Devops Automation Made Simple. Replaces Ansible, Puppet and Chef - <AUTHOR> https://disizjay.github.io/node-farmer/ <comment><USER2> > Replaces Ansible, Puppet and Chef

> || AGENTLESS ~ BASH OVER SSH ~ PLUG N PLAY ||

Uhm, no, not even close. You're not agentless, you have the most fragile agent that got ever commonly deployed: shell over SSH. So easy to break it down by accident in so many different ways. The same brain-dead idea as in Ansible (but executed much more poorly), and so far from what Puppet and Chef do.

> // nf Terminology //

> Seed, Plow, Soil, Sow, Fruit, Feed, Canal

You envied Chef its misleading terminology and wanted to invent your own? How does that help your potential users?

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't want to get involved with complex configuration and programming. Developers and administrators could easily write I put files in node-farmer. Where as in other automation tool it's a nightmare. For example Ansible, you need to write your inputs in YAML programming language, isn't that easy to learn a programming language to do the work ? Everyone is not skilled in programming.

<comment><USER2> > You don't want to get involved with complex configuration and programming.

I don't? Why do you think so? And what is this "complex configuration and programming" you're talking about?

> Developers and administrators could easily write I put files in node-farmer. > Where as in other automation tool it's a nightmare.

Uhm... what? What is nightmare?

> For example Ansible, you need to write your inputs in YAML programming > language,

YAML _is not_ a programming language.

> isn't that easy to learn a programming language to do the work ?

Yes, it is that easy to learn _another_ programming language to do the work. Programmers and sysadmins do that _constantly_.

> Everyone is not skilled in programming.

Well, I don't want people _unskilled in programming_ to write _programs_ to manage environment I operate in.

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, YAML is a data serialization language for programming language.

Complex configuration mean writing recipes in chef world, writing playbooks in Ansible, you often run into indentation issues or configuration issues. In my opinion I thought to overcome something like this you need to be dumb sometimes.

You would like to learn all the programming languages or any new that may come in future but not everyone. You don't wanna be too much skilled or learned to do automation. You can spend that time somewhere else maybe networking or security or architecture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rather spending time on showing your programming skills and technical skills to write a configuration file, spend that time elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Over twenty years ago, we were doing parallel ssh to multiple hosts. We found that did not scale, for many reasons.

Thus, cfengine was born. And Puppet. And Chef. And Ansible.

Feel free to repeat all their mistakes if you want, but if you want to build a better tool, I would encourage you to learn them and understand their weaknesses first.

Just blindly repeating the mistakes of the past is not a recipe for success.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. I am learning from their mistakes and trying to bild a better one, I need good testers and collaborations to build a future tool. I thought this platform will provide me good suggestions and probably good collaborations.

Thank you for your suggestions. I'll keep what you said in mind.</comment></comment>


Bare bones Raspberry Pi PC gets ready to launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16316439

<comment><USER2> It's a shame that they're not having two streams - the ultra low cost machine delivered to their intended target, and a commercial machine delivered to the thousands of hackers who've expressed very real interest.

The hacker stream could be slightly more expensive, and would help (or entirely fund?) distribution and documentation and etc of the low cost stream

Also:

> Mr Braben got his start in games thanks to the BBC Micro on which he, and > school friend Ian Bell, created pioneering computer game Elite.

The BBC micro was pretty expensive, and normally found in schools or homes of well off families. So I'm glad he's decided to get a really cheap capable machine in the homes of people who could use it, rather than an odd niche gimmicky development board.

There's some things wrong with English education, especially with technical subjects at all levels, and it's nice to see someone side-stepping the political nonsense and delivering something that might actually help.

I wonder which of today's 12 year olds will turn up in 15 years time saying "I started with a Raspberry PI".</comment>


9 museums that want your legacy tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/slideshow/detail/121888#slide7

<comment><AUTHOR> Slide #7 is my friend's museum in a tiny little South Texas town (Wharton). I was surprised to see it on CW. Anyway, if you have some interesting stuff taking up space in your garage, send it to one of these museums. If you miss the old junk that you've thrown away, go visit one of these museums.</comment>


What is the best book you read this year? (optional: why?) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1\. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

2.Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall by Andrew Ross Sorkin

</comment><comment><USER3> I've read a lot of books this year (47 so far[1]) and they cover a wide range of genres, topics, etc. So it's hard to say that one is "the best" overall, so I'll break it into some categories:

1\. Most interesting, overall: _Godel, Escher, Bach_ by Douglas Hofstadter

2\. Best in Hard Sci-fi: _Foundation 's Edge_ by Asimov

3\. Best in Business: _Customer-Centric Selling_ by Michael T. Bosworth, John R. Holland, Frank Visgatis

4\. Best in Technology: _An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems_ by Michael J. Wooldridge

5\. Best in Mythology: _Norse Mythology_ by Neil Gaiman

6\. Best in "Deserves a mention regardless of category": _On Writing_ by Stephen King

7\. Best in Mathematics: _A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science_ by Barbara Oakley

8\. Best in Biography: _The Man Who Tamed Lightning_ by Floyd Miller (biography of Charles Proteus Steinmetz)

[1]: [https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/14999185](https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/14999185)</comment>


Creating beautiful login form using HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.dzyngiri.com/index.php/creating-beautiful-login-form/

<comment><USER2> The html5 spec is clear [1] : "The placeholder attribute should not be used as an alternative to a label."

If you really want to do this kind of layout, you should find some accessible way of hiding labels.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/forms.html#the-placeholder- attri...](http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/forms.html#the-placeholder-attribute)

</comment><comment><USER3> While the login form might be pretty, I'm a bit turned off of "dzyngiri" by the lack of indentation in their code. And it might be helpful to have the demo/download buttons immediately visible rather than having to click the tiny X in the box/tooltip/whatever that is. I probably spent a minute searching for the buttons before finally clicking the X.

<comment><USER4> I must agree, the "close to reveal" box is incredibly counterintuitive, took me a while as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While this is great and helpful, it'd be really great if we could see more content in the ways of the theory behind what makes something beautiful. Something more on color theory, and more things on UX Design like what was posted earlier yesterday about dialog boxes and meaningful verbs.

I say this because I can read things like webdesign tuts all day, but I leave not knowing why I did something.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lovely! I'd add "outline: none;" to inputs, chrome displays the ugly orange border when fields are focused.</comment>


Show HN: An ad-free news website with crowdsourced summaries - <AUTHOR> https://news.hoxly.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks creator here. I often find on sites like HN/Reddit that I tend to mostly just read the headlines/comments and not necessarily the articles themselves.

I wanted to build a site that is more aligned with that use case. I was partially inspired by Wikinews but wanted to lower the barrier to entry for participation. On Hoxly News, each story is a collection of facts which link to a source URL. Facts can be independently up/down voted and in aggregate form a TLDR style summary.

Stories also support a threaded comments section similar to HN.

Instead of ads to fund the site I decided to build a "credit" system where users purchase credits to perform various activities around the site. You can read more about that here: [https://news.hoxly.com/credits](https://news.hoxly.com/credits).

Feedback is appreciated.

<comment><USER2> > Feedback is appreciated.

Ok. In my opinion:

1\. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark.

2\. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further.

3\. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned.

4\. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is not transparent at all.

It is also unclear to me why the credits system has been introduced in the first place. The linked page mentions that it is supposed to "limit spam and reward quality contributors". It seems to me that the same goal can be achieved by using upvoting-based reputation system with carefully configured entry barriers that is already in use at many Stack Exchange sites.

In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs is to ask for donations. But it needs to be done in a very transparent way. For instance, show a chart of real Google Cloud / Amazon AWS bills offset by donations. People need to be 100% sure that when they donate money to "running costs", it would not end up being used for something else like your new iPhone or a vacation in Mexico.

Edit: add line breaks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

> 1\. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark.

I'll see if I can add an optional dark mode.

> 2\. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real > content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further.

I'm not really sure what changes could be made that would encourage users to explore. Could you elaborate?

> 3\. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. > Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the > number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned.

Yeah, this is a problem. I think maybe it can be partially solved by abbreviating 3,000 as 3k, etc.

> 4\. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link > you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase > page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is > not transparent at all.

Okay, this is something I hadn't even considered. Originally the entire credits pack actually required authentication to view but I changed that last minute. I'll see what I can do to make the pricing more transparent.

> In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs > is to ask for donations.

I have run websites in the past on the donation model. In my experience it hits a wall once you have more general web surfers on your site than power users. Reddit tried the donation model with a transparent meter that showed the sites costs each day but it eventually had to pivot to ads.

<comment><USER3> A dark mode would definitely be nice, but I think there are some larger UI improvements that can be done. Some basic ones would be better padding and spacing for legibility, and making use of the large empty spaces for additional content. And being able to see the number of comments a post has without clicking on it is a must.

