing now.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is strong medicine, but the reports around ayahuasca, ibogaine, psilocybin, DMT and peyote all indicate the possibility of deep and lasting positive psychological shifts. I'd personally submit to treatment in the safety of a psych/medical clinic rather than a secret Peruvian yoga retreat but the fact that so many centers are popping up indicates some kind of global hive-mind desire for change. I'm supremely interested in the official and unofficial studies taking place all over the world right now in these domains.

</comment><comment><USER14> Psychedelics are, I think, a genuine example of a suppressed technology. They're one of two major suppressed technologies of the 20th century, with the other possibly being nuclear power.

<comment><USER15> To expand on your point, psychedelics have been suppressed even before that. Witches burnings in Europe for example, have been related to those "witches" taking psychedelic plants and potions. The Christian missionaries explicitly banned Indians from taking peyote and magic mushrooms as it was considered a "communion with the devil" in their eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _" The exciting thing isn't just that these drugs work for something that we already have treatment for. It's that they're getting big effects on disorders for which we have very poor treatment."_

It sounds to me like it may imply that much of what we call "mental health" disorders are really somatopsychic conditions.

<comment><USER17> Wait, do people think that mental health disorders somehow don't involve brain function? What else could it possibly be?

<comment><USER16> Uh, I think most people have some vague, hand-wavy notion about "the mind" and social factors, (largely) disconnected from brain function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At the very least psychedelics should be a legitimate subject of serious inquiry in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry.

<comment><USER19> The only reason they are not, as far as I can tell, is nearly universal drug schedules in the west - rather than lack of promise or interest among researchers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was surprised the article didn't mention Ayahuasca, maybe the original source did. I know a few people that used it to get off heroin for good after going through several Regan-relapse cycles.

<comment><USER21> Which is effectively DMT.

<comment><USER22> Not exactly. Ayahuasca actually refers to the vine Banisteriopsis caapi, which is a powerful MAOI, but contains no DMT.

Traditional preparations _often_ (but not always) contain other components which contain DMT, the effect of which is normally metabolized by a mitochondrial enzyme called monoamine oxidase. Since the ayahuasca vine inhibits the activity of monoamine oxidase, a preparation of ingested DMT taken with, or after, an MAOI will allow the DMT to reach the brain.

The vine taken on its own, however, has an intense effect which is said to be mildly psychedelic, and a preparation of just the ayahuasca vine qualifies as ayahuasca.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just finished reading "Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal" by Tom Shroder. It was parallel tour of the history of influential people (primarily Rick Doblin of MAPS), and a Iraq veteran suffering from PTSD that was treated later in the book with MDMA. [http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Test- Ecstasy-Power-Heal/dp/014751...](http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Test-Ecstasy- Power-Heal/dp/0147516374)

</comment><comment><USER24> Rick Doblin at MAPS has said he's funding the medical research of psychedelics and MDMA partly to change their public perception. It's a good strategy. "Medicinal alcohol" during Prohibition and medicinal cannabis during Prohibition 2.0 both helped sway a skeptical public.

Strategic concerns aside, psychedelics clearly are powerful medicines and can yield profound insights, and their relative safety makes their Schedule 1 status morally repellent.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here's a link to an early-release PDF of the study: [https://psilosybiini.info/paperit/Psychedelic%20medicine,%20...](https://psilosybiini.info/paperit/Psychedelic%20medicine,%20a%20re- emerging%20therapeutic%20paradigm%20\(Tupper%20et%20al.,%202015\).pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> The man made the "unreliable narrator" his main device, but I think "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" should put to rest any idea that such trendy chemical amusement aids have much therapeutic value in the general case.

It least puts such ideas in a position of having to work a lot harder to make their case.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure I follow your logic here. Although there are reasons to believe the incidents in the book are to some degree real, it is a story told with a purpose of entertaining, not a medical evaluation of chemical action.

Have I mistaken your purpose, and if not, can you clarify the reasoning?

<comment><USER26> No, I think the book makes something akin to a _moral_ point. That Our Humble Narrator was as much victim as perpetrator of the Better Living through Chemistry era.

It's precisely the opposite of a medical evaluation. It's a reductio ad absurbum on the idea that there's a potential Utopia within us revealed by drugs. Drugs apparently make you a new man but the new man may not be perceptually ... congruent with the old man.

I think he's describing the collapse of the experiment that included the Summer of Love.

"And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high- water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Can the medicos provide structure to ameliorate this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> max-a Psychedelics can trigger psychosis too.

<comment><USER28> There is evidence that does not agree with (edit: support) this statement: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819185302.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819185302.htm)

<comment><USER29> While this book is only one anecdote with severe extenuating circumstances - it's a pretty good read.

[http://www.amazon.com/And-Then-Thought-Was-Fish- ebook/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/And-Then-Thought-Was-Fish- ebook/dp/B008DZEWF8)

It's also online as part of his blog: [http://www.stilldrinking.org/the- episode-part-1](http://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1)

<comment><USER30> Definitely a fantastic read. Terrifying, but incredibly interesting. The author seems like an otherwise fairly well-adjusted person now - but it must be incredibly weird to look back at memories from when you were that completely out-to-lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> TA: "The fact that the effects last beyond the time that you take the medication -- that's really a new paradigm in psychiatry."

I have no doubt that psychedelics are capable of producing lasting changes in behaviors, habits, or outlooks. Actually, I'd be surprised if that particular point is at all controversial.

However, prespcribing a psychedlic that could have lasting impacts on a person for "reasons we don't understand" seems... unnecessarily dangerous, whenever an alternative exists. Which of course is only an argument for more research.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this the state of most mental medicines? That is, "reasons we don't understand"? Hence the typical search for the right med combo of anti- depressants, stabilizers, and stimulants to make someone OK?

Sure SSRIs might have lots more study than LSD and they might know how it affects certain neurotransmitters. But it seems a far cry from really understanding it.

<comment><USER32> I know a lot fewer people who have started taking SSRIs and then started taking SSRIs every weekend and got involved in cults centered around taking SSRIs and experiencing enlightenment and then ended up broken shells of people.

SSRIs have a very specific method of action, and it's drastically more limited in scope than these recreational drugs.</comment></comment></comment>


With 'Siren,' Unreal Engine blurs the line between CGI and reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/22/siren-epic-games-unreal-engine-vicon/ <comment><USER2> Writer fails to understand basic concepts like "uncanny valley"...</comment>


Effects of One Year of Space Travel on the Human Body (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/scott-kelly-mikhail-kornienko/471717/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> A reciently documented phenomenon that surprised me was the observation that astronauts' core body temp can raise as high as 1°C after a few months in space. Sustaining an elevated CBT can cause both physical and cognitive issues. The human body does some strange things in zero-G.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15560-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15560-w)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" on a trip to Mars, it's distance from Earth, not duration of spaceflight, that becomes the bigger enemy. The ISS orbits about 200 miles away, just within Earth's protective magnetic field. There, astronauts receive 10 times the usual amount of radiation, high-speed particles from the sun or other parts of the galaxy that tear through DNA molecules, that increase their risk of dying from cancer. Farther out, the exposure would get much worse."_

How much worse does radiation exposure get?

<comment><USER3> Whatever it is, for a long trip they'll use some isolation, maybe magnets or a thick lead layer.

<comment><USER4> _maybe magnets or a thick lead layer._

No and no. Permanent magnets that would be strong enough to be effective would be too heavy. The power system to support effective electromagnets would be too heavy. It goes without saying that a thick lead layer would be too heavy.

One of the actual schemes discussed would be to have a solar flare emergency shelter that the astronauts could go to in case of a solar flare. This would use water as the shielding material, which would save weight, as water would have to be brought along in any case.

<comment><USER5> > _Permanent magnets that would be strong enough to be effective would be too > heavy._

Heavy to shove out to sea from shore, but not if you've got a dock! (Read: build the craft already in space. And then have some mean engines.)

But this is all untenable; we need to become robots and cut out the malarkey.

<comment><USER4> _Heavy to shove out to sea from shore, but not if you 've got a dock!_

So you're proposing something like Aldrin's _cycler_ craft. Given our experience on Mir and the ISS, we are going to have to get a whole lot better at environmental engineering to be able to do that for human passengers. I've read that the inside of the ISS smells like some kind of porta potty.

