'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-expert-twitter-only-goes-so-far-bring-back-blogs/ <comment><USER2> I've been on this train for a long, long time.

If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content.

Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog.

We actually created [https://startablog.com](https://startablog.com) to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

<comment><USER3> When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

<comment><USER4> > I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all > that.

You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you?

With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface

<comment><USER5> Part of my current job is handling the technical side of managing Wordpress sites (we have people who do the design/content writing/page building, but I get pulled in for "why isn't this plugin working" or "why is the site slow" type stuff).

For my personal sites I've always done something custom or a static site generator. That definitely requires some more in-depth setup on the frontend, but the long-term maintenance is drastically reduced compared to Wordpress. Sure you don't need to know the command line, but unless you log in weekly to check for plugin updates, make sure you properly vet your plugins, and either get lucky or spend a bunch of time on site optimization, your site will probably be slow and, at some point, get hacked.

You can pay for more hands-on hosting that includes managing a lot of that stuff, but all of a sudden the costs get a lot higher. For a personal blog, I don't want to pay $30/month for hosting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and constructive discourse show up as the same thing on the P&L of a social network, that dynamic of Twitter is tolerated, tacitly enabled, or even deliberately built upon.

<comment><USER7> Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings get blogs for free. Better yet, an author gets to publish her thoughts in a single place and to engage readers as usual.

Why Twitter doesn't at least try this feature in an opt-in way beats me.

<comment><USER8> Well they kind've do. Tweet-chains. If someone replies to their own tweet to create a series of Tweets, Twitter groups them into a chain and puts a "Show This Thread" link to expand it. It's the same thing in practice.

<comment><USER9> It is not the same thing in practice. It doesn't allow as natural paragraph formatting or sentence flow since the break-up interval for the text is dictated.

It makes it harder for people to reply to the chain (do you reply to the first or last?). The same problem exists for retweets; if someone retweets a tweet partway through the thread, it doesn't behave as neatly as you describe iirc.

Also, there's just a difference for the author. Writing a paragraph of text like this comment, where I get to go back through it and edit it as I go, add and remove paragraphs... It results in me creating a more carefully edited and thoughtful piece of writing. With the tweet threads, someone either has to write the tweets one at a time (and can't edit previous ones) with twitter dictating the breaks, or they have to do paragraph-oriented editing locally, and then figure out how to break it up correctly for tweets (which is non- trivial actually! URLs take up a difficult-to-predict-naively number of characters, so it's not naively 140 chars if you have urls, etc).

Basically, twitter's model facilitates a different sort of writing and reading than a single long post does, even if they are just both a bunch of letters.

<comment> aaron-lebo Just to back you up, your post is 1022 characters.

If you were limited to 280:

 _Some discussions have nuance that cannot be expressed in 280 characters.

Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.

However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to_

It's artificial scarcity, that doesn't really benefit the reader that much, and certainly not the writer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all.

The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.

<comment><USER11> "Drooling scroll zombies" is a wildly and unnecessarily uncharitable description of people that visit websites and apps that you (apparently) don't enjoy.

Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense. There is both enlightening and mind-numbing content on social networks, blogs, television, and books. Are people that read many books drooling page-turning zombies? Is scrolling through blogs inherently superior to Twitter scrolling?

<comment><USER10> > Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense

I think it makes a lot of sense when the medium is purpose designed and highly optimized to maximize additive shallow interaction.

Sorry, I've had too many meetings and dinners disrupted by too many different people who couldn't stay off the phone to keep pretending it isn't a problem. ... and had far too many informative long form works ignored by their target audience (members of which also just spent our last meeting glued to facebook scroll).

<comment><USER11> It is entirely possible to curate a Twitter feed of: experts in nearly any subject, gossip, sports, pornography, spiritual guidance, comedy, hate speech, or journalism. The same can be said of bookshelves. It is also possible to consume both excessively or in inappropriate situations. There are young members of my extended family who are regularly scolded for trying to read books during meals.

The rudeness of your guests does not justify passing judgment on millions of people with an almost infinitely broad spectrum of usage patterns, and makes about as much sense as criticizing those who read words on paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is.

But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain old lies are told.

Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. The idea of verified identities as a prerequisite to post has been floated, and will no doubt resurface.

All of this leads to a dead-end. Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police.

The same problem applies to Facebook, Medium, and all the others.

The reason to blog is simple. Because sooner or later a rational human exploring the bounds of human knowledge through writing will post something that will make one or more powerful people scared, angry, or offended. A blog makes retaliatory deplatforming much more difficult to pull off.

<comment><USER13> >Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police.

What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda?

I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more support than complaining about people getting banned for targeted harassment or encouraging forcible removal of non- whites... Shout-out to a pithy evergreen tweet on this: [https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...](https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744).

<comment><USER14> > What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically?

They ban interesting content all the time - a very recent example is they banned the AYTU Bioscience page where they talk about an experimental covid treatment.

YouTube censored their videos as well.

<comment><USER13> I think they have an understandable reason for that (too much harmful misinformation about covid going around, they don't have enough eyes to sort it out, and at their scale it's probably net harm reduction to put a simple wordfilter on it for now), but I'm a lot more sympathetic to arguments along these lines in particular. I could believe that moderation is more effective on smaller userbase-scales because it reduces the need to adopt blanket policies like this. I don't think it does the issue justice to reduce the problem down to just that there's too much/little censorship as the earlier post did.

<comment><USER15> Look up Lindsey Shepard of Canada and why she was banned.

Also the Aytu ban was pushed by a NYTimes writer and twitter often bends their rules to that. Aytu bioscience is a publicly traded company with deals with one of the largest hospitals on tech they have been working on since 2016. They even have a SEC filing from this week of their deal on the tech which twitter and YouTube both banned because a nytimes reporter complained (bias against the president).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bring back Technorati, circa 2004. I miss it very much. Decentralized blogs need some centralized point to keep track of conversations. Pingbacks didn't work because they lacked verification and therefore were immediately overrun with spam. Technorati offered validity. If I wrote something good and there were 500 pingbacks, and 490 of them were spam, Technorati made visible the 10 good ones, and let me see the reputation level of the 10 good ones. I want that again.

<comment><USER17> Totally agree! I wonder, what would/should a modern reimplementation look like? Shouldn't be that hard to do or am i missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The obstacle is not the format but the ease of sharing. Yes, I've had a blog since ~2000, I know there are some ways to share others' content on your own blog, but it never became as easy or readily consumable as a retweet.

Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best blog posts still tended not to spread even an order of magnitude as well as a good tweet thread. As much as I hate the format, I don't think blogs can or will displace it.

<comment> aaron-lebo The network is a boon and bane.

The network allows things to go viral, but I don't think a retweet or tweets are very consumable. Twitter has an atrocious UI. I think when people do these threads tweet storm things, it's way way less readable than essays people were writing a thousand of years ago. I close the page when I encounter those and shake my head at how redundant all the extra stuff is between each sentence. Who naturally writes like that? It's almost like we are going backwards.

The only reason Twitter is big and the network has the power it does it because by a chance of history it got celebs on it in the middle of the last decade. I think content creators, especially devs, should be aware that there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole. I don't go out of my way to read Tweets and I never ever check out someone's Twitter feed because I can't stand the site and the narcissism it fuels.

It's like America Online keywords. Someday it will be a dead piece of history. Twitter, what's that, grandpa?

We're funneling our content through platforms that amplify those who talk the most and/or have the patience to comb through that. How many voices are excluded because people don't want that?

<comment><USER18> > The network is a boon and bane.

Couldn't agree more. Some good info gets distributed that way, but so does even more crap. It does tax people's ability to filter.

> Twitter has an atrocious UI.

Sure, twitter.com has a terrible UI, but there are many other UIs available that are better

> there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten > foot pole.

There are a lot of us who _do_ use Twitter too. I'm connected to probably over a hundred fellow developers, sysadmins, computer scientists, etc. One step away through them are _thousands_ , and we do learn from each other every day. (More so than here, that's for damn sure.) Avoiding Twitter means missing out on that, just like using _only_ Twitter would mean missing out on blog content. It's a high price to pay for fashion, and people who avoid or dump on Twitter for that reason seem to outnumber those who do so out of genuine principle by a large margin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Blogs never left, as a technical matter.

Go to Wordpress and get your dog-gone blog on.

<comment><USER20> Blogs died the day Google killed Google Reader.

OK, they're still out there, but they rely on Twitter and sites like Hacker News to drive traffic. The RSS-driven native blog ecosystem is nothing like what it was in the Reader days.

