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How to Go from a Engineering Student to an Entrepreneur - stevederico http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaJKPCdimLA ====== scrrr Hm so all the successful entrepreneurs were younger than 30 years old when they started?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Releasing early with bugs: GrandCentral A Little Too Beta For Some - brett http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/26/grandcentral-a-little-too-beta-for-some/ ====== brett It's interesting that this write up is not as negative as it could be. For a phone service some of the failures he mentions are pretty bad. Is Arrington pulling punches because he's already been positive? Arrington claims people expecting Grand Central to do what is says are putting too much faith in a beta product. What you can get away with has a lot to do with your offering. I'm not going to stop watching justin.tv because it's down (like right now, completely dead). But I'm not sure if beta is a good enough excuse for me to miss calls from clients. Especially now that beta is ubiquitous and virtually meaningless. Gmail certainly would not be off the hook for losing my emails. Is it really just caveat emptor for beta products as he suggests? ~~~ BrandonM I would say that the answer to your last question should be a resounding "yes". The whole point of the "beta" label is to alert potential users that the product is not completely stable, but is in some usable state. The problem is not so much that the service was not 100% reliable, but that the NYT readers expected it to be and relied critically upon it. As most Linux and 'BSD users have come to learn, "beta" means just that: not ready for critical use. The user gains some privileges, like being able to use "bleeding-edge" software or to get a valuable service for free, and in return they sacrifice the stability and reliability that comes with time-tested software; all that as they actually are an integral piece to testing that software. Without such a beta stage, the whole rapid development movement would fail as projects get mired in extensive internal testing stages. Your GMail comment especially strikes me, as I hadn't considered that before. Perhaps they grew much faster than anticipated and are still working on stability issues, and the "losing my emails" scenario may not be far off the mark. By attaching the "beta" label to their service, they can probably avoid any liability that may arise if such an event did occur.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Wesabe's Bank Aggregation Engine Open Sourced - tonystubblebine https://github.com/wesabe/ssu ====== tonystubblebine This is code for pulling transaction data from a huge number of financial institutions. Consider it an alternative to Yodlee.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart - peter123 http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/02/26/amazon-shopping-cart/ ====== dschoon I have great admiration for the amount of time and precision put into this article--as well as Amazon's relentless, cold, uncool devotion to optimization. These meditations on A/B optimization reminded me of a genetic algorithm-based A/B testing framework mentioned not too long ago: <http://ejohn.org/blog/genetic-ab-testing-with-javascript/> (I'd link to Genetify itself, but there's no homepage, just the demo) An interesting thought: Why hasn't this caught on? Machines are good at exactly the things A/B testing aims at: measuring performance, permuting a test-matrix, and reporting on the results. This is not to say Genetify is the answer, but rather that I rarely hear of conversion optimization from developers. ~~~ paraschopra Part of the reason why developers don't really focus in conversion optimization is that it requires continuous creative effort. It is not something like you do once and then be happy with it. Coming up with different variations which can perform well is hard and doing it consistently is even harder. Another reason is that proper optimization requires a good amount of traffic, without which your A/B tests would never achieve statistical significance. That said, optimization is pretty popular with online retailers and big web companies from whom even a 0.1% change in conversions/signups/etc can result into addition of tens of thousands, or even millions of dollars of revenues. For small-websites, the benefit of 0.1% may not be obvious. Hence, not much motivation for investing in optimization. ------ wave Duplicate post. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434830> ------ dlevine Amazon supposedly has an amazing experiments system. Someone can launch an experimental feature, and if it succeeds, it gradually becomes the default. Having your users vote is definitely the best way to make decisions. Lately, when my cofounder and I disagree, I say "let's build both versions and ask our users which one they like best." (in most cases, the differences are trivial enough to make this feasible). ------ xel02 First lesson: A great e-commerce website needs to evolve, and that evolving should be done through thorough testing and optimization. Second Lesson (one I feel is more important in general): Don’t copy what other people do if you aren’t fully aware of the business issues involved. ------ alanthonyc Great analysis of Amazon's evolution of their call to action. One thing that struck me the most while reading it though was: "Back then, ... Amazon, for the most part, sold books." I just consider them a generic shopping mall now. ~~~ frossie I expect this is why the quantity is more up-front now. I bet it is pretty unusual for anybody to buy multiple copies of a given book at once, so defaulting to one and giving the opportunity to adjust later made sense. Now that they sell many things that are probably bought in multiple quantities (say, socks), customers are probably having to adjust the quantities more often. All very well, but sometimes I wish they would spend a bit more time on their wishlists - not much has changed since the beginning and some more effort in this area is overdue by now.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft Admits Normal Windows 10 Users Are 'Testing' Unstable Updates - Santosh83 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/12/12/microsoft-admits-normal-windows-10-users-are-testing-unstable-updates/ ====== newen I actually disabled all updates a while back because of stability and driver issues when I had auto updates on. Things are a lot better now and I don't have to worry about Windows restarting on me while I'm busy working. Probably will just do updates every few months or something like that. This makes me think I made the right decision haha. ~~~ kdtsh The worst thing I’ve noticed is, when you disable updates on windows 10, you’re notified that you can disable for 30 days, and then if you want to disable it again, you have to do updates first. Keeping your machine updated is a good idea and all but this is pretty insulting ... ~~~ newen I installed the O&O ShutUp program, which lets you disable updates indefinitely. ------ neilalexander It seems Microsoft is the new Google. Everything is perpetually beta. ------ DrScump I check for updates manually when I'm on fast, unmetered WiFi but will next be on slower or metered service, given Microsoft's penchant for huge downloads in the background. I shouldn't be _punished_ for that. ------ oculusthrift isn’t that how most companies launch products now adays? test it on 1 pct of users before full launch? ~~~ lozenge The issue is picking the users that are manually checking for updates. This used to be a precaution people applied onto their system, now it can actually make your system less stable. ------ boznz Nothing Changed from Windows XP then.