 _we need to become robots and cut out the malarkey._

I hope we will still have _" human fundamentalists."_ (To use Charles Stross' term)

<comment><USER6> Electromechanical robotics is but an intermediate step. I can't wait to be an engineered lichen, with self-repair systems lifted from _Deinococcus radiodurans_.

<comment><USER7> I'm inclined to think that it's just too soon to go into space. It will truly become practical when biotech allows us to evolve into completely different forms that are more durable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like this article you'll probably also like astronaut Scott Kelly's book _Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery_ [1]. My wife got it for me as a christmas present and so far it's really enjoyable.

[1] Amazon: [http://a.co/bL0Tavv](http://a.co/bL0Tavv)

<comment><USER9> He also has a book for children called My Journey to the Stars: [http://a.co/11xrP6e](http://a.co/11xrP6e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really wish we'd invest in developing a centrifugal alternative to gravity in space. It's good to know how the human body is affected by weightlessness but why bother?

<comment><USER11> The problem with a torus-form habitat is that it fits poorly onto a typical rocket. You can only fit a (long) tube onto a rocket.

This means that a non-trivial building effort is required in space, as opposed to just attaching more cylinders together, ISS-style. Inflated structures have some promise here, but you probably also need something more solid to attach life-critical systems to, and something thicker to serve as a radiation shield, even while below the Van Allen belt.

This is of course doable, but it's a new, untried territory, which means expensive R&D and even more expensive orbital operations. Without a pressing need to keep humans in space for years, it's unlikely to be undertaken. It's cheaper to build more efficient shuttle craft for space stations, and e.g. more efficient engines for a rocket to Mars, to cut the trip time.

<comment><USER4> _The problem with a torus-form habitat is that it fits poorly onto a typical rocket. You can only fit a (long) tube onto a rocket._

No, but a cable fits nicely into a rocket. Dividing up the ship into two pods would get you a nice long radius to minimize Coriolis effects. If one pod contains a nuclear reactor, for which you need separation from the crew compartment, then it's quite convenient.</comment></comment></comment>


The SEC Wants Disgraced VC Mike Rothenberg to Cough Up More Than $30M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/02/the-sec-wants-disgraced-vc-mike-rothenberg-to-cough-up-more-than-30-million/ <comment><AUTHOR> > Harvard Business School... used Rothenberg Ventures as a case study for > students after Rothenberg graduated from the program... that case study — > funded by HBS before any hint of trouble at the firm had surfaced — was co- > authored by two professors who had a "significant financial interest in > Rothenberg Ventures," as stated prominently in a curriculum footnote.

More like a case study on how the top levels of academia are susceptible to blatant corruption from industry.

<comment><USER2> Can you explain how you think academia was corrupt here? As far as I know, all the investors in Rothenberg Ventures were honest people who got ripped off.

Case studies of bogus companies are interesting in their own right, such as the HBS study of Enron [[https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=36626](https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=36626)]. I think a detailed case study of Rothenberg Ventures would be worth reading, especially for people thinking of investing in flashy, smooth-talking, pop-up VC firms.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to go out on a limb as guess that the Harvard professors used their Business school's reputation to prop up the reputation [edit: was valuation] of the firm. We see this in many research focused universities where professors use the clout of their program to pump up their student's ventures -- typically with the professors being angel or early seed investors.

Corruption doesn't need to be illegal or against policy to be corruption. Corruption can be the degradation of institutions -- making their results less reliable -- and muddying truth.

<comment><USER2> VC firms don't have valuations. They raise funds and get paid a percentage of the funds under management (typically 2%/yr) for operating costs and a percentage of the overall gains they make (typically 20%).

As far as reliability of results: an insider's view (perhaps slightly biased) is usually more reliable than an outsider's view (who doesn't know anything more than what's publicly reported.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for making this clear, I edited my statement to be reputation based and not valuation since the judgement of the firm is important for their ability raise funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How could anybody working not realize it was embezzling money? It's not possible to run a 70 man team on 60m of capital, even with 2 and 20.

One of my friends is a partner at a hedge fund that manages 100m and has three partners, no employees, and money is super tight, they barely can make ends meet every month.

It's inconcievable that anyone would ever think the fund was legit, regardless if they found the accounting fraud or not.</comment>


Understanding Time Zones - <AUTHOR> https://lyonheart.us/articles/understanding-time-zones/ <comment><USER2> "... America/New_York and _America /Toronto_ instead of Eastern Time or EST."

Did the U.S. annex Toronto when I wasn't paying attention?

Does that mean we can get _Tim Horton 's_ now?</comment>


BDD with RSpec and Steak (via a real example) - <AUTHOR> http://timeless.judofyr.net/bdd-with-rspec-and-steak

<comment><USER2> I'd really love to see this article accompanied with a video of you actually working (no narration necessary). I think it would be very helpful to see what the real work flow is like.

<comment><USER3> That is an awesome idea. For me, the power of BDD (it's really still just TDD but let's not open that can of worms further...) is in the process.

I'm not a fan of RSpec; however, I also find Steak just a little too minimalist for me.

Occasionally, I want very badly to be able to render my Scenarios to plain text for communication with customers and other developers. I need the individual steps for that as well.

Where the example here maintains the steps (eg., Given, when, and then) as comments, I prefer them in the code.

So I wrote Coulda (<http://coulda.tiggerpalace.com/>) a bit over a year ago. Yes, it uses Test::Unit. While I am in the minority, I still prefer Test::Unit. It scales well.

When I say that, I mean in the sense that I can write almost any test using just "assert" and then add an error message for when the assert fails. I don't limit myself to using solely "assert"; however, when I'm not sure how to write an assertion, and neither shoulda nor Test::Unit gives it to me, it's easy to build it using "assert" and then wrapping it in a method (making it a helper).

And I still find Test::Unit code readable enough. Maybe that's just a matter of taste.

Dare I add: RSpec, although cleaner with the release of RSpec 2.0, is still a very complicated swiss army knife. Miniunit, included in Ruby 1.9.1 but also available as a gem for older Ruby installs, is the basis for Test::Unit as Ruby moves forward. That is, Test::Unit inherits from Miniunit in Ruby 1.9.

And Miniunit is far _far_ simpler than RSpec.

 _Update: I'll consider rolling a screencast of how I TDD w/ Coulda as a basis for comparison._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd also like to plug my own rspec extensions, Saki:

<https://github.com/ludicast/saki>

It lets you write your specs with "smart contexts" so you can do stuff like:

      with_existing :user do
        that_has_an :article do
          that_has_a :comment do

or

      with_existing :user do
        on_visiting edit_user_path do
          it { should let_me_edit(@user) }
        end
      end

I'm obviously biased, but I think this sort of testing kicks ass. I initially wrote them as extensions to Steak, but then ripped them out to use with vanilla rspec.

<comment><USER3> The only problem that I see with this is the same that I see with vanilla RSpec or shoulda: state is accumulated through nested blocks.

This is why I tend to prefer the Given-When-Then style with reusable "macros" (class methods) that provide niceties such as "given_a :user", "when_i_visit root_path", etc.

Assuming that you are writing automated acceptance test, any test of more than trivial length would then be nested several levels deep.

<comment><USER4> That's a reasonable argument but doesn't bother me because

1) I don't like the given/when/then syntax anymore (a personal thing, but I do see the advantages (Uncle Bob has a great article about it))

2) I don't mind the nesting as long as each context is making explicit what it does.

Of course it's a "different strokes" thing. I could see this not fitting in with everybody's style but for me it has DRYed up the parts of a test that should be DRY (imho).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, this is my first post to Timeless. judofyr and I are going to switch off Sundays from now on.

Overall, I feel pretty good about this, but commentary is always welcome. I'm still getting used to the nooks and crannies of MongoMapper, but I felt that leaving some awkward parts in was better than pretending that everything always goes perfectly when you're doing test-first development.</comment>


Startup Teardown: Less Spockiness, More Alien Fistfights - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@paulmontreal/less-spockiness-more-alien-fist-fights-beeminder-a0aca2a21bf2 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a cofounder of the startup being torn to shreds in this piece and delighted to answer questions!</comment>


Facebook is sharing your phone number - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/192399/facebooks-phonebook-fiasco

<comment><USER2> You are responsible for sharing your phone number when you provide it to Facebook. Facebook is doing what it feels like with it. As usual.