<comment><USER19> I migrated to [https://feedly.com](https://feedly.com)

One might find a clear point of inflection on blog traffic with the demise of Google Reader, but basically people just quit writing blog posts when the new wore off.

Children (parenthood) wiped out a lot of my discretionary time, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On Twitter, there is a single type of content (a tweet). With blogs, there are two types of content (posts and comments). While it seems like a small difference, it changes behavior and appeal. When Alice comments on Bob's blog post, Alice is on Bob's "territory". Her comment is not an equal blog post in response. It will primarily be seen by Bob's audience, and most of her own readers will be unaware of it.

On Twitter, there is discoverability. As you browse, you frequently jump across profiles, and are continuously recommended users to follow.

On Twitter, there is brevity. In general, blogs are not designed for hundreds of short posts.

On Twitter, you do not have to pay for hosting, nor do you have to manage anything.

So there are a mix of technical, social, and network effects. Until these problems are overcome with a single solution, Twitter will retain its stranglehold on content.

\---

Personally, I wish Twitter would just remove post length restrictions and make it a proper micro-to-macro blogging service. (To be clear: I'm not a fan of a Twitter monoculture, I hate their UI, they make getting data difficult, their site is _painfully_ slow, and they are often user-hostile. But it's been years and no micro-to-macro blogging service has overtaken them, and at this point it'd be better to have something dastardly that works, than something dastardly that doesn't.)

<comment><USER22> > Personally, I wish Twitter would just remove post length restrictions and > make it a proper micro-to-macro blogging service.

I would rather not wade through 10000 word thesises and then sentence by sentence "takedowns" in the response

<comment><USER21> Well, you'd only see the first line or two. They'd be tap/click to expand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Medium had such a great stab at doing this before they completely lost their way. I think someone should make another attempt at this, there doesn't need to be a billion dollar company here to still get very rich and, more importantly, make something people want...

<comment><USER24> Genuine question: why do people dislike Medium so much? I see a lot of hate for it.

<comment><USER25> they ran smack into the common failure mode of building up a large audience and then trying to use that as leverage for user-hostile monetisation tactics.

<comment><USER26> I was going to say "that's not entirely fair," but I suppose it basically is fair. It's at least worth noting that they still really do seem to be trying to find ways to make it viable for independent writers to get paid for their writing -- their user-hostile monetization tactics are about trying to get you to sign up for that paywall, and that paywall gives a chunk of its revenue to authors who choose to put their stories behind it. The real tragic irony of Medium is that it's quite plausible they've made every poor decision with the best of intentions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can bring them back, but I don't have time or attention span for 100 blogs.

I still like Twitter for getting a broad range of thoughts quickly. I view it as a very rough pulse of public consciousness. Not a research paper or word from God.

<comment><USER28> You don't have to, with RSS you have your own feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sadly many blogs are often content mill level boilerplate followed by 1-2 sentences of real content. I think people begin to associate blogging at unknown domains as suspicious, given the wide variability in actual content per word on the page.

A series of tweets won't have this problem, people aren't trying to game SEO. They're gaming social media which has a different set of incentives for good/bad

</comment><comment><USER30> No one has mentioned substack ([https://substack.com/](https://substack.com/)) yet. It's a product that seems to be on the right track. More generally I think getting a newsletter from a trusted source is a much better way to be informed than Twitter threads because Twitter in general encourages a weird mind-meld type of narratives where everyone just talks about the same thing 24/7 because everyone is liking, retweeting, and thinking about the same set of ideas in 280 character chunks.

<comment><USER31> How are they on the right track? They've taken over $17 million in funding from VCs, meaning they need a ~$170 million exit in the next 7 years, meaning they need to monetize like crazy.

Everyone loved Medium, too, in their Year 3 when they were just burning VC cash and nobody there cared about being a profitable, sustainable business.

<comment><USER32> Substack is different in that they are a kind of Patreon meets Medium (with the newsletter angle, but I think on a long enough timeline that's a gimmick). With regards to what sets them apart from Medium -- in short, they actually have a revenue story: a cut of subscriptions. Even this is phrasing is wrong though because IMO a lot of "subscriptions" in this space could effectively be categorized as "recurring donations" since they are more about supporting individuals or small collectives and less about pay-for-product.

I'm a little skeptical about the overall size of their market or their ability to create sustainable revenue opportunities for individual creators in the long term, but they certainly have more obvious a pathway to revenue than Medium.

They ought to be investing in low friction, easy to use customer acquisition tooling for creators btw. Something that doesn't feel like marketing but is, effectively, marketing. That's where they can apply those millions in technology and differentiate between Medium. For these "substacks" (btw this phrase is actively being xeroxed and they should invest in ensuring this is the case) where people are trying to quit their jobs to become full-time creators, they need to come with a story and tooling that eases these creators into the idea that part of their new lifestyle is keeping certain KPIs up and to the right (without drenching these concepts in growth jargon).

By doing this they can effectively outsource their growth to their customers: they take the vig from creators and at the same time utilize the creators to grow their platform. It's a smart idea.

<comment><USER31> Patreon is a great comparison and, I think, supports my position. Only $35 million in annual revenue after 6 years.

Not a bad business but they've taken $160 million in finding to get there.

Actually, my bigger point was just that the tech industry is full of businesses that were hot & sexy in their early years and then people got disappointed when they tried to start being a real business in year 7 or 8 or 9.

Instead of jumping from the Medium hype train to the Substack hype train....it is probably safer just to get off all the hype trains and assume any given startup will eventually try to become profitable and screw over old time customers in the process. You're going to be about 90% right with that as your default assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been writing blog for almost 15 years. I think blog died because readers can not support blogs in some way. Many readers became silent subscribers and that's it. The RSS is only a publishing protocol. It's a good format to subscribe some notification, updates and such, but it's no match for the two- way relationship of modern social network.

1\. The user can not directly comment with an RSS nor contact the author in some way

2\. Author can not gain profit from RSS. Nor the reader app, distributor and publishers. There needs to be a payment option in RSS style.

Twitter and Facebook are exactly opposite of this, it's built upon layers of layers of connections and there is no way to enumerate the whole graph. It gets tired pretty fast and became an echo chamber. Contents tend to get shorter to grab attention with fragmented information everywhere.

And in the era of mobile phones, making content on a small screen is painful. But making viral videos are not. I think someday if videos are just easily indexable and searchable as texts, Tiktok can become the blogging platform of next generation.

<comment><USER34> You'd think in the era of patreon this would be solved by now in a manner that is opt in by users who have shown they are willing to pay for online content, or some other way that doesn't require intrusive paywalls or advertisement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> More generally twitter has spent the last 14 years painting itself into a corner.

It seems the world need a massively scalable messaging backbone, and when twitter was created I thought (IIRC, this is a decade ago and I can't remember if and where I wrote it down) something like that would happen:

Basic Twitter would stay free and there would be all kinds of paid services on top:

\- it could be extended to allow APIs for machine to machine communication.

\- it could be improved to be used for groups and one to one messaging (WhatsApp, later Telegram took this market. Google+ had a decent chance to get a slice of another part of it.)

\- they could charge for API access or for more than what clearly personal usage (more than a few groups, multilanguage distribution, near realtime machine to machine communication etc)

When I think about it now here's another one:

\- paid subscriptions to feeds. Examples: news feeds (maybe you pay for access to your newspapers)

Instead they become what I would describe as a spam distribution machine where you can follow celebrities.

</comment><comment><USER36> And frickin RSS! That was the content collaborator before Twitter.

<comment><USER37> I was surprised at the number of "RSS feed?" emails I got from blog readers when I started a new blog back in 2015-2016. Adding an RSS button to my blog long after the big blogging craze felt kind of weird but I use it myself now too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The devil is always in the details. Deciding who pays to host new platforms, who gets to gatekeep content, etc ad nauseum, would likely sink any such effort.

Frankly, that seems like a long way to go for what is effectively twitlonger. If you buy the premise that Twitter is effective at amplifying the right voices (very much still up for debate), and the problem is the interface for long-form content, then it seems to need a much simpler UX fix rather than trying to invent a separate-but-joined platform from whole cloth.

</comment><comment><USER39> We tried blogs, they failed (or were superseded)

So, wishing for them to work won't help.

[https://theconversation.com/](https://theconversation.com/) was an attempt at blogs 2.0 and it's failed. (failed as in an educated longform alternative to Twitter, it might make money however)

Medium is doing ok.

I think maybe gatekept shortform media might be possible, it's in part what HN is. I would look at furthering HN to the next level.

</comment><comment><USER40> Should Twitter release an easy static site generator of sorts and host those user blogs for free so users can post about each others blogs on regular Twitter? Keeps people on Twitter.

<comment><USER26> Doing that _not_ for free is basically Micro.blog's business model; a hosted account there is actually a hosted Hugo instance.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py blogs take a long time to write -- if expertise is a product that consumers use to judge new information, a blog may be too slow

long-form would be interesting if it were a pull-based model (N followers of some expert want their opinion on some piece of information)

public follower networks are also valuable -- the signal value of one expert following another is non-zero

</comment><comment><USER41> What is your opinion on dev.to ?

<comment><USER42> Full of armchair experts, and top-lists-huge-landing-image ego postings.

Their platform is excellent, their content not so much.

>The most important skill that you should develop to improve your life

This is dev.to in a nutshell.

<comment><USER43> Exactly. Lots of 'self-proclaimed senior field marshals and developers' sharing their programmer war-stories which often descends to language, library, editor or OS flamewars.

Not sure how it compares to hackernoon, but it seems they are competing well towards the nadir of technical decision making and advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I mean I agree with the headline but the article seems to just poop on twitter

</comment><comment><USER45> Why did RSS feeds die?

<comment><USER46> Because large corporates couldn't monetise them with enough ads. Once the large sites had dropped support for RSS, everyone then followed.

<comment><USER34> Most large sites do still have RSS feeds, I've found. Usually it's strange when I can't find one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why did the RSS feed die?

</comment><comment><USER47> It would be nice to see a blog platform like medium without all the pop ups, pop overs, and paywalls. Just Charge people a few bucks a month to have a blog and let them have a tip jar.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you are an expert reading this considering writing a blog - whatever you do, please don't start publishing on a paywalled medium like Medium.

<comment><USER49> What alternatives do you recommend? I'm starting to write, and Medium seems like the best option to me because how else am I going to get readers?

<comment><USER50> Static website (Hugo/Jekyll) that you host yourself and share on Twitter, relevant subreddits, and Hacker News?

<comment><USER51> This is a far less pleasant and high-variance process than you make it out to be.

\- Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience.

\- Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (been there)

\- Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an especially differentiated audience.

For someone whose job is content creation, this might be realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose primary job is research, and being an expert, not social media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on audience generation and self-promotion. That's not realistic.

I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure, the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing that.

<comment><USER50> That the thing about Faustian bargains. Great in the short term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Funes- Make it "uncensorable and anonymous blogs" and I'm in.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't know if blogs are the answer, but twitter is certainly the website equivalent of typing into WebMD "Bleeding from the anus".

There's just so little there of value amonst an absolutely swarm of careerists (see every journo) sociopaths (see anyone replying to a journo) and arseholes (see anyone replying to anyone they don't follow). This isn't a COVID-19 thing, this is essential to twitter as a platform. And the SV folks know it too- which is why their libertarian credentials went out the window the second it got serious.

There's absolutely a problem that there are experts on twitter, because it's preventing them from being somewhere they can be seen by anyone with an ounce of sense, but the replacement to twitter needs more connectivity than blogs (not as much as twitter) and the classical separation of author from consumer. That's the fundamental problem - you could be Fauci or Trump, you're still just a twit. Whereas in the past it would be Fauci writing an update on the HHS website, and Trump being ignored on Sean Hannity's comment section.

</comment><comment><USER53> I just started a blog last week.

[https://soatok.blog](https://soatok.blog)

</comment><comment><USER54> Sorry, can't get web publishing advice from Wired. [https://i.imgur.com/FaX02Aw.png](https://i.imgur.com/FaX02Aw.png)

<comment><USER55> How would you publish it so you would earn enough to pay salaries to all employees involved?

<comment><USER56> Not using behavioural economics ideas

<comment><USER55> And what original ideas of your own would you use in their stead?

Look, I don't like those popups too. And I, too, prefer media that doesn't do that. But at the same time, keeping in mind how hard it is to make any kind of money in that market, I don't have the guts to tell those people how to run their business.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Speedify channel bonding app beta test on iOS 12 - <AUTHOR> https://speedify.com/blog/news/speedify-7-beta-join-testing-program/ <comment><USER2> This looks promising. I've been looking for apps to test out the new Siri Shortcuts and I've been in love with Speedify since it's inception. I cant wait to beta test this app!</comment>


Drawing fractals in the browser with L-systems and ES6 - <AUTHOR> https://eng.qualia.com/drawing-fractals-in-the-browser-with-l-systems-and-es6-6cecfd74e084 <comment><USER2> Awesome! I've had a lot of fun last year building my own "virtual botanical laboratory" in JavaScript (see [https://heerdebeer.org/Software/virtual_botanical_laboratory...](https://heerdebeer.org/Software/virtual_botanical_laboratory/)). It is based on the book "The algorithmic beauty of plants" by Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer (1990). Quite an interesting read. You can find that book on-line as a PDF here: [http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop](http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop) )

It took me many a day at the local hacker space dedicated to building the software, but as it is so intriguing, I got a lot of comments and interest from other hackers as well. There's just something awesome about simulating life-like structures on a computer.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of my favourite indy game that was never released: _How To Be A Tree_

[https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38310.0](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38310.0)

</comment><comment><USER4> The blog post seems to be pretty much a recreation of examples from the The Algorithmic beauty of Plants, but I didn't notice the author giving any credit to the original source.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice.

Can L-systems support random variations? The code in the example produces the same fractal each time as the L-system is deterministic.

<comment><USER6> Yes, you could have different possible production rules for a given symbol and sample from them according to some distribution. You could also just randomly perturb/fuzz a given iteration of the system.

A deterministic system is nice, however, because you can make changes to the production rules and rendering without having to worry about as many possible outcomes (introducing stochastic production rules increases the number of possible outputs combinatorically). This is not too much of a problem if you're just making cool fractals for fun, but if you're doing procedural generation with L-systems then you have to keep an eye out for degenerate cases. For example, if you're generating foliage this way, you might get plants that grow into the ground or in weird non-biological patterns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> L-systems have also been used to make music.</comment>


Learn You a Haskell for Great Good – Chapter 12 in Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/uncomplicate/fluokitten/blob/master/test/uncomplicate/fluokitten/articles/learnyouahaskell_12_test.clj <comment><USER2> Just quickly skimmed the source, and there is a hilarious comment for the bind! function:

"An impure, heretic variant of bind that sacrifices kittens to C++ gods."

[https://github.com/uncomplicate/fluokitten/blob/master/src/u...](https://github.com/uncomplicate/fluokitten/blob/master/src/uncomplicate/fluokitten/core.clj#L341)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few more (but not many functionst) that are a compromise, so I expect that Haskellers would have a few objections. But, this is Clojure, and not haskell :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the fact that it is all code and no fluff. Are other chapters planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Chapter 13 has already been written a couple of years ago. As for the others, I planned to write them, code and text and all, but didn't have time to follow through. A few weeks ago I found time to add lots of improvements to the library, and have just released new version, so who knows :)</comment></comment>


DOJ asks Supreme Court to moot Microsoft email case, citing new law - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-asks-supreme-court-to-moot-microsoft-email-case-citing-new-law/2018/03/31/e3c46e60-34f6-11e8-8bdd-cdb33a5eef83_story.html <comment><USER2> I felt quite motivated to acknowledge Microsoft having acted in the wider public interest defending this case. I know the mailboxes in question are "bad guys" but they were chosen to remove any sense we want to be seen to support their right to privacy against this warrant from the US. The Microsoft defence as I understood it was, a proper MLAP warrant needs to be made in Ireland respecting Irish law and determined by an Irish court system. US law stops at the border.

I also believe that a bunch more tech companies like Amazon and Google rolled over in this space. Which, given how you and I UNIX heads like to rant about Microsoft bears thinking about.</comment>


From "happy hacking" to "screw you" - the story of Meraki - <AUTHOR> http://www.virishi.net/from-happy-hacking-screw-you-story-meraki <comment><USER2> Sadly, this can very easily happen to companies that sell hardware. There are so many factors at play, including changing manufacturing costs, changing component costs, regulatory compliance for FCC and safety compliance where applicable... it can be very easy to get low-volume stuff "out there" at the start to get initial sales and users, but you soon realize that there are major changes required to actually build it into a business. That doesn't explain the licensing change exactly, but I can at least appreciate the price change.</comment>


Six big economic ideas [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/econbriefs.pdf?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/ <comment><USER2> If this sparks your interest in economics, I highly recommend looking at Econtalk: [http://www.econtalk.org/archives.html](http://www.econtalk.org/archives.html)

I love the episodes with Mike Munger, because they usually cover basic economic concepts (and also Mike has a great rapport with the host Russ).

<comment><USER3> Econtalk looks like a real gem. What other podcasts are out there?

<comment><USER4> Are you specifically looking for other econ podcasts or podcasts in general?

<comment><USER3> Nothing in general. It could be science, technology or anything that is interesting.

<comment><USER5> I'm a _huge_ fan of podcasts, and I have a strong bias towards Informationally dense shows dealing with Politics, technology, and sciences.

Common Sense with Dan Carlin - I think he may be the most underrated and most prescient political commentator of our times.

Econtalk - for the high bar of intellectual honesty of its host.

Waking Up with Sam Harris - a little of everything.

BhTV the Glenn Show - hosted by an African American economist , probably the leading commentary on race relations in the USA today.

The Tim Ferriss Show - excellent interviewer and some truly remarkable guests.

Risky Business - information security reporting by a truly excellent and knowledgeable journalist.

Congressional Dish - reads and provides background on legislation currently proposed in congress. Will give you a very solid understanding of many current topics (her work in reading through TPP, CISA and other bills is fantastic).

Slate's Whistlestop - stories of famous moments in American presidential campaigns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thomas Sowell [1], an almost-published novelist turned hard core economist (i.e. got his Ph.D. in Economics) is one of the best writers of economics books, many having a libertarian slant.

I recommend the following books especially - 1. Basic Economics 2. Applied Economics and 3. Knowledge and decisions.

He also produced a crazy detailed trilogy about culture and has written an autobiography which might read a bit like the written version of Mad Men. He often remarks that he is 1/3rd as old as America itself.

And even if you end up completely disagreeing with his opinions, it is worth it to check out at least one of his works to see that it is possible to write economics books which are not utterly boring.

[1] After 9/11, he turned into a slightly loony war hawk. But his best work was produced before that.

<comment><USER7> I read Sowell's "Economics in One Lesson" and recommend against it. It's basically a libertarian promotional pamphlet. If one wants an economic education, something like "The Undercover Economist" is much better.

edit: oops, I definitely mixed Sowell and Hazlitt up. Leaving this up anyway, so that the replies make sense. Sorry!

<comment><USER8> Even UC Berkeley, not exactly known as being a libertarian stronghold used Economics in One Lesson when I went there. I wouldn't exactly throw it away just because you don't agree with it.

<comment><USER9> I think the parent poster is misremembering. _Economics in One Lesson_ isn't by Thomas Sowell. Not sure it should be characterized as a libertarian textbook either - most would class it as coming from the school of classical economics.

[http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/economics_in_on.html](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/economics_in_on.html) is worth reading.

<comment><USER8> I can't believe that Delong actually approves (at least partially) of EiOL. I'm shocked!

The libertarial, classical, and supply-side ideas can all be very close to each other but often come at them from different directions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We could create 6 TLDR threads for the 6 ideas so we could discuss them in their own branches. Any TLDR volunteers? :-)

<comment><USER10> Would prefer someone did a tl;dr right here.

<comment><USER11> +1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you want to read one of these, read the Hyman Minsky one. Minsky spent his career explaining the 2008 financial crisis, even though he died in 1996.

Libertarian will hate him (he supported Keynesian economic intervention) and yet neo-Keynesians will hate him too (he thought Hicks–Hansen model was oversimplified to the point it wasn't worth using).

But his predictions came true. That's pretty rare in economics, so people were forced to pay attention.

<comment><USER12> I think in economics when somebody claims that their "predictions came true", it's usually due to luck and not the merits of their theory. You need decades of statistical evidence to support an economic theory, not the events of a few years.

<comment><USER13> In economics, timing of predictions matters far less than mechanism. Minsky offers a predictive _mechanism_ few others in economics provide. I'm not entirely familiar with it, though he has some strong proponents, most notably Australian (not "Austrian") economist Steve Keen.

To give an example from elsewhere in the field, I find Solow's growth model to be vastly inferior to that proposed by R.U. Ayres, in that Ayres considers energy as an input, whilst Solow concocts "technological improvement" out of the residual of labour and capital inputs. For both causal and theoretical bases, the Ayres result (replicated by many others) strikes me as far more convincing.

Much of orthodox economics disagrees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can anyone summarize these six big economic ideas?

<comment><USER15> 1\. Akerlof's information asymmetry: Sellers must use signalling to inform buyers of their product's high quality.

2\. Minsky's financial instability hypothesis: Stability makes even high risk debt attractive which leads to a crisis of instability, a "Minsky moment".

3\. Stolper-Samuelson theorem: Abolishing tariffs in favor of free trade with low-wage nations can hurt workers in high-wage nations, even when the high- wage nation benefits overall.

4\. Keynes' fiscal stimulus and multipliers: Every government dollar spent stimulates the economy multiple times, by subsequently being spent by the recipients.

5\. Nash equilibrium, game theory and the prisoner dilemma: Rational actors make choices based on what they think other actors will do. This leads to stable but sometimes sub-optimal scenarios.

6\. Mundell-Fleming trilemma: Pick two: Fixed exchange rate, monetary autonomy or free flow of capital. You can't have all three.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seeing as this has turned into book club. Highly recommend two books, neither of them are pure economics, however combined they give a fascinating overview of the last 70 years of the american economy, as well as some really interesting ideas for what the future might look like:

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business Hardcover – May 17, 2016 by Rana Foroohar (Author)

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier Paperback – January 31, 2012 by Edward Glaeser (Author)

</comment><comment><USER17> I am admittedly woefully uninformed about the topic, but why is it discussions of economics seem so much more verbose than those of math and science? Perhaps it's just this article, but all this flowery language and backstory should be optional.

<comment><USER18> Well, I don't know how much uninformed about economics you actually are, but I think that at least part of this perceived verbosity is due to you being acquainted with it through stuff aimed at lay people. The Economist is a sort of popular economics reporting magazine (a "pop-econ" magazine). The stuff they write is aimed at a general audience.

Though admittedly economic articles are do seem verbose when compared with math or physics articles. But there's a lot of variance in their verbosity, too: theoretical articles are pretty much just math. Empirical guys on the other hand are always somewhat verbose, as they like having some plausible stories behind the mechanisms they're testing or to explain why their instrumental variable is exogenous. The literature of subfields are/were almost entirely verbose, such as in the case of the old institutional economics.

I'd say that it all boils down to: how wide the intended audience is; how established is a field or subfield is; how do new articles fit in with the older literature. When all you've got in your head is some hazy philosophical point, trying to formalize it from the outset will probably just alienate you from the discipline. So older literature will be, on average, more verbose than current literature. On the other hand, if all people do is point out more and more new issues, and if every new article is "orthogonal" to each other, they might never produce a succint framework (in which case it all turns into philosophy). And this goes for other fields too: mathematics was a verbose field too until some of it's ideas became common sense, and so was physics. Economics is still undergoing a lot of changes, and will probably undergo a lot more as economists focus themselves on narrower issues and as more data is collected.

<comment><USER19> The Economist is a world current affairs magazine with a slant towards business. It's not really about economics in the way the term is understood as an academic discipline.</comment></comment></comment>


Donate to support women in open tech/culture, get Ada Lovelace pendant - <AUTHOR> http://supportada.org/donate

<comment><AUTHOR> If you've ever been annoyed by a sexist comment on Hacker News, you should donate to the Ada Initiative. We're working hard to change the culture and attitudes in open source and free/open culture.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's awesome to see that 30 conferences have adopted an anti-harassment policy in the last year, largely because of Ada Initiative's efforts!</comment>


Europe's record heat wave moves toward Greenland - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/un-greeland-europe-ice-heat-record-1.5225980 <comment><USER3> I recall reading a CNN scrolling ticker headline about the current European heatwave that said ~5% of European homes/offices have AC.

The DOE says 3/4 of American homes have AC, and furthermore, AC uses _6%_ of all electricity generated in the United States, quite staggering imo and a lot more than I would have expected. Without AC, a lot of America would just be too unbearable to support some major communities.

[0] [https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-cooling- systems/air-...](https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-cooling-systems/air- conditioning)

<comment><USER4> Why would you pay to install and maintain AC if we (in Central Europe) literally have 2 weeks of real hot summer (about a month recently though)?

It would literally be a waste of money.

<comment><USER5> Window mounted AC units are $100 - $200. It sits in a closet except for the 2 months a year that Seattle requires AC. A proper central air system would be overkill, but the small one is worth it.

I wonder if window / removable units factor into the DOE's 75% number. From a real estate recordkeeping perspective, my home does not have AC, despite the previous owner permanently building a window unit into the side of the house. If they're not counted, the real number of American homes with AC could be well north of 75%.

<comment><USER6> > except for the 2 months a year that Seattle requires AC

Huh? 2 months out of the year AC is _required_? Even if you can not, somehow, stand a week or two of 90-100 degree weather(with NO humidity!) without air conditioning, to months of _required_ AC in Seattle seems like an insane exaggeration.

<comment><USER5> You're right, I was loose with my language there. It is never "required" in the way that eg Phoenix AZ would demand. It's a convenience. "Desirable" would have been a better word.

<comment><USER6> Right on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IIRC there's around 7m of sea level rise tied up in Greenland ice, and it's already melting remarkably quickly. Now add the wildfires and it seems like it's escalating dangerously out of control.

While a tipping point tips, government action is still conspicuously absent, and countries (well Russia and Canada mainly) are trying to nail their continental shelf claims in the Arctic for oil exploration.

<comment><USER8> We're going straight from "we don't really know if something is happening" to "it's too late anyway so why bother" without going through the troublesome "we should try to stop this" phase.

<comment><USER9> If the world were a fine place worth fighting for, maybe you'd have a point.

But increasingly, I just look around, see the news, see the social media, and think why bother? Humanity will never be anything more than this. Things seem to be wrapping up, don't have kids, don't try to save the world, just savor what is left till it's gone.

In the coming decades we will begin to see a loss in the knowledge of mankind, as people become more dependent on machines and fewer and fewer people know how to work them. Progress will begin to slow down, wealth will continue to consolidate, and people will be left working hard back-breaking jobs to sustain themselves. The world of the future will have more farmers and less engineers, and even fewer people who even understand code and how to write it.

<comment><USER10> Do you live on the same planet as me? The world is an incredible place and gets better every day!

I look at my children and their experiences growing up and it's far better than mine ever were. If I had the choice I'd be born today.

<comment><USER11> I respectfully disagree here.

The US has seen a sharp decline in children earning more than their parents. 90% of people born in 1940 earned more than their parents, compared to just 50% in 1985, a trend that we simply aren't doing enough to correct[0]. We're on our way to a new gilded age, but perhaps your kids will among the fortunate and not of the "useless class", as Yuval Harari would say.

As technology and AI continue to progress, it's going to become harder to educate and train the workforce, and perhaps more importantly, re-train them as human skills continue to fall into obsolescence. I look at my baby nephew and hope that he'll be able to find solid-paying work one day, but that just isn't a given anymore.

0: [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/12/09/504989751...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/12/09/504989751/u-s-kids-far-less-likely-to-out-earn-their-parents- as-inequality-grows)

<comment> rv-de what crispy means is that s/he is doing well.

<comment><USER12> Or isn't American, the US standard of living has dropped but for many people around the world, this is as good as it's been for them in centuries or longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Greenland's ice sheet has been melting pretty fast for years [1]. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker, but using "threaten" sounds to me like until now it had been living peacefully unaffected by climate change.

[1] [https://www.livescience.com/64546-greenland-ice-sheet- meltin...](https://www.livescience.com/64546-greenland-ice-sheet-melting- faster.html)

<comment><USER14> > Greenland's ice sheet has been melting pretty fast for years [1].

Your link talks about how the rate of ice sheet melting is increasing (currently 4x what it was in 2003), so I'm not sure how you arrived at this statement. The whole problem is not that it was never melting in the past, it's that the melting is accelerating, and that even the rate of acceleration may be increasing due to feedback loops; that is what is threatening.

<comment><USER13> > _The whole problem is not that it was never melting in the past, it 's that > the melting is accelerating_

Yes, I'm perfectly aware of that. My point is that we are way past the point of threats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The relevant charts ("the daily image update is produced from near-real-time operational satellite data, with a data lag of approximately one day"):

[https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/05/daily- image/](https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/05/daily-image/)

Artic Sea Ice:

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iqr_timeseries.png)

Antartic Sea Ice:

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iqr_timeseries.png)

</comment><comment><USER16> What I would like to see is a country average temperature record, we often see high temps, some may be a small hotspot, others may well encompass the entire country. With that, are heat waves becoming larger in size and by that - <USER2> covered? Asking as from my experience in life, they kinda feel like they are.

<comment><USER17> It's more vague and visual than what you describe, but this makes pretty compelling visualizations:

[https://showyourstripes.info/](https://showyourstripes.info/)

<comment><USER18> This combined worldwide graphic is far more striking: [http://www.climate-lab- book.ac.uk/files/2019/06/all_countrie...](http://www.climate-lab- book.ac.uk/files/2019/06/all_countries_BBC-e1563724721978.png)

From: [http://www.climate-lab- book.ac.uk/2019/showyourstripes/](http://www.climate-lab- book.ac.uk/2019/showyourstripes/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The range between the min and max temps for the last 100 years is under 1°C globally. For the last 1,000 years it's just over 1°C (from wolfram alpha at least). It's clear that temps are slowly rising, but the constant reports of extreme weather seem at odds with the data to me. Is 1°C over 1,000 years really doing all this? When I read articles about the weather I have to remind myself what the data says. If I didn't check occasionally I'd think we'd increased by 10°C in the last 5 years.

For the record, I drive an electric car and my house is supplied by a purely renewable provider here in the UK. I hate the thought of polluting the planet and I do what I can to live a green life. I really love science and study as much as I can, but reading about global warming is very different to reading about quantum electrodynamics or special relativity. I'll happily watch the oil companies go under and I think dumping tons of crap in to the atmosphere is clearly terrible and shouldn't go unpunished, I just wish I had some better data to back this all up.

Source: [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=global+temperature](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=global+temperature)

Has anyone got good sea level rise data for the last 1,000 years? Again, when I read any article I feel like the sea must have risen by a few meters already as everything is so dramatic, but I can't find a decent dataset that sets out what has actually happened.

<comment><USER20> Slowly rising? Have you seen the 100yr graph?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, it looks bad, but the y axis on the chart only represents 1 degree. This is kind of my point, it's so easy to show a chart with a big uptick and if you don't dig deeper you come away thinking we're about to catch fire.

<comment><USER20> Because 1dgree is a lot, and the rate of change is the scary thing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems like the perfect time to panic.

I just don't see how we're getting out of this alive.

<comment><USER22> > I just don't see how we're getting out of this alive.

Even worst case predictions for climate change don't imply the human race will be threatened. But what we will see is massive geopolitical disruption as previously habitable regions become uninhabitable. What happens when coastal Myanmar is underwater or southern India experiences 130 degree days on a regular basis? Climate change is going to make itself felt over the coming decades as increases in migrant crises, regional conflicts, and famines. (Not to mention economic loss as, e.g., the agricultural viability of large areas changes.)

<comment><USER23> I guess it depends on what you mean by "threatened". Sure, humans will continue to exist, we won't go extinct, at least not globally. But we're looking at local and possibly global societal collapse. If we're back 500 years in the past developmentally and technologically, that's a huge deal. Maybe even if you survive, can you go back to a world without vaccines, antibiotics and mass communication?

<comment><USER10> Do you think we can lose 500 years of tech development globally? I can see some areas becoming challenging and definitely a slowdown in progress but it seems unlikely that all this knowledge will evaporate

<comment><USER23> I don't have a good answer to that question, I'm not sure anyone does. But if society collapses, much of that knowledge goes with it. Our society is incredibly complex and fragile, with a very high degree of specialization. That makes us vulnerable to these kinds of issues.

While the "dark ages" were hardly dark and ignorant, the collapse of the Roman empire meant advanced road building and concrete were lost for 1500 years. So there is some historical precedent here.

<comment><USER12> 500 years would put us back to 1500ish, I can't see that, steam technology and electric motors/turbines are simply doable (and where done) with not much technology to boot strap from, hand tools made machines which made specialised machines which repeated for generations but the first step comes back to steam and electrification.

It's not like every book in every library would or could disappear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone seen predictions that would provide a good estimate of when everyone would die? My sense is if we can surface this data to poor people quickly they might have time to save money and move to Northen Canada where most are saying the weather would be perfect as the climate heat average index increases. The more we share this on FB the faster we can save everyone. I think we can all agree rich people can stay in their original location bc they will have money to pay for AC. Just my 2 cents here.

<comment><USER25> The trouble is that life can get so much worse without everyone dying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hey dang: why editorialize the actual article title?

It was up verbatim and got edited to appear less catastrophic.

</comment><comment><USER27> Two things. First, anybody ever think about why an ice covered body of land was called _Greenland_? Here's a clue, it used to be a lot warmer and green. This is nothing new. Ice was a disaster for the settlers of Greenland.

And this:

"Scientists already know that the Greenland ice sheet is melting. But the hidden heat source originating from deep inside the Earth partially responsible for that melting has been a mystery. Now, researchers have pinned down evidence of that heat, revealing yet another force pushing glaciers into the ocean."

[https://www.newsweek.com/puzzling-heat-deep-inside-earth- mel...](https://www.newsweek.com/puzzling-heat-deep-inside-earth-melting- greenlands-glaciers-786943)

<comment><USER28> Because people from Iceland wanted to entice people to join them on a voyage there, and thought calling it Greenland would help them with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The biggest problem IMO is that people don't seem to be able grasp that governments simply cannot solve this.

Only when there is that general understanding can people stop focusing on government as the path to solving this.

Unfortunately however almost _everyone_ focuses on government and elections which is simply wasting more time.

<comment><USER7> Individual action cannot convert to zero carbon generation, make treaties, implement carbon taxes, require impact labelling or ban unsustainable methods.

Governments are the _only_ ones with the necessary leverage. Even if we have to wait for some country to elect a Green party government, or there be enough XR style demonstrations disrupting the economy that they _have_ to act.

<comment><USER29> All those certainties need to be loosened up.

New ideas are needed.

Clearly government has failed to solve this. And when there's a problem that needs solving, and the current 'solution' ain't working, well you'd be crazy to stick with that being 'the solution' wouldn't you?

<comment><USER7> You don't think an alternative to government action will take longer to find? Or are you advocating revolution?

What are your new ideas?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What scientists think about the biological claims made by a Google employee? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-anti-diversity-document-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin?share=13d40fd1&srid=Q <comment><USER2> > argues that cognitive sex differences influence performance in software > engineering.

Damore never argued for this, he argued that cognitive sex differences could possibly influence interest in software engineering work as it done today and that difference in interest could partially explain the gender gap in tech. He then suggest that we try alternate approaches when we try to increase women's representation since they might work better, which hints at him thinking that women would be valuable as engineers at Google, just that the current arguably misplaced diversity efforts might not achieve that goal.

<comment><USER3> > Damore never argued for this

Is the articles quote unfair then? It explicitly calls out an apparent jump from preferences to abilities in the original. (My emphasis)

>>I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and _abilities_ of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

>

> At what point did we jump from talking about personalities to abilities?

<comment><USER2> Difference in preferences usually results in difference in abilities due to a difference in life choices, that is how I interpreted it. So if biology has any effect on preferences then biology indirectly influences ability but it is still nothing that can't be overcome by someone who likes the subject.

<comment><USER3> > Difference in preferences usually results in difference in abilities due to > a difference in life choices, that is how I interpreted it.

Indeed, but the relationship is not necessarily simple and requires argumentation rather than handwave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google CEO Sundar Pichai (note to employees):

> Our co-workers shouldn't have to worry that each time they open their mouths > to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo > states, being "agreeable" rather than "assertive," showing a "lower stress > tolerance," or being "neurotic."

Evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin (quora answer linked here):

> It's true that women and men, on average, have been found in some studies to > differ in empathizing/agreeableness, systematizing, gregariousness versus > assertiveness; and neuroticism.

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one that sees an inconsistency between the touchy feely world of inclusiveness and diversity within these US tech companies, and the Darwinian harshness of life outside them in the US? I'm thinking of what seems to an outsider like a generally held callousness towards those that fall through the cracks, and a focus on individual agency as being the sole determinant of success, ignoring very real factors like background etc.

<comment><USER6> No. Plenty of people see what's happening and play along because it's pretty dangerous not to.

This guy was naive enough to try and present a rational and measured suggestion for meaningful improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The passing mention of IQ is interesting, since it has nothing to do with > gender, which is the focus everywhere else. He's presumably talking about > race, but he doesn't want to be branded a racist, so he keeps the reference > subtle. So why risk doing it at all? It's a dog-whistle to the alt-right.

He could be talking about a difference in variance of IQ between genders, which has been observed in some studies.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's great that someone took the time and had the peace of mind to write down this firm rebuttal.

Sexist or not, the original manifesto was anti science. How so many whose paycheck depends on the implementation of logic got hoodwinked into defending what basically amounts to an political pamphlet by a couple of references baffles me.

<comment><USER9> More scientists have written in defense than opposition, and even the most hardened opposition concedes the validity of some of his sources.

<comment><USER8> > More scientists have written in defense than opposition

Yes, and all of them underlining the argument that women are indeed different from men, which isn't contested in the slightest.

What remained uncontested is the sloppy science. In science you present a claim, construct an argument, and reach a conclusion.

You can't construct an argument that doesn't support your conclusion and then proclaim it must be valid because it has something to do with the initial claim.

What happened here was:

-Fact: Women are different than men.

-Observation: There is a difference between men and woman in IT.

-Conclusion: this difference in IT must be based on the primary difference between men and women.

or

-Fact: all goats breathe

-Observation: Plato breathes

-Conclusion: Plato is a goat.

I hope everyone recognises this fallacy.

It's pointless to keep presenting evidence for the initial fact. What you need to do is introduce new facts that construct a solid argument that includes your observation and logically binds it into the conclusion.

As the quora article points out, that's not what happened.

On top of that (or underneath) there's also some political la-ti-da going on, which is fine for a memo, and if it had been restricted to that, I doubt it would have caused this much commotion.

TL;DR (also, don't use that term in any sort of treatise that you want to sound scientific) if you want to use science to shield you from negative reactions to postulating an unpopular idea, make sure it's sound.

<comment><USER9> So you're saying that he stated some science, which you're not disputing, and then made an argument from those grounds that moved from science into politics, and you don't agree with the argument he made.

That's not anti-science, attempting to root your discourse in science is absolutely pro-science. At best you can say that the parts which led on from the science were "non=science" \- well yeah, by definition.

<comment><USER8> > then made an argument from those grounds

Except that's exactly what he didn't make. It severely lacked implications that tied his facts and arguments to his conclusion(s).

> you don't agree with the argument

"Since in the original memo a conservative argued towards a conservative point of view, and you oppose that, you must be a non-conservative arguing towards a non-conservative point of view."

That doesn't follow.

> attempting to root your discourse in science is absolutely pro-science.

New Earth creationism, anti-evolution, etc. Let's try and be realistic here. Interpreting conclusions of actual science to derive truths that were never implied by said conclusions to further base your own argument on is intellectually dishonest and not "pro-science".

<comment><USER10> Your Plato metaphor is unfair, because we already know Plato is a man, not a goat, from fairly conclusive evidence before you present your statements. However, Damore has put forth that the current societally accepted reason for the skewed IT gender distribution (prejudice against women) has less than conclusive evidence backing it up.

Your assertion of the memo's claim:

-Fact: Women are different than men. -Observation: There is a difference between men and woman in IT. -Conclusion: this difference in IT must be based on the primary difference between men and women.

This is close to what I believe Damore was saying, only replace 'must be' with 'may in part be and we shouldn't rule out the possibility just because it's politically incorrect to discuss.'

Here's what I claim the current politically correct claim is:

-Fact: There have been cases of sexism found in IT. -Observation: IT as a whole is a sexist industry. -Conclusion: this gender difference in IT must be based primarily on this sexism.

However, is this a foregone conclusion, given the current studies found on it? I know of several attempts which have been made but none are any more persuasive to me than Damore's theory, either being too small, flawed(often for the same reason Damore felt the need to write the memo and why he was fired), or just inconclusive. And it seems anecdotal evidence makes up a large part of our reason for believing it as a society.

It's quite possible the truth lies in a mixture of both, in fact I'd say I'm almost certain of it. However, for some reason everyone is outraged at the suggestion that there might be a drop of truth behind what Damore was saying even though he wasn't claiming gender inferiority, merely preference.

Additionally, I don't believe he was misusing the conclusions of the scientific studies he cited. The prime example is his claim of women being more 'neurotic,' and people immediately assume he's calling them inferior. Whereas there was no value judgment in the original scientific study (which was widely accepted prior to the memo) or his application of it and may very well indicate a preference not to work in IT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Regardless of whether or not you agree with the original manifesto, why couldn't Googlers have a civil discussion like that Quora thread instead of firing him?

<comment><USER12> Amongst many other reasons, because stuff like that 'manifesto' actively harms Google by harming a significant minority of their employees who might, if nothing was done about it, leave the industry because it was the last straw after a lifetime of harassment and devaluation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank you for this submission. This is basically the first scientist disagreeing with Demore. The previous ones (five of them I think, submitted to HN and quickly flagged) basically agreed with what he said. I think we can now start to have a normal discussion with arguments, based on studies and evidence, rather that name calling (although Suzanne's answer is not entirely unemotional, but that's her right).

<comment><USER14> You realize she does lead her comment/ TL;DR with "He's secretly pushing an alt-right agenda"?

<comment><USER15> The guy is absolutely pushing an alt-right agenda, it's plain to see in the manifesto, and that's before we get to his guest appearance on a prominent alt-right YouTube show.

<comment><USER14> > absolutely

You don't know that, and I get little impression of such from his Bloomberg appearance today: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/fired- engin...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/fired-engineer- damore-i-feel-google-betrayed-me-video)

Even so you are aware the Quora question is "What do scientists think about the biological claims?", so the ad hominem is not only a distracting annoyance but is also undermining of one's claim to objective impartiality.

<comment><USER3> I doubt the respondant would claim objective impartiality, and if they did, their article would quickly make clear that they have a background and situation that colours their view of the issue and that they feel very strongly about it and are emotionally engaged with it.

None of this means that they are wrong on the substantive points they make though, even though you're right that the alt-right claim isn't helpful. In fact I got the impression of someone who feels very strongly about the issues, but who is still trying to engage logically and reasonably and in good faith, even if they slip occasionally. Much the same can probably be said for the original memo author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > what scientists think

> one scientist's opinion

We're reaching "both sides of the climate change debate" levels of spinning here.

<comment><USER17> Yeah this must be how climate change deniers feel about the scientific view of climate change. It really feels like it's just one scientist's work against another. I don't have time to actually read their studies so how should I know who to believe?

Of course this is much worse than climate change because that's 'hard science' where it's relatively easy to get good evidence. Psychology seems to be barely better than guesswork.

<comment><USER16> > Psychology seems to be barely better than guesswork.

It depends on the school of thought and experimentation methods.

Some, for example, will focus almost exclusively in easily measurable physiological responses to stimuli and draw very restricted conclusions on their experimental results.

Others will sit on a desk, reflect on their past and speculate extensively about human nature based on that.

But yeah, it's a rather soft science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I got as far as this:

> > On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These > differences aren't just socially constructed ...

> His implicit model is that cognitive traits must be either biological (i.e. > innate, natural, and unchangeable) or non-biological (i.e., learned by a > blank slate).

Within a few lines of each other. I think she is reading what she wants to read.

</comment><comment><USER15> TLDR; manifesto guy was egregiously wrong in basically all assertions.

<comment><USER18> Author has misread, misunderstood, and misrepresented manifesto guys doc, attributed motives AND tried to tie this into the alt-right.

<comment><USER19> I think at this point we can all agree that Damore tied himself to alt-right by doing those interviews.

edit: I find it interesting that most comments criticizing the guy is heavily downvoted while his supporters claim _they_ are being gagged

<comment><USER20> > I think at this point we can all agree that Damore tied himself to alt-right > by doing those interviews.

I don't think we can.

There is no consensus regarding what the "alt-right" _is_ , even among those who self-identify as members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Should HN not be consistent and censor this side of the debate too? I don't understand this site sometimes.</comment>


Scala Actors are Just Code - No Magic - <AUTHOR> http://dearjunior.blogspot.com/2011/08/scala-actors-are-just-code-no-magic.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> I think languages that allow the use of non-alphanumeric characters as method definitions make the language appear more magical simply because it looks like built-in language syntax. I remember when I first looked at sbt, they were creating directory paths with the '/' as an operator to concatenate strings. (ie "home" / "user") I'm guessing that might also be the reason Ruby is cited as magical all the time.

<comment><USER3> I really can't stand this trend. When I took a look at Lift, it was riddled with these "magical" method definitions that look nice but mean absolutely nothing to someone who's new to the framework. I'll gladly take a self- explanatory alphanumeric method name over a "/", a "+", etc.

<comment><USER4> Why not have both? Also do you happen to use any regular expressions ever? Can you imagine specifying a regular expression using self-explanatory alphanumeric method names?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regarding the for loop, it's not magic either. "For comprehensions" in Scala are a wonderful syntax sugar that can look like familiar "for loops" for Java folk, or familiar "do loops" for Haskell folk depending on how you use them. But they always desugar to flatMap/map/withFilter method calls that you could have written yourself -- there is nothing "special" about them in that regard.

<comment><USER4> The desugaring process is what makes the for loop magic. I cannot write a different control structure that looks like the that for loop in scala without touching the compiler.

A counter example that shows how to avoid the sugar would be "if expressions" in smalltalk (simplified, may differ to reality). In smalltalk, the abstract boolean class has a method 'if'. And the "true" subclass of the boolean class implements the 'if' method to execute its first parameter, while the "false" subclass implements the 'if' method to execute its second parameter.</comment></comment>


NSQ – A realtime distributed messaging platform - <AUTHOR> http://nsq.io/ <comment><USER2> Having played with NSQ off and on for the past few months, and having gone deeper with it over the past week or so in preparation for rolling out a production service, here are a few things that have really impressed me, in no particular order:

It's super easy to run. A few command line params, if that, and I've got a local nsqd running that I can develop and test against. Great for those offline coding sessions on BART.

The tools it ships with are very handy, specifically to_nsq and nsq_tail. Again, both make developing stuff really easy because I can get stuff in and out with fast, native command line tools or http. In fact, when I was first playing around I built an entire prototype based on a few simple shell scripts and the provided tools, just to see what would happen.

The nsqadmin and nsq_stat tools give you a lot of visibility into what your producers and consumers are doing, how well things are performing, who is connected to what, etc. And again, part of the distribution and very easy to run locally.

The Go producer and consumer API is clean and easy to build around, pretty well documented with a lot of examples in the NSQ apps themselves.

So far very stable. I haven't seen any crashes on the server or producer/consumer side.

Helpful and friendly people on a low noise freenode channel.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

This is something that I've always tried to stress when talking about NSQ...

The "message queue" is the most boring and uninteresting aspect of the system.

It's the combination of out-of-the-box tooling and conceptually simple primitives that really differentiate it from other systems.

<comment><USER4> The Features page says it is "horizontally scalable (no brokers, seamlessly add more nodes to the cluster)", but the Design page says you need to run a 'nsdq' daemon - which is a message broker - i.e. you cannot embed the daemon into your application?

<comment><USER2> You can embed nsqd (in Go): [https://gist.github.com/joshrotenberg/ad49d39dbee8b48789d9](https://gist.github.com/joshrotenberg/ad49d39dbee8b48789d9)

That said, for a larger deployment you'd still probably want to run the lookupd as well, at which point, at least for a typical architecture, running nsqd standalone is probably fine. Embedding is darn handy for testing, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion on bitly blog / reddit with some comparisons to zmq: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/117dsj/nsq_real...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/117dsj/nsq_realtime_distributed_message_processing_at/)

And also a great article that compares / contrasts NSQ along with a lot of other alternatives: [http://www.bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message- queues/](http://www.bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/)

<comment><USER3> (project author)

I appreciate all the work that Tyler has put into his series of blog posts on messaging systems (and NSQ bug reports!) but I think this particular article is one that misses the mark [1].

While raw performance is important, I think comparing the guarantees and related operational and development semantics are far more interesting and useful.

These systems vary a great deal in the interfaces and functionality they expose to users building on top of them and operators dealing with them when they're deployed in production (and inevitably break!). _This_ is ultimately what matters most.

P.S. single node (localhost) performance is essentially useless. Most of these tools are designed to be deployed as the backbone of large distributed systems (NSQ in particular), so scalability and performance in that context is a better indication of real-world performance.

[1] He's since posted this follow-up that outlines many of the same things [http://www.bravenewgeek.com/benchmark- responsibly/](http://www.bravenewgeek.com/benchmark-responsibly/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We are using NSQ at Hailo for sending and receiving billions of messages every day. It scales incredibly well and is extremely reliable. We'd be happy to speak more about this with anyone who's interested.

<comment><USER7> Can one use NSQ as a replacement for Kafka?

<comment><USER8> Kafka offers persistence, which seems extremely rare in distributable queue. (Is it even available outside of Kafka?)

On that note, what is everyone using these queues for that they can ignore durability?

<comment><USER9> The standard JMS spec supports durable queues and topics. Generally a nightmare to manage though - trying to track down a unconsumed message on a clustered durable topic with lots of subscribers is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm glad these new projects are coming on, and this one seems to be very forthright about its limitations, but I'm just putting this in the bucket with all of the other messaging systems that provide a minimum feature set.

I haven't seen much on the market recently that offers things like (first- class) persistence, guaranteed ordering, guaranteed delivery, or any of the other more complex distribution patterns. That's why I'm still using ActiveMQ. I'm pretty happy with it, so I suppose I'm not really looking for a replacement, but I still wonder what benefit people are getting from these newer systems.

<comment><USER3> (project author)

NSQ is as much about what it doesn't do as it is what it does. To a certain extent this mirrors, and was inspired by, the language's philosophy (Go) [1].

Also, NSQ was designed to replace an existing home-grown system deployed at scale. This dictated a lot of the initial requirements (and in certain cases excluded off-the-shelf tools).

When we left the experimental phase we realized we had built something that was useful to others, and it turns out that despite not having the features you've identified it can be incredibly effective in lots of use cases that don't need stronger guarantees.

[1] If I'm being honest, NSQ was a vehicle for adoption of Go at bitly as well as the project we used to learn the language. This was a huge risk at the time (almost 3 years ago) but one that has certainly paid off.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, don't get me wrong, it looks good for what it is, and certainly some of the best products come from skunkworks and hobby.

Is there anywhere I can read about the specific problem at bitly you built it to facilitate? I mean, I've seen a lot of these systems where there are integration and timing concerns, so some kind of message bus is useful. But if they do get to a point where things needs to be distributed, sending messages without order and delivery guarantees just seems to be passing the buck to downstream systems to not mess up.

<comment><USER3> Yea, in the original announcement blog post (which became the design doc):

[http://nsq.io/overview/design.html](http://nsq.io/overview/design.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think I had heard about NSQ till now; how is it better than, say, a pub-sub queue on a beefy Redis server? (Or a cluster of servers, if you wish). Nothing beats Redis' simplicity, AFAICT.

<comment><USER12> Redis pub/sub is ephemeral. If you aren't connected and listening, you missed it.

<comment><USER11> My mistake: I should have said Redis queues.

<comment><USER12> NSQ's improvements over Redis queues are:

\- NSQ is about equally simple as Redis. Like Redis, it's one binary (and an optional second, if you want a dynamically resizable cluster)

\- simplicity of clustering, just boot more servers

\- messages aren't lost if the worker process takes one and then dies, they will be retried.

\- optional overflow to disk, queues do not have to fit in RAM

\- optionally always write to disk, for reliability

\- a message on one "channel" can be queued automatically in several "topics", and the sender doesn't need to know. So messages can be diverted to monitoring, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> NATS is a simpler, faster alternative: [http://nats.io/](http://nats.io/)

<comment><USER14> Gotta love those benchmarks for 4k payloads... those are some big messages right there.

<comment><USER13> Our payloads are generally exactly 20B. We don't use the MQ to transport data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks like there isn't any kind of user-definable shard/partition key available within the topics - a message within a topic could go to any client subscribing to a channel for that topic? Is that correct?

That's obviously fine for AWS Lambda-style single event processing (maps, filters, sinks), but isn't that going to make multiple event processing (reduces, sorts) really difficult? It rules out using in-process memory or local KV storage for maintaining the necessary state across the aggregation window - you're only left with pounding some remote database, not a great strategy as per [http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/why-local-state-is-a- fundam...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/why-local-state-is-a-fundamental- primitive-in-stream-processing.html)

<comment><USER16> For the applications I've dealt with, it's an upside that a workers distributed across a number of servers can process messages from producers distributed across a number of servers, with no user-defined partitioning. Kafka, I think, requires you to define partitions to have multiple workers consume a stream. In the NSQ case, if you need more throughput, just spin it up.

Somewhat on a tangent, one of the goals of the design was to avoid any servers in the middle of the "workers" (consumers) and producers, and making it such that any consuming or producing server dieing or experiencing a network partition doesn't slow down any producers or consumers who can still reach each other.

You're right, this isn't really focused on replacing map-reduce thing like some other message streaming systems are. For one, I can't imagine a "sorting" step using nsq. It's still used for somewhat hefty data-processing tasks, in multiple stages. Each stage has as many servers spun up as needed, consuming messages directly from the previous stage, and publishing to nsqd on localhost. They might consume and acknowledge multiple messages to produce one new message.

For reduced inter-server hops before hitting the database, you can run workers on the same host as producers. So you might have a X hosts producing messages (and running their own nsqd locally, of course), and have Y consumers on each host, configured to consume messages from localhost instead of using nsqlookupd to find all sources, and those consumers would make direct requests to the appropriate database host. With this setup you can still use nsqadmin to monitor the queue levels on all producer hosts, and you can still be archiving messages to disk on some other remote hosts.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, that's a very helpful explanation. (A partition key is optional in Kafka - the DefaultPartitioner just computes a random partition regardless of key.)

I am having trouble visualizing this in NSQ:

> [A server] might consume and acknowledge multiple messages to produce one > new message

I can imagine a server consuming multiple messages and performing a single write to e.g. ElasticSearch or Cassandra - in this case it doesn't matter that the batched write is a random subset of messages. But I can't imagine consuming multiple messages and emitting another message - at least not without being able to reason about what partition of data was present on that server. For example, I can't detect an abandoned shopping cart because a single shopper's events will be scattered across all servers.

Maybe I'm thinking of this wrong - can you give a live use case for consuming multiple events and emitting a single message in NSQ?

<comment><USER16> You're right, it can't do some calculation across all data for a single user or session or anything like that.

I suppose I was thinking that it might reduce "just a little", just adding stuff together as appropriate, but that wouldn't really be useful.

In practice, the way multiple events turn into a single event is that some are just thrown out, according to some static filter rule, or after checking a datastore.

The places where NSQ are typically used is where new data never stops flowing. So sometimes for this sort of thing, it updates a value in some datastore, and creates a new message for the next stage with the latest value, perhaps only if the latest value reaches some threshold, in a scheme where the value decays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've noticed that a lot of message queuing systems have an "delivery at least once" property. What exactly does the possibility that a message could be delivered more than once buy you?

<comment><USER18> You can have "at most once", "exactly once", or "at least once" [0]. Each has a different tradeoff in terms of implementation complexity, speed, and other availability/consistency concerns.

For different applications differently delivery QoSes are tolerable. For instance, if your messages are idempotent (either by design or nature) then "at least once" is equivalent to "exactly once" and may be much faster/easier.

Generally, "exactly once" demands the least of the application and the most of the broker.

[0] I suppose you could have "any number of times" as well, but that's no guarantee at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can somebody comment on the advantages of using this over zeromq/nanomsg?

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> NSQ is a full-featured messaging platform out-of-the-box, whereas zeromq and nanomsq are lower level libraries that you could use to build (the same) functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks very interesting, though their protocol seems very MQTT-like. I'd be interested whether they considered (and rejected) other protocols before writing their own).

<comment><USER21> Here is the HN thread in which NSQ was announced, and similar questions were asked.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631994)

Although I don't know how the system has evolved since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could you use NSQ to create a P2P messaging system?

<comment><USER23> I think you would need to add good firewall traversal technology (UPnP, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How does this relate to mqtt?

<comment><USER25> MQTT is a wire protocol for connection a message sender and receiver, but leaves the actual messaging architecture (brokers, P2P, etc) unspecified. NSQ appears to include its own proprietary wire format, as well as a full im- memory messaging architecture.

<comment><USER26> Just want to add the NSQ wire format looks pretty efficient as well. Seems to be defined at the binary level which was one of the biggest wins for MQTT in terms of memory footprint. Although would be nice if a standard protocol was used instead of creating their own.

<comment><USER9> Binary formats have their drawbacks - the guy that designed the AMQP protocol called the wire protocol he designed for it an "expert mistake". Admittedly he was designing a spec rather than a product but worth understanding.

Source is a long but very interesting read about messaging, amqp, zeromq and others: [http://www.imatix.com/articles:whats-wrong-with- amqp](http://www.imatix.com/articles:whats-wrong-with-amqp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This looks interesting but I'm hesitant to switch from RabbitMQ & Celery to this.

<comment><USER28> We use it at Life360, formerly on RabbitMQ. No real issues.

<comment><USER14> I would also like to know why you made the switch in the first place. Was it the more-easily-distributed nature of nsq?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What is the core problem this solves?</comment>