I really like this project and the credits system in place. If you're open to the idea I'd be down to collaborate on some of the frontend / design work. Feel free to message me.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If you're open to the idea I'd be down to collaborate on some of the > frontend / design work. Feel free to message me.

Sure, I'd like to hear more if you had some ideas. It doesn't look like your profile has any contact info, but you can email me: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like this. it cuts out the padding most articles have very effectively. Can anyone post links? How automated is the fact extraction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes anyone can post links/facts assuming they have an account with at least one credit.

When you submit a story you can specify an initial seed source which will be summarized using the gensim summarization module and used to prepopulate the facts section. If gensim isn't able to generate a summary then we just use the headline of the linked article as the first fact.

After that, facts can be added manually by adding some text (max 160 chars) with an accompanied source URL.

Gensim: [https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.htm...](https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting, how do the summaries work? By the way I have just added a "salesforce buys tableau" article and the summary of my source link doesn't seem to work.

Here: [https://news.hoxly.com/story/165](https://news.hoxly.com/story/165)

<comment><AUTHOR> When you submit a source url we try to download and parse it using the Newspaper python library then use the Gensim summarization module to create a summary.

Sometimes it doesn't quite work. In the case of Bloomberg I've noticed that they aggressively block AWS IPs which is why it says "Are you a robot?".

Newspaper: [https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

Gensim: [https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.htm...](https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you added RSS, I would like to add it to my news site [https://news- hud.com/](https://news-hud.com/) which has a similar philosophy of cutting down on cruft.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have RSS! [https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.*](https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.*)

You can change the query string to whatever you want depending on what type of news you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you speak Swedish and care about Swedish news, there's a Swedish equivalent[0].

[0] - [https://nyhetsnotiser.se/nyheter/](https://nyhetsnotiser.se/nyheter/)

<comment><USER8> Are those just scraped, or are they curated somehow?

<comment><USER7> They have synopses and linked/related articles ("Relaterade Nyheter")[0] from different news sources and their archive goes back a year[1].

Given this, I'd be inclined to believe that it's curated. _However_ , I haven't studied it enough to verify if news links > x months are added as "related news" to current news articles.

[0] - [https://nyhetsnotiser.se/ekonomi/merkels-eftertradare_- ecb-s...](https://nyhetsnotiser.se/ekonomi/merkels-eftertradare_-ecb-skapar- problem-for-smasparare/1201918)

[1] - [https://nyhetsnotiser.se/arkiv/](https://nyhetsnotiser.se/arkiv/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent, clean minimalist UI that seems to work without JavaScript on first recce - unlike some of the projects showcased here.

Just the thing for my text browser.

Bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER10> Tried to create an account. When I try the activation link, it gives me a 500. When I try to login, it sends me back to the login page.

Requested a password reset. Reset my password. Login page still sends me back to the login page every time I try to log in.

Ha! Figured it out! I cannot login with my email. Need to use my "username". That is an unusual choice.

Which tech stack did you build this with?

<comment><AUTHOR> > When I try the activation link, it gives me a 500

That should not be happening I'll have to look into it.

> Which tech stack did you build this with?

It's Django with registration powered by Django registration.

Django registration: [https://django- registration.readthedocs.io/en/3.0.1/](https://django- registration.readthedocs.io/en/3.0.1/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks interesting, but I have a question: who provides the titles and who (if anyone) can edit them?

I ask because one of the top news is "Facebook launches _it 's_ own currency" (instead of "its") which I find a bit grating/unprofessional.

This, in turn, would make me question the sources.

Edit: typo

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that's a typo. I've fixed it manually in the database.

To answer your questions, the titles are provided by whoever submits the story to the site. It's up to that person whether to use a title from an article they found or come up with their own. There are some guidelines for that here: [https://news.hoxly.com/guidelines](https://news.hoxly.com/guidelines).

As for editing, there is no automatic way for anyone to edit a title once it has been submitted (I did have an idea for allowing people to submit alternative titles and vote on them but never got around to it). Obviously under special circumstances someone with access to the database can edit them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What stack do you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's Django running on AWS Lambda. The frontend is done in Bootstrap MD. No other JS besides the Bootstrap stuff and some handwritten.

Django: [https://www.djangoproject.com/](https://www.djangoproject.com/)

Bootstrap MD: [https://mdbootstrap.com/](https://mdbootstrap.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love the idea and execution! How do you deal with repetitious fact/links being added to an article?

good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think having the same fact submitted multiple times from different sources is necessarily a problem. The voting mechanism on the facts should cause the version of the fact with the most reputable source to rise to the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love the idea!

Would be cool if you supported left and right arrow keys to quick navigate to next / prev article

And because there's not that much content you could probably preload it

</comment><comment><USER15> Love this idea, and the implementation. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very nice! Perhaps you can join forces with HN. I'd love to see this idea implemented here.

By the way, would HN allow bots to post summaries?

<comment><USER17> Someone made a bot to post automated summaries from their site a while back and quickly got told to stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Have you considered adding categories?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been thinking a lot about how to implement a categories type feature. Right now the closest thing is "Filters" which allow you to basically follow keywords and customize your homepage based on what text appears in the headlines. Kinda like Google News alerts.

Right now, I'm thinking maybe it would be good to add tags to stories which would reduce some of the problems with filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will you consider making the project open source?

<comment><USER20> if it were open source I would have submitted a fix for the alignment css issue. ;)

I don't see a good argument for NOT making it open source. The value of sites like this is not the code so much as the community that builds up around a particular instance of it (witness all the open source HN clones that don't detract from the value of HN at all).

Even if other folks created their own instances they'd still need to build up their own communities, which is fine, because, for example, we don't really want cute kitten posts here on HN but totally on a clone dedicated to cute animals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what the business model is?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read about the business model here: [https://news.hoxly.com/credits](https://news.hoxly.com/credits)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A feature idea: intentionally include fake news links or fake facts (that you verified are fake of course) and add them to the website as you see fit. This will hopefully reduce bots and ill-mannered actors.

<comment><USER23> This sounds like the tried and true method of defeating a schoolyard bully by punching yourself in the face before the bully can!</comment></comment>


Don't Plan to Get Rich from Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/06/10/dont-plan-to-get-rich-from-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> Getting rich is our goal. We are certainly not aiming for a modest outcome.

We are not an imitation of any other company out there, we are unique in many ways. We want to build the company up into a large solid company as quickly as possible. An employer people will want to work for, a place where people will be proud to work--and be paid well.

We are going to build the #1 company in the market, and maintain that position over time no matter what.

<comment><USER3> is it "Political Connector" you are talking about?

<comment><USER2> Yes, we are in stealth mode right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heh, yes, let me quit my job, forget about future earnings, and do a start-up so I can have modest returns in a niche industry.

I'm sorry, but I don't think that mentality is good advice for entrepreneurs. I'd rather reach for the top of Everest and even if I only get halfway there, it would still be better than conquering an anthill.

<comment><USER5> Well yes, that's terrible advice for an _entrepreneur_ who's very existence is inherent to the idea of starting a business, and making money.

It's wonderful advice for developers who's existence is inherent to developing software for people who need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you don't plan on getting rich (or whatever outcome you dream of) from your startup, then why are you doing it? If you want a modest outcome and to be your own boss, then start a small business. It kind of sounds like this guy failed at a couple startups and has just lost all faith in major startup success.

On another blog post on his site ([http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2009/09/22/why-luck-is-a- terrib...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2009/09/22/why-luck-is-a-terrible- marketing-plan-for-your-startup/)), I found this line:

 _"I know a handful of people – including myself – who have reached for the startup life. Each of us did it for one, maybe two startups (you can only do so many before you burn out). Not surprisingly, none of us "made it.""_

Are you kidding me? Most startups fail, but you have to keep trying. If you stop after 2 startup failures, then I don't think you have real entrepreneur spirit. You need to keep going until you get what you want, even if you have to start 50 startups. And if you keep going, you _will_ eventually get what you want, including riches. Guaranteed.

Luck isn't something that magically falls out of the sky and lands on you. Luck is a combination of opportunity and preparation.

As an entrepreneur, you need to have lofty goals. When you tell your friends and family what your goals are, you better get a response along the lines of "You're crazy, you should aim for something lower." That's a good thing. Aim high. Very high. Even if you don't get to your lofty goals, you will probably get much further than you would aiming for modest goals.

<comment><USER7> How is "starting a small business" different from a "startup"?

Isn't every startup a small business, by definition, until it gets big?

<comment><USER6> Not all small businesses dream of getting "big." In fact, very little do.

Different people have different definitions of a "startup." To me and (I think) to many others on HN, a "startup" is a business designed to scale dramatically. It's an _innovative_ company with high-growth potential.