Are people really still surprised when they find out that information they share with some free online web site is going to be used in ways that they didn't anticipate?

<comment><USER3> Facebook takes your _phonebook_ , not just your phone number.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is true. I know a few people who are on facebook and use the same email address on facebook that I have them down as in my phone, and facebook mobile did nothing with their numbers (which they have not put up there).

Facebook had my number because you end up giving it when you try use the official mobile apps, and they add it to your profile at that point (which makes it available to all your contacts if you are not careful about your privacy settings). Are you sure that it doesn't have the numbers of people in your phonebook either because they explicitly added it to their profile or because they have used facebook's "mobile" options?

(unless of course this is something new: I've not touched the mobile apps for mobile version of the site as accessed via browser for some time, as to my knowledge none of them support the use of HTTPS instead of plain HTTP yet)

<comment><USER3> It definitely takes all of your contacts.

<http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/facebook-phone-numbers/>

"When you download Facebook's mobile app, this feature syncs your phone's address book with your profile. From then on you can access all of the numbers in your phone from your Facebook profile."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The issue is not new(s).

Showing a screenshot with lots of phone numbers that are less distorted than your average captcha image seems just as bad though..

<comment><USER6> Looks like the author has updated the image now: [http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/numbers_hidden_be...](http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/numbers_hidden_better.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I created a dumby facebook account to get ahold of some friends who dont use email. After about a week facebook gave me an ultimatum, give them my phone number or upload a color picture of my drivers license. I decided to say good bye to facebook.

<comment><USER8> What you did is expressly against the terms of use of Facebook. It's for real people, real businesses, etc.. They were just trying to verify you're a real person, possibly your account was reported by someone as being fake.

<comment><USER9> >What you did is expressly against the terms of use of Facebook.

Yeah, I think we all know that. It doesn't mean that we're going to agree with them. Yes they were in "the right" by booting him, but that doesn't make it any less of a shitty policy.

>It's for real people, real businesses, etc..

Yep, wouldn't want to add any noise to that delicious advertiser signal!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not to be a total dick, but I hope that those phone numbers are disconnected because the smart ass who made the article failed on blurring out the numbers correctly...

</comment><comment><USER11> I, for one, find the phone number integration in the mobile app (iPhone) to be very useful.

But my privacy settings are very restrictive, and I only friend people I've met.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/the- facebook-...](http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/the-facebook- scare-that-wasnt/)

</comment><comment><USER13> A friend pointed this out to me this morning. When I opted out here: [http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php...](http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php?r=%2Fphonebook) it said for the iphone app: "Note: Before you click Remove, you need to make sure syncing is switched off." Though, it was already switched off. Ah, good times, good times...

<comment><USER14> What's annoying is that if you disable it, it also disables syncing the other way, so you don't get photos automagically in your contacts.

<comment><USER15> How would you get those photos without sending in a phone number?

<comment><USER14> Facebook syncing contact photos down to my phone doesn't need to imply my phone sending phone numbers back in return - these two things are just conflated in the app.

<comment><USER15> How would they know which photo to send you?

<comment><USER14> Because I've linked the two contacts, obviously. But that's on the handset. There's no reason that sending photos to me implies sending phone numbers back in return.

<comment><USER15> This process implies

1) downloading all friends' profile pics from Facebook

2) manually going through each contact and linking them to proper Facebook identity

3) repeating the process every now and then for people who change their phone numbers, change profile pics, or just weren't in the contacts list since they haven't called before

Shouldn't be too hard to build such app with existing Facebook API.

<comment><USER16> "Shouldn't be too hard to build such app with existing Facebook API."

But not with the current T&C. Developers can access friends' photos, but cannot store them. Even relationships between users can only be cached for a modest period of time, not stored.

<comment><USER15> I believe profile pics have a different treatment than photos (privacy on photos is dynamic and can be revoked, while on profile pics it's public) and together with friend lists are considered part of user data.

<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/best-practices/> "You can cache user data indefinitely, but we strongly recommend you use the Realtime API to keep user data current."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a lot going on here. Facebook reports to be a social networking site. As such, one might expect to exchange contact info with someone they meet on the site. Of course, this means Facebook actually has to store it. That's fine.

The problem is that Facebook has insecure defaults. It is reasonable for a person to assume that contact information would only be visible to their "friends" (whether or not they are accepting random people as friends is another issue). Facebook should make it painfully clear that this isn't the case, and give its users more robust tools to control their data.

Of course, even if this does happen (which it won't, because it is in Facebook's every interest to keep as much of your info public as they can), some users will _still_ leave their contact info public and wonder why they get calls from strangers...

Remember when you learned how to write checks in the third grade? I think it is time to prepare kids for controlling their online identity formally...

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't see anyone in my contacts list who I'm not friended with and who isn't already sharing their number in their profile in a way I can see it. Maybe he just hit a bug in the list?

<comment><USER19> This was/is a widely reported "bug" (since early last year) and is actually the main problem. If I have you in my phone's address book, and you are not on Facebook, how is it I can give permission for your phone number to be uploaded to their servers?

This was changed in updates to the app, however the fallout continues to rain down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you have one, using your Google voice number is perfect just for cases such as these.

</comment><comment><USER21> someone who is stupid enough to put his/her phone number on Facebook deserve to be pwned</comment>


Utilizing LLVM TableGen to Generate SSH Configs - <AUTHOR> http://www.embecosm.com/2015/04/14/utilizing-tablegen-for-non-compiling-processes/

<comment><USER2> That's pretty cool. Userify[1] is offering server-side configuration in the next release (finally) and .ssh/config Jumpbox support for the servers you have direct access to is planned as well, but the idea of using a pure template is interesting.

1\. [https://userify.com](https://userify.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this what m4 is supposed to be used for?

<comment><USER4> Better would be Augeas.

[http://augeas.net/docs/references/lenses/files/ssh- aug.html](http://augeas.net/docs/references/lenses/files/ssh-aug.html)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Lightbus – Python/Redis Message Bus for Eventing and RPCs - <AUTHOR> https://lightbus.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News. I started developing this over two years ago when I become dissatisfied with what I felt was a lack of good options for an easy-to-use Python messaging system. I didn't think it would take this long (of course!), but I've certainly learnt a lot about messaging and distributed systems. I tracked my progress in issue number 1 on GitHub, and I feel pretty happy that I now have 98 of 98 tasks complete! [1]

I've been using this in production now for about a year and it has faired very well. I found a few weird bugs along the way, but it has felt stable for quite a while now. I'm therefore finally making an official release. I wanted to call this version 1.0, but I'm going to play it safe and call it 0.9 for a few months and see if anything crops up in other peoples' environments.

Before embarking on this I spent a long time talking to other developers to see if anything similar existed. The most similar I could see was Nameko, but I didn't feel like that ticked my boxes. Lahja is another one which I saw pop up more recently. I've also written a short comparison with Celery, as it something I'm often asked about [2].

I've also spent a lot of time writing up the docs. A crude word count indicates I've written 23,400 words of narrative documentation :o

I was also keen to not strictly limit this too Python. I've therefore documented the Redis interactions required for other languages to interface with Lightbus[3], albeit without the various niceties that Lightbus provides).

Constructive feedback is very welcome!

[1]: [https://github.com/adamcharnock/lightbus/issues/1](https://github.com/adamcharnock/lightbus/issues/1)

[2]: [https://lightbus.org/explanation/lightbus-vs- celery/](https://lightbus.org/explanation/lightbus-vs-celery/)

[3]: [https://lightbus.org/reference/protocols/](https://lightbus.org/reference/protocols/)

</comment><comment><USER2> We ([https://bespoke.app](https://bespoke.app)) use Lightbus in some supporting infrastructure, and despite starting with a less stable version, we've been quite happy with it.

Firstly, the maintainers are extremely responsive, and have gotten most issues fixed in less than a day. IMHO, the devs are being particularly conservative in calling this 0.9 instead of 1.0 -- which is arguably a good thing! Here's a quick/informal experience report. Happy to go into details.

Pros:

\- It's very "Django"-y. The declarative interface reads and writes like Django ORM code, so there's very little context switch. It should feel familiar to Django programmers.

\- It's built on "boring" tech. The default transport layer is Redis. Most of us don't need a distributed queuing system like NSQ or Kafka. Config is YAML.

