3D Printed Sugar - <AUTHOR> http://the-sugar-lab.com <comment><USER2> What's really interesting is that their printer can, apparently, do full-color prints like these:

[http://the-sugar-lab.com/gallery/color-floral-single-surface...](http://the- sugar-lab.com/gallery/color-floral-single-surface-set)

[http://the-sugar-lab.com/gallery/3d-printed-sugar-i-love-my-...](http://the- sugar-lab.com/gallery/3d-printed-sugar-i-love-my-chefjet)

[http://the-sugar-lab.com/gallery/blue-floral-single-surface-...](http://the- sugar-lab.com/gallery/blue-floral-single-surface-sugar)

[http://the-sugar-lab.com/gallery/3d-printed-colorful-sour-ca...](http://the- sugar-lab.com/gallery/3d-printed-colorful-sour-candy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if they print the whole thing with colors or if the printed piece is colored later on.

<comment><USER3> At least in the non-food printers, it's printed in color. They use dyes mixed into the binder and print it out exactly like an inkjet printer does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://pwdr.github.io/](http://pwdr.github.io/) <\- this nice and cheap DIY 3d printer can print on powder sugar, gypsum and other powders.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not yet available apparently, but they mention[1] the printers are capable of printing chocolate, sour apple, etc.

The fact that they can get such vibrant and detailed printing makes this even more interesting. I can see a market for high-end restaurants, cake shops and confectionery shop to propose custom-made pieces.

What I wonder is how long it takes to print various pieces. The Pro version of the printer has a large printing volume of 10x14x8". I imagine printing in full colour must add a significant amount of time as well.

Now the question is: how much are people ready to pay for a lump of sugar, however beautifully crafted it is?

[1]:[http://www.3dsystems.com/chefjet](http://www.3dsystems.com/chefjet)

<comment><USER6> This could be the first step towards entire 3D-printed meals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You want ants? Because this is how you get ants.

<comment><USER8> I wish this was the top comment :(

<comment><USER7> I'll never get top comments because I'm in this weird ban from hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The folks at Evil Mad Scientist started the CandyFab project [1] a while back. The printing method is different so the resolution isn't as good, but it's open source.

[1] [http://candyfab.org/](http://candyfab.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The style of archetecture, food, decore, etc. used to be hand made with complex ornate patterns.

Then "modern" (I'm sure there's a more specific term here) came and things that were flat, "same-y", 90 degrees, and facuets that look like this: [1]. Mass production. A reflection of the industrial processes that were developed.

I am curious to see if 3d printing can bring back some of the ornate patterns of old. This time without the hand work.

[1] [http://www.homedesignbee.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/mini...](http://www.homedesignbee.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/minimalist-bathroom-decor-with-unique-sink- faucets.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Sometimes, people use mass production to make really nice things at scale. [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-japan-copied- americ...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-japan-copied-american- culture-and-made-it-better-180950189/?all) under the Work Wear section.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the recent Globe & Mail article posted here [1], I can only hope we can all soon enjoy in this part:

 _Perhaps the story should have ended there. The delights of sugar were largely in control of the rich, it's true, and their patronage of an exclusive ingredient meant that its identity was bent to their showy, needless ideas of extravagance. Instead of feeding the poor, the malleable carbohydrate was turned into a medium of edible and ornamental sculpture. Banquets were eaten off plates spun from sugar. Master confectioners perfected the art of sugar boiling and produced trees and elephants and even crackling tablecloths out of lowly cane syrup.

"Obviously it was overkill," says Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History. "For the very rich who had money to waste, sugar was the perfect form of conspicuous consumption. And if a little was good, then more, more, more was really good."_

I want myself a sugar Eiffel Tower..

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162545)

</comment><comment><USER13> If the machine works decently these will sell really well(if not the next generation model or a competitors will). Every overpriced coffee shop, bakery, and restaurant that can think of something creative to do with it will want one.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does that mean that in addition to resisting the processed foods that are specifically designed to encourage people eat more of it, while delivering little, if any, nutritional value, now we shall also have to resist the temptation of eating foods visually designed to be most attractive?

I understand the aesthetic pleasure and interest from the hacker point of view, but I'm also looking from the point of view of obesity epidemic and other "diseases of civilisation", which spread now all over the western world.

</comment><comment><USER15> OMG! This is awesome! [http://the-sugar-lab.com/gallery](http://the-sugar- lab.com/gallery)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think 3D printed food might be the first step to the new age.

Driver-less cars could be it. But the food industry employees millions as well.

Food that's consistent, cheaper and better(impossible) than what a human can create won't be a small thing, plus it's easier than cars to integrate in current society.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd love to see more innovative ways of having the sugar interact with the glass. The included example in the middle of the set was really cool and shows you how unique this could be for a coffee shop or restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there any advantage in printing food? Apart from making the meal better looking and more expensive, I don't see any.

<comment><USER19> It sells better. People like good-looking food. There are whole businesses built around just that, like Edible Arrangements or GoGoCake.

You can also shape it into something that hasn't been possible before.

[http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/assets_c/2013/04/3d_printed_food_...](http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/assets_c/2013/04/3d_printed_food_janne_kyttannen- thumb-525xauto-53049.jpg)

[http://cdn.wonderfulengineering.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/...](http://cdn.wonderfulengineering.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/NASA-3D-printing-food-1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sweet!

</comment><comment><USER21> Absolutely amazing. I wonder if it can also print gummy candy in whatever shape.

Even more crazy would be if a 3d printer could actually print the molecules to create any type of material, even sugar.

</comment><comment><USER22> Whoever made your site. Don't fire them, shoot them.

<comment><USER23> What's wrong with this site?

<comment><USER22> I apologise for my impulsive reply. I should have better discipline (usually I don't reply at all because I know I'm pretty dickish)

This is how the site looks to me: [http://s13.postimg.org/uduowd0if/sugar.png](http://s13.postimg.org/uduowd0if/sugar.png)

In my opinion this is pretty terrible. We all know the importance of first impressions (case in point, people reading my initial response).

<comment><USER24> With a resolution that high you must be used to small fixed pixel width sites. Pity they can't all just be doubled or quadrupled in size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I found many of these creations to be remarkably similar to diatoms:

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=diatoms&tbm=isch](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=diatoms&tbm=isch)

Also the concept of coloured sugar reminded me of the coloured sugar cubes my grandmother put out for tea with guests. These were proper bought ones and commonly available many decades ago but I have not seen them since.

Generally if someone has a taste for sugar (in tea) they really have no taste. So sugar sculptures as edible food items are going to be 'playing with food' to a certain extent, not that 'yummy' to most people. Maybe sculptures such as 'diatoms' is where this technology can excel rather than 'food'.</comment>


Santorum Talks About Longtime Google Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_84/-203455-1.html

<comment><USER2> I suspect the so-called "Google problem" wouldn't have arisen if he hadn't compared homosexuality to beastiality and pedophilia.

If you're going to use language to degrade a group of people, you shouldn't be surprised when, in return, language gets wielded by them as a defense.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/9996/santorum.jpg></comment>


The Impossible Function (a C puzzler) - <AUTHOR>

A tutorial for LLVM uses a toy language which has only the datatype "double".  The toy language can call C functions which accept doubles and return a double.
I decided to extend the language so that instead of using double, its sole datatype would be a pointer to a function.  That function would itself accept pointers to other functions, and return pointers to functions.  Instead of passing a value, you would pass a pointer to a function that produces the value.  (Although that value in turn is also a function, it can eventually bottom out by returning special addresses; for instance returning the NULL pointer can mean "false".)
Here's the puzzler:  Such a function signature is impossible to express it the C (and C++) type system!  I encourage readers to try to formulate a typedef for it.
Naively: typedef func_ptr (^func_ptr)(func_ptr);
Edit:  Using ^ in place of asterisk to represent pointers because the markdown eats asterisks.
Except that that is invalid code (you can't reuse func_ptr in its own definition).  What if you try to declare the function without a typedef?  Observe (successive iterations of replacing the word "void^" with a function pointer):
void^ (^the_function) (void^ (^)(void^));
void^ (^)(void^) (^the_function) (void^ (^)(void^) (^)(void^ (^)(void^))); void^ (^)(void^) (^)(void^ (^)(void^)) (^the_function) (void^ (^)(void^) (^)(void^ (^)(void^)) (^)(void^ (^)(void^) (^)(void^ (^)(void^))));
Now, it's certainly possible to think of types that are logically impossible because they are recursive, such as a struct that contains itself as a member.  The difference with the Impossible Function is that it isn't a logical contradiction (a function that can accept a pointer to itself or to a function like itself).  Furthermore it has a perfectly good representation in machine code; it would just be an indirect call to a function after pushing the its pointer argument on the stack.
It's a hole in the type system. <comment><USER2> The problem in your thinking is that you say "it can eventually bottom out by returning NULL". But you don't tell the compiler that.

You have to end the recursion somewhere. Fortunately, you can just use an equivalent type.

typedef void^(^func_ptr0)( void^ ); typedef func_ptr0 (^func_ptr)( funcptr0 );

func_ptr foo( func_ptr a ) { return a; }

void main() { func_ptr ^p = foo; }

There's really no reason to keep expanding it. If you're suggesting that using a void^ is not allowed, then that's like suggesting that you can't return NULL.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a common occurrence:

<http://c-faq.com/decl/recurfuncp.html>

Enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER4> You may be able to do it like this:

        typedef int *func_ptr;

Declare a function:

        func_ptr some_func(func_ptr);

Call a function (recursive example):

        some_func((func_ptr) &some_func);

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you indent the function definition (without the typedef), please? It is near impossible to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to, but the markdown ate my formatting & I don't know the escape code.</comment></comment>


New Plundervolt Attack Impacts Intel CPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-plundervolt-attack-impacts-intel-cpus/ <comment><USER2> > Plundervolt can't be exploited remotely, such as luring a user to a website > and executing the attack via JavaScript.

It may be a nasty vulnerability, but it's no Spectre/Meltdown-level one that is worthy of the name.

> Intel has also released microcode (CPU firmware) and BIOS updates today that > address the Plundervolt attack.

Hit 'Microcode Update' reboot, and it's fixed.

Move along now, nothing significant (or remotely exploitable) here.

<comment><USER3> Previous microcode updates slowed Intel processors with >20%.

<comment><USER4> Not this. This is merely a configuration issue. Intel left an interface open that should not have been left open. A processor is a large distributed system and undervolting does not go well with secure computation.</comment></comment></comment>


Tippin.me – Micropayments on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://tippin.me <comment><USER2> Three clicks got me to the actual about page: [https://tippin.me/howto](https://tippin.me/howto)

and you shouldn't click the "about" link at the bottom. (The about link opens a biography of the web designer or someone a user shouldn't care about initially).

First click the taco icon top right which says "US" (I thought it was a locale changer).

Then work your way down the page to the link "Want to Tip? Get started with Lightning Network" (Very small link, right at the bottom).

Then you will see that it's actually what this site is about and the first mention of Twitter.

<comment><USER3> > First click the taco icon top right which says "US" (I thought it was a > locale changer).

And that button is only clickable with a mouse (because it's a div with an onClick property)

<comment><USER4> I hate to break it to you guys but no one comes to hackernews for web design critique. It's much more productive to discuss the actual technology. A solo developer built something pretty cool and interesting and all you care about is the web design?

<comment><USER5> It's cool project, though I very often see critique (or tips) on web design.

Sometimes it's very simple bugs/problems authors have overlooked, sometimes it's just not very good UX (e.g. open a webpage and i does not answer what? why? how? and how much?).

Very often top comment can be a link or explanation which answers all these questions, that index page does not answer.

In this case we have link to the relevant part - which IMO should be the index page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the comment of Peter Sunde on it : [https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1098485289528500229](https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1098485289528500229)

Seriously, what are the advantage of Tippin compare to a service that use real word currencies ? Anonymity ?

<comment><USER4> Money over IP is quite impressive. Something ideological must be clouding your judgement if you can't see it.

<comment><USER7> "Money over IP", so like Credit Card? PayPal? and many other money services?

<comment><USER4> Nope. I mean money as in actual wealth. As in a store of value money.

<comment><USER8> You mean value that fluctuates "randomly" on the daily in what was proven to be a manipulated market? A market plagued by corrupt, insecure or amateur on- ramps like Quadriga, Bitfinex or MtGox? Anonymity goes out the door as soon as you get verified on one of these on and off ramps.

You cannot have a store of value if the only value that is created is a speculative agreement. The same critique that went behind fiat currency no longer being backed by gold applies just the same to cryptocurrencies. Turnkey solutions like stablecoins essentially mean you are now forced into using them as a pseudo bank and counting on them to not be handling fractional reserves at any point in time.

Crypto can have its uses in time, but it is not the emperor's new financial panacea that many people hope it is.

Regardless, the project is pretty cool and so is its execution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _This is a beta project, just like the Lightning Network itself, so losing small amounts is a possibility._

I just love the lightning network. Years of development and it still doesn't work.

<comment><USER10> It actually works pretty well whenever I use it. They are just responsible hackers and are pointing out that it is not production quality yet.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, > as a topic gets more divisive.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A > good critical comment teaches us something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That landing page is so bad that I don't even understand which problem it is trying to solve.

<comment><USER12> Great color choices tho

<comment><USER7> One of my favorite lines ever is from impress.js' documentation:

        > impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)

Now, great colors are so, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "buy me a taco" message is more prominent than what this service really does and how.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want to congratulate the creator Sergio for building on Bitcoin. Whereas others would create an altcoin, ICO, make a ton of claims and then... nothing comes out of it.

The reason "crypto" (it's really just Bitcoin) stagnated is because nobody was building on existing solid infrastructure. Now with LN leading the way we're going to see mainstream applications being built on BTC.

Bravo Sergio for leading the way :clap:

<comment><USER14> I'm not trying to create controversy but:

"The reason "crypto" (it's really just Bitcoin) stagnated is because nobody was building on existing solid infrastructure."

So you know this for a FACT?

Looks like Crypto is not stagnated by any means (price might be suppressed) if you look at the news, it seems crypto as a whole is moving forward at an accelerated pace.

<comment><USER4> It's all fluff and nothing of substance. Add to that all the 51% attacks. Ethereuem World Computer couldn't handle some kitties.

Come on. Bitcoin is here. Bitcoin works. Bitcoin is battle tested.

Obviously anyone choosing to altcoin is doing it as a quick-get-rich scheme and not actually trying to build something useful.

<comment><USER15> Bitcoin is not suitable for actual transactions though, with its low transaction rate.

<comment><USER16> LN is a good solution imo. Bitcoin transactions only happen when opening and closing a channel (which is kind of like moving money from a savings account to a prepaid card) after that you can do as many payments as you want. Eventually I guess Bitcoin will move to having larger blocks, but that largely depends on the world getting faster connections for node syncing and hard disks price going down (to store the actual blockchain)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An unpaid UK researcher saved the Japanese seaweed industry (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/how-an-unpaid-uk-researcher-saved-the-japanese-seaweed-industry/ <comment><USER2> > Nori contains toxic metals (arsenic and cadmium), whose levels are highly > variable among nori products. It also contains amphipod allergens that can > cause serious allergic reactions, especially in highly sensitized > crustacean-allergic people. Therefore, daily consumption of high amounts of > dried nori is discouraged

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

</comment><comment><USER3> > The reason nobody had been able to find nori seeds was because they were > looking for the wrong plant.

Algae by definition are unable to produce seeds. "Seeds" here is jargon with a different meaning.

<comment><USER4> I have the seed of an idea that they might be using a lay taxonomy here. Or is it the germ of a thought?

<comment><USER5> Erasmus Darwin was way ahead of you. He weaved them into erotic poetry...

<comment><USER4> The lunatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wait, so nori isn't actually a plant? (As far as I know, algae are not plants...)

<comment><USER7> Correct! Seaweed is a complex algae. Although much less common, seagrasses are true plants (which evolved from terrestrial plants like 100 million years ago). I can't think of any other submerged marine plants, and some limited google searches are only giving me mangrove forests as additional marine plants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Despite being fired for getting married, she became the first elected president of the British Phycological Society in 1952. Today, Drew-Baker is known in Japan as "the mother of the sea," and every year a festival is held in her honor in Uto City.

I wonder if she gets extra recognition from at least half of the Japanese population, for the circumstances surrounding her firing, given that being fired for daring to be both female and married is still apparently the established practice in many Japanese companies today.

<comment><USER8> That's not the case at all. Women certainly quit their jobs due to poor maternity support and childcare services, as well as the managerial glass ceiling, but I don't know how anyone can believe that Japanese labor law would allow for the standard practice of firing women when they get married.

<comment><USER4> Japanese labor law does not allow it. But Japanese labor law is often not upheld. Japanese law does not allow the education system to systematically downgrade the results of female students to stop them becoming doctors either, which has gone on for years.

<comment><USER8> You're referencing a scandal unrelated to your original point that sparked massive outrage when it was uncovered.

Where is your evidence that it is "established practice in many Japanese companies today" to fire women when they get married?

<comment><USER4> Through my friend Asami, mostly. To be more accurate, you are encouraged to get married, the dismissal happens when you get pregnant.

Look up the term 'matahara'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pesticides found on nearly all fruits and vegitables - <AUTHOR> http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/06/13/apples-can-be-tainted-with-pesticides%E2%80%94but-you-still-need-your-fruits-and-vegetables/

<comment><USER2> "And so we're back in the magical world of risk perception, where science can become the tool of bias—conscious or not."

I just cannot wrap my head around that one.</comment>


We're Writing a Guide for Startup Internships, Join In - <AUTHOR> http://seatgeek.com/blog/tech/internships-in-nyc-with-startups

<comment><USER2> Just an FYI: SeatGeek's internships are unpaid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but my interns get significant formal training, learn a ton, get college credit and have a great time: <http://www.comm.lsa.umich.edu/blog/?p=2538> <http://www.macalester.edu/news/features/maxschwartz.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I was in college, and first looking for a job, an internship would have been great.