The new corner coffee shop would be a small business but not a startup. The owner just wants to make a decent living.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fuck that, I plan to! In fact, having modest ambitions seems like a Really Bad Idea -- you'd give up too easily.

</comment><comment><USER9> I happen to agree quite a bit with the OP. As revenue from my startup grows, I see it as buying time back from consulting. This year it will buy about 3 months. Maybe next year it will be 6. Eventually I hope it to be 12+.

I'll never get rich, but eventually I'll be free to work solely on my startup without anyone else telling me what to do. No one will envy my car, but many will envy my lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER10> By silicon valley standards I think modest outcomes _can_ make you rich. Consider bootstrapping and selling for $5m...

I do agree with the article in the sense that you need to have a relatively concrete vision and execute on that, then iterate repeatedly to a more grandiose vision. There are so many kids out here with $ signs in their eyes imagining Facebook or Google success without realizing all the stepping stones along the path.

There are of course more capital-intensive businesses where it's either worth a $100m or nothing at all, but even those have to start with a focused vision. Operationally a $100m biotech startup probably looks a lot like a $5m SaaS startup.

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of a talk DHH made about making money online. One of the key take-aways for me was to stop aiming for the Fortune 500, and instead aim for the Fortune 5 million and work from there.

[http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier- hans...](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at- startup-school-08)

</comment><comment><USER12> Pretty much the plan (as I understand it) behind starting Fog Creek, right? Rather than starting a business to get rich, create yourself a place to pursue your own interests and get paid while doing it.

<comment><USER13> If people pursued this philosophy on a large scale, the economy would be far more stable, and its participants more contented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The post doesn't say anything about innovation which is the key part of technology entrepreneurship.

If one can't innovate and create something radically new and efficient, then yes, he should probably stick with traditional business models and limit his ambitions to small markets, slow growth and modest returns focusing on efficient execution.

And there's more to it. Good engineers could do _much_ better if they join an existing ambitious startup rather than if they convert to a small software workshop owners.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm, let's see...

If we really wanted to, we could make a very nice livelihood doing contract programming/consulting for let's say $100 per hour. That's roughly $200,000 per year. Not bad. Over 40 years, with compound interest, conservative investments, and a reasonable lifestyle, that adds up to, well a lot!

So why would anyone in that position take so much time away from earning to work on a side project, prototype, or startup? There could be many reasons, but the two biggest I can think of are:

\- We work on something that pays nothing now because we _have to_. We don't ever want to wonder what would have been if we didn't.

\- We invest time we can never get back in the _possibility_ of a big pay day. That may or may not ever happen, but unlike OP, this is one lottery we're willing to play because it's more than luck; we _do_ have significant influence on the outcome.

<comment><USER16> I understand your point but I also think that no startup will be truly successful unless you are working on the startup because you want to and love what you do, not just because you have to, or because you want to get rich.

<comment><USER17> For me, when I say I "have to" work on my startup, I'm really saying that it's what I want and love to do, and if I didn't do it, I'd spend my whole life wondering and regretting choosing the "safe" approach. The safe path will always be available in the future, as long as I keep my skills current, so why not live a little dangerously until I know for sure whether I'm good at it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Obligatory:<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

Although the author does makes some fine points like learning to run a startup by actually running your first one. This is so true for there are much more ways to fail such as co-founders!

</comment><comment><USER19> Micropreneurship???

Is this all turning into a joke? I think I'll apply for a job with BP.

</comment><comment><USER20> I appreciate the pragmatism from a "devil's advocate" point of view but think this is bad advice in general. What is an entrepreneur if not a visionary and eternal optimist.

</comment><comment><USER21> A great way to not build the next big thing is to say to yourself "we're not gonna build the next big thing."

</comment><comment><USER22> Sorry, I play to win.</comment>


Show HN: I made a full-text searchable archive of Kale's hackernewsletter - <AUTHOR> https://hnl-archive.gitlab.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to learn something about web scraping and elasticsearch so I made this little website.

It solves my need to revisit interesting stuff I read from this amazing newsletter and would otherwise not be able to find again. Maybe I'm not the only one who needs this?

There's still lots to do, but it's already usable.

I'd love to know what you think. :)

<comment><USER2> Ha, this is great - thanks for building this! I've been wanting to do more around my archive, but it is hard to find the time these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> :D Great. Glad you like it. If you have any ideas for improvement, just ask and I'll see what I can do. This is my first real side project in a long time and I'm a litte enthusiastic about it. ^^

<comment><USER2> Will do! When you get a chance please send me a email with your contact info so I can reach out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to convince anyone of anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/how-to-convince-anyone-of-anything/

<comment><USER2> You haven't convinced me.</comment>


Codecademy now has Python lessons - <AUTHOR> http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python

<comment><USER3> I still cannot read that name without my brain auto-correcting in the missing "a".

I wish they would change the name to something more distinct from Code Academy.

<comment><USER4> i've seen the name dozens of times, i've done a dozen or so lessons on their site to try it out, i've told people about it, and this is first i've realized this.

<comment><USER5> Amazing, I just noticed for the first time, makes you wonder

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So from what I understand Codecademy's long term monetization plans seem to be focused on being a middle man between new programmers and companies looking to hire [1].

But I'm curious how this is actually achieved. The key in such a system would be keeping users engaged in the site from the time they first start learning to the point that they are ready and qualified to get their first job. This is likely six months to a year of training (at the low end) and it can't just be 1)learn the basics of javascript 2)learn the basics of html css 3)learn the basics of python.

New programmers with an eye for getting to their first programming job asap are better off building a portfolio that shows that they can work in the full stack and get stuff done. Or alternatively with in the confines of Codecademy if you're not going to have a deep portfolio, showing a mastery of the full stack with deep knowledge or maybe one platform (say deep understanding of javascript and the fundamentals of CS).

I'm curious how Codecademy plans to bridge this divid or if they have other plans in mind (which they probably aren't as willing to share with the masses)

[1] <http://www.quora.com/How-will-Codecademy-monetize>

<comment><USER7> Have you looked at the Code Year track? The last challenge before the start of the Python course and following a flurry of jQuery challenges is a project aimed at demonstrating programming prowess attained up until that point [1]. It seems like the perfect place to start to "build a portfolio" as you say. It's also at a great point in the track since people should be very comfortable with a stack like html/css, js, jQuery.

It's easy for us experienced folk to say "forget that rubbish, build a portfolio" but that argument quickly falls apart in the context of teaching people who have no idea what programming even is and who want to explore it more. As much as I would love to have sat down at the age of 14, looked at a computer, and started pumping out concurrent, distributed Ruby web servers, it doesn't happen that way. You really do have to start from the basics, poking and prodding, until you can actually build anything worthwhile.

[1] [http://www.codecademy.com/courses/web-beginner- en-R7w8I/0?cu...](http://www.codecademy.com/courses/web-beginner- en-R7w8I/0?curriculum_id=4f4bdd96848740000300026a#!/exercises/0)

<comment><USER6> I haven't and that is great to know. I guess that was part of my question: How does Codecademy attack the balance that hiring companies want to see when it comes to technical knowledge and experience building real things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The original link points to a non-official course that is still in beta testing.

Here is the link to the official Python track: <http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python>

EDIT: all better now!

<comment><USER9> Is the site broken currently? I can't see the actual exercise.

<comment><USER8> Nope, it's up. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER9> I tried with both Firefox Aurora 16.0a2 and Google Chrome 21. I'll check again after going home. This is what I see btw: <http://i.imgur.com/8VBLS.png>

<comment><USER10> Same problem here, with Opera 12 and IE9.

Edit: Got it to work, it was the firewall blocking something.

<comment><USER8> Glad to hear it; thanks for circling back. what_ever, were you able to have better luck later?

<comment><USER9> Ah, we do have a firewall at work which is pretty aggressive. Didn't get time to check it out yesterday at home. Will do so today. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been increasing my intention to learn Python for awhile now, this may just lower the barrier enough to be my tipping point.

<comment><USER12> I like that phrase: "increasing my intention" -- :)

Is that like "reducing the duration of my procrastination"

<comment><USER11> Yes :) How about "increasing the priority of this spare-time goal relative to other spare-time goals"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm very excited by this, but also VERY skeptical. I was using Codecademy for months to learn Javascript, HTML and CSS but recently stopped because the course quality was getting very poor. It seems like they spent a lot of time developing the first 1-2 months of lessons, and then started winging it from there.

<comment><USER14> I have to agree there. I got to a certain point and quit because I _had_ to go to the help forums for each question. There are certain problems that only accept one solution even though there are multiple paths. For example, the isOdd and !isEven problem. I wrote down isEven and !isOdd, but it would only accept the opposite of that. Same result, but only one gets you a passing grade.

I thought I left the guessing what the teacher was looking for behind when I finished college philosophy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just finished Udacity's CS101 (Python). I've been thinking of taking a few more Udacity courses.

Anyone with experience with both -- Udacity and Codecademy -- recommend either one over the other?

<comment><USER16> Can you elaborate on your experience with Udacity?

I've taken the Codecademy javascript course, and while I came out of it with the absolute basic fundamentals, enough to where I could play around with the language myself, I wish they'd gone over a bit more of the theory behind the code. At times I felt as if I was simply going through the motions to get to the next challenge. I thought Codecademy was just a bit too simple, which is why I'm interested in the Udacity courses. Still a great starting point.

<comment><USER17> I went through Udacity CS212 and thought it was great. I have to say, I already knew some python, so I'm not a total beginner, but it was presented in nice bite sized pieces so you can do a little every day (which is my preferred method of learning).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Opening Lesson 1, Variables and Data Types ([http://www.codecademy.com/courses/introduction-to- python-6We...](http://www.codecademy.com/courses/introduction-to- python-6WeG3/0?curriculum_id=4f89dab3d788890003000096)) gives me empty content (decorated, but without content inside).

EDIT: I'm using Chrome in Win7.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain how this works? Looks like the page loads socket.io - <USER2> Python running in a sandbox on a server?

<comment><USER20> blog post coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So excited about the Python courses! Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER22> Only problem is, that I am experiencing an 500 Error, when trying to resume "Taking a Vacation" Pt 2.

[http://www.codecademy.com/de/courses/python- beginner-P5YtY/1...](http://www.codecademy.com/de/courses/python- beginner-P5YtY/1?curriculum_id=4f89dab3d788890003000096)

No idea why.

<comment><USER23> I got a 500 error on lesson 1 of unit 1, i.e. I made it all of 0% of the way through. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most excellent, Ted!!

I heart Python. (I'm learning it as my first language). I've already passed much of what they are going through (at least in these introductory lessons), but I am super happy to have another resource to help me learn the language. Thanks for the post!

</comment><comment><USER25> awesome! python is my first language and it lays a great foundation for picking up other languages like javascript and go, both which I'm learning now. Its exciting to see codecademy make python more accessible to beginners.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice stuff, I've tried to get a few friends to try python and this is a great way to get them started.

A bit sad it is only Python 2 though. Some of the stuff thought is not compatible with Python 3.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's buggy in Firefox, so I can't app tab it with the rest of my everyday tabs. A little disappointing, but no biggie.

<comment><USER28> can you email us about the bugs? would love to investigate - contact (at) codecademy (dot) com.

<comment><USER27> Sent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> are there more lessons past the basic addition stuff? (oh, I see that there are, but for whatever reason it didn't take me to them automatically)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is Ruby/Rails coming too?</comment>


The H-Bombs in Turkey - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-h-bombs-in-turkey <comment><USER2> While Turkey has conflicts with some groups who want to grab part of the land or overthrow the government, they are FWIW a useful ally in the region because they have mostly-friendly dealings with UAE, Saudis, Iran, parts of Africa and also Israel. The degree of diplomacy varies, but there aren't many NATO members in that region who are as compatible when it comes to diplomatic ties with the region's powers. Russia, unfortunately doesn't deal with Iran, Israel and the Saudis the same way.

Given their growing business ties and influence in the region, maybe China can be another powerful ally. Or India. It certainly would help to have more than one dependable ally there, but China, like Russia, is in a weird power-play game with the USA, Australia, etc. Russia is more biased than Turkey, and that says a lot since Turkey cannot be a neutral Switzerland type because of their borders and demographic, so they're less of an option.

Also, let's not forget that Turkey has better relations with some ex-USSR nation that have considerable natural resources, due to cultural heritage, but then again strained relations with most of the ex-USSR countries.

It's a mess, but that's world politics.

<comment><USER3> Turkey has the same advantages now that caused it to be the arguable center of the Western world for parts of the previous several centuries: it's simply wildly well-placed, geopolitically. Russia needs at least the presence of a relationship given its never-ending pursuit for warm water ports. Europe realizes that, as the sole overland route to the Middle East (and by extension, all of Asia) without going through Russia, that Turkey is key to both the economic and territorial security of the continent. The Middle Eastern nations recognize that Turkey is a nation with enough Islam in its identity that they are more able to sell their populaces on explicit cooperation, and due to Turkey's importance geopolitically, can be a convenient partner that allows them some interaction with the West (that doesn't need to be sold or hidden to their population). Finally, so long as the US continues to have ambitions in the Middle East or in counterbalancing against Russia, Turkey will remain important because of all of the previously listed reasons.

Once you start paying attention to geopolitics, it becomes fascinating. It helps explain a huge slice of Russian behavior that seems far less logical at first glance, as well as why certain parts of the world seem to be perennial hotbeds of conflict, no matter the prevailing rulers or ideologies.

<comment><USER4> This doesn't explain why you need obsolete nuclear warheads sitting 70km from ISIS. Maybe it's a honeypot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm skeptical that the PALs are as easy to bypass as this article says. It's possible that the arming code includes critical information necessary to properly detonate the bomb, such as timing info for firing the various detonators. Even if it doesn't, the critical PAL hardware is deep inside the bomb, requiring the bomb to be disassembled to get to it, then reassembled afterwards, and that's not quite as easy as swapping out your car's spark plugs.

<comment><USER6> So, the PALs can be completely disabled at the pull of a plunger. This plunger takes <1s to pull and I'm sure that 1 of those soldiers on base could pull it. Once this happens, the bomb is no longer immediately valuable as it has to be remanufactured.

There is also a tamper-resistant membrane that prevents individuals from getting to the fissile material, and nuclear payload. This could render the bombs likely free of design information. In fact, it turns out these bombs have a ton of conventional explosives inside of them as well and adjusting the timing could make harvesting the fissile material a pain in the ass.

Design: [http://i.imgur.com/tv7JVXC.png](http://i.imgur.com/tv7JVXC.png)

Source: [http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/060315-slides-...](http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/060315-slides- bellovin.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Interesting reading. Thank you for posting that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Command and Control [1] is highly recommended, and discusses this very situation, along with the always/never constraints on nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Weapons should Always go off when used legitimately, and Never go off when not authorized.

Before reading this I had never really thought through the idea of fail-safe, especially that it has an implicit opposite: fail-deadly.

1\. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#navbar)

</comment><comment><USER9> While still concerning, they really buried a key detail: "About two thousand U.S. military personnel remain stationed there."

<comment><USER7> Turkey has the largest standing army in the region. 600K or so. Those 2000 troops wouldn't last long enough to get the weapons out.

<comment><USER10> I think you're vastly underestimating 1st world intelligence capabilities. By the time anyone is brainstorming how exactly they want to take the base the big players in NATO already have guys sitting in jets idling on the taxiway, an aircraft carrier is taking a hard turn into the wind and an aide is popping popcorn and cracking a beer so Mr. Putin can enjoy the spectacle.

When nukes are involved things get taken very seriously. Nobody wants to be the guy who thought it would all blow over and got it wrong.

<comment><USER7> Then how come they are still there?

If what you write is true they should have had clear warning about that coup attempt. It might have succeeded.

<comment><USER11> Unless this is exactly what they planned.

<comment><USER7> That could be but there is absolutely zero evidence for that, it appears that they were caught flat-footed, the (Turkish) base commander was arrested.

<comment><USER12> Let's see:

* there's a list of 6000 people to be arrested, military and non-military, which must have existed before

* offensive on the ground took place at a time when they must have known Erdogan wasn't there

* they could have shot down his plane with F16s, but didn't

* the coup was generally terribly organized, in a country where the military certainly knows how to do it

* Erdogan is known to be a mischievous POS

Many people are sceptical and for good reasons.

<comment><USER7> If find that a _more_ worrisome scenario than a failed coup. The previous (successful) coups in Turkey ended with the military handing back power as soon as it was feasible and they have traditionally only done this to safeguard Turkey as a secular state.

Going with your suggestion would indicate that this safeguard no longer exists.

<comment><USER13> > safeguard Turkey as a secular state

In '61 and '97\. Go to turkish leftists, ask what happened in 1980.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing most people don't hear in the traditional American story about the Cuban Missle Crisis is that we put our weapons close to Russia (in Turkey) before they put any weapons close to us.

<comment><USER5> Really? I thought that Kennedy's secret agreement to trade the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba was the standard ending to the story.

<comment><USER14> I don't recall ever hearing that.

<comment><USER15> [http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Cuban- Missile-C...](http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Cuban-Missile- Crisis.aspx)

> No one was sure how Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would respond to the > naval blockade and U.S. demands. But the leaders of both superpowers > recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and publicly agreed > to a deal in which the Soviets would dismantle the weapon sites in exchange > for a pledge from the United States not to invade Cuba. In a separate deal, > which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States > also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets > removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their > military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not.