\- The API is designed to favor ease-of-use over virtually everything else, and yet there's actually very little magic under the hood. There's a bit, but we've found it pretty easy to reason about. Default options are sensible, and easily tunable.

\- The documentation is good. It's a bit spartan for some of the more complex things (e.g. writing your own client in $YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE).

Cons:

\- Our biggest concern has been with logging. Message-bus architectures have all the difficulties of cooperative multitasking, with the added problem that events can also go missing. Good logs are invaluable in debugging this kind of problem. My understanding is that this is on the roadmap.

All in all, I think it's a safe bet for pure Python projects. If you're a polyglot shop, you _may_ want to consider something else in the short term, but Lightbus is _very_ capable of solving the problems that message-bus architectures were designed to solve [0].

[0] e.g.: "how can these isolated web apps share data in a sensible way".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there! Thanks for the comment, I'm glad its been going well. I'll reply to a couple of your points below:

> The documentation is good. It's a bit spartan > for some of the more complex > things

Yes, I've documented the protocols[1] but I haven't gone into much more detail. The docs may also need some iterating on as/when people try to develop new clients.

> Our biggest concern has been with logging. > Message-bus architectures have > all the > difficulties of cooperative multitasking, > with the added problem > that events can also > go missing. Good logs are invaluable in > debugging > this kind of problem. My understanding > is that this is on the roadmap

Yep. Two things are on the roadmap that are relevant to this:

1\. Revamping the logging system, likely to have an option to support structlog 2\. The ability to see a causal trace for each message (Message C was caused as a result of Message B, which was caused by Message A)

I think no. 2 should be straightforward, and I think no. 1 is just going to take a grim sense of determination and deleting a bunch of old logging code.

[1]: [https://lightbus.org/reference/protocols/](https://lightbus.org/reference/protocols/)</comment></comment>


Have a fully operational back end, in less than an hour. - <AUTHOR> https://elebase.io <comment><USER2> Seems nice. Im just a little bit curious.

So no programming of logic? Defining models by UI?

Is it kind of like a headless CMS but without the pages?

Do you have version controlled models? Do the content itself have version control?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, an advantage of Elebase is you can model your data using the UI and access that data via an API without having to build it yourself. How you use the data is completely up to you in your front end logic.

It is like a headless CMS in the sense that there is an out-of-the-box data management interface, but the concept of "page" is only one you need to use if that is appropriate for your application. In many senses, a "page" doesn't make sense for your application, so it isn't forced on you. That is a bit of the weakness of traditional CMS -- it is designed around the concept of a webpage, which is still very valid, but also a structure that is sorta 1990s, early 2000s. Does a 'watch' application have pages?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Build world-class apps with advanced location and mapping features using rich geographical data without having to roll your own geospatial database.</comment>


CirQuoid – PCB Prototyping Tool - <AUTHOR> https://cirqoid.com <comment><USER2> I have experimented with various at-home PCB production techniques: engraving, toner transfer, UV litography. The main limitation for all of these is fine pitch parts (less than 0.5mm) and plated holes (vias and through holes). The fine pitch part can be solved relatively easily (have a better mask for litography, have a finer engraving bit) but I am not aware of easy solutions for plating holes.

I have settled on Chinese board houses- you get very good PCBs with plated holes, soldermask and silkscreen- for 50USD and two weeks in total.

I have spent countless hours debugging copper whiskers shorting traces together- something which I have only seen on self-made PCB.

<comment><USER3> > for 50USD

dirtypcbs.com charges $12 for 10 PCBs (50x50mm), and the quality is fantastic. ENIG coating is more expensive, but HASL is fine as well. I haven't really tried any other houses, but DirtyPCBs have been great for me.

> and two weeks in total.

The only problem for me is that they take three weeks (as with everything from China that's shipped to Greece), which is way too long for a prototype that's usually then iterated upon :(

Having a machine that could make prototype PCBs (which I would then probably throw away) would be as much of a game-changer as my 3D printer is for prototyping. I'd try etching my own, but holes will be a problem, as I don't have one of those vertical drills.

<comment><USER2> DHL shipping is another 20-25USD + VAT on import makes it closer to 50. But very cheap, anyway.

Drilling itself is not the problem- just buy a nice set of drills with larger diameter shank and a small vertical drilling machine (Proxxon makes solid tools for that).

The problem is connecting both sides of the hole together- you'll have to place vias where you can solder both sides, always think about which side do your connectors go and spend a lot of time soldering.

On the other hand, it makes you gravitate towards SMD parts more :)

Also, my first boards had a lot of fuckups unrelated to production (mostly, wrong connections, incorrect pinouts etc).

As I gained more experience, the boards started to work with less revisions (usually the minimum functionality works on the first try, with some more advanced aspects not working as good as required) . That way, I can work on multiple designs in parallel (e. g. laying out the next board or programming the previous one while waiting for next board to arrive).

<comment><USER3> > DHL shipping is another 20-25USD + VAT on import makes it closer to 50.

I pay $14 total, shipping is free and customs here doesn't bother with small packages.

> just buy a nice set of drills with larger diameter shank and a small > vertical drilling machine

"X is not a problem, just buy a machine that does it" can be applied to everything. I don't want to spend that much money/don't have that much time/space.

> The problem is connecting both sides of the hole together

Yeah, vias are going to be a royal pain. For through-hole vias where components go, I can just apply enough solder so that it touches both sides.

> On the other hand, it makes you gravitate towards SMD parts more

SMD parts are fantastic and I use them as much as I can, but they aren't always feasible :/ (Think DC connectors, SMT antennas, etc).

> As I gained more experience, the boards started to work with less revisions

Definitely, but my problem is that I always find something I can improve, even if the board _works_...

<comment><USER2> > shipping is free

That's why you get them in 3 weeks as opposed to 2 ;>

With free shipping from DirtyPCBs my boards arrive to Latvia in ~5 weeks since order, so you should consider yourself luckier than you currently do :)

<comment><USER3> Ah, yes, that's very possible. For Europe, I hear that AISLER is competitive, and you get ENIG coating by default and DHL shipping, so it's fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm afraid that this tool is in price limbo, much, much too expensive for a hobbyist (especially when you can etch or CNC your own) but of not good enough quality for a company that wants to prototype PCBs (at least that's what the boards look like to me).

<comment><USER4> "not good enough quality"

I agree ... scanning through the images, I can't find an instance of a trace passing between pins on through-hole parts with 0.1" centers. This is critical on a milled board because you can only make a two-sided PCB.

<comment><USER5> You can make a lot of PCBs without having to route traces between 0.1" pins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not explicitly stated anywhere on the page, so let's be clear - this will only do 2 layer PCBs (top/bottom copper), correct? Also, what can it do without any "addons"? It looks like an addon is needed to do anything useful (etching, drilling, pick&place). What am I missing?

I reckon anyone willing to spend ~€3000 on hardware will be designing significantly more complicated PCBs than this will be capable of making.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't do plating for vias so it's less of a two layer board and more of two 1 layer boards sharing a piece of FR4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very useful for quick prototypes. 2k is no money for a company on a tight deadline.

At DIY level however there are already multiple open source projects doing this for a fraction of the price.

<comment><USER9> links?

i just started doing toner transfer, and while the quality is poor i really missed being able to play around with things before buying 20 boards and waiting a week. once a software guy..

anything that would improve that process with a modest outlay would be fantastic

(it does seem like for 2k they should be integrating with a more general tabletop light duty cnc setup)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 100mm by 75mm is too limited for my uses.</comment>


Show HN: Communication Board in React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shayc/cboard <comment><AUTHOR> Cboard is an open-source project that helps people with speech impairment (Autism) to communicate via text-to-speech in the browser! The reason I'm showing HN is because we're looking for more contributors to help us make this a reality. UNICEF recently asked for similar projects, and apperantly low income countries can't afford commercially available solutions, either because of price or language barrier, our app is already supporting 33 languages. Even if you can't contribute please upvote for visibility, thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A short presentation about the project made by Martin a fellow dev who joined the team: [https://youtu.be/2BnPQpjsZzM](https://youtu.be/2BnPQpjsZzM)</comment>


To make the most money as a software engineer, move to Switzerland (2014) - n-izem https://www.itworld.com/article/2695401/big-data/to-make-the-most-money-as-a-software-engineer--move-to-switzerland.html <comment><AUTHOR> Update 2019: Median annual pay for Software Engineers in Switzerland: 111,000 USD (up from 104,000 in 2014)

And this website shows actual job offers for developers with salary brackets: [http://swissdevjobs.ch](http://swissdevjobs.ch)</comment>


Andy Rubin Takes Leave of Absence Amid Report of 'Inappropriate Relationship' - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/andy-rubin-takes-leave-of-absence-from-essential-amid-r-1820832278 <comment><USER2> The title is click-baity. He took leave of absence from the current company Essential because reports of an in-appropriate relationship at Google surfaced publicly?