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Denim Breaker Club (Beta Test) - anu_gupta http://hiutdenim.co.uk/pages/denim-breaker-club ====== anigbrowl This seems a ridiculous idea at first blush but on reflection I think it can work, and well. Too bad there's no button to sign up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Will Google Crush The iPhone? - terpua http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2007/10/18/gphone-iphone-wireless-technology-personaltech-cx_bc_1019gphone.html ====== joeguilmette Not unless they can think outside the "40 buttons and small screen" box.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN Devs: What's up with the expiring pages? - arctic (Not sure if this has been asked/answered before. If it has, can you link me?)<p>So, I browse hacker news pretty much every day. Thing is, I go about it reasonably slowly while I do other things. So, when I come to change page a few minutes after trawling through the previous one, I find that the link's expired. And then, if that page wasn't the firstage, I have to start from the frontage again to get back through to where I was.<p>I really just wanted to ask why this is, and why a system like Reddit's (after, or count or something in the URL) isn't used. ====== joshstrange <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2533105>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Best resources for running a Linux dedicated server? - Ileca I never touched Linux but I plan to rent a dedicated server for running a website on it and I fear doing a lot of wrong things. What did you read at first, up to mastering that field, especially on a security point of view?<p>Keep the list simple, focused on the essentials from noob to wizard, with no overlapping docs. It can be books (books are great), pdf, webpages. French resources would be even better.<p>Remember, it's for the purpose of managing a server and while I plan to use Linux as my primary OS, I have no idea what's the difference between using Linux on a server and using it for office stuff past the fact I will have to face the CLI.<p>Thank you in advance to all those who will answer.<p>Edit: I was supposed to "Ask HN" but it seems I did something wrong? Sorry if that's the case. ====== kelt I find the getting started documents/guides over at Digitalocean and Linode very helpful. [https://www.digitalocean.com/help/getting-started/setting- up...](https://www.digitalocean.com/help/getting-started/setting-up-your- server/) [https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-beginners- guide](https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-beginners-guide) From there, there's a whole lot of other topics too, web servers, the usual LEMP/LAMP stack. [http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux- security.html](http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-security.html) on the basics of security too. Good luck! ------ thrwawy20160421 Amazon AWS is not a terrible way to get started. It has a firewall that is on by default, you will have to deliberately add rules for your services ( for example to allow port 80 in to httpd )	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Surge in Meth Use in Colorado Complicates Opioid Recovery - DoreenMichele https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/07/14/628134831/a-surge-in-meth-use-in-colorado-complicates-opioid-recovery ====== liquidise This strikes as correlation not causation. As someone in denver since before the legalization, i believe these stats are related, but i think the bigger cause was pot legalization in so few areas at once. By legalizing in CO and not nationally, my story is that we attracted a number of people looking to move for a lifestyle, not knowing that at the same time housing prices were skyrocketing due to a blooming tech scene and gentrification. The influx of smokers only added fuel to the fire. The two ongoing trends create hard times for the un/underemployed. It is well documented that crimes rates correlate with hard financial times. ~~~ dfsegoat RE: Pot legalization - it could be you are correct. I lived in Denver pre-/post-medical legalization. I now live in Northern CA where we just legalized. Basically I've seen the same thing happen both places: Cannabis is legalized, and there is an uptick in violent and petty crime in the areas where cultivation is. Meth I don't know. ------ abenedic What will be interesting over the next 20 years is how legal weed will impact addiction rates. ~~~ Animats Colorado's governor is having second thoughts about legalization.[1] [1] [https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/20/us/colorado-marijuana-and- cri...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/20/us/colorado-marijuana-and- crime/index.html) ~~~ reducesuffering Is this a propaganda piece pushed by entrenched alcohol industry interests? ~~~ creato As someone who thinks marijuana should be legal, I thought it was a reasonable article. ~~~ jdhendrickson The video embedded in the article pretty much made the point that legal weed brought transients to the state, and they are in turn people that would have committed crimes regardless of what state they are in. Legalizing nationally would negate the issue. ------ rubzah Looking at the chart in the article, heroin overdoses have grown by about the same amount as meth. ------ mirimir The speedball (stimulant+depressant) has long been popular. In the mainstream, that would be coffee plus alcohol, and often tobacco. For the hard-core, that would be cocaine or methamphetamine, plus morphine, heroin or eucadol. But without medical supervision, the risk of overdose is too high. Because opiates tend to wear off faster than stimulants, and titration is nontrivial. ~~~ oxide Comparing the mix of moprhine and cocaine with coffee and alcohol is both misleading and inaccurate. Even cocaine and amphetamine are apples and oranges, despite both being classified as stimulants. ~~~ mirimir Well, all combinations of stimulants and depressants are speedballs. And in my experience, they differ mainly in intensity. And of course, in risk of death. Which I did make very clear. Anyway, it's basically that stimulants prevent falling asleep, passing out, or (ideally) dying at high depressant doses. Which allows users to experience more intense effects from said depressants. And that depressants reduce anxiety, relax, and (ideally) prevent dying (usually from cardiac arrest) at high stimulant doses. Which allows users to experience more intense effects from said stimulants. And re cocaine vs methamphetamine, I've used both a lot, albeit many years ago. And sure, they're quite different. But they both made me happy, and kept me awake. As I recall, cocaine was much better for play, dancing, and sex. And methamphetamine was better for working, driving, and just slogging through emergency situations. For a few years, I basically lived out of a bicycle, and I always carried methamphetamine and morphine, in case of emergencies. It was standard issue for most all military services, so hey. ------ mchahn > when her parents gave her pain pills for a toothache. Just like that, she > was hooked. I call B.S. The next paragraph reveals the cause ... > Both my parents were addicts	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com - tptacek