[http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile- crisis](http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis)

> During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union > engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 > over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 > miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John > Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, > explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it > clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize > this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people > feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was > avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's > (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. > promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. > missiles from Turkey.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the- real...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban- missile-crisis/309190/)

> Once that was straightened out, Kennedy himself declared repeatedly that the > Jupiter missiles were "the same" as the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Rusk, in > discussing the Soviet motivation for sending missiles to Cuba, cited CIA > Director John McCone's view that Khrushchev "knows that we have a > substantial nuclear superiority … He also knows that we don't really live > under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under > fear of ours. Also, we have nuclear weapons nearby, in Turkey." The chairman > of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, had already acknowledged that > the Soviets' primary purpose in installing missiles in Cuba was "to > supplement their rather defective ICBM system."

> if the administration's domestic political priorities alone dictated the > removal of the Cuban missiles, a solution to Kennedy's problem would have > seemed pretty obvious: instead of a public ultimatum demanding that the > Soviets withdraw their missiles from Cuba, a private agreement between the > superpowers to remove both Moscow's missiles in Cuba and Washington's > missiles in Turkey. (Recall that the Kennedy administration discovered the > missiles on October 16, but only announced its discovery to the American > public and the Soviets and issued its ultimatum on the 22nd.)

These are all US-based sources so I'm not sure what gave you that impression unless you only heard about it in the 60s/70s when it was embargoed/classified?

<comment><USER14> I don't recall any of my social studies books or any reading I did as a high school student in the 80s mentioning anything other than "we found missle sites being built in cuba and it led to a crisis".

<comment><USER15> Well, it wasn't declassified until 1988 so it wouldn't have been included in anything written before that year.

<comment><USER14> I must have misunderstood what you meant by "These are all US-based sources so I'm not sure what gave you that impression unless you only heard about it in the 60s/70s when it was embargoed/classified? "

<comment><USER15> I made a mistake when writing a post quickly. I really should have just done a range (i.e. 1963-88).

<comment><USER14> No, what I mean was, I did most of my "history learning" about the Cuban Missle Crisis from my parents (my dad lived in florida at the time), and then in high school ( _just_ before the documents were declassified). I didn't really look back at the incident until fairly recently (IIRC while reading one of Rhodes's books about atomic weapons) and it was then that I learned about the Turkey missles. I don't think most people who heard about CMC are even aware (post declassification) that we had missles there. Knowing about those missles changed my opinion about the CMC a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >the "dial-a-yield" of the B-61 bombs at Incirlik can be adjusted from 0.3 kilotons to as many as a hundred and seventy kilotons.

Wow that's quite a range. I wonder if it's the hydrogen volume adjusted to determine the yield.

<comment><USER17> The fuel for the large majority of the fusion energy in a thermonuclear weapon is lithium deuteride, a solid. But here's some theories now how this works, one of which is changing the amount of tritium gas in the primary; but note that the primary (no pun intended) purpose of the tritium in the primary is to boost fission output through neutron release

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

<comment><USER16> I'm picturing an 8 position DIP switch on the side of the bomb and a bomb tech with a small flat blade screwdriver selecting ON ON ON ON OFF ON ON ON

lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there no US response to their base being isolated and restricted like that? Or just no direct military response? They've effectively been taken hostage from the sound of this article.

</comment><comment><USER19> Quote "...it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them. "

What kind of aircraft would be that?

<comment><USER20> >it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them.

This is a lie. B-61's mount on to any NATO MIL-STD-8591 hard point. Any F-15, F-18 can mount and fire B61's without any modification.

<comment><USER21> My take was the author meant no aircraft with the range to drop them on Russian targets.

The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.

<comment><USER22> If that is what the author meant, that is what the author should have said. "Equipped to deliver" pretty clearly means no aircraft that can load the bomb.

At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.

<comment><USER23> i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.

new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means _getting it there_ , as in parcel delivery.

i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away. whether you can put the package on the truck does not imply any fitness for delivery.

<comment><USER22> > i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair > use of 'equipped to deliver'.

So "the target" is always and forever Russia, and mainland Russia at that? No, the generic statement "equipped to deliver" cannot be interpreted with respect to a particular use case among many. It means "capable of loading the weapon and striking _a_ target".

> new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay > person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.

Any aircraft capable of carrying air-to-ground ordinance can "get it there", for some set of "it"s.

> i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to > deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away.

By your definition no truck is "equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away", yet trucks do this every day. You are adding a bunch of hidden assumptions about what "equipped" means, many of which aren't valid.

<comment><USER23> i think this level of pedantry is pretty unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Although Incirlik probably has more nuclear weapons than any other nato > base, it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver > them

What the hell is the point of that?

</comment><comment><USER25> Why did not they think of this while facilitating coup guys?

<comment><USER25> Thanks for down voting. Well fact is fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I understand that stationing nuclear weapons is a good way to ensure your allies of your support in case of an attack, but having them stationed anywhere in the Middle East in these chaotic times sounds completely nuts to me.

You can't know who will be in power in any of these countries in one year from now and what they'll do.

The Turkish military is probably strong enough to easily overpower the US soldiers stationed at that base. What if they decide to simply take the nuclear weapons by force?

Edit: The Germans have removed their NATO forces from Turkey some time ago (Turkey protested against that) and I believe that this is due to them viewing the situation in Turkey as extremely unstable.

They don't want to get caught in a situation where they might have to go to war to protect a government that acts unpredictable. (meaning: they might incite the war themselves)

First thing the Turks did when they shot down the Russian plane was to call for article 5 of the NATO treaty! (collective defence against an attacker)

<comment><USER27> It would be a declaration of war on the US and NATO.

I think you may be underestimating the results of that attempt to take the nukes by force. Syria, Libya and Iraq are representative of what would happen to Turkey if they did that. The US is vindictive, and tends to hold a grudge for a long time - and it behaves that way on subtle matters, this would be 10x. The US would proceed to do everything possible for the next two decades to destroy Turkey and turn it into a third world basket-case, and it wouldn't care about the fall-out from doing so.

<comment><USER26> I'm sure that you are correct. But that doesn't solve the problem what we'll do once they have the nuclear weapons.

Turkey is no North Korea, they have strong ties to many governments and are in a strategically central position.

On top of that they have a lot of open disputes with many countries around them and they are known to act militaristically.

<comment><USER28> It's the mosques calling for jihad we should be paying attention to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists Waited Two and a Half Years to See Whether Bacteria Can Eat Rock - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/scientists-waited-two-and-a-half-years-to-see-whether-bacteria-can-eat-rock/ <comment><USER2> Original paper: Napieralski, S., Buss H., Brantley S., Lee S., Xu, H. and Roden, E (2020). "Microbial chemolithotrophy mediates oxidative weathering of granitic bedrock." _PNAS_ 116 (52) 26394-26401; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909970117.

PDF: [https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/52/26394.full.pdf?casa...](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/52/26394.full.pdf?casa_token=11TLH4jWjpwAAAAA:mkryEkwF8HYDUjnzftrI70FPccyiSh8dtQuqiYW9wpjvf1Zx4A2niSNiBORXJAvOd8GGwuMJoZEneJYI) (works, even though it seems like it shouldn't...)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exciting experimental evidence for the concept of lithotrophy [0]; while we knew about the mechanisms of action for a while, and have previously found rock-eating microbes within otherwise-unliving rocks, this experiment shows us that these microbes are part of the circle of life.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> Bacteria are also used in mining to refine the ore: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioleaching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioleaching)

</comment><comment><USER5> Only 2.5 yrs? This reminds of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment)

</comment><comment><USER6> Stop treating the Earth like dirt!

More muck-racking journalism from Scientific American:

Would You Like a Side of Dirt with That?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/would-you-like- si...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/would-you-like-side-dirt- eating-soil/)

Pay Dirt: Martian Soil Fit for Earthly Life

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/martian-soil- fit-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/martian-soil-fit-for- earthly-life/)

Eating Dirt: The Benefits of Being (Relatively) Filthy

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/eating- dir...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/eating-dirt-the- benefits-of-being-relatively-filthy/)

Dirt Doesn't Smell like Dirt

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/dirt- does...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/dirt-doesnt-smell- like-dirt/)

Why Researchers Need Better Space Dirt

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why- researchers-n...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-researchers- need-better-space-dirt/)

Secrets of Life in the Soil

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secrets-of- life-i...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secrets-of-life-in-the- soil/)

How Dirt Cleans Water

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dirt- cleans-w...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dirt-cleans- water/)

Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion- an...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and- nutrition-loss/)

How Dirt Can Clean the Air

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dirt-can- clea...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dirt-can-clean-the- air/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Jesus, this is a bad article. It's filled with several very bad attempts at humor and buries the lede but my main problem is that it's just wrong.