Good work on this!

</comment><comment><USER4> this is awesome. if you want to cross post any of those internships for free on the we are ny tech job board, just let me know. - <http://wearenytech.com/jobs>

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be great. Let me know what you need from me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a better attempt to describe the ideal internship from both sides:

[http://stream.thisisapipe.com/post/5786867144/unclaimed- inte...](http://stream.thisisapipe.com/post/5786867144/unclaimed-internships)

[http://stream.thisisapipe.com/post/6740079459/internships- pa...](http://stream.thisisapipe.com/post/6740079459/internships-part-ii-the- implicit-contract)

</comment><comment><USER6> Surprised to see so many non-technical internships for the fall. Does demand for tech interns lower during school semesters?

<comment><AUTHOR> In our experience, it's much harder to find dev interns that can have a real impact in such a short period of time to make it worth the recruiting and training effort. Most students with dev talent don't have to "intern" but can actually work, even if it is remotely.

<comment><USER6> Do these students attend school full time, then, and work 20 hours/week? Or do they drop out and work full time?

(Thanks for answering, btw--I'm considering a scenario like this right now)

<comment><AUTHOR> They attend school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is not meant to be a complete list yet. If I get some interest outside of NYC, I will expand it to other cities.</comment>


Why "A + B ! = A - (-B)"? - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0039/

<comment><USER2> Hint: This isn't about math or logic where A + B certainly does equal A - (-B).

It's about storing negative values in unsigned data types in C.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title is actually: Why A + B != A - (-B)

not: Why A + B = A - (-B)</comment>


Beautiful men, women have higher IQs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2011/01/16/2011-01-16_beautiful_men_women_have_high_iqs_too_study.html#ixzz1BOSV0FCc

<comment><USER2> Dupe of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115403> (URL differs only in that this one has a random-looking fragment ID appended; (1) isn't HN supposed to check for that, and (2) why did you do that, mikecane?).

What I said there:

Actual article is at <http://personal.lse.ac.uk/KANAZAWA/pdfs/I2011.pdf>.

They used two populations with different measurements of attractiveness and of intelligence, and analysed them separately.

In the first population they got results that suggest on the order of 11-14 IQ points per standard deviation in attractiveness.

In the second, 2 IQ points per standard deviation.

The first population was of children in the UK. Their measure of "attractiveness": the children were assessed at ages 7 and 11, by their teachers, as one of "attractive", "unattractive", "underfed or undernourished", "abnormal feature", and "scruffy or slovenly & dirty". I kid you not. You may, if your own intelligence happens to be reasonable, be able to think of one or two problems with assessing "attractiveness" in this way when you're looking for correlations with intelligence.

(One more detail: attractiveness was treated as a binary variable in Kanazawa's study, with a child being reckoned "attractive" if put into the "attractive" category both at age 7 and at age 11. More than 60% of children were reckoned "attractive" by this criterion. Draw your own conclusions.)

The second population was of US high school pupils. They were reassessed about 7-8 years later, at age 18-28. (How were any of them 28 at that point? I don't know.)

The NY Daily News story says:

> The study indicated attractive men have IQs that are 13.6 points above the > average, while beautiful women are 11.4 points higher than average.

which is simply rubbish: those figures are from the first population only (and the second gives much, much weaker results), they concern children of age 7 or 11 and not "men" or "women", and they're really measuring all kinds of things other than attractiveness.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>>why did you do that, mikecane?

It wasn't on purpose! I count on the filter here to save me from posting things already up. The NYDN must take the blame here for giving me the URL that it did.

<comment><USER3> > The NYDN must take the blame here for giving me the URL that it did.

Nope, you get the blame for not editing the junk out of the URL; the filter here isn't especially smart, and merely adding a # to the end of a URL makes it think it's different. Know the limitations of the technology you use, and change your behaviors appropriately (or change the technology).

EDIT: I see that at least five people disagree with me. My reasoning is mostly related to the fact that, when I submit articles, I get the URLs from an RSS reader, which invariably means that there's a huge amount of junk at the end. So I edit it down to the smallest URL that works (sometimes stopping several times to make sure that the URL still works), because that's the polite thing to do (both to people opening the article and to the filter). Shifting the blame for not doing so to the entity provide you with the URL isn't, in my mind, the correct thing to do. Others may disagree with me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen RSS-extracted URLs like that here. But this was not one of them. The headline came up on a news site and I simply clicked through. I never expected extraneous stuff in the URL because that's never happened before using the news site. I usually get clean URLs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) I'd take these findings with a big grain of salt:

[http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf)

2) I'd be very cautious about interpreting causality, even if the results are true. Beauty is influenced by environmental factors (diet, exercise, health care etc.) that are correlated with parental and own-income. Some of these same factors also influence intelligence. There's a decent chance this research boils down to "being poor sucks."

<comment><USER5> I won't believe in those findings until I see a correlation of beauty/IQ and family income.

I've never seen a person that grew in a rich family be downright ugly.

<comment><USER6> Cross-breeding in European nobles can produce people that are, by birth, both atrocious and rich.

Otherwise, you'right, for obvious evolutionary reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this not blazingly obvious? There is no such thing as inherent beauty in the world - there is just the human perception of beauty. And we find other humans beautiful, not for some random reason, but because they will make better and fitter mates. That's what beauty in human beings is.

And being more intelligent is indeed a part of being better and fitter.

Beauty is a way for your body to broadcast its fitness. And there is no reason to think that it would broadcast only physical fitness, and totally ignore any form of mental fitness, even though it's mental fitness that has been responsible for most societal advances in recent years, AND personal advances.

<comment><USER8> Except beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I like women with nice boobs / ass and don't mind them having a couple of pounds extra; but the media / teens today prefer anorexics. I also know a couple of women that prefer skinny / waxed males (metrosexuals), although the stereotype for attractive males has included for centuries muscles and a reasonable amount of body hair.

<comment><USER9> I agree with your first line.

I'm sceptical as to how scientific this study can be, when as you say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". A measure of beauty changes over time and from culture to culture. I'm sure, if you selected a different data set of beautiful people you could prove the exact opposite.

<comment><USER10> _if you selected a different data set of beautiful people you could prove the exact opposite._

Sure, but if you _selected_ your data set, it wouldn't be the least bit valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The original intent of the IQ test, as stated by the inventor of it:

        Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual
        capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to
        know whether he is normal or retarded. ... We do not
        attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we
        leave unanswered the question of whether this
        retardation is curable, or even improveable. We shall
        limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard
        to his present mental state.

        — Alfred Binet

        *Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1873-1961, French
        psychologist) 'New Methods for the Diagnosis of the
        Intellectual Level of Subnormals' (1905), in The
        Development of Intelligence in Children, trans.
        Elizabeth Kite (1916), 37.*

That attractive people are "more likely to be normal than abnormal" isn't a huge surprise, and yet isn't hugely significant. Especially when those attractive "intelligent" people do some very retarded things with their lives.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it just me or does that title not parse at all. It should be something like "Beautiful men and women are more likely to have higher IQs"

<comment><USER13> Yeah, though the unterminated list is a frequent pattern in headlines (especially in newspapers or other very "journalisty" areas). Say, something like: _"Ruby, Python, C All On The Up"_ I find it a bit archaic now - it has a certain early 20th century air to it.

Two real examples:

"Apple, Microsoft Are Megabrand Kingpins in Social Radar Index" - <http://adage.com/article?article_id=139386>

"Twitter, Facebook are victims of 'single, massively coordinated attack'" - [http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/06/twitter-facebook- victims-o...](http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/06/twitter-facebook-victims-of- single-massively-coordinated-attack/)

<comment><USER12> Actually it looks like they wrote the title twice then dropped both copies in the blender to come up with something unique. "Beautiful men, women are more likely to have higher IQs" or "Beautiful men, women are smarter too" either of those I might have misinterpreted but understood, but the resulting title smoothie is just not coherent.

Now on about the actual topic. Could this be an instance of correlation and not causation? Exercise is good for the brain. Exercise makes you look better. Therefore people who exercise both look better and are smarter on average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Two thoughts popped into my head after reading this.

1\. Beautiful people tend to have more confidence. If you recall from grade school there's an old rule about multiple choice tests which says "if you don't know for sure go with your first instinct". People with an abundance of confidence do this naturally while those without confidence will often talk themselves out of the right answer.

2\. Beautiful people get more attention. For better or worse a beautiful person probably drew the attention of their instructors since it's human nature to be drawn to attractiveness. This means a more personalized education which in turn should translate into a slightly higher IQ.

Given the difference recorded here is only between 5% and 6% I could see small factors (like the ones listed above) being the cause of such a phenomenon

<comment><USER15> There's also a link between IQ and diet, and, obviously, diet and beauty (healthy people look better; eating too many Big Macs will make you fat, and thereby less attractive to most.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's as may be, but (anecodatal unscientific opinion coming up) I think there is a correlation between being attractive, and not being very interesting; beautiful people don't usually have to try so hard in life, so they may not develop the more interesting personality traits those who have to try harder acquire)

I like to think that anyway. Makes the World seem fairer.

</comment><comment><USER17> We're amazingly modest too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately, the title also infers the converse: that, by the standards set by those conducting the experiment, ugly men and women have lower IQs.

This raises the question of what people call "beautiful," "attractive," "ugly" and "unattractive" respectively: purely subjective measures which do not take into account the fact that some of the wealthiest, most successful and smartest people in the world look physically ugly, scrawny, geeky or otherwise "unattractive" by the standards the experimenters seem to have set.

Consider Bill Gates, Gandhi, Einstein, Steve Buscemi, Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. Each a genius in their respective fields, yet hardly the most perfect- looking physical specimens.

Enough evidence exists of the existence of physically unattractive, socially intelligent people with high IQs to provide sufficient data to refute the argument above.

Those conducting the experiment simply appear to have begun with an assumption and then selected only evidence which confirms the assumption, ignoring counterindicative data.

I really would not take the findings of this experiment seriously without some form of verification - for instance, a repetition of the experiment by another team in another part of the US, perhaps repetition of the experiment with other nationalities and so on.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised no one has pointed out how subjective the term "beauty" is. How, exactly, did they measure this?

Or, is it just possible that smart really is sexy? :)

<comment><USER20> Here's an unpopular, but scientifically verified thought:

Beauty isn't all that subjective.

Things like waist/hip ratio( 0.7 for females, 0.95 for males ), facial symmetry, skin smoothness, have all been subjects of bias-controlled studies in which the overwhelming evidence is that human beings have biologically predetermined ideas of attractiveness.

That's not to say there are not significant subjective aspects, but the research is rather clear on at least some aspects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Given that both intelligence and physical attractiveness are highly heritable"

Larry Summers, and others, have gotten into trouble when he said there was a genetic component to intellectual capability and interest.

I guess as long as the claim is very generic, our culture will let it slide.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yet another news story for which it's good to point to Peter Norvig's article on interpreting research findings.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

The finding in the submitted link needs a lot more definition and replication to be credible.

For readers who are interested in IQ research, I've found a bibliography on Wikipedia

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations)

that links to a lot of high-quality reliable secondary sources on the latest issues in intelligence research.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, surely if you accept the evolutionary premises that a) women seek men who are successful

        b) men seek women who are beautiful

        c) intelligence leads to greater success

        d) intelligence is genetic/hereditary (to some extent)

then this is an inevitable outcome. That more physically beautiful people tend to be more naturally intelligent, due to sexual selection / natural selection / evolution.

(I didn't come up with this myself, I read a psychology paper that pointed this out some years ago. Can't find citation though)

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know why this is such a surprise. This was all explained in the first chapter of Brave New World.

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone else find the publication odd?

</comment><comment><USER26> Looking for a cofounder ... please send photo?

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't attraction relative?

<comment><USER28> No. There are differences of opinion, but if you show people a group of e.g. 8's on Hotornot, and a group of 2's on Hotornot, I doubt that anyone will have trouble figuring out which is which.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One other consideration: I recall a 20/20 special years ago that showed how superficial society can be. They did a test where they had one 'unattractive' person on the side of the road who had no gas and needed help. Needless to say, they never received any help in comparison to the 'attractive' person who was put in the same situation.

The point that I'm making is that, maybe the reason why 'attractive' people may have a higher IQ, is that they are more likely to receive help from others based solely on their appearance.

Another point I would like to add: Maybe 'attractive' people feel the need to increase their intelligence, due to the stereotype that 'attractive' people don't need to have intelligence and can just rely upon their looks to get them through life.

<comment><USER28> You don't need to put 'attractive' in quotes, here. Attractiveness is a real thing; assessments of beauty strongly correlate with one another. And you're talking about an example where one group of people _literally attracted_ other people. So there's no sense in which they weren't attractive.

IQ is pretty stable over a lifetime. It would be extraordinary for "help from others" to have a long-term influence; only diet and head injuries seem to affect IQ in a permanent way.

<comment><USER29> I would need to put the term in quotes if I'm planning on using the term in an unusual manner.

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quotation_mar...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quotation_mark#Signaling_unusual_usage)

I put the term in single quotes due to the fact that 'attractive' can be an ambiguous and subjective term.

I'm aware that 'Attractiveness is a real thing'.</comment></comment></comment>


The Poetics of CLI Command Names - <AUTHOR> https://smallstep.com/blog/the-poetics-of-cli-command-names/ <comment><USER2> To `useradd` or to `adduser`: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

the slings and arrows of outrageous manpage,

or to take up `file` against the output of `which`,

and seek "Perl script text executable"?

<comment><USER3> You win HN for the day imo!

<comment><USER4> I concur, bravo! Someone should enshrine this comment somewhere. Sometimes I wish hacker news had a "best of".

<comment><USER3> That would be fun. Someone clearly disagreed with me though, for I have one downvote now? Lol.

<comment><USER4> Hhhmm, I think but I can't know for certain that it may be because comments that don't contribute to the discussion are discouraged. So one may argue you could've just upvoted. Generally I agree with this approach, but sometimes people just deserve some verbal applause. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER5> It does contribute though. I have to type 'man' _every_ time I want to add a user to decide which. It's a great lesson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Say what you will about PowerShell, the commands are really discoverable and intuitive. The list of approved verbs is helpful too when writing your own cmdlets: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/powershell/scripting/develo...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/powershell/scripting/developer/cmdlet/approved-verbs-for-windows- powershell-commands)

<comment><USER7> Discoverable? Not for me.

I've been reading the output of 'help' and reading it, and reading it, and I can't see a paradigm (apart from prolixity) or much consistency.

Unix commands have the advantage of brevity, and the inconsistencies somehow aid memorization.

<comment><USER8> Get-command, Get-member And get-help can make things more discoverable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OS/400, the operating system of the IBM AS/400, has a really consistent pattern to its command names. The format is VERB+NOUN where VERB is a small list of verb abbreviations (ADD=Add,CFG=Configure,CHG=Change,CPY=Copy,CRT=Create,DEL=Delete,DSP=Display,RMV=Remove,STR=Start,WRK=Work With) and likewise there are abbreviations for the type of object the command acts on. So CRTPF=Create Physical File, CRTLIB=Create Library, CRTUSRPRF=Create User Profile, etc.

(OS/400 was later renamed i5/OS, and then renamed again to IBM i. Likewise, AS/400 was renamed iSeries, then System i, and then merged with System p–successor of the RS/6000–to become POWER Systems. But, I prefer IBM's original product names–OS/400 is a far more distinctive name for an operating system called "IBM i", which promotes confusion with Cisco IOS and Apple iOS.)

<comment><USER7> I also used the AS/400 / System i / IBM i, back when it was called the System/38.

The feature I most miss is command prompting. Type a command name, press F4, and fill in the blanks for the parameters. If a parameter takes enumerated values, type in a question mark (?) and get a list of the allowed values.

That was great for productivity.

<comment><USER10> Is this like PowerShell's `Show-Command` and the earlier Macintosh Programmer's Workbench Commando?

<comment><USER9> Yes, same basic concept. Display a fill-in form to guide the user in filling out the command parameters. The main difference is that the OS/400 display a text mode form (5250 block mode terminal form), whereas PowerShell Show- Command and MPW Commando are both GUI tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TIL: " _you can extend Git by putting an executable in your $PATH called git-[command], and you 'll be able to reach it using git [command]_". Cool!

</comment><comment><USER12> "The more niche your command, the longer its name should be. Very short names should be reserved for utilities people use all the time, like cd, ls, rg."

So I had to read that sentence to find out about rg. I use git grep all day (aliased to gg, making his point), which I guess is a slower alternative.

</comment><comment><USER13> Watching less experienced students navigate Linux while teaching a networking introduction has also led me to a bias against hyphenated commands. I was surprised at how often newcomers will add a space into these two part commands.

Extra annoyance points if the second part of the command forms a valid sequence of options. I'm looking at you `netstat-nat`.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Don't start your command name with the letter g even though it's a perfectly > fine letter situated right in the center of the keyboard. All past and > future g commands are the personal property of Richard Stallman, who in 1983 > was granted an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to the > entire g namespace. Although he grudgingly granted exceptions for git and > go, if you're not Linus Torvalds or Google, don't bother hitting him up.

What?

<comment><USER15> I guess it won't hurt to explain the joke.

The Mac has what is sometimes called a "BSD userland" with the result that cp, rm, ls, grep, etc work basically like they do on FreeBSD. But some Mac users prefer the GNU versions of those commands. To avoid breaking scripts that depend on the BSD behavior, when Homebrew installs the GNU versions, it names them gcp, grm, gls, ggrep, etc.

<comment><USER9> Not just macOS. At my first full-time job, I was introduced to Solaris. I had been using Linux for years, and been using GNU utilities for even longer (through EMX, which is like Cygwin but for OS/2). And the lack of options I was used to from the GNU versions infuriated me. They told me, "just put a g in front". Although it wasn't a standard part of Solaris install, the sysadmin had installed several of the GNU utilities (from sunfreeware.com) and they were present with that prefix.

This custom, of installing GNU utilities with a g-prefix, isn't just on macOS and Solaris, but also on other UNIX flavours as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yggdrasil would be a _great_ name for a command that provides a navigatable tree interface to your file system.

It'd probably quickly get shortened to "ygg", which feels pretty nice to type to me...

<comment><USER17> It would probably get confused with Yggdrasil, the hot new "Linux distribution" that everyone is trying.

<comment><USER18> from wikipedia: "The last release of Yggdrasil was in 1995."

<comment><USER16> Why is this giving me flashbacks to the time around then when a friend tried downloading Slackware to some insane number of floppy disks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The version number should never appear in the command name.

Well, that's nice in theory, but...

> In 50+ years of typing into terminals, we have not figured out how to have > multiple versions of things coexist peacefully.

Well, yes, we have. By making the version number appear in the command name. It's not a great solution, but it's _a_ solution. And since you didn't really provide a better one, it's pretty silly to advice _against_ using it.

Also, symlinks _are_ a thing. Nobody (normally) invokes python3.7m directly. There's a symlink pointing to it (or more likely not, as it's probably not the python you want).

<comment><USER20> Versions should appear when you have multiple versions, not a default behavior.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure how you envision that would work. Should the contents of a package mutate when another version of the same package is installed? Would you consider that to be a sane behavior?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h No, you use your package manager's alternatives system to manage who gets the "default" name.

<comment><USER19> Yes, that's covered by the last paragraph of my initial comment - it's generally handled by symlinks already.

jspaetzel seems to think this isn't good enough though, and that the commands should magically just have the non versioned name until multiple versions show up on the same system. I'm curious about how they envision that to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> _Consider how your command will be pronounced around the world. Kodak is a word that was designed to sound the same in many languages. lego and ikea might be great command names too, if they weren 't already trademarked_

Actually, English botches IKEA, which in its native Swedish and presumably most other continental European languages is something like _ee-kéa_. It took me a while to decipher, first time I heard about _eye-keer_.

</comment><comment><USER22> If we could just get a standard for -? or /? or --? I would be happy already.

<comment><USER23> same for -help / \--help. And there are the rogue commands that use -? and --help for the same...

<comment><USER24> Perhaps I don't understand what you are talking about. One hyphen for single- character combinable flags, and two hyphens for multi-character flags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm happy I got to name the "say" tool in macOS X.

Internally we sometimes use a lower level tool for debugging TTS, which is called... "grunt".

</comment><comment><USER26> Nothing make me feel more like a wizard while programming that rattling off some complex statements on the command line. Normally I don't use the cli a whole lot day-to-day but recently started on a project that has me using it a great deal. Overall the project has been pretty miserable but one of the bright spots has been getting much more competent with Linux commands.

</comment><comment><USER27> Meta, but clicking on the article brings me to a page where I can't read anything on the ledger iPhone — the top half is logo, ad and white space. The bottom half is covered by a huge cookie popup. And the bottom line is a floating chat button

</comment><comment> batman-farts imagine if Slack called itself webirc...

We'd all be better off, as we would know never to type that command.

</comment><comment><USER28> What about `less` is `more`!?

<comment><USER29> "more" can't scroll upwards. "less" is a clone of more that can - hence the name.

In most unixes, more is now an alias to less, resulting in the literal fact that "less is more".

<comment><USER30> So now in order to transmit the mnemonic you have to communicate the lineage of the command. "more" begat "less" begat "zless"...

Punny names stop being funny after a few years. How about a general principle of not using punny names in the first place?

<comment><USER29> I think it's important to remember that unix-based operating systems are under your control. You can create aliases under any name you like, if you'd prefer a different name.

<comment><USER31> > _unix-based operating systems are under your control_

Except when they're not.

<comment><USER32> True, but if you can run any command, you can probably run the alias command. It's just more convenient if you can run it from a .bashrc or similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> i also love the posix c naming conventions, like fopen, malloc, iconv, the level of ambiguity and abstraction is poetic

<comment><USER30> creat() really gets me going

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> various 8bit '80s BASIC implementations:

REM

Yes, it's the comment marker, standing for REMARK.

But it's also, metaphorically, a line that is "asleep."

Genius.

</comment><comment><USER35> I for one love pieces like this :-)

</comment><comment><USER36> TFA lost me with the thing about curl. Yes, it's super easy to type, but it's a terrible UI.

<comment><USER37> You might like lftp.</comment></comment>


Yahoo in Talks to Buy Foursquare - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-buy-foursquare/ <comment><USER3> People forget that Mayer acquired 56 companies (57 if Foursquare deal goes through). That is, 41% of all of Yahoo's acquisitions over the past 20 years happened in the last 3 years. Think it is important to analyze this Foursquare deal the context of this yet-to-be-proven strategy.

Back to this deal: Interesting possibility, for sure. Will it work out? Who knows with Yahoo.

Foursquare assets:

         1) Brand name with both consumers and businesses

         2) 45m daily active users

         3) Valuable data- Can improve Yahoo Search, Yahoo ads, etc

         4) Large group of domain experts

Yahoo's value add:

         1) Yahoo does have a strong ad sales department, so it can bring lots of brand names to Foursquare

         2) Can heavily integrate Foursquare into its search features- so Foursquare's DAU can stabilize/grow.

Seems like Mayer's strategy is:

1) Buy her way out of changing Yahoo's employees + culture. This is a longer term play.

2) Try to create some constellation of a platform. Ideal world for Mayer would be:

         a) Get your homepage to be Yahoo

         b) Read the latest trending headlines via Yahoo media

         c) Yahoo stories pump up Yahoo-owned Tumblr blogs, Yahoo-owned Flickr photo sharing, etc

         d) After that, you search for things on Yahoo. The search would ideally share information coming from Foursquare.

The big thing is on execution and that's why people constantly criticize Yahoo. If they do actually make a sensible platform, expect Mayer to be viewed very positively.

<comment><USER4> "2) 45m daily active users"

Source? Maybe user signups, but I can't imagine daily active users.

<comment><USER5> Looks like it's registered users, as of a year ago.[0]

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/foursquare- surpasses-45-milli...](http://www.businessinsider.com/foursquare- surpasses-45-million-registered-users-and-begins-collecting-data-in-new- ways-2-2014-1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has got to be entirely for their location data. While I see the migration of check-ins to swarm as Foursquares way to say individual check-in data is largely useless, their data on latitude and longitude of businesses as well as their somewhat lengthy knowledge about the venues from user reviews is very valuable. Foursquare is also probably cheaper than buying Yelp, or Google Places which are the only other ways to get this sort of in-depth information. Untappd is exclusively Foursquare so you also get a link to all that information. I see Foursquares migration away from check-ins and more of a location API as their way of saying "there are so many niche markets that do check-ins why not just focus on what we do so well which is providing location / review data"

<comment><USER7> > _While I see the migration of check-ins to swarm as Foursquares way to say > individual check-in data is largely useless, their data on latitude and > longitude of businesses as well as their somewhat lengthy knowledge about > the venues from user reviews is very valuable_

The problem is that without ongoing individual check-ins the aggregate data becomes stale and useless, especially when you're talking about the kind of small businesses that are going to make up the long tail of any monetization strategy. There's no way Yahoo! would do this as a pure data play unless they have a plan to revive the individual check-ins.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if they are letting the smaller apps (like Untappd) be their check-in frontend and they basically just aggregate up all the locations the people have "checked-in". With Untappd, to create a new location, you have to download Foursquare and create it so it keeps users creating new venues and you immediately have a somewhat genre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When your company is on its way down and may never make money again, Yahoo will be there.

<comment><USER9> Foursquare has build a solid data business, also its data team is one of the best out there. Go on youtube and watch some of their presentations to see what is possible with their data. The issue is that they are stuck in a strategy and a founders vision, this makes it hard to totally change their business, branding etc. I still think apple should have bought them a long time ago, but it is a solid buy for Yahoo, not the foursquare part but the data side, which is worth more.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand why they pivoted to a Yelp model instead of just trying to grow check-ins and market their data to businesses. For at least the US market I imagine Foursquare is the best dataset out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/588354385249435649](https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/588354385249435649)

edit: cnbc saying they are not in talks for the twitter blocked individuals here

<comment><USER11> [http://www.cnbc.com/id/102588909?trknav=homestack:topnews:7](http://www.cnbc.com/id/102588909?trknav=homestack:topnews:7)

additional info

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is Yahoo's acquisition strategy? Looking at the list of acquisitions since Marissa Mayer's arrival [0], the theme seems to be pageviews + content + userbase + advertising. This is the strategy of a media company. Attract as many eyeballs as possible, then monetize them.

How does Foursquare fit into this? Perhaps the plan is to turn it into an advertising platform for businesses, and differentiate from Yelp through feaures like better review transparency?

Advantages I see of Foursquare:

\- Recognizable brand, offline and online, despite declining userbase.

\- Lots of brick-and-mortar businesses already signed onto platform.

\- Businesses pay money to advertise. Yahoo can monetize offline channel and reach customers in-store.

\- Businesses frustrated with Yelp, now is opportunity to differentiate.

This acuisition could fit into the "media company" strategy because it enables monetization of businesses and opens up offline communication channels for reaching customers.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo!#cite_ref- Tumblr_83-0)

<comment><USER13> For a very long time Yahoo considered itself first and foremost an entertainment/media company. It considered "online" as its channel.

It's not a bad strategy given that Yahoo isn't particularly technically exceptional.

<comment><USER14> How do you definite technically exceptional? Trendy javascript frameworks?

[http://labs.yahoo.com/](http://labs.yahoo.com/)

<comment><USER15> Some people just talk out of their asses, Yahoo has been for a long time a big player when it comes to be technically exceptional.

They were doing all the big data stuff we see as "cool" way before it was cool.

<comment><USER16> Times change!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to post it here because the other post complaining about FourSquare's check-in function (Swarm) dying is saturated.

I'm a big check-in user but FourSquare's pivot has been brilliant. You can clearly see the benefits when they partnered with Twitter, with FourSquare being the 'Google of the physical world'.

Having a dedicated app for checking in (meaning the people who like to check- in are properly looked after in their own, siloed app) is a lot nicer than before.

Back to Yahoo!: Don't think this will be a good acquisition. Look at their previous acquisitions: Tumblr. Nothing much has happened, no major monetisation project.

Twitter would be a better company to buy. It also makes logistical sense as well. Combination of Twitter and FourSquare would be an effective combination against Facebook, and also Google Plus and Google Maps.

<comment><USER18> Twitter said no to Yahoo already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pump the brakes a bit here, a lot of folks I trust saying no such acquisition talks are taking place.

[http://recode.net/2015/04/15/sources-say-yahoo-foursquare- ar...](http://recode.net/2015/04/15/sources-say-yahoo-foursquare-are-not-in- talks/)

Ugh... I hate that I enjoy this type of gossip so much. It's the reality TV of my demographic.

</comment><comment><USER20> Do people still use foursquare or is this about something else? I don't know anyone who still uses it. At work, I once remember a time when people were competing for most check-ins at the coffee place across the street, or even our building itself.

Now, nobody ever mentions it.

<comment><USER21> Used to use it, but the last redesign just made it unusable imo. I switched to Yelp when that came out after previously being a Foursquare user for 5+ years...

<comment><USER22> agreed - foursquare was great, then they split apps, now it is completely useless. maybe they were ahead of their time ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks like Yahoo! is where startups go to rest in peace!

<comment><USER24> Another solid purchase by the company that bought broadcast.com in April 1999 for... drumroll... $5.7 billion! Yes, I'm actually not making that up. It's why you know who Mark Cuban is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems their list of troubled acquisitions was not long enough ...

If Mrs. Mayer has strategy - she better execute it fast. If she has not - <USER2> least deal with tumblr before wasting money on another company.

<comment><USER12> I think she has a pretty clear strategy, as I mentioned in another comment in this thread. Look at the list of acquisitions since she joined as CEO. [0]

Almost all of these acquistions fit into one of three categories: content, advertising, mobile. The strategy is to build Yahoo into a media company.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo!#cite_ref- Tumblr_83-0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A lot of people here don't realize Foursquare is something entirely different now. When it comes to traveling to a new place Foursquare definitely beats Yelp in recommendations.

For check-ins and that sort of gamification there is Swarm.

</comment><comment><USER27> Used to be one of my favorite apps - used it a few times a day. Until great bate-and-switch! :)

[http://locationplay.blogspot.com/2014/08/so-long-and- thanks-...](http://locationplay.blogspot.com/2014/08/so-long-and-thanks-for- all-checkins-or.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Related, but unrelated: Many people who perform a search using the default on their browser do not know whether they are on Google, Yahoo, Bing. They just Googled it, Google may as well be a verb to them as in "I googled it on Yahoo. The first link was from Foursquare."

</comment><comment><USER29> How does this kind of thing leak? When the last company I was at sold, most of us weren't even told for fear our acquirer would get cold feet if the terms leaked.

<comment><USER30> It's part of the M&A playbook. One way to test whether a company is for sale or willing to buy you is to "leak" that you're currently in talks with your target acquisition or acquirer.

You get a response sooner or later, either in the form of a firm denial by the other party through the press, or in the form of someone picking up their phone (either from the target itself or from a potentially interested alternative).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So a company that no one cares about is purchasing another company that no one cares about?

<comment><USER32> But apparently they care enough to point out that no one cares about them....

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> At least Foursquare is mobile-native, which is one of the primary goals of Yahoo. One of the primary things Foursquare desperately needs is scale, which is one thing Yahoo can legitimately claim to have. For Foursquare it's a bit like admitting defeat, but being eaten by Yahoo could be a good move for users. I've been a foursquare fan since 2011 and would love if the service could regain some of its former luster and glory!

<comment><USER34> Foursquare also makes a good tie-in with Flickr and their WOEID[1] stuff.

[1] [https://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/guide/concepts.htm...](https://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/guide/concepts.html)

<comment><USER35> The Yahoo Geo team that gave birth to WOEID is no longer. But if you were looking for a geo acquihire, Foursquare would be a pretty amazing one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Foursquare isn't about checkins anymore, it's about discovery and the TL;DR.

Yelp users love to go on and on and on in their reviews while Foursquare's ratings aren't review-driven though I've found them just as accurate.

</comment><comment><USER37> I pray that their API stays as developer-friendly as it is now. Google's Places API ToS makes it practically unusable and I can't think of any other obvious alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yahoo is indeed the place where startups go to die!

</comment><comment><USER39> Yes, Foursquare's situation is bad. Still, it has gathered precious and unique data.

One shouldn't underestimate its holistic value.

<comment><USER40> Exactly, they have gathered precious and unique data but world is changing so fast and if these data are not updated they will be worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looking at Foursquare's history on CrunchBase, they show "only" $150 Million in funding. That's not even accounting for some of it being debt rather than equity financing.

That makes $900 million a good return, even though I'm sure it's not the peak return FourSquare good have ever gotten.

</comment><comment><USER42> It is funny to see that the total amount Yahoo gained from all her other acquisitions put together is less than a fraction of the Alibaba deal.

</comment><comment><USER43> Yahoo is forming a monopoly in the outdated tech company space.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats to the founders they did it again! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_(service)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_\(service\))

</comment><comment><USER44> I couldn't even remember what foursquare was ...

</comment><comment><USER45> Yahoo and Foursquare both lack a clear strategy moving forward. I'm not sure adding two struggling companies makes a strong one. Reminds me of Microsoft/Nokia.

</comment><comment><USER46> that would be another bad acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER47> People still use Foursquare? My first reaction when seeing this was: "What year is it?!"

<comment><USER48> Its actually my preferred way to find good restaurants nearby. What do the cool kids use for that nowadays?

<comment><USER49> Citymaps. Yelp has a long way to go before I will trust their rating system, and Yelpers' style of reviews are just painful to read.

<comment><USER48> Citymaps looks decent, the data seems to come from 4Square but the UI is better (though a little slow sometimes). I also don't trust Yelp that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I realize this isn't contributing to the conversation, but it's funny to see this directly underneath the post describing the immense dropoff in foursquare's popularity.

<comment><USER13> That would be a great way to try and lower the purchase price of a struggling firm. Dump a bunch of negative PR on the company through 3rd parties immediately before making your offer.

<comment><USER12> Negotiations are based on facts, not perception. M&A revolves around balance sheets, usage statistics, product strategy, and other metrics based on real data. The press is clueless and articles are worthless in the long-term.

<comment><USER51> Not so much. _Any_ negotiation is heavily influenced by perception and emotion. What you're describing is more true of a pure financial acquisition, but way less true of a strategic acquisition. Fear of missing out, which not generally based on facts, can drive acquirers into a frenzy and drive a valuation halfway to the moon.

<comment><USER12> Good point and nice distinction between financial vs. strategic acquisitions. But keep in mind there are two sides to the table. If a potential acquirer unleashes a frenzy of negative press leading into an acquisition, it could be obvious to the company being acquired, which could negate any points based on the negative press.

<comment><USER52> Or, if it is a social network, acctually hurt the value of the company to be acquired. It's certainly a good thing for a social network to have the status of "the place to be" and not "the sinking ship".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened to the Nexus 7? - <AUTHOR>

Over the summer I remember reading about the high anticipation for Google's Nexus 7 tablet. However, the launch itself seemed lackluster and I have never seen one in the wild.
Was there a flaw with the Nexus 7? Did consumers simply not adopt it? Is it successful and just under-publicized?
In my case, I was ready to pre-order a Nexus 7 but the fact that I had to use Google's payment gateway instead of just Amazon turned out to cause me enough hesitation that I did not purchase the product. <comment><USER2> Got mine a week ago. Absolutely love it. I haven't played with other tablets very much, so I can't offer a serious comparison. I thing the size is perfect for reading, browsing and watching videos just about anywhere. It's also perfect for handling my morning email over coffee without taking over my little coffee table.

Also, having Jelly Bean on my tablet makes my 2 year old droid incredible (cyanogenmod) seem _much_ older.

Not by any means useful data to people who don't know me, but the four people I know who own one love theirs as well. My GF uses mine almost as much as I do and is hoping to get one for herself.

It also didn't hurt to get a $25 Google Play credit along with the device.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got one. It's nice. Not iPad nice, but nice. I think it's mostly forgotten because Google really doesn't know how to do e-commerce. Play.Google.com/store is a mess. And the order process was such a mess I was skeptical that the order went through until the box arrived - and then a day later I received the shipping number and order confirmation.

It's not like anyone has to invent e-commerce anymore. It's pretty much solved from the UX all the way down to the taxonomy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bought one as soon as it was available. My major problem with it is the same problem I have had with my Android smart phones: Lack of apps.

Almost all new Y Combinator startups choose iOS first. When Google has their $0.25 app sale, I had already purchased 95% of the apps they showed off.

</comment><comment><USER5> Google / Asus pushed them through retail channels here (Netherlands) and it generated quite a buzz. Demand was much bigger than the supply, especially at first, because the retailers didn't realize there was so much interest in this device. I can't say anything real about the numbers, it wasn't Apple-like but at some point they sold more than 5000 a day (quite a lot for a small country like ours), I imagine total number of sales is around 100k. No one slept in front of a store, but lots of people tried to get one and had to wait a few weeks for the next batches to become available.

That said, I like mine but don't love it. The screen is quite bland and not a lot of apps cater to the form factor. I mean, phone apps work fine if the aim is to have bigger fonts and a bit more screen real estate, but only a handful of apps do something useful with the extra space. Also, a number of apps is blocking either the tablet version or phone version through the Play store, even though either would reasonably work. It's nice as a reader (for anything other than PDF, but reflowing formats are fine) and certainly more comfortable to hold than my Samsung Tab 8.9 or 10.1. JB is a nice plus but my phone and Tabs should eventually get that as well. Not getting rid of the 8.9 / 10.1 form factors any time soon, though. I treat it as yet another digital accessory for a tech-addicted lifestyle, non-essential yet nice to have.

</comment><comment><USER6> What happened was the Kindle Fire HD series announcement. And then the Nook HD series announcement. And the continued rumors of an iPad Mini. Most people are not going to tear through a bunch of tablets. They will spend their money on the one they are willing to keep and use. And for most people, the rumor of the iPad Mini holds them back from buying anything else.

</comment><comment><USER7> I bought one and just recently sold my iPad. Everyone I know who has one loves it and everyone who comes over and uses mine now wants one.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've seen them at my local Staples store. It's pretty slick. I expect Best Buy has them in stock, as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> I bought a few for an RFID project (they can read NFC/RFID with no extra hardware). Its very cool and seems well made but I couldn't really see myself using one as my personal tablet over an iPad.

I like the size though!

</comment><comment><USER10> I see them all the time. I pre-ordered mine on launch and I've used it tons since.

My iPad 3 normally collects dust as the N7 form factor is so much better and lighter for reading, despite the screen inferiority.

<comment><USER11> I read a lot of PDFs, specifically programming books. I like my 7" Android tablet (Kindle Fire 1st Gen) but I find the reading experience terrible in comparison to the iPad 3. There really doesn't seem to be any way to display technical books on a 7" screen unless they are specifically designed for such a task. I had to sell the iPad a while back, so now I may take a look at the 8.9" Kindle Fire to see if it's big enough to properly display my PDFs.

While I'm interested in it, there is one thing about the 8.9" Kindle Fire that really disappointed me already. They advertise $50 a year for a mobile connection, but it's only for the first year. When you take a look at the huge price increase between the Wifi and the ATT 3G version, it's not a discount, you are just being forced to prepay for your service. Other than that, it looks pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You made your decision based on a payment gateway... ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't intentional - it was a question of convenience. I searched for the Nexus 7 on the Amazon app on iPhone after reading the story, but then found out that I needed to pay on Google. I didn't want to fill out the payment info for Google on my phone as a matter of convenience, and I never returned to Google's site from my laptop to follow through with purchasing.</comment></comment>


Amazon changes its review policy - <AUTHOR> https://madgeniusclub.com/2017/12/10/amazon-review-policy-change-more/ <comment><USER2> I don't think it's gonna make a difference. At least in Amazon ES, most reviews are written by top reviewers who have made their "career" by first reviewing small products bought by them and after that they're gifted other, bigger products (using 100% OFF coupons so they appear as verified purchases). The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value.

And Amazon ES is full of those.

<comment><USER3> > The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated > long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value.

Not always. I've seen tons of critical two- or three-star reviews that were multiple paragraphs and had pictures detailing the issues with the product. Piss off the right person with a shitty product or even an unfortunate lemon, and you'll get lambasted for it.

And then there's people like me; I don't review Amazon purchases often, maybe one in 20 items, but when I do I write a detailed review because either the item greatly impressed me, or seriously pissed me off. I've never done a compensated review (I wouldn't even know how to start doing that) and the few times a negative review resulted in a seller offering to refund or replace in exchange for five stars and a positive review, I've refused.

Only once did I change a review after interacting with a seller, and I left the entire negative text intact with an addendum stating their customer service was helpful and polite, and I was raising from two stars to three solely because their customer service attitude and promises to improve the product made up for the quality control issues in my mind. I did this without the seller requesting it, but they were greatly appreciative and refunded my purchase without me even asking for it.

<comment><USER4> For sure, the other typical 'long reviewers' are the 'Vine hopefuls'. People trying to build a reputation for good / helpful reviews so they can get 'free stuff' from the Vine program (where Amazon sends you products, ostensibly 'on (indefinite) loan') to review.

<comment><USER5> >> ostensibly 'on (indefinite) loan') to review.

They're yours to keep, although they reserve the right to ask you to send them back within 6 months (never happened with me). You can't give them away (you're expected to dispose/recycle them) and you're not allowed to post reviews of those products in other places, although I've seen that happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The described policy change of requiring a customer to have spent at least $50 to leave a verified review happened in 2016... [0]

[0] [https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/message.jspa?message...](https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=3742695)

</comment><comment><USER7> My latest foray into Amazon review was this. Company contacts me asking to do review. They have me purchase the product with my own money. Then they send me the amount via paypal. So I don't think this policy will stop much assuming they all shift to that model.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've stopped leaving Amazon reviews. Recently I was bored and went through a few bits of network equipment and PC hardware I purchased and reviewed a few of them. 3/6 of the reviews were rejected for being against community guidelines with no reason provided. Even after reading the guidelines it's not clear why they were rejected. I put in effort to describe why something got its rating from me. For example, I discussed the strengths/weaknesses the network equipment. From now on I might leave a star rating, but I'm not wasting time to get a review accepted. I'll leave that to the shills.

<comment><USER9> Same thing happened to me with Wikipedia. I made a time-consuming, cited edit to an article and it was immediately backed out. Now I completely ignore factual errors in Wikipedia, including one that I just looked up and found is still there at least 5 years later.

<comment><USER10> Want to link to that specific factual error? Someone here could probably fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google crippled their rewards for reviews (1TB for Local Guides dropped to 100GB now nothing) as they gained a critical mass of participants.

There has to be a way for Amazon to Mechanical Turk reviews of reviews -- however many layers deep required!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great idea. At least they get some cash with a real name attached to the review. I hope they don't allow those pre-paid Visa cards.

<comment><USER13> I don't know that the banks "tell" vendors "This purchase was made with a pre- paid credit/bank card" \- I've not seen a flag that shows that before.

<comment><USER14> Stripe give you a `funding` property on a card source [0], which at least in the UK distinguishes between debit, credit and prepaid cards somewhat reliably.

0: [https://stripe.com/docs/api/python#card_object- funding](https://stripe.com/docs/api/python#card_object-funding)

I assume this is not exclusive to Stripe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> tldr; Amazon now requires fake accounts to pay them first.</comment>


How I improved my gas mileage by 16% - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fuelizer.com/how-i-improved-my-gas-mileage-by-16-percent/

<comment><USER2> There's one simple step that doesn't mean losing your entertainment or spoiling your driving enjoyment, and makes driving safer rather than more dangerous as well as improving your mileage: check your tire pressure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, that's also a great way to improve it. Good thing improvements are cumulative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not an expert on automotive engineering, but I don't think removing any electrical component from your car will increase fuel mileage. Most cars have the serpentine belt on the engine also connected to the alternator, so the alternator is always spinning, regardless of how much electrical juice you are using. However, if you have a hybrid, I can see where using less electricity would increase your fuel economy, this is why the new Toyota Prius has solar panels.</comment>


Time Warner Cable, Cox Suffer Widespread Outages in Northeast - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/09/news/companies/time-warner-cable-cox-outages/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This service outage is strange: Phone service is out. DNS is out but internet access otherwise works (can't use default DNS provided by Cox). Cable service works for local channels only.</comment>


Show HN: Hadoop in Excel - <AUTHOR> https://datanitro.com/hadoop_in_excel.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm one of the developers. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have on this.

If you're in New York, I'd love to meet you in person at our Big Data in Excel meetup this Monday: [http://www.meetup.com/DataNitro/events/149402612/](http://www.meetup.com/DataNitro/events/149402612/)

And, as the page says, we're looking for beta users! If you're interested in this, know someone who might be, or just have an opinion, I'd love to talk to you. You can comment here or reach me at ben at datanitro.com.

<comment><USER2> Looks like a _killer product_ , because there are a lot of business people who readily know how to write what is essentially functional code in Excel but for whatever reason cannot or will not write even simple map and reduce functions in a conventional programming language to extract information from a large Hadoop data set.

Are formulas or spreadsheet browsing limited in any way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Formulas should be used as columnar operations: you can apply one formula to every element of a column (map) or aggregate an entire column (reduce). (This isn't that much of a restriction - you can use If-Statements to make complex expressions here.)

Spreadsheet browsing is limited to a sample of the data (head + tail); you can set the size of the sample before pulling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did you write your mappers and reducers in java using the hadoop api or does this translate into hiveql or some other higher-level language? Great job btw, this looks super helpful for the business types to get useful reports on their own rather than interrupt the workflow of someone with more formal training (huge issue typically).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're working directly in Java right now, but might explore alternatives later. We're also planning to add support for Impala/Presto/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are you using on the back-end to perform the queries? Are you using MapReduce? What is the average latency expectations when using the application?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using MapReduce. Latency will depend on your cluster and the query; it's just a regular MapReduce operation from Hadoop's point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny as this sounds it may be in fact exactly perfect for a large subset of Hadoop use-cases. If it works well.

</comment><comment><USER6> Being pretty naive to the space, I'm assuming the killer differentiator from Microsoft's own Power Query (which looks like it can pull from Hadoop) is that this pulls a subset of data as an initial workspace, while Power Query pulls all of the data? Any other key differences?

Really cool tool! Wish I had some large real-world Hadoop cluster to try it out on...

<comment><AUTHOR> The major difference is the ability to run queries on Hadoop in addition to the being able to pull data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this would really benefit from a dead simple tool that would allow users to import from csv files into a local Hadoop instance, without having to do anything besides install Hadoop. But this seems like something that could really democratize data analysis on large data sets considering the number of people who are pretty good with Excel.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've seen demos of a tool called Datameer which seems to offer very similar functionality (an Excel-like interface for configuring a job on a small set of data, followed by submission of that job to a Hadoop cluster as a MapReduce job). How does DataNitro compare to that?

</comment><comment><USER9> Ummmm...doesn't Excel have a row limit of somewhere around 1 million?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it does. This doesn't involve pulling all of your data into a spreadsheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can Excel open a 1-billion-row data file?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it can't - the limit is just over one million rows. This doesn't involve pulling anywhere near that many rows into your spreadsheet.

<comment><USER10> Then why MapReduce?

<comment><AUTHOR> We let people with Hadoop Clusters pull a small sample of data into Excel, analyze it with Excel formulas, and then run the analysis on the full data set. The last part happens outside of Excel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While impressive in terms of a technical achievement, Excel is a pretty appalling analysis tool generally. I fear for what it will turn into when you throw this much at it. Big Data doesn't let you power through being wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is aimed at people doing simple analyses on massive sets of data, which can work extremely well. [1] We're not advocating that people without a data science background start doing ML or something.

[1] See "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data", by Peter Norvig, Alon Halevy, and Fernando Pereira at Google.

<comment><USER11> Which is why I'm not besmirching your technical achievement as much as...Excel is widely abused by the ignorant, Big Data is widely abused by the ignorant...Hadoop in Excel...</comment></comment></comment>


Scott Adams: Monetizing Business Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/monetizing_business_ideas/

<comment><USER2> I started reading this thinking that it was going to be one of his more outlandish style posts. But this strikes me as being not that far removed from what Kickstarter is trying to do in the domain of small creative projects.</comment>


Graham & Coase: when big companies are a good idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/graham-coase-when-big-companies-are-a-good-idea.html

<comment><USER2> He puts his finger on the right question: why do large firms exist? But I disagree with the answer. I think a better answer is: they don't. That is, they existed in the past for reasons of industrial scale; but they exist now (at least in post-industrial fields) only by inertia. The wheels of history grind slowly and the monoliths haven't been ground to bits yet. But they will be: into smaller, more productive, hopefully more humanly satisfying bits. It just takes a long time for people to get over the things that everybody "knows" about reality, such as that great companies inevitably grow into behemoths.

Google is an interesting case, because they manifested so many seminal changes, for example their hacker-centric culture. And they still do some amazing work - yet astonishingly little compared to what one would expect from an organization with tens of thousands of such smart people.

This is explained if you consider that we are early in the post-industrial age. It takes time for new organizational forms to develop. This is also an opportunity, because anyone who can see a little further ahead has a chance to leapfrog over their cohort the way Google did. Somebody is going to figure out how to grow a company without dissipating the bulk of its human energy in meetings, politics, and other depressing shit.

<comment><USER3> I think it's now possible to build a billion-dollar tech startup with less than 10 programmers. But perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part. I'm still struggling to fit in as an employee, and I wouldn't hire anyone who wanted to be hired.</comment></comment>


How to get 45,000 pre-launch signups in your 1st 20 days - <AUTHOR>

This is what we've done at Fab.com since we put up a pre-launch splash-page on March 9th.
1.  Create scarcity.  Require future members to request an invite.
2.  Create levels of priority access.  The more friends who join, the higher level of attainment. See for yourself at http://fab.com/priority-access.
3.  Provide easy ways for users to share on Facebook, Twitter, email contacts, etc.
4.  Target influencers on Facebook.  We took out a very small ad buy on Facebook targeted to less than 100,000 people who we thought would be big influencers.  They have driven the viral growth.
We're now adding 4k users per day.  Do a Twitter search for Fab.com and see for yourself the activity.
Oh, and it helps to be in a sexy category that a lot of people are interested, where there is no current leading online player (in our case online design sales). <comment><USER2> 5\. Regular self-congratulatory HN posts :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Create levels of priority access. The more friends who join, the higher level of attainment. See for yourself at <http://fab.com/priority-access>.

Good idea. I guess if one was planning on launching a different kind of business (e.g. a SaaS) you could award people who refer X number of friends with a free lifetime account...it won't cost you anything except for a few missed sales.

Just don't go down the "Win a free iPad" route, as that'll bring in a whole lot of free riders that have no interest in your product and are only in it for the chance to win.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would be interesting to know exactly how much $ was spent on the "very small ad buy" and any other paid advertising that occurred.

Along with the other commenter who noted that a previous site (with existing membership) already existed on the domain it's hard to determine if these techniques or other factors were at play here.

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be great if I could import addresses from gmail (or other services) instead of typing emails one by one...

<comment><USER5> oh, nm, it is under "more invite options" ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It probably also helps that you had a pre-existing social network at the same site right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, that's turned out to be little help. Less than 4k of our new subs are former members so far.

<comment><USER7> You're only at approximately 11 times that now, so I'd venture to guess that it's a bigger deal than you're crediting it.

Most people would kill to have a ~4,000 startup base to spread the word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much was the domain?

<comment><USER3> Definitely keen to know this! Unowned 3 letter domains are long extinct...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: If ideas are overrated... - <AUTHOR>

Why do we still see people not openly discussing their startup idea ? Why all the 'stealth mode' & secrecy ? <comment><USER2> It's just _other peoples'_ ideas that are overrated. Mine is pure gold.

</comment><comment><USER3> Partly paranoia, and partly because overrated doesn't mean worthless. I occasionally advise startups we've funded to keep some part of their plans secret. (You never want to keep everything secret, or it just advertises you're keeping a secret.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fortunately, YC folks have you to advise them. I often find myself in the predicament where I need to discuss an idea/ get some feedback / advice from someone who's familiar with the startup scene. Friends - family are too out of touch with tech startup world to provide any relevant,useful input.

I'd say YC should start like a monthly session (paid) where a limited set of entrepreneurs can get advice/input? Maybe far stretched considering your time constraints, but just thinking out loud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Guy Kawasaki said it best:

Nobody wants your crappy idea, everyone is already working on their own crappy idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, I think a lot of it are delusions of grandeur and fear that people will mock the ideas. Note--stackoverflow.com was very open all along, very successful, and as far as I know virtually no competition.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the concept of ideas and execution being multipliers, put forth by 37signals (and surely others).

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch06_Done.php>

Of course, the reality is non-linear, and the exact shape of the idea/execution/expected-profit manifold is quite up for debate.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very simple: everyone thinks _their_ idea is the best thing since sliced bread. So they won't tell anyone, by fear of being copied.

I have a scoop for you: people couldn't care less about copying your idea. However, once you are successful, everyone will want to copy you.</comment>