http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/jonah_lehrer_plagiarism_in_wired_com_an_investigation_into_plagiarism_quotes_and_factual_inaccuracies_.html ====== tokenadult This one nails Lehrer to the wall: "In a third post from mid-2011 titled "Basketball and Jazz," one of Lehrer's paragraphs closely paralleled one written by Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley some three years earlier. "Lehrer: "The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time. "Newsweek: "In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters (considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw, compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and writers. "Tellingly, Begley misstated the number of participants in the study. (There were only 5 coaches and 5 sportswriters, not 10 of each. In addition, there were also 10 people in the novice group who were neither coaches nor sportswriters.) Lehrer made the exact same mistake in precisely the same manner." When Lehrer reproduces someone else's mistake, you know he isn't looking up or verifying the facts himself. The honorable thing to do in a blog would be simply to link to Begley's piece and say, "Sharon Begley wrote an interesting article a few years ago about a study on this issue." P.S. I posted an article to HN earlier about the initial discovery of Lehrer making up quotations in articles in other publications. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370417> I had also seen him "recycle" earlier writings of his in paid publications, because once one of his articles was submitted here to HN, and I thought, "Hey, I've read this before." Indeed I had, in the previous publication where he had first written on the same subject a couple years earlier. ~~~ Alex3917 I've mentioned this here before, but similarly I caught Chris Hedges plagiarizing in one of his articles, in a very similar situation where he had blatantly copied someone else's mistakes. But when I emailed his editors to tell them about it, they basically told me to go fuck myself. I'm pretty sure that most journalistic organizations these days know what's going on and just don't want any of it to come to light unless some other organization forces the issue, in which case they then do everything they can to throw the person under the bus. ~~~ smhinsey I think part of this is also that no one really wants to admit that a lot of content that goes out under a given columnist's name is not actually written by them. The byline is more about branding than authorship these days. ~~~ Alex3917 That's definitely true for newspaper editorials and for columnists, but not usually for regular articles and blog posts. ------ dredmorbius So ... this is the result of close analysis of a single author. As medical types will tell you, one of the problems of running imaging and diagnostics on ill / injured / diseased patients is that you'll find anomolies -- not because they're relevant to the illness in question, but because individuals differ. What is the prevalence of the cited behaviors -- recycling, press-release plagiarism, plagiarism, quotation issues, and factual issues -- in an unbiased sample of other authors / reporters / columnists / essayists? What, specifically, is wrong with some of the behaviors in question? I haven't followed the Lehrer situation particularly closely, I'm aware that he's admitted to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan specifically (not good). I'm a bit puzzled as to what he's being faulted for in "recycling" -- essentially reusing his own material. The press-release plagiarism cited appears to involve taking quotes from press releases, rather than interviews (which Lehrer shaded to sound like it had been told him directly). The looser view would be that, well, the pres release "told Lehrer" ... and anyone else reading it. Not great, but a modestly pale shade of gray. Direct quotations of the published, non-press-release works of others is getting rather darker. Though I wouldn't mind knowing what specific rulebook(s) Seife is playing from when he states: "Journalistic rules about press releases are murky. Rules about taking credit for other journalists' prose are not." I mean, I really hope we're not making shit up as we go along (and frankly have no way of knowing if Seife is or isn't -- he's, erm, not citing sources, merely his own authority as a professor of journalism). Seife admits as much later in his piece: "There isn't a canonical code of conduct for journalists; perfectly reasonable reporters and editors can have fundamental disagreements about what appear to be basic ethical questions, such as whether it's kosher to recycle one's own work." He also notes that recycling can be considered common and acceptable practice, though he feels "may violate the reader's trust". My own experience, especially in persuasive writing that's repeated as an author attempts to argue for a position, is that there is _considerable_ recycling of material, though often an author will refine and strengthen arguments over time. That's what I myself practice. Handling quotations also allows for some leeway. It's not uncommon to tidy up tics of speech and grammar particularly from spoken conversational passages. It can, in fact, be a _negative_ shading to quote someone with complete faithfulness and accuracy, including all "ers", "ums", "ahs", and syntactical tangents and fragments. That said, changing meaning in as fundamental a manner as to equate memorizing a few stanzas of an epic work with memorizing the whole thing, _and_ failing to correct it, is pretty bad. At different points in time, attitudes toward what would currently be considered plagiarism in news were radically different. It's very, very helpful to recognize that outside a relatively few fairly stable rules (murder, real property theft), much of ethics and morals is temporally, culturally, and situationally relative. Today we suffer witches to live. In Revolutionary America, plagiarism was common practice ([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-andrlik/how-plagiarism- ma...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-andrlik/how-plagiarism-made- ameri_b_1772782.html)). My feeling is that too strict an insistence on slavishly faithful accuracy can be as much a liability as confabulation. We know now that war photographers since Brady have staged and arranged subjects in photographs to more effectively tell stories. That NASA image processing often involves significant Photoshop enhancement and visible-range representations of invisible spectra from radio, infra-red, ultra-violet, and X-ray ranges. That NPR extensively edits interview audio, and will even modify "live" host comments over the course of repeats of their anchor news programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered to correct for flubs. That Campbells put marbles in its soup, that clothing catalog models wear heavily pinned garments, and that HN moderators will re-edit headlines and censor meta articles. Who ya gonna shoot? If we're going to hang Lehrer, let's hang him for what he's been doing deliberately and in clear exception to both norms and hard-written rules. Not based on either fast-and-loose definitions of correctness or normal deviations. ~~~ tptacek Taking a published statement from someone and attributing it as if it were an interview, with the words "this person said to me", is not "tidying up". It's lying. ~~~ dredmorbius Claiming that that's what I said ... would also be lying. ~~~ tptacek No; the word "lie" implies an intent to deceive. If I misunderstood your comment, that was a "mistake". ------ shock3naw Is the sunburst background behind Lehrer's head