"there is an enduring mystery to dirt: where does it come from?", "Mystery of dirt's origins is a thorny experimental problem"

Why would they try to pretend nobody knows where soil comes from!? Did they not even bother to Google the word "soil"? "Soil formation" is the third heading on Wikipedia. There's an entire field dedicated to soil formation: pedogenesis! Soil science isn't some new start-up field where everything's unknown - soil scientists can give you a pretty damned good estimate of not only where soil comes from but how many nutrients it will have over time, what microbes are in it, what will happen to the soil over time, etc etc.

Unfortunately this kind of thing seems to be par for the course for SciAm. A writer picks out some random new research and writes about it as if it's groundbreaking. Unfortunately, 99.5% of research isn't the discovery of DNA, it's "we tested if bacteria A has more xyz than bacteria B and the difference was not statistically significant."

I'm reminded of [https://xkcd.com/683/](https://xkcd.com/683/)

<comment><USER8> Logically, all xkcd references in comments resolve to [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/) including this one.

<comment><USER9> Nice. Did you just come up with that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR- yes it can.

"The minerals incubated with microbes appeared ragged or pitted — as if they had been dipped in acid, not bacteria — after their 864-day incubation. The sterile control minerals, by contrast, retained sharp, smooth edges."

</comment><comment><USER11> misleading title, they did not wait, wait means something completely different

they ground the rock up, placed it in a tube, put it in a drawer, then took it out two years later and performed some measurements

the minerals turned out to be less jagged than sterile minerals kept for the same amount of time. The scientists concluded that the bacteria ate the rock by stripping electrons.

Now a possible alternative explanation (not explored by the journalist) is that the bacteria lived off the remaining organic materials in the rock and the byproduct of their life were substances that dulled the crystals.

<comment><USER12> The alternative explanation is that they mined the rock for food? That's just as interesting.

<comment><USER2> I think that's actually the result!

I read @glofish's proposal as suggesting that bacterial excretions(?) indiscriminately dissolve the rock.

The paper (linked above) does try to address this in a few ways. Iron, the putative energy source, is specifically concentrated on the surface of the inoculated samples--but other metals aren't. The bacteria are also mostly found on the mineral edges. They discuss this near Figure 5/6 and in the supplement.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your personal development? - <AUTHOR>

How are you keeping track of the skills you want to develop?  How are you maintaining skills you don't get to use often?  Personally I have a MoinMoin wiki set up in a Dropbox folder.  I try things in VMWare on my laptop as I don't have reliable internet access at the moment. <comment><USER2> Hey that sounds like a good idea. Using a personal wiki I mean - that had not occurred to me.

A common problem I face, especially so because I am self-employed, is that at any moment there are many things I could do to better myself. Which one do I choose? I don't always make the best choices. Often I do nothing at all because I am overwhelmed.

<comment><USER3> Thats more a wetware problem, than a software :)

<comment><USER2> A friend of mine just today bought me a pack of 3 by 5 notecards and a ball point pen.

It's not like I don't know what my priorities are, but it's intractible to hold on to them all mentally. Writing them down means that I can, temporarily, forget some of them.

<comment><USER3> That's great Michael. If that's any help for you:

1\. i'm using task/todo list for such things.

2\. In David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" there is whole chapter or more which is i think about the problem you metioned (he names this "open loops" \- problems you must solve but don't want to have it constantly in your mind but manage them in some way using external memory to not clutter mind and not forget them).

Probably you heard about this book because it's popular but i think it's worth mentioning, it's the case when popularity comes with reason before not after ;)

<comment><USER2> I've read Allen's book, but it was many years ago. I'll read it again soon.

There's more I'd like to say, but I'd like to get something done tonight. :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> URL aggregators online/offline are also good for keeping resources in one place, you can use tags for fast search.

It's imporant to find one which can export data to "human format" to convert it later fe. when service is going to be shutdown or you need other functions.</comment>


Regretsy Issue Resolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2011/12/regretsy-issue-resolution/

<comment><USER3> When will Paypal and other companies that take this "under no circumstances say anything with substance" tack to PR learn that it's utterly counter- productive? Anyone who would be motivated to read the blog post had first read regretsy's side of the story, wherein Paypal comes across looking petty, immature, and unprofessional. None of that is addressed by this blog post, so the only takeaway for readers is that your only recourse if Paypal seizes your money is to raise a giant stink about it and cause them another PR headache?

All they had to say was,

"Our representative was enforcing our policy, but unfortunately did so in a way that we didn't intend, and without the respect and courtesy we expect. It can be easy for someone who spends their day dealing with scammers to see wrongdoing where there is none, and we're sorry that happened here. Regardless, scammer or not, we expect all of our representatives to deal with customers courteously and professionally, and will redouble our efforts to ensure that happens in the future. We sincerely apologize to regretsy and offer our commitment to improve. We would like to assure both regretsy and the community at large that customers remain our priority, and we will do everything in our power to earn your patronage."

That's it. An honest, humble, apology, and you wouldn't have people running around the Internet saying Paypal are a bunch of childish crooks.

<comment><USER4> Their statement actually isn't nearly as bad as you imply. They mention that there was a problem, that they handled it incorrectly, and that they were multiple conflicting factors associated. They even admit at the end (again) that they were wrong. It's short, sweet, and to the point. I think on the scale of 1 to horrible, this is pretty far from horrible.

<comment><USER5> I'd just like to point out the docs for using donate buttons ([https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin?cmd=_render- content&co...](https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin?cmd=_render- content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_donation_buttons&bn_r=o)) makes no mention of "clear guidelines for any business that uses PayPal to accept donations"

i couldn't come up with those guidelines on a paypal search. so, it seems pretty horrible to me. It's fine to have rules, it's horrible to have secret rules you don't tell people about. They don't ask for documentation of non- profit status, or any of that. Just, here's a button! good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _"For background, we have clear guidelines for any business that uses PayPal > to accept donations."_

That doesn't appear to be true. This post lays out the actual content of the relative PayPal policies:

[http://thegreengeeks.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/why-paypal- is-...](http://thegreengeeks.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/why-paypal-is-wrong- regarding-regretsy-according-to-their-own-policies/)

and assuming the screenshots are not doctored, those policies do not seem to be particularly clear, nor do they say that documentation is required other than for officially registered non-profits.

</comment><comment><USER7> So Regretsy gets a (potentially) reasonable human to look at their case only after making a media fuss? This is pretty troubling, as for every Regretsy out there, there are many more smaller fish who will continue to get quietly screwed, simply because they cannot attract the attention of the media in the same manner.

<comment><USER8> This has always been the case with PayPal. They deliberately make it as hard as possible to actually contact a real human, and then act all surprised if the victim manages to get enough publicity to get past the barriers.

[http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/06/9252...](http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/06/9252348-paypal- says-our-bad-on-regretsy-charity-scandal)

PayPal's business model seems to be based off of Kafka's novel _The Trial_.

<comment><USER9> Log in to PayPal; scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Contact Us"; click "Call Us"; dial the phone number; when prompted, enter the number on the website; when asked why you want to call them, say you wish to speak with an operator; when they ask you why you want to speak to an operator, tell them you just want to speak to an operator; wait a few (maybe at most ten) minutes: congratulations, you are now speaking with an actual person; note: if this person cannot help you, they can usually find someone who can. Calling PayPal is trivial, and they do not in any way make it even remotely hard to "actually contact a real human".

<comment><USER10> > note: if this person cannot help you, they can usually find someone who can

Not according to <http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0>. Specifically:

> At this point, I asked to speak to a supervisor and was told that "No one > above me will talk to you. No one at my level ever makes phone calls. We're > only doing this to help you."

<comment><USER9> That entire conversation description is so over-the-top that it is difficult to take any of the details seriously... that said, I'd be very interested to know if they tried simply calling back and asking to speak to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great, it was resolved once it was picked up by some media and someone high up at PayPal realized it was an issue. Nothing about the bad customer service, nothing admitting to any kind of wrong-doing - just "we are truly sorry that it happened"

Being sorry it happened and working towards preventing it from happening in the future are two very separate things, and PayPal is only saying the first. Can someone take these guys out already (Stripe?)

<comment><USER12> I've used stripe and it's definitely a breath of fresh air, but as I understand it, most people won't bother switching away from paypal to something without international support. Stripe's working on that: <https://stripe.com/global> but otherwise there isn't a good international alternative to paypal at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why, on the blog, does the Director of Communications at paypal use a headshot that looks like he's trying to stare you down before killing you? Oh wait.

<comment><USER14> For more than a couple seconds, I was confused as to why they had a picture of an angry Mr. Bean attached to the post.

<comment><USER15> I had the same confusion too initially lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
       Last night we became aware of an issue

lol, so which big media company contacted y'all for an interview?

I guess this is going to be the future of getting PayPal to do the right thing - you have to make it to the top of a social network somehow to embarrass them.

PayPal has promoted tipjars for over a decade now, this was just stupid.

<comment><USER17> You know, that is exactly the point here, isn't it? _Why wasn't PayPal already aware of it?_ Clearly, the answer is simple: why should they be? Until somebody important gets in touch with somebody important, nothing has happened.

<comment><USER18> Paypal _was_ aware of it, as they claim its written into their policy.

They should stop worrying about the 'important people' and just simply 'do the right thing'. Start with retraining the customer service people to not be belligerent jerks. Next if you're going to stand behind some regulation to monitor accounts, staff it appropriately so innocent people don't get randomly locked out of access to their _own_ money for 6 months.

<comment><USER17> No, no, I mean this guy claims that PayPal _was not aware that Regretsy was having troubles with PayPal_. Think about that. Think about the utter failure of management and customer service that that concept implies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a really amazingly tone-deaf response. We may only hope that somebody like the Daily Show takes them properly to task for this.

<comment><USER20> It really isn't that bad, under the circumstances. They did some things right:

1) Acknowledge a problem in a timely manner (assuming the really did only get escalation one day ago) 2) Provide specific information on what is being done to fix the problem (working w/account holder, making a donation as a mea culpa) 3) Explain limitations on resolution (legitimate constraints on public comment for privacy-protected matter)

What wasn't done well was:

a) letting it get this far to begin with b) failing to explain how future problems will be prevented by policy changes

<comment><USER21> I'm really only seeing damage control as Paypal's motivation behind this statement on their blog.

I wonder how many other folks have had the same problems with Paypal's inconsistent application of their policy (when not just outright obstruction), who don't have the same resources to make noise as the woman running Regresty. And whether they will get similar resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Paypal would have been better off without this message.

I read the Regretsy story yesterday, didn't think much of it - typical Paypal customer service, I've read those stories 1000 times. Now that I know it got someone's attention at Paypal that is "important" and could have done "right" in one way or another but they blew it.

At very least they could have refunded them their transactions fees! Paypal now looks worse in my mind than if they would have said nothing.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'll believe it when I hear it from Regretsy...according to their blog (<http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/06/breaking-news/>), they know as much about the resolution as we do...

<comment><USER10> This is almost as disturbing to me as the original announcement—make a prominent post saying that you're working on the problem, let it get lots of attention, and then (apparently) ignore the issue. Well, it didn't work very well for AirBnB ([http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb- nightmare...](http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare-no- end-in-sight.html)), and hopefully it won't work for Paypal, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's a suggestion to their Director of Communications: communicate with a smiling face. Perma-frowns only work on people purchasing stock trading bots or MiGs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Moral of the story is: when wronged, make noise, and make it well.

</comment><comment><USER26> wow, unbelievable. I posted a comment to thepaypalblog.com and I've had two total strangers tell me that my email address is appearing in the comment input fields when they go to comment! They've both said that other people's details are also appearing.

</comment><comment><USER27> At the very least, regretsy gets a donation to help their cause. Which, despite all the problems paypal caused, is one good thing to come out of all this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately for them, I closed my PayPal account last night. One too many stories like this for me, thankyouverymuch. If I ever need them again to buy something I'll purchase without logging in, anonymously, like most people do, manually entering my credit card info. I'll pay that price.

<comment><USER28> Which will do nothing.

Unless you're someone who's using PayPal to collect money, there's remarkably little reason for them to care if you're logging into an account to pay by credit card, or paying 'anonymously' by credit card without logging in.

If you want any change from PayPal then you need to persuade people to stop accepting money through it, since that's the only way you impact their ability to collect fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apparently now they're refusing comments on their blog because theres so much negative backlash.

</comment><comment><USER29> how could a serious pr department attach that photo to any statement?

</comment><comment><USER30> if they want to make real impact, they should be changing their policies...not just releasing the funds in this one single case.

if the only way to get good customer service is to get millions of people to support you, then you aren't doing it right

</comment><comment><USER31> Great! You need to get on the first page of HN to get an "Issue Resolution". Everybody else, die in hell.

</comment><comment><USER32> let us all acknowledge that HN front page is the new, uncorrupted BBB - <USER2> gets shit done.

</comment><comment><USER33> He looks like a really nice guy.

</comment><comment><USER34> I really like this from PayPal. They have nipped the issue in the bud. They are making a donation to boot.

It seems to me that both Regretsy and PayPal are at fault. Regretsy for using a button with implications they didn't realise. Paypal for not making these issues clear and what looks like some shocking customer support. I hope PayPal look into the customer support issue but that aside the issue is resolved. PayPal have publically admitted fault and are taking steps to correct it. Good on them.

PayPal gets a lot of bad press. I do feel though if you look at the quantity of transactions they deal with and the amount of rules and regulations they have to work with they are doing an alright job. The could improve in areas but lets face it.. what big company couldn't.

<comment><USER18> How long have you worked for PayPal?

<comment><USER34> Oh someone posts an unbiased comment against PayPal.. must be working for them! It is the 'in thing' to bash PayPal at the moment. Just because you take a sensible view doesn't make you an employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am somewhat mystified by the level of paypal hate going on here. The major issue here was bad customer service (something that google, and even say Mojang, for example, seem to get away with quite easily).

A big problem here is people acting with good intentions and believing that somehow that should be a shield to the world. Unfortunately, even the best intentions can't shield you from having to comply with business, taxation, and financial regulations. Make no mistake, regretsy was in the wrong here. Paypal was in the wrong here too, but mostly because they were rude and unhelpful in enforcing a legitimate policy enacting legal and regulatory requirements.

<comment><USER36> The backlash here is comparable to EA's banning of users from their single- player games, I would say. Shitty customer service is crappy, but the backlash is greater in proportion to the criticality of the asset in question. In Paypal's case, the asset is cash, which naturally flips the "fuck you guys" toggle in people in general a bit faster than, say, not being able to log into the Minecraft forums.

<comment><USER37> > not being able to log into the Minecraft forums

Ha, some of the anger I've seen from our users would make you think _we're_ stealing millions of $ from them when they have an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The Director of Communications needs a new headshot. I'm sure he's a swell dude, but his photo makes him look like he's about to pounce on you.

<comment><USER39> Don't worry about him. He's just directing communications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Moral of the story: get your issue frontpaged on HN or Reddit and someone will fix it

</comment><comment><USER41> I wish there was a way to assassinate a corporation.

<comment><USER42> <easierSaidThanDone>Build a better product and market your ass off!</easierSaidThanDone>

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > _"In this instance, we recognized our error and moved as swiftly as possible > to fix it."_ — eBay

I wonder what those defending eBay in the earlier thread will think of this.</comment>


Why do some Covid patients infect many others, but most don't spread it at all? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all <comment><USER2> > In addition to [reproduction number] R, scientists use a value called the > dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The > lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people.

SARS (2005): k ~= 0.16

MERS (2012): k ~= 0.25

Spanish Flu (1918): k ~= 1

Estimates of k for Covid-19 vary:

\- An earlier study in Hong Kong said k was slightly higher than for SARS or MERS.

\- Recent study [1] based on data outside China puts k ~= 0.1, which would mean 10% cases lead to 80% of the spread.

\- Lower k would explain why the virus didn't spread all around the world immediately, and why many infection clusters seem to clear on their own.

Large infection clusters are thought to appear due to aerosol transmission, in particular indoors, where the risk is 19 times higher according to another study [2].

1\. [https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67](https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67) 2\. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.28.20029272v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.28.20029272v2)

<comment><USER3> The indoor/outdoor transmission difference is still underreported.

It does make sense that the virus is more effective in a dank, windless environment, much like the environments in which horseshoe bats roost.

<comment><USER4> Yeah the media should really be drumming up "stop meeting your close ones indoors". It would directly prevent thousands of deaths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the fascinating and tragic aspects of tropical medicine that the current pandemic has illuminated is that understanding of emerging diseases is largely observational, incremental, and slow. The observational aspect in particular is mostly accidental and relies on either getting lucky enough to observe something or having a large enough pool of cases to look at. We literally cannot say anything with certainty about the course of the disease on a time scale longer than a year.

Does the disease produce immunity and how long might it last? Well, only as long as we have been able to observe a patent who has recovered. So, 6-7 months?

What are potential chronic complications that can result from the disease? We have little clue, because literally no one on Earth has had more than 6-7 months of medical history with this disease.

<comment><USER6> Just because we don't have direct evidence, doesn't mean we don't know anything. We can make educated guesses and talk about what is more or less likely. For example, it's less likely that immunity will last for 7 months, its more likely to last for a few years. For the majority of people who catch the virus and have a mild response to it, it's unlikely they will have long term negative health consequences. Just because we don't have concrete proof yet, doesn't mean that all possibilities are equally likely to happen.</comment></comment>


'Dancing Naked in the Mind Field' by Kary Mullis - <AUTHOR> http://csp.org/chrestomathy/dancing_naked.html

<comment><USER3> As books go, this one is a waste of trees. The book is made up of a series of more or less disjoint pieces. Some of them are right off the wall. He's an AIDs denier - a loaded term, but you get the idea. I vaguely recall one about him being passed out in a cabin for some period of time and a brown recluse spider returning night after night to dine on a festering sore.

Hard to know if Mullis is a gifted technician or a lucky wanker. Say, compare the way that Feynman writes about himself: Feynman is kind of amusing and matter-of-fact; this book is irritatingly self-conscious about being un- stereotypical, and the book gives no sense that his famous technique is other than a one-off.

I assume that he had very little to do with the production of the book - <USER2> would be kind of a bummer to think that such a smart guy would be such a douche.</comment>


Duncan Watts vs. Malcolm Gladwell:  Mathematician turned sociologist challenges "Tipping Point" idea. - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html?page=0%2C0

<comment><USER2> I think it greatly depends on the market rather or not influencer's have an impact. The average person isn't buying toothpaste becuase someone famous is, but they do drive escalades and hummers because they saw it done by "influencer's"

<comment><USER3> "The average person isn't buying toothpaste becuase someone famous is, but they do drive escalades and hummers because they saw it done by "influencer's"''

I think Watts' point is that the influencers are not part of some special core sect of mavens and connectors, but simply people within one or another social sphere who, for whatever reason, happen to get attention. It's more random that Gladwell suggests.

(I tried reading the book, but just didn't have the attention span and it went back to the library before I finished it. I think I skim-read about half of it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Watts book Six Degrees is pretty interesting to read. There's a lot of good material in it that will leave you with lots to think about. It's a bit dense in places and could have used a better ordering of the materials, but I'd still recommend the book.

</comment><comment><USER5> One thing Watts does not account for in his simulation ... in real life, influentials are disproportionately likely to be connected to other influentials.

And just empirically we can see the influentials do have an effect. No one can really deny the power of celebrity endorsements. Now what can be questioned, though, is just how many connections do you need before you can be considered an influential, and what magnitude is their influence? From Watt's experiment we can probably conclude that 40 is not enough to do a lot.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bit of an ego blow to those styling themselves as "influentials."

<comment><USER3> 'Bit of an ego blow to those styling themselves as "influentials."'

I wonder if Galdwell's conjecture gained traction because, deep down, most people really like to believe that some people are simply special.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Watts' claim that trend-spreading data doesn't show the influentials pattern certainly seems plausible. The article places naive emphasis on his models, but those can be tweaked any which way. The really impressive finding is his repeat of Milgram's degrees-of-separation experiment.

I was going to add the music-ranking experiment to this list, but on second thought that one (while interesting) doesn't address the influentials theory at all.</comment>


Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years? - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2012/01/31/why-has-andreessen-horowitz-raised-2-7b-in-3-years/

<comment><USER2> The simple answer is that a16z is showing the world how this is done, and so many investors have come knocking on their door that it'd be silly to say no.

First off, they're clearly doing this right. They are more than just the new face of venture capital, they're innovators in technology capital (much like YC). They have a clear mission (as you've just read) flowing from some of the most insightful, experienced and well-connected technology business leaders in the world. Their portfolio is great and they have a compelling case that they are adding value to companies far beyond the money.

Second, this is a nearly-perfect moment to raise for their fund. I know if I was in charge of some serious money in this economic environment I would be haranguing them endlessly to invest. I can imagine they just had to pick a number, and why not take as much as they were offered on the best terms? If things go well, they may need to come in to deals with more money. If the market goes sour, they'll be glad they don't have to raise for a long while.

And by the way, even if you're not interested in VC financing or even being an entrepreneur, please at least check out some of Ben's classic blog entries from the sidebar of this article. I recommend his essential take on corporate politics:

[http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/23/how-to-minimize-politics- in-...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/23/how-to-minimize-politics-in-your- company/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the whole thing distasteful, without being able to say why, exactly. Apparently, apart from being able to design a large organisation, CEOs stand apart by knowing _other_ senior executives, both as candidates for jobs within their organisation and as potential customers. It all sounds very caste-like. I don't blame them for trying to make money by getting people a place within the aristocracy.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the real world can be distasteful at times. I spent years refusing to play the game; preferring to stay strictly idealistic about ability and hard work paving the way. It got me nowhere fast as an entrepreneur. The minute I stopped fighting against how things actually work, success came calling.

I still don't like the notion that your connections can get you the right opportunities radically faster than your ability, but that will always be how the world works. Marc Andreessen would not be what he is today without Jim Clark (the gatekeeper).

People are social beings, and that's the root of the issue. The networks you form, give you radical advantages. Half of success, in my opinion, is your ability, work ethic and willingness to seize opportunity; the other half is who you know.

Most meaningful jackpots in life are guarded by gate keepers. If you want to succeed, far more often than not you're going to need help, and you're going to have to give someone else a cut of the action. Others are inclined to help you once you make them personally invested, that's obvious. People are also more inclined to trust and work with people in their networks - trust by established association. Works the same way with that little piece of paper, a degree, that gets you the stellar job.

Silicon Valley is supposedly a meritocracy. Try getting a meeting with, a contact with, a phone call with, or an email response from - Ron Conway (for example). I don't care how badass of an engineer you are. You can't get anywhere near him without a referral from someone else (the who you know part playing its role).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does believing in founding CEOs and building a great network of contacts explain in any way why they felt they needed to raise so much money so fast?

<comment><USER6> To some degree it answers why they are raising money in the first place.

Agreed, though, his essay doesn't answer either (A) Why $2.7B in particular, and (B) Why in just three years - other than the fact that purpose people believe in their approach so much that it was easy to do so.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The essay answers the question, why is A2Z awesome... but it doesn't provide any reason as to why they want to raise so much (e.g. they see the need to be able to invest hundreds of millions into certain companies), and why now (e.g. there's an epic shift in mobile/internet so it's necessary to invest now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree, every CEO had to learn the proper skills at some point their career.

Jack Welch from GE comes to mind, he is consistently ranked as one of the best CEO's in modern business but he started off as a chemist. Sure MBA's have a little more finance knowledge or management skills but nothing that cannot be practiced, learned, and mastered.

<comment><USER9> Eric Schmidt as well. His ancient history is as the author of lex.

<comment><USER10> so is Andy Grove, who holds a Chemical Engineering degree (but lead Intel to its success)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thats $54 million in operating fees. You've got a pretty good company right there.

<comment><USER12> I presume that they both already have more money than they know what to do with, so I suspect the management fees weren't the primary motivation. Also they have office space, employees, computers, etc. None of which are free. Assuming they are collecting the 2% management fee which is allegedly standard, then most of it is probably going towards running the firm.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I believe that to be true but its staggering how success begets success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would be interested in learning more about the technology that they use inside of their organization to enable a lot of this. Clearly they've recognized that they need share a lot of information to make this work and to give them a competitive edge.

Does anyone know if they have a dev team in-house to build this stuff?

</comment><comment><USER14> a16z is taking an incredibly well-structured approach to value-added investing. It's nice to see a strategy and mission that actually explains how they are different and goes beyond generic platitudes like "enable innovation".

</comment><comment><USER15> Clearly, it was not to find out what it means to beg a question.

<comment><USER16> Alas, the only winning move with "begging the question" is to not play. Insist on its proper use as a logical fallacy and you're a pedant; misuse it and draw the ire of grammarians and Aristotelians. Solution: "this raises the question."

<comment><USER17> So true. I move that the expression "beg the question" be stricken from the lexicon. If you use it right, people have no idea what you're talking about. Use it wrong, and people like me get all distracted and discombobulated. Best not to say it at all.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I avoid it, in part because it's not even clear that the correct meaning _is_ correct. Originally question-begging and circular reasoning were subtly different fallacies, but they're rarely distinguished anymore. If it's a case where "circular reasoning" (or perhaps "assuming the conclusion") works, those are clearer terms imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Okay, it's settled. I want these guys in my corner after YC to raise my game when I'm a founding CEO.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm in favor of more musical blog posts</comment>


Fast Company on Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/fancy-doing-startup-ycombinator-vc-guys-already-have-ideas-you

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to me like YC's position in the market space allows for potentially better identification of potential products. But will people be as 'sold out' on foreign ideas? We're never as careful with other people's property as we are our own.

Hopefully by not saying, "exactly what we're looking for," PG et al. can avoid that problem while potentially glomming on even better ideas.

PG does better at 'letting go' than so many people, it's impressive.</comment>