Leaders and board at Essential seem to be aware of his relationship at Google prior to the press reports. So, it is not clear why is this suddenly a big deal and requires leave of absence. Are they embarrassed that they got publicly caught and doing this for optics? What are they embarrassed about?

<comment><USER3> This could entirely be a CYA strategy of the board as the phone seems to be a flop and somebody has to be made accountable for that - here Andy might be a welcome scapegoat and distraction for not very smart investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, this appears to be about having an allegedly consensual relationship with a subordinate. And I get why that's a problem, because of the power dynamic.

But I think it's a little funny if this is how he ended up getting pushed out at Google given that Sergey Brin had an affair with a Google X employee while working on Glass and is none the worse for it.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget that Larry dated Marissa for a long time, and she was his subordinate. And then there's Eric, who was notorious...

Anyway, my understanding was that it has historically been OK at Google to date subordinates, so I'm waiting for more to come out because I can't imagine that "he had a consensual relationship with a subordinate" is all that's going on here.

But maybe someone who has worked there for a long time can correct me?

<comment><USER6> A lot of things have been "historically OK" (at Google and elsewhere), but are no longer acceptable in today's society. It is called progress.

Reminds me of this: [https://youtu.be/GrlEQ15mVPM](https://youtu.be/GrlEQ15mVPM)

<comment><USER7> _> >after a woman complained to Human Resource_

Did you miss this^^? She complained. Maybe she complained to get back at him but still, she complained.

Bill Gates also dated and married a subordinate. Poor woman, where was Gloria Allred to save her...

<comment><USER5> No I didn't miss it. That's what I'm saying -- there has to be something beyond "consensual relationship with subordinate" going on here. The fact that someone complained to HR supports that hypothesis.

My point was that sleeping with subordinates is not historically the kind of thing that gets people fired at Google. I make no claim about whether that's good or bad (whether or not that should ever be ok is a different discussion), just an observation that that's the way it has been, which (along with the HR complaint) indicates to me that this wasn't a simple case of Rubin sleeping with a subordinate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the EU (at least in Germany) this would be illegal in a normal company because it is against the law and/of personal freedom! Why are this personal rules allowed in a company in the USA? Nobody should say to me that's ok or not ok to get in a relationship with one of my coworker and I have not to report it to my supervisor!

<comment><USER9> Do you not understand the power imbalance between an employee and an executive? How can a subordinate consent if their job is potentially on the line? This exists to protect people from being threatened into going into a relationship against their will.

Every time a power imbalance exists there is always a chance it will be exploited and people must be protected from this.

<comment><USER10> I agree. I want to make sure you don't overstate your case.

It _is_ possible to have a relationship with a subordinate that's nothing but equal and fair. People do it all the time.

Where the problem comes in is when there's a problem, either somebody did something wrong or the people just don't get along anymore. Suddenly every little piece of the relationship is now the company's business -- and there's no way anybody can go back in time and piece together what happened in private between two consenting adults. This makes what is usually a private emotional mess between two adults (and possibly a criminal case if something was done wrong) into this huge corporate-wide drama that can never be resolved well. The only thing to do when something like this is discovered, crisis or not, is to fire both parties immediately for violating policy.

So there's nothing puritanical going on at all here. And manager/subordinate relationships are not always bad and evil. Just from a practical standpoint, it makes the employer's job impossible to do well, so it has to be avoided.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> After all the recent high-profile cases the outcome is going to be brutal - zero trust between genders, open door policy for any 1:1 meetings, recorded if law allows; minimal and legally pre-approved communication, covering one's back in all cases, reduced VC spending in opposite gender-led companies, making work a hell where only lawyers would thrive.

<comment><USER11> And all of the blame for this inconvenient atmosphere lies squarely with the harassers. So direct it at them, not the victims. As long as Trump and Moore and everyone on down are immune to these accusations, everybody else is just going to have to suck it up.

<comment><USER12> > _And all of the blame for this inconvenient atmosphere lies squarely with > the harassers. So direct it at them, not the victims._

If what 1/Nth of a group (the harassers) do, is applied to "all men" or "all VCs" or wharever, and are all "presumed guilty" then you can also blame those doing that lousy extrapolation.

The idea that "all X are Y", is of the same nature as the racist notion that "all blacks are criminals" because they know of _some_ black criminals.

<comment><USER13> Notice that the comment mentioned _harassers_ not "men", so maybe you are jumping the gun a bit there. The idea that "all harassers are harassers" sounds pretty solid reasoning to me.

<comment><USER12> > _Notice that the comment mentioned harassers not "men", so maybe you are > jumping the gun a bit there_

I'm not discussing the parent comment itself (that would be extremely narrow focused).

I'm answering the ideas expressed in the comment, based on the general context, and how we've seen things play out in the world.

<comment><USER13> So you are making a general argument on the toxic role such generalizations have? ;)

I understand where you are coming from, but I feel like jumping to conclusions about anything related to this story is way too soon.

<comment><USER12> > _So you are making a general argument on the toxic role such generalizations > have? ;)_

Yes, on the toxic role SUCH (not ALL) generalizations have. So no need for sarcasm ;)

(Generalization, I'd say, is both the start point of knowledge, and the start (or maybe end?) point of prejudice. It's a tool. If it's not representative, or if it's representative but misreads the causes why it is so -- e.g. "blacks are overrepresented in jails because they're an inferior race with crime in their dna", it's harmful. Otherwise, it allows us to use abstractions, which elevate our thinking just like a higher level programming language does).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bing's first month a bust - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bings-first-month-a-bust-2009-7

<comment><USER2> I've been getting a lot more traffic from Bing lately than Google. A few weeks back I recall hearing an older woman at work saying "..look for it on... what's that called? Bing?" My guess is she's not the only person, seemingly obvious to the search engine wars, that has taken notice.

I still like Google better though.</comment>


Ask HN: Would it be possible to reimplement Qubes OS but lighter? - <AUTHOR> Would it be possible to reimplement a concept like QubesOS using something like Kata Containers, maybe with Firecracker MicroVM?
SubgraphOS uses sandboxes, so I think it's maybe a closer concept, but has critized because it has several vulnerabilities.
With Kata every container would be on a light VM with its own Kernel, so it would be closer I think to what Qubes provides, without needing Xen.
Would having a Host OS without an Hypervisor like Xen be a problem from a security point of view? <comment><USER2> Even bare metal hardware has potential vulnerabilities, eg Spectre & Meltdown, micro-code bugs and management console back-channel attacks. Hypervisors have been shown to be vulnerable to certain advanced attacks. And there are no doubt, many zero-days that are yet to be discovered. Making an OS lighter by changing the implementation is likely to introduce unintended new vulnerabilities.

The OSes you mention have relatively small user base and thus their security models are relatively unproven. I note that all of the environments you mention use Linux for the userland and thus you will have apps that also have potential security risks.

Perhaps it would be better to re-frame your question in terms of the requirements that you intend to address. For example for highest level of security you could go with an OS like seL4 and rewrite everything to avoid Linux system vulnerabilities. Probably not practical. And the rewrite is not guaranteed to be bug free.

The most secure environments are carefully specified and architected for their intended application. The more general purpose an environment the greater the number of potential vulnerabilities. It has been said that the most secure computer system is powered-off, disconnected from all communications and located in a locked and sealed underground vault in a remote off-the-grid location.

<comment><AUTHOR> You made some very good points. I still think you can achieve a reasonable level of security with something like Qubes. No computer is unhackable but hacking a computer requires time and money, so it's a matter of if it's worth it. If you make yourself a target for a three letter agency they'll probably get to you one way or another. Qubes allows to isolate network interfaces and usb ports to protect also from evil maid attacks.</comment></comment>


"Do What I Mean": Name Resolution in Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://willcrichton.net/notes/specificity-programming-languages/ <comment><USER2> Variable shadowing should be an error. If you have to answer the "which X is this" questions the author covers when reading code, the language is too confusing. Better to get a compile time error.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. Shadowing can be very useful when transforming types that represent the same thing. For example, rebinding a variable to be immutable.

<comment><USER4> Another one is traversing enums in Rust: [https://docs.rs/syn/0.15/syn/enum.Expr.html#syntax-tree- enum...](https://docs.rs/syn/0.15/syn/enum.Expr.html#syntax-tree-enums)

<comment><USER2> Those are examples of why shadowing is bad. Too-cute use of a risky feature. When looking for usage of a variable by search, it's helpful that there not be shadowing. Cuteness means trouble for maintenance programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Imagine that function A binds the variable FOO, and calls the function B, > which calls the function C, and C uses the value of FOO.

Languages that lack dynamic scoping typically propagate a reference to a "context" through the B function. One can see this common pattern in threading libraries such as pthreads, for example. The A function creates a data structure that contains everything C needs, passes it to B as the "context" parameter and it is then forwarded to C.

It's more verbose but also more explicit.

</comment><comment><USER6> While the opinions of Mssrs. Steele and Stallman should not be lightly dismissed, and I think I can see where they are coming from, the marketplace of programming languages seems to have voted against dynamic scoping to an extent that it has not, for example, chosen definitively for or against static typing. Dynamically-scoped variables are rather like globals, but with the added complication that each one is a stack.

<comment><USER7> Concrete solutions to Stallman's objection in lexically scoped languages include,

\- Callable objects that store `FOO`, and

\- Closures that capture `FOO`.

I'm pretty leery of argumentum ad populum. I think we went with lexical scoping for a few clear reasons, and I don't know if the reasons for dynamic scoping are compelling. I would love to hear more of them, though.

<comment><USER6> My comparison of dynamically scoped variables to globals might be wrong, but, unlike my comment on the way languages have developed, it is not an argumentum ad populum.

It has been a while since I worked with dynamically-scoped programs, but I found it harder to reason about how they worked. Maybe it was just because I was less familiar with the technique.

It might be that all forms of beyond-local scoping multiply the difficulty in reasoning about programs (especially in the presence of mutable data), and dynamic scoping is a more powerful form of it, increasing the opportunity for setting up difficult-to-follow situations.

The issue of ease of understanding is a different one than ease of extending, and I would judge the former to be more important, all else being equal.</comment></comment></comment>


The patent system: End it, don't mend it - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/1208/p09s06-coop.html <comment><USER2> This article takes much broader aim than merely at the patent system (which I leave for others to argue) - it takes aim at the entire system of affording special protections for intellectual property generally. The authors nowhere attempt any form of coherent articulation of this broader position and merely take swipes at the protections they oppose, but I think this broader position either undermines their credibility or indicates a serious sloppiness on their part.

In essence, the authors assert that there is a major difference between having society (and its laws) protect tangible forms of property, on the one hand, and intangible forms, on the other. Thus, we understand how our home should belong to us exclusively, for instance, but it is somehow different when the issue comes, for example, to copyright protections.

I realize that I am perhaps flying right into the teeth of some firmly-held opinions at this site in delving into this, but I will do so anyway.

Statements stating or implying that protection of tangible forms of property are fundamentally legally distinguishable from protection of intangible forms are based in ignorance.

Legally, in a system of private property, the law recognizes "bundles of rights" that attach to all forms of property. We can own property, we can possess it, we can alienate (sell or transfer) it, we can bequeath it, we can improve or modify it, and on and on. These legal attributes that attach to property are there for the owner's protection and for society's betterment.

Is it outrageous that the law allows a property owner to deal with this bundle of rights largely as he sees fit? Not at all. In fact, this is how we can truly enjoy our forms of property to the fullest extent. I may own my property but I can take one specific attribute among the bundle of rights that define my ownership, e.g., my right to exclusive possession, and I can transfer that right while still retaining overall ownership. This is how the law recognizes and enforces a lease. Would our society be better off in abolishing all leases just because some landlords become slumlords and exploit their tenants? Of course not. That would be absurd. That sort of remedy, while perhaps having superficial appeal as a means of eliminating abuses, clearly would defeat the many valuable things that a society derives from allowing leases to be recognized and enforced.

Why should this bundle of rights be any different for intangible property rights (so-called intellectual property)? Authors in the eighteenth century, even if they had obtained copyright protection in their own countries, would often suffer scandalous losses as their works were ripped off and reprinted without any form of compensation given to them. Is it wrong that, today, such rights are protected? Silicon Valley over the past several decades has thrived and grown as the fruits of the labor of countless individuals were given legal protection in the form of copyright, trade secret, and, yes, even patent. Do we now want to take all creative efforts and allow those who poured their blood and sweat into devising new and improved algorithms, designs, inventions, etc. to be stripped of all protections as, for example, happens to their works in countries where intellectual property is not protected (e.g., mainland China)?

How many startup businesses depend on licensing the products of their creative efforts to others? Abolish IP protections and suddenly there is nothing left to license (a license being the counterpart of the lease discussed above, representing a subdivision of a bundle of rights belonging to the owner of the intangible property involved). Even software as a service could be ripped off with impunity. Any employee of the organization offering the software-based service could walk away with any code he wanted and freely use it for a competing site. Without IP protection being recognized by society or its laws, there would be nothing to stop this. If everything that is intangible is simply held in common, the fruits of any individual's creative efforts would not be protected and there would no longer be any special economic rewards associated with doing a creative work. Of course, one could argue that society "benefits" from having a more widely available use of those works but who will be motivated to pour blood and sweat into creating them? And who will want to put risk capital into a company whose charter is to develop such creative works when such investors will bear 100% of the loss if the venture fails while they will get no special reward (or at least a much diminished reward than they would have gotten if their company had legally protectible rights to its IP) if it succeeds? Of course, very few if any persons would want to put their money into a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation.

Thus, the claim of these authors that protection of IP should be abrogated is worse than wrong - in a system of private property, anyway, it is absurd.

Any such abolition would undercut the basic foundation upon which the vast majority of startups (and much of enterprise generally) are based.

Again, I leave the patent discussion to others, but any such discussion needs to be based on a carefully considered analysis and not on a facile and superficial strewing about of random points that strike an author's fancy. Just for starters, when I hear "abolish patents," I wonder how this would be any more beneficial to society than, for example, abolishing leases - is it a good answer in dealing with existing abuses to throw out an entire system that may and very likely does serve many good purposes in society? I am skeptical (at the same time, I acknowledge and do not defend the current abuses in this system, which are numerous - at a minimum, the system clearly needs fixing).

<comment><USER3> As an anarcho-capitalist, I would argue that intellectual property right violates the right of _property owners._

That being said, the rights of a owner of a mp3 file is overruled by a wider power enforced by the state. That owner cannot reproduce, sell, and _compete_ at will with the originator of the mp3 file without permission. He, as _owner_ of that particular mp3 file, cannot do with it as he see fit.

The whole system of intellectual property is government intervention into the economy for the political interests(patent lawyers, corporations that benefit from monopolies power, software developer, artists, etc). It is a system that also changes widely from nations to nations, and in history. It is an unstable system that tends toward chaos as parties compete for special privileges and political favors.

Contrast that to property right, in which anarcho-capitalist recognize it to not change over time and remain universal throughout history, regardless the whims of democracies, dictatorships, and other coercive apparatus.

How long should copyright should last, and what kind of freedom is afforded to public? Should patents last for so and so years. How should we choose non- obvious between obvious patents?

That's the question of an interventionist utilitarian technocrat who don't care much about property right but the end it achieves, not the product of a thinker who believe strongly in private property.

==Addenum==

That's the emerging views of anarcho-capitalists led by none other, a lawyer who specializes in patent.

It is also a view that have practical impact on spreading libertarian ideas by changing a think-tank organization(mises.org in this case)'s strategy toward spreading ideas and economic knowledge toward everybody else by the mere embrace of giving anything and everything information that could be given away.

 _We made the decision to give away everything that possibly could be given away, from code to text to the right to reprint — as far and as widely as possible._ \- mises.org

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting angle that I had never heard before. I'm not sure that I agree with the specifics but I do know that I grew up reading and enjoying Von Mises over many years for the rigor of his thinking and for his courage in standing up for unpopular views. I will look into it.

<comment><USER3> It would seem that you are familiar with the Austrian school, but you are not up to speed on the intellectual property controversy within libertarian circles.

Well, Lugwig von Mises was a utilitarian, but not his student, Murray Rothbard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Ideas kept under lock and key are much less useful than those that are freely available."

That's precisely the point of the patent system. It is supposed to encourage disclosure so that after the protected period the knowledge is made fully available to society.

The alternative is trade secret protection whereby inventors remain secretive about their work product, never disclosing to the public at large how the device works and not allowing follow-ons to build upon their knowledge.

The two problems with the current system are 1) protection terms are too long and 2) the enablement requirements aren't enforced well enough.

Let's say that the protection term is reduced to one year. And assume that the USPTO requires patents with sufficient detail to fully enable readers to replicate and practice the invention.

Under that scenario, I think that the patent system would be seen as an asset to society. In exchange for a year's worth of protection the inventor has to tell society explicitly how to do exactly what he or she is doing. I don't think most people would have a problem with that system.

If you go back to the Constitutional basis for the patent system, it was "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

As long as "limited time" is a reasonable period, I don't know that abolition is required.

<comment><USER5> I'd add two more problems:

3) Too expensive. 4) Takes too long.

Getting a patent attorney to prepare and file a patent is very expensive. It takes $10k just to get started. The patent system is so byzantine that you can't reasonably expect to do it yourself and be successful. The cost is a drop in the bucket to a large corporation, but it's a major barrier for individual inventors.

Not only that, but it takes way, way to long to actually receive a patent. I applied for a patent about two and a half years ago, and I'm still waiting.

As an individual without infinite resources, I'm hesitant to built a business around my concept unless I can be confident that it'll be protected. If I'm not granted the patent, then it would be trivial for an organization with deeper pockets replicate what I would have created.

I know that patents typically don't make a business defensible, but in my case I decided to pursue a different business opportunity. If I'm granted my patent, then I suppose I'll figure it what to do with it then. On the other hand, what good is a patent on a technology conceived three years ago, except to make life difficult for others?

<comment><USER6> I read today a factoid that said innovation was down because patents were being filed less (2 percent iirc).

Interesting that someone would think that the number of patents was a direct way one could measure innovation. My interpretation was that possibly less irresponsible patent grabbing was taking place because due to the recession there was less incentive to spend money patenting, and more incentive to keep businesses alive through _real_ innovation.

Of course, I could be completely wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to strongly disagree. First of all, all his statements about how the patent system does not promote innovation are merely conclusory and do not show any evidence or reasoning behind them. (Other than a couple of cherry picked individual cases).

This is an interesting question, but it is unfortunately really hard to show scientific proof either way. Economics is just too uncertain of a science to prove something as complex as this. One thing that is known is that most countries whose economies rely on IP creation usually end up with a relatively strong IP protection system.

Now, as I have said here before, I agree that some patents may hinder innovation. Patenting things that are not new or obvious or issuing patents that are too broad can just create a lot of harmful rent seeking which only hurts innovation. But this is something that should be fixed by modifying the patent system not scrapping it.

This is too big of a discussion to have here, but I should point that a big mistake people make when considering the cost of the patent system is to assume that if patents did not exist things would be just the way they are now, but without the patents. This is simply not true.

I really doubt those Africans would have any AIDS drugs if the patent system did not exist, because nobody would commit the resources of developing and testing an AIDS drug without patent protection.

Furthermore, if there is no patent system, the only way to protect your inventions would be by keeping them secret and companies that do innovate would go through very costly measures of making sure their inventions are secret. These measures probably cost much more to society than the patent system. Also, keeping inventions secret often resulted in the inventions being lost forever. Thus, if there is no patent system one may argue that the ideas would still be kept under lock, in fact they would be more severely locked down than before.

If you study the history of innovations, you can see a lot of interesting inventions being completely lost merely because their practitioners wanted to keep them secret. Also, you will find out about entire secret societies being formed just to keep knowledge secret (e.g., the Masons).

For example considering the kind of buildings the masons built in medieval times, they must have had some pretty good knowledge of rudimentary physics and mathematics. But all this knowledge was carefully kept secret to ensure their monopoly. Thus, nothing was published and nothing could be used by the scientists of the era to develop overall scientific theories.

edit : full disclosure, I am a patent lawyer. Further edited for spelling and grammar.

<comment><USER8> If the windfall profits granted by state-capitalism were vacuumed back into non-existence, perhaps it would be possible for governments, non-profits, and academia to collaboratively conduct pharmaceutical development out in the open.

I've never seen anyone but patent lawyers make a spirited defense of patents for their own sake.

<comment><USER9> My father is a professor and doctor of medicine at one of the most esteemed medical schools in the country. He is 100% sure that without patents we simply wouldn't have most of the drugs we have today. They are far too expensive to develop and then have your competitors copy. The government funding for these projects is pitifully small and slow (I can say that from an academic non- medicine perspective as well). Non-profits are pretty much useless as well since they have nowhere near the funds.

<comment> alan-crowe Drug development seems to be the case where the patent system actually works and I wonder if that is due to having one patent per product? Elsewhere you get patent thickets and invention choked off by multiple ownership. Perhaps a useful reform would be to insure that no product is encumbered by more than one patent. This could be done by letting the most inventive patent covering a particular product be the trump patent. Minor patents would lose their nusiance value. Research incentives would be turned upside-down. Instead of doing cheap research to get a trivial patent and a seat at the bargining table to leech off real inventors, expensive research, aimed at major breakthroughs would be the only way to win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems intellectual rights for something like music makes more sense, since one can work just as hard on another song and achieve almost equal success. But in technology there is usually a limited amount of ways to do something most efficiently. Each longstanding patent makes alternative efficient methodologies harder to come by. It impedes the process of evolution since there's a definite _best_ way.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author ignores the main reason patents exist by pulling in emotional things. Sure, in a magical happy world it would be great to offer children in Africa free AIDS medicine, but the fact of the matter is that millions of dollars go into getting a drug like that to market. It takes millions of dollars of research, millions of dollars to go through clinical trials, millions of dollars to go through FDA approvals, etc. And ultimately most drugs are very simple chemical compounds that could be easily synthesized in retrospect with the most basic of equipment.

While it's certainly bad for companies to exploit the patent system and try to extort profit out of sick and dying people, that does not justify throwing out the protection altogether.

If we threw out the patent system, none of the drug companies would spend the millions of dollars required to create things like a cure for AIDS as they would not make that money back because the next guy would just do some simple chromatography and have the same chemical compound synthesized for a fraction of the cost. What company is going to go tens of millions of dollars in debt with no hope of making that money back? When the incentive to do research is gone, we have no AIDS cure at all and in my opinion a world with no AIDS cure is worse than a world with an AIDS cure that's a bit expensive.

There are many things that are broken with the patent system for sure, but throwing it out completely would cause many things to fall apart and cause catastrophic damage.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pricing is hard and getting the right time-period for a monopoly on an idea is no different.

And then the Patent Office profits by awarding patents putting the negative externality burden on those in the field of the patent to "fix" mistakes.

For a man of his historical importance Jefferson had a lot of questionable ideas (owning slaves, blaming banks for his debt, monopolies on ideas, and I don't care much for the speeches I've read of his either).

Louisiana Purchase turned out all right though.

</comment><comment><USER13> James Dyson made 5,167 prototypes before he came up with the winning formula for the Dyson cleaner. I doubt that he could have become a successful billionaire without the right to fight off the companies who tried to make a quick buck out all his hard work.

[http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/02/5127-failed-p...](http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/02/5127-failed- prototypes-james-dyson-and-his-vacuum-cleaner.html)

<comment><USER14> Making sure inventors get rich is not the aim of the patent-system. Most people work hard every day and there isn't a system in place to make sure they will all profit from that real big one day. So yes - there are people which profit from the patent-system, as there are always people which profit from a monopoly. And exceptionally one of those people profiting from it is even the one who put most work in it. So it might be a slightly better system than a pure lottery. Except that I'm not forced to play lottery, while I'm forced to partake in the patent-system. I would prefer not doing so. Make it an open- choice and I'm fine with it, because then I will avoid taking part in the patent-lottery as much as I avoid taking part in any other lottery. And don't worry, that won't stop me from inventing, actually it will make working for me on new stuff a lot easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whatever happened to patents needing to be "non-obvious" and patent grants being utilized within a certain time period? It seems those two provisions would solve a huge number of frivolous patent lawsuits. Both provisions existed at some point in the last 100 years. What the hell happened and when exactly did it happen? It seems like our patent laws were fairly reasonable not all that long ago.

</comment><comment><USER16> This article keeps mentioning "empirical evidence" yet gives nothing but opinion. Then it mentions some instances where the bathwater is cold and suggests we throw out the baby.

Save your 3 minutes.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my web app? Trying to get out of slump. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wysp.ws/

<comment><USER2> Your practice engine idea is really smart, but it isn't at all immediately apparent upon visiting the site. At first, your website looks like any "portfolio site" (deviant art, dribble, etc). To make the practice engine the focus of the website, I would consider a new homepage design that focuses on the "learn to draw" aka "practice engine" aspect of the website, as opposed to a portfolio showcase. There are lots of portfolio sites, but very few websites that teach you how to draw on a structured learning path. It is a great idea, stick with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! So, are you suggesting to send any new visitor to a landing page describing the site's features, with a focus on the practice engine?

<comment><USER3> Yes, and include screenshots & explanation of the practice engine.

Also, the practice engine is cool but feels incomplete. There are random lines between body parts - I'm sure they are there for a reason, but I don't know what that reason is.

<comment><USER4> Whenever I've looked at drawing tutorials they give stages. Just tried the hands tutorial. I can see what circles and bits to be drawing first and why they are there but only because I've done other tutorials. More steps and explanation would be good!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not immediately apparent what your site does. Instead of the cryptic "unlike other websites, wysp is not about showcase etc" , can you just write something as straight forward as "Learn how to draw" or " Let us help you improve your pencil skills" or whatever message directly tells your target audience what it is exactly you do

<comment><USER6> I completely agree with this. I think using plain English and a couple of concrete examples at the top of the page would help immensely.

I didn't know what this meant, for example: "Wysp is a journey to realize your full creative potential."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Agree with other comments that at first use it's not clear what the site is for, but shows a lot of potential. Have you done any A/B testing? If not, check out <https://www.optimizely.com/>

Also, are you sending email to users whenever they get comments? Emails to people who sign up but never post anything? Welcome emails to people who sign up telling them what to do? Create sets of automated email campaigns and it will dramatically improve your usage stats. Articles from Patrick trend on HN all the time, but here's a link in case you missed it (+1 from my professional experience): <http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/>

Best of luck to you!

<comment><USER8> Thank you for the insight and link for email campaigns! Addresses a lot of biases i had about them.

<comment><USER7> Don't let bad marketing give email a bad name.

Yes, I too have had my biases. If you do them well, then email can be incredible effective and welcomed by users. It's all about how you target, segment, and position yourself in a genuine, authentic, and helpful way. (The "bad marketing" emails tend to forget that last part.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with other comments that this looks like a portfolio site while your USP is teaching.

I tried your tool and I didn't really understand why it taught me anything. It put up a picture, waited for me to draw in your limited drawing tool, then asked me to evaluate myself. I just scribbled and gave myself four stars an everything continued happily.

It seems like the practice engine lacks useful feedback, but maybe that is a feature I would get if I signed in?

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you expect that useful feedback to be implemented?

The self-rating system currently in place in meant as a guide for the spaced repetition system. If you give yourself unrealistic ratings, it will only result in a less optimized learning experience...

<comment><USER9> But then I don't understand how the "teaching" app is really teaching me. It's just telling me to draw a set of pictures. Why does that have to be an app? Couldn't you just have 20 images to practice drawing as an HTML page?

<comment><AUTHOR> The value added compared to a list of pictures is:

\- spaced repetition engine: the pictures that are served to you are customized depending on how you did on previous sessions, so as to lead to an optimal learning rate

\- timer: motivates the user and turns the exercise in a sort of game

\- asking for self-evaluation: forces the user to go over their output and self-feedback

How do you think I could made this value more evident? Or do you think that not a strong enough value proposition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love the concept. In the past, I've taken part in many communities and forums that had an immensely positive effect on my progress in learning to design graphics and music.

One thing you can improve instantly, that will probably reduce the bounce rate, is the landing page copy. Make it very clear what your product does.

Otherwise, I think you may be limiting the users and yourself too much by enforcing the time-trial and web-based drawing tool. It's probably quite engaging for those who dig in in front of their PC with a graphics tablet in hand. But it didn't work out for me on the MacBook trackpad or the iPad.

If it was my MVP, I'd just let people upload the image -- no matter how they made it -- and focus on community building. 9 times out of ten, the thing that helped me improve was advice from a peer or mentor.

You want to have an environment where people aren't scared of posting because of unsubstantiated negative reviews. But you need to have members that are capable of constructive criticism. Otherwise you just end up with praise and flattery, which belongs in a showcase more than it does in a Practice Engine.

Goood luck! I'll take another look at the app when I'm at a desktop computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your insight! A new landing page is in preparation : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Positives: 1. Generally great idea. 2. Very nice css, looks beautiful. 3. Really like the blank page section - it really encourages people to get involved. (make this more prominent). Advice/Criticism: Just looked at it for a few minutes but here are my first impression thoughts: 1\. You say on home page it is for practice and personal progress, but all I see is other people's are that is way better than mine. 2. You feature the practice engine but it only has two courses, and feels incomplete. (plus it looks like you are asking for my money before you convince me I should use your site / before I even fully understand the purpose). Maybe try to feature your best feed back coupled with the piece instead of your most popular art. Add more classes and make a couple of them (more obviously) free. Encourage me to upload art from the start - right now it feels like I should focus on other peoples art instead of my own.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your insight. Very useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> focus on what sets you apart, the practice engine. on your homepage although just under the nav you have text explaining this, people are generally more visual as I'm sure you know, try using something more visual to explain how this practice engine works maybe?

by way of an example, <http://www.sublimetext.com/> has a set of features that really make it stand out as a text editor. they could be written out in text, but it's hard to understand what they are when described in words. instead the author has put some animated pictures showing the actual features in use. this presentation instantly shows how you would use those features and most people understand right away where the benefit is.

i'm not sure animated would work for yours, but perhaps a swapping image showing a particular artists progress over a few weeks/months.

just an idea, hope it helps. 1 other tiny thing that got to me, the top nav text isn't vertically centered in the space. it's a small gripe, but sometimes little details can make the difference, especially on a site for artists.

edit: another thing that comes to mind, you feature art on the homepage in a similar style to a portfolio. including what's new or popular. what if instead you featured the artist, and then change between pictures of their progress up to that point. you could highlight the learning aspect by showing progress of each artist you feature on the homepage, rather than just 1 piece of art by that artist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your great feedback! I particularly like the idea of showing the progress of an artist on the landing page, that would be quite powerful. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You have 2 courses. The first prominently displays $2.00 price, and _then_ says "$2.00 (one session free!)". The second is free.

But when I scanned it, all I saw was "$2.00", not the freebies.

Maybe style the buttons, so they display what is free?

<comment><AUTHOR> A more prominent, colorful "free!" label? Most definitely a good idea. Thank you!

<comment><USER13> Also, a "first session free" label. Maybe CSS style the button? Though patio can tell you horror stories about "great" changes like this which decreased sales, as he didn't test on IE (which simply didn't show his button).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have a pretty high churn rate, so I've recently been rolling new features to try to stay afloat. User feedback is positive, but the usage stats aren't.

Any insight as to what I could be doing wrong?

<comment><USER2> What kind of specific feedback are you getting? And what do your usage stats specifically look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Usage: I have a very restricted core of regular users. Most new users quit after a few days or a week (I suppose the app did not deliver on the reason why they joined the website in the first place?). When contacted, these users basically never reply. Paid users also never reply when contacted for feedback.

The spontaneous feedback I'm getting is positive but unhelpful, in the lines of "this site is great, love the concept", etc.

Any idea? What's your first impression?

<comment><USER14> I'm in a similar position to you, I'm bootstrapping an analytics service and need feedback. I'd be happy to give you a free account and help you with your analytics so you can figure out what's wrong with your churn.

Send me an email, if you like, the service is <http://www.instahero.com>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Email sent : )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You could disable user-scalable in meta tag viewport. Painting Application didn't work in iPad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, I haven't added touch support yet. I'll get to it!</comment></comment>