in the table necessary? I thought this was about being 'professional.' That being said, I'm glad the journalism community is cracking down on people who are recycling, plagiarizing, and not fact checking. ------ Alex3917 Meh. There were some of Lehrer's articles that I genuinely liked, but as often as not I got the feeling that he didn't really know what he was talking about. Although that's not unlike most other popular Internet science writers. ------ rd108 I'm sorry, none of what I read seemed very egregious to me. In many cases, I couldn't even decipher whether something had been really plagiarized or not. You DO use lots of material from other people when writing a story-- some of these phrases, especially under tight deadlines and late nights, likely jumble into a mish-mash of words and phrases that might spill out while writing. Even the case of copying someone else's mistake (in the "10 sportswriters" example) also seems forgivable to me... and- forgive me if I'm too generous- just another mistake, albeit this time on Lehrer's part. ~~~ tptacek * Lehrer takes copy from previous pieces, sometimes whole paragraphs, and uses them in future pieces. The author is ambivalent about how big a transgression this is, but in 18 pieces he looked at, it was easier to count the ones where Lehrer hadn't obviously recycled copy. * Lehrer copied multiple paragraphs from a press release directly into his piece. More egregiously, he attributed text from one press release as if it had come from an interview. * Lehrer plagiariased at least 3 journalists, one of them at pretty extreme length, and another so obviously that he copied mistakes the original journalist had made in the underlying facts. * When Lehrer was working with actual quotations from sources, he changed them, effectively altering what those people had said. * Lehrer made numerous factual mistakes, like any pop science writer, but when those mistakes were pointed out to him (including by other journalists), rather than issuing a correction, he ignored the mistakes _and then repeated them in future articles_. I found this pretty damning. ------ rd108 Lehrer himself (@4:50) on the Colbert Report explained why "creatively borrowing" others work is fundamental to innovative thinking. I would preface this with "ironically", but he actually believes his argument. [http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report- videos/41274...](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report- videos/412742/april-17-2012/jonah-lehrer) ------ benologist Somebody should tell these guys about Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo, Geek and all the other sites that do this crap for a living. ------ awwstn2 Here's Lehrer's barely-used Twitter account. His most recent Tweet called Samsung plagiarists: <https://twitter.com/jjonahlehrer> ~~~ kintamanimatt Wrong twitter account: <https://twitter.com/jonahlehrer> I used to follow him. Since I last looked he seems to have been on a deleting spree. Sucks because I really enjoyed his writing. ------ nuxli Seems like generating this sort of plagiarised output is something we could train a machine to do. No need to put someone on the payroll to do it. ------ regnum It's not been a good year for This American Life. First their story about abuse at Apple factories in China turned out to be piece of fiction. Now all this with their contributor Jonah Lehrer. ~~~ knowtheory Hunh? I'm a bit confused why you've singled This American Life out here. Mike Daisey is an interesting case, and someone who published a lot on the story he fabricated in a lot of different outlets. This American Life were the ones were simply the ones who confronted Daisey directly and publicly. Jonah Lehrer, the extent to which he was a contributor to TAL, was certainly not a frequent contributor (in fact I don't remember which of their episodes he's been on at all), but he is much more associated with his magazine work. Actually i checked This American Life's site. They don't have Jonah Lehrer listed at all (although they do have a colleague of mine listed twice under misspellings of her name): <http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/contributor> ~~~ maxerickson Prior to confronting Daisey, they presented his work as if they had fact checked it. They say as much in their retraction: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/460/r...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/460/retraction) My opinion is that they handled it well, but 'simply the ones who confronted Daisey directly and publicly' throws away quite a bit of the story. ~~~ knowtheory That's true, but they were not the only ones who fell prey to that either. My point about why TAL _stands out_ is that they were the ones to confront him on it. Not that they were unique in having asserted that his story was true.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: A Fortran web framework - mapmeld https://github.com/mapmeld/fortran-machine ====== projectramo I would love it if these projects were accompanied by a little blog post stating who the person is, why they decided to do it etc. for projects where it is obviously a labor of love. Especially because of the effort it would take to get this working on a "dead" language. Like who are you? How did you decide to work on this for the pure joy of it? Why not Cobol? Why a web framework? ~~~ hellofunk Fortran is actually still in major widespread use, particularly in the scientific and engineering fields. This is partly because it has unparalleled speed in some domains, better even than C or C++. ~~~ fhood Fortran is ubiquitous in ocean and atmospheric modeling. I believe this is the case for all earth sciences. ~~~ theophrastus I have a buddy at US Fish and Wildlife where they do river flow modeling with Fortran routines from the seventies formerly compiled on Windows machines. He was finding it increasingly difficult to get his all-powerful shadowy IT division to install a compliant MS Fortran compiler, and linux (somehow deemed governmentally untenable?) was out of the question. So i helped him get his ~2000 Fortran lines into C/C++. _woowee..._ but did i see some hairy spaghetti code. A favorite maneuver was to jump out of a loop, change the loop counter on a subroutine branch, and jump back into the _middle_ of the loop. ~~~ hughw Change the loop counter? That's supposed to be impossible in Fortran, isn't it? Maybe that's a language extension? ~~~ theophrastus This was from code originally from about 1978ish, which compiled on a Microsoft Fortran compiler from the 2000s. It looked something like (without indents): DO I=1,10000 ... IF (QQQ .LT. RIX70) THEN CALL IXNARF( I, J, R1, R7, XL23 ) GOTO 23 ... END IF 111 CONTINUE ... END IXNARF could change 'I' (because Fortran 77 passed arguments by reference not value) and sometime after line (er... "card") 23 it might jump back into the loop at 111. oh and there was like three comments in the whole several thousand lines, including my favorite at the top of one of the main loops: C CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGA ~~~ sevenless I remember you could change the value of 3 in Fortran 77. Then there was the proposal for a Fortran COME FROM statement. [http://www.fortran.com/fortran/come_from.html](http://www.fortran.com/fortran/come_from.html) ~~~ semi-extrinsic I believe Intercal implements the COME FROM statement. ------ danpalmer Also relevant: [https://github.com/azac/cobol-on- wheelchair](https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair) ~~~ elcapitan The views are a little disappointing, using just plain mustache style. Shouldn't a cobol web view have something like HEAD DIVISION META-TAGS SECTION. BODY DIVISION. ~~~ twic DIV DIVISION?! ~~~ elcapitan HR DEPARTMENT. ------ rlcarino Hello, I wrote the 'fortran+fastcgi+nginx' thingy. It has evolved into [https://github.com/rlcarino/heeds](https://github.com/rlcarino/heeds). Production live runs (and a little blog post about it) may be found at [http://heeds.csu.edu.ph](http://heeds.csu.edu.ph). Some students from a university connect to the runs with their Android phones without cell data cost via Facebook's Free Basics which is available in that part of the world. Usage instructions for students are in the FAQ of [https://www.facebook.com/groups/csuheeds/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/csuheeds/). Why do it? It is a consulting gig. Ric Carino ------ cpr Seeing this gave me a subtle but definite frisson of nostalgia for Fortran (first language, learned in late 60's). ------ nickpsecurity For those wondering why it's used, here's a write-up I found on Eric Raymond's blog comparing Fortran and C: [http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html) Some comparisons are dated. However, I think the older variants still have advantages in readability, more clear semantics, semantics closer to algorithm itself (esp mathematical functions), less guessing by compiler for optimizations, and maybe a few others. Those I listed seem to still be advantages over C in general or as it's commonly used. ~~~ Trombone12 Also of note is that the implicit typing system of Fortran is held up as an advantage (although a bit reluctantly) ------ ufmace This reminds me of the time I actually found myself charged with integrating a chunk of Fortran code compiled into a Windows DLL with an Excel sheet via VBA. The VBA side was straightforward if a little icky, but handling strings in Fortran was really giving me headaches. Documentation on Fortran, even down to basic syntax, seemed inconsistent and hard to find online. I think I got the project mostly working before I left that company for unrelated reasons. ------ mhd I'm mostly used to Fortran 77 and that was ages ago, that actually looks quite readable... ------ k__ Reminds me of: [https://github.com/azac/cobol-on- wheelchair](https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair) ------ supernintendo Nice work! That home page, while admittedly simple, renders incredibly fast. Have you done any benchmarks / performance comparisons to other web frameworks? ~~~ mapmeld No, not yet. It ought to be comparable to C++ in most cases. The difficult part is extending Fortran to do something that you want / hasn't been shared yet on the web. ------ WorldMaker Given Ruby on Rails, COBOL on COGS, silly naming pattern, I'm a bit disappointed this isn't called something like Fortran on Flumes. ------ haifeng Just because you can? ~~~ ronnier For some reason I've been seeing more and more Fortran lately. Maybe it's the trendy thing to do. ~~~ phamilton Honestly, High Performance Fortran has really nice support for parallel arrays. For computational programming I see a lot of value. ~~~ valarauca1 The issue is what you give up. Yes the FORTRAN compiler/runtime is fast but concurrent primitives weren't added until FORTRAN03, and recursion wasn't fully supported until FORTRAN90 [1]. It hides almost all the implementation details from the programmer. Fortran is a really good language for number crunching. Academics who don't know how to code can build very fast number crunching tools without really any CS or hardware knowledge. This the target use case and target audience. If you want to do low level system things with it, it'll be painful. [1] Some fortran70 compilers had limited support for recursion it wasn't added to the official language standard until 20 years later tho. ~~~ colechristensen >The issue is what you give up. This is the feature, not a bug. The purpose of fortran and why it is a fast efficient tool for scientists to write software is is exactly that it hides implementation details and is a bad systems language. It allows you to define the important math parts of your program and hides the implementation part exactly so the compiler has a lot more power to optimize. ------ jchomali I am definitely going to try this! Would love to see a bit more about the creator! ~~~ mapmeld Thanks! You can find my name on GitHub and Google around to find more info / e-mail address ------ antidaily Finally! ------ ha470 An accomplishment, certainly, but... [http://i.imgur.com/TnQRX6v.gif](http://i.imgur.com/TnQRX6v.gif)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
FCC, FTC Demand Gateway Providers Cut Off Covid-19 Robocall Scammers [pdf] - QUFB https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A1.pdf ====== troydavis The named offenders are: > SIPJoin of Suffolk, Virginia; Connexum of Orange, California; and VoIP > Terminator/BLMarketing of Lake Mary, Florida SIPJoin: [http://www.sipjoin.com/wholesale](http://www.sipjoin.com/wholesale), [http://www.sipjoin.com/about-us](http://www.sipjoin.com/about-us) Connexum, a subsidiary of Gawk ([https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2016/02/02/124061...](https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2016/02/02/1240612/0/en/GAWK-Completes-Acquisition-of-Connexum-Nearly- Triples-Annual-Revenue.html)): [https://www.gawk.com/voice- servers.php](https://www.gawk.com/voice-servers.php), [https://www.gawk.com/about-us.php](https://www.gawk.com/about-us.php) VoIP Terminator/BLMarketing: [https://www.voipterminator.com/](https://www.voipterminator.com/) Here’s the FCC letters sent to these carriers, which name the customers as well: [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A4.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A4.pdf) (about “VoIPMax,” Philippines), [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A3.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A3.pdf) (same), [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A5.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A5.pdf) (about “Oberlo Peer BPO,” Pakistan) ------ 4ensic Publicly naming the providers and threatening to block at the provider level with a short timeline. Some action from what has been a paper tiger.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
First U.S. use of CRISPR to directly target cancer seeks approval - ChefboyOG https://www.statnews.com/2019/05/02/crispr-targeting-cancer-seeking-go-ahead/ ====== Funes- As someone who lives with and takes care of a cancer patient, I'm really frustrated with how little effort has been devoted to cancer research in such a long period of time, taking into account that it's been several decades of misery now for millions of people--and a lot more to come; that's for sure. Besides governments allocating less funding to research, prevention and treatment--for cancer as well as other grave ailments--than they could, what especially irks me is this: negligent practices carried out by big corporations to which authorities have always turned a blind eye. The sheer amount of unregulated, harmful practices that has come to define our current lifestyle is abominable. Radiation, pollution, carcinogenic and generally unsafe food, hygiene products, food and liquid containers... All factors whose pervasiveness correlates with cancer cases skyrocketing. We should all be willing to reflect upon what we're doing to our personal and collective health, and if our lifestyles are actually sustainable or do require to be reformed. ~~~ bufferoverflow There's a LOT of effort going into cancer research. It's just cancer is not one thing. It's not like HIV. There are many many different types of cancers, and they are currently treated and diagnosed differently. They are expressed differently. Many cancers are extremely treatable now thanks to research (testicular cancer >98% survival rate), while others are not at all (<1% for pancreatic). ~~~ ekianjo main problem with pancreatic cancer is lack of detection. Virtually no symptoms or markers until very late stage. ~~~ tyingq That's true, though the five year survival rate is still pretty dismal (34%) if they find the pancreatic cancer early, when it is still localized. [https://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/detection- di...](https://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/detection-diagnosis- staging/survival-rates.html) ------ ebg13 It's a safe first step. These patients are guaranteed to die very soon without a miracle, so the risk of causing a new cancer doesn't matter. ~~~ cannonedhamster Statistically likely, not guaranteed. I'm already statistically likely to be dead and resistant to chemo but so far so good. The patients know the risk though and decades is dramatically longer a time frame than they likely have. Hopefully this works wonders and can be pushed to other types of cancers. ~~~ achievingApathy Wouldn't accepting only those that had such advanced cancers though skew any results? I'm very much in favor of these individuals getting any and all help they can as soon as possible but I want to remain optimistic about the validity of the results. (I can't tell if you meant to imply that you are in remission or going through chemo now). ------ magicalhippo Just wanted to mention... if you (or one you know) get cancer, once the type of cancer has been established, ask where it typically spreads to. Monitor changes in those areas. A relative got cancer in a lymph node, and got it successfully operated out. A couple of years later got shortness of breath and back pain. Doctors gave asthma medication for the breath and physio for the back pain. After a year of no real progress, an unrelated shoulder x-ray showed spots in the lung tissue. X-ray technician noticed this and escalated it, and only when they verified it did we learn that the original cancer typically spreads to the lungs and bones... Now in this case, finding the cancer had spread to the lungs and spine a year earlier probably wouldn't have done much to delay the inevitable, but it would have allowed them to start pain medication much sooner, making that year less painful. ~~~ edwhitesell This is definitely good advice. Also, from my own experience with cancer that spread: get a second opinion from another oncologist (get a third if you feel the need). It's your body, it's your life, do your homework. After all of that, do your follow-ups. Oddly enough, I'm two years out of my initial diagnosis, sitting in the oncologist's waiting room for results of my latest scans as I write this. ------ ddon China is experimenting with CRISPR on people from 2016, NPR have an article about this [1]. It involves using cells from his own immune system, known as T cells, after they have been taken out of his body and genetically altered in a lab. * [1] [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/21/5853365...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/21/585336506/doctors-in-china-lead-race-to-treat-cancer-by-editing-genes) ~~~ AlexCoventry This is such a great idea. Much more direct than trying to train the immune system with a vaccine. ~~~ AllegedAlec We tried something similar with children with SCID [edited] a while back. Many of them were accidentally given leukemia. Not saying we shouldn't try this, but genetics are capricious, and we should be very careful when trying things like this on humans. Plants and test animals are one thing, but when we're doing trials on humans, there's a lot more at stake. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080807175438.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080807175438.htm) ------ leshokunin Love this. I really hope they get to try properly. Similarly to giving people the right to die, I wish people could get full clarity on these trials and make up their own mind. I hope it works out for them. We really need cancer to end. ------ thatoneuser This will be very interesting to see. Would this be the first big use case of crispr? ~~~ inciampati All throughout biology people are using CRISPR/Cas for endonuclease and binding activity. A lot of engineered plants for instance are based on this system. It is not simple to apply to adults, unless it's by engineering a cell culture (like T cells). ------ yread Messing with transcription factors? Sounds a bit like shotgun debugging ------ teh_infallible That’s ironic- I was under the impression that CRISPR actually caused cancer, as targeting a single gene has the effect of altering hundreds of other genes. ~~~ ztratar Not really sure where to start, but 1) CRISPR's altering doesn't necessarily only alter one gene, and 2) altering one gene doesn't necessarily alter "hundreds of other genes" either. ~~~ AllegedAlec CRISPR isn't as specific as the (popular) scientific literature makes it out to be. It's way better than most other methods, but there's always a chance that other genes (or transcription factor binding sites, or any of myriad other constructs in the genome) are also hit accidentally. ~~~ hobofan Is that a big risk though? I imagine that for a patient (and with that a specific genome with specific editing errors) you could extract some cells, grow an in vitro culture, and test the CRISPR on that? You could then sequence the altered genome and see how much genes were "collateraly edited" and only if the result is non-risky apply the medication to the patient. ~~~ AllegedAlec T-Cells are remarkable tricky to grow in-vitro. Most of them only grow after presented the particular antigen (for the non-biologists: the part of the virus/bacteria which they recognise) which they are keyed to. I haven't looked at the actual proposals, but I figure they'll take T-Cells, use CRISPR on those directly, clean them off (so you don't accidentally CRISPRize other cells in the body) and re-inject them directly so they won't die off. You could sequence part of them before insertion, if you manage not to kill the rest of the T-Cells with the wildly differing in vitro environment, but by that point you're playing a numbers game. The non-specific CRISPR action (called off-target mutagenesis in the literature) is a low probability event, but if you sequence part of the T-Cells, you could easily miss one with a bad (read: non-lethal) off-target mutation. ~~~ hobofan That makes sense! Thanks for the insight!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Prototyping board for making motion sensitive wearable light - thefool https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2055918540/1295169121?ref=hn ====== thefool Hi there! I made this, it turn electro-luminescent materials (the make EL wire, EL panels/tape, EL paint) into a capacitive touch sensor It is also an open source arduino compatible board based on the ATMEGA 32u4, so it is programmable using a micro USB cable, and can use it's port to output keyboard and mouse commands. ~~~ thefool It can also be connected to wireless chips, like the NRF24, XBEE, or the ESP6822 wifi module to have installations or garments that are networked with each other.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hacking Google for Fun and Profit - tectonic http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2011/12/14/hacking-google-for-fun-and-profit/ ====== _djc_ Well done -- an accomplishment indeed. Great content aside, I found the tone especially refreshing. Too often, it's "look how smart I am, and how stupid you all are" -- the brilliant jerk archetype. Thank-you. ~~~ tectonic Thanks :) ~~~ tintin I also like the way you spent the money. There are a lot of articles on HN about how to get rich. But you gave a nice example of loving your job and caring about society. ------ chrislomax I think these are fantastic finds and I'm even more shocked at Google's response to be honest. Companies like this are usually really defensive and threaten to sue you and cut off all your services. It takes a bigger man (company), to admit they are wrong and reward people accordingly for helping them. Although I would never be able to understand security on this level, it has always interested me since the days when hacking guides were galore across the Lycos and Yahoo directories ------ wdewind Awesome post, love to see that even the great borg is human sometimes like the rest of us :) Just curious for someone who knows more than me, couldn't all of these have been prevented by requiring all POSTs to the server have an attached CSRF nonce? Is there a downside to having a blanket policy like that? ~~~ underwater Tokens would not have helped for the first two. They were logic errors; the attacker used Google features in ways they were not expected to. The first was a GET request, not POST. Images have fairly lax cross domain restrictions. So while the attacking website can't see the image loaded from Google they _can_ detect when the image doesn't load. Google was returning a non-200 response code for images the user can't see. The second wasn't a traditional XSRF. Instead it was making the victim (unknowningly) edit a shared document created by the attacker. The attacker uses the feature of Google docs that shows all current editors to see the victim's Google account name. ------ richardburton I am in awe of your skills. This is the first time I have heard of this program and I must say that I am a little surprised at how _little_ money they offer to developers in return for them exposing potentially catastrophic bugs. Some engineers at Google must be paid rough $500/hour and more so you would have thought that finding bugs of this magnitude for say $10,000 a pop would still be cheap. ~~~ rytis > Some engineers at Google must be paid rough $500/hour and more You reckon? I doubt that engineers are making ~$1m/yr... But I agree, that the time spent by someone discovering a bug is worth well over $500. Let say you spend 3-4 evenings playing with it and you find something. that roughly translates into 2 full days of work. Assuming $500-700/day figure (which might actually represent a significant amount of engineers at Google) they should be paying at least $1-1.5k per bug. But even that is on a cheap side I think... ~~~ richardburton You are right. $500/hour might be a bit extreme but I think we both agree Google is extremely cheap! ------ stephenhamilton That is very neat. Regarding the choice of charities, did Google let you choose any registered charity, or was it from a list of pre-selected charities? ~~~ justinschuh It's pretty common for people to donate the reward. We're happy to do so for registered charities, and typically increase the amount donated. If a reward goes unclaimed we just make a donation to the International Red Cross. ------ tripzilch Very nice write-up! Especially since RSnake stopped writing ha.ckers.org, great and educational reports have been rather scattered (unless anyone knows some good blogs on that subject? hm, makes me wonder if the sla.ckers forum is still up ...). You conclude that these bugs are "subtle", but I don't quite agree. In some sense, ClickJacking is _always_ "subtle"(vuln 2 and 3), and you can argue the same for any kind of side channel information leakage (vuln 1 and 2). Except that clickjacking is known for years now and should be considered serious like XSS. And the information leakage, well, it's IMO just not allowed to happen if you're a huge corporation implementing a worldwide single-sign-on identity service and many different types of web applications, while claiming to care about your user's privacy. It should be their number one priority and failing this means they're rolling out new features in a tempo that simply means they cannot hold true to claims about privacy. Somebody else mentioned the tone of this article. While I'm not a big fan of the "jerk" attitude either when it comes to security testing (mostly because usually the bigger the mouth, the less interesting their feats), a security vulnerability is still a coding _mistake_ that always ends up inconveniencing or endangering the privacy of the userbase. And I think that should be said. Which the author did. But he also downplayed the bugs by calling them "subtle" and then immediately praising Google for how lucky we are that they fixed them so quickly ... maybe I just do prefer the jerks, after all. ------ vinhboy I love these type of posts. Thanks for sharing. How do you stumble upon these exploits? Do you purposely go searching for them, or do you just accident upon them? ~~~ tectonic In this case, I wanted to take Google up on their Vulnerability Reward Program, so I purposely went looking for security holes. I used Firebug and the Chrome inspector to search for issues. ------ kahawe Those are the kind of personal hacker blog posts I really like: most of the time spent was actually hacker-stuff and he presents the results - not 90% spent on an article of pointless musings for nothing but self-promotion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google is pledging $4M to support U.S. immigration organizations - suprgeek https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/29/google-us-immigration-fund ====== ocdtrekkie This isn't really an accurate headline, Google is pledging $2 million, and offering to let their employees contribute another $2 million.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: An interactive CLI ArXiv explorer - 191101 https://github.com/knguyenanhoa/cli-arxiv ====== 191101 I wrote a simple arXiv quick browser + article suggester in the terminal. I personally use it on a day to day basis and would love suggestions on ways to improve it. ~~~ sixhobbits I love the combination of TF-IDF and Cosine similarity! Still in my opinion one of the most underused / underrated algorithms tools in the box. ------ ivan_ah If you're going to be doing ML and require downloads of PDFs, I would recommend getting the bulk data from s3 instead of downloading: [https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3](https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3) It's a little more complicated to use, but you get it ALL ;) In addition to TfIdf, topic modelling would is a very good fit for browsing and finding similar papers. Here is a demo of LDA applied to 10% of the quant- ph arXiv papers that I worked on back in the day: [https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~isavov/arxiv_demo/readme.html](https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~isavov/arxiv_demo/readme.html) ~~~ 191101 This is very cool, thank you :). I was trying to keep the script lightweight so only wanted articles that I'd already read used for the NLP. In hindsight that may not have been necessary. ------ agiagiagi9999 The menu doesn't work, it just says "GOODBYE" whenever I try to use it. Some basic in-tool instructions would go a long way here, given this isn't really a CLI tool, it's a menu based console UI tool. ~~~ 191101 Thanks for the feedback - I'll definitely be trying to make the controls more explicit. ------ agiagiagi9999 This is pretty cool. Would be nice to be able to read the text version of the articles inside of this. ~~~ 191101 That's true ;), I had to compromise and only show the abstract for now. It does work for me just in terms of skimming through the articles to find what I want to read. I'm looking into adding another layer of menus to show the actual text though.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The 'Art' of Being Donald Knuth - bentoner http://mags.acm.org/communications/200807/?pm=2&zin=169&u1=texterity&pg=36&z=106 ====== simplegeek Also this is amazing _Then a startup came to me and said 'Don, write compilers for us and we will take care of finding computers to debug them. Name your price.' I said, 'Oh, okay, $100000,' assuming that this was [outrageous]. The guys didn't blink. He agreed. I didn't blink either. I said 'I'm not going to do it I just thought that was an impossible number'. At that time I made the decision in my life that I was not going to optimize my income._ ------ cpr The thing these interviews never really convey is the kindness and "gentlemanliness" of this great man. I didn't know him well (I worked at a start-up (Imagen) in the early 80's that was a spinoff of the TeX project), but saw him around Stanford and work to form a strong impression of a true giant among men, and not just because of his brainpower. ------ michael_dorfman It's great that the CACM decided to run these excerpts in print form, but for the full experience, you really ought to check out the videos at the People's Archive: <http://www.peoplesarchive.com> ------ simplegeek Can you guys identify any books in Knuth's room? I just spotted _Hackers Delight_ (on his left) :) ~~~ ovi256 Well, I can see: "The C?????? Oxford English Dictionary", bellow the clock. "Graph Theory", just behind the humidifier thingy. A pity the resolution is not better. ~~~ simplegeek Ya, also there is Cormen's book & Unicode 1.0 (I guess--not sure) :) ~~~ enf That's Unicode 3.0 if you are referring to the shelf on the left, above the stereo. ------ hsmyers From the posts thus far, it's good to see the appreciation of this man. Not many of my computer books are as well-worn as my set of 'The Art'. His contribution of TeX alone would have assured his stature; just another side effect the good doctor. I just wish folks would leave him undisturbed so he can finish up v.4!!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) - krat0sprakhar https://pragprog.com/articles/erlang/ ====== chrisseaton > Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor But only if your program is embarrassingly parallel with at least N times available parallelism in the first place! If you have one of those it's already trivial to write a version that runs N times faster on N cores in C, Java, multi-process Python, whatever. If your program has sequential or less parallel phases or needs to communicate then you are subject to Amdahl's law like you always were. Armstrong has that claim in the Erlang book and I was gobsmacked to see it written down with no caveat or mention of the limits from Amdahl's law whatsoever. I was sure it was a joke and it would be followed by 'ha ha ha of course not - nobody knows how to achieve that despite decades of intensive research', but no it's a serious claim made with a straight face. Erlang's solved it! Erlang helps you write parallel programs... but only if you program is entirely parallel in the first place. ~~~ devishard >> Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor > But only if your program is embarrassingly parallel with at least N times > available parallelism in the first place! If you have one of those it's > already trivial to write a version that runs N times faster on N cores in C, > Java, multi-process Python, whatever. You've made two claims, one irrelevant and one false: 1\. _only if your program is embarrassingly parallel_ is irrelevant, because a almost every program is embarrassingly parallel in Erlang. The language is built around concurrency to the point that parts which wouldn't be obviously parallel in another language are in Erlang. Further, slow hashes in crypto have taught us that is actually quite difficult to make something which can't be parallelized. 2\. _it 's trivial to write a program that's faster in X language_ I'm not sure how toot define trivial, but I've yet to find a language that can communicate between threads as performant-ly. Even languages like Clojure which use similar thread semantics can't do what Erlang can because the underlying threads aren't as lightweight. Spinning up a million threads in Erlang isn't even unusual, whereas in any of the languages you mention it's either crippling-ly slow (Python or Java) or very difficult to synchronize (C most, but Python and Java aren't easy). ~~~ BeetleB >only if your program is embarrassingly parallel is irrelevant, because a almost every program is embarrassingly parallel in Erlang. The language is built around concurrency to the point that parts which wouldn't be obviously parallel in another language are in Erlang. Further, slow hashes in crypto have taught us that is actually quite difficult to make something which can't be parallelized. OK. Not an Erlang user, but I can't let this statement go. I've studied parallel numerical algorithms. Many/most of them _will_ involve blocking because you're waiting for results from other nodes. If you're saying Erlang has somehow found a way to do those numerical algorithms without having to wait, then I'd love to see all those textbooks rewritten. Amdahl's Law reigns supreme. ~~~ aeturnum I'm not devishard, but I parsed his statement slightly differently. He's not saying that Erlang makes things parallel magically. Rather, he's saying that Erlang forces tasks that /could/ be parallel to be parallel by default. Thus, Erlang will tend to maximize the sections of your program that are run in parallel compared to other languages. ~~~ BeetleB Which would make the original commenter's point valid: >Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor No, it won't. It will only be true for tasks that /could/ be (completely/embarrasingly) parallel (as you say). Which is kind of circular. ~~~ brightball Not really. Think about every object you'd have in Java that's being passed around your system. Now imagine each of those objects are their own processes and you're passing around references to them. Just on that one case, you've taken huge chunks of a linear execution pattern and parallelized it. Now make that your norm and amplify it to everything. Now realize that the message passing allows this mode of operation to spread each part of this workload over not only more cores but more machines across the network. And then realize that you can deploy updates to this codes individual parts while other parts continue running without taking down the whole system. Then you get Erlang. ~~~ BeetleB None of what you said will prevent the need for waiting for the majority of numerical algorithms. No one's disputing Erlang's prowess at parallelism. What the critic in this thread was saying was that you can only get Nx speedup on an N core processor for a limited set of algorithms. Most parallel algorithms will not fall in this category. Amdahl's law is a general truth - it doesn't matter what your architecture/language is. There is nothing special about Erlang that will make any parallel algorithm scale linearly with nodes. ------ rdtsc I posted this in another thread on what I like about Erlang (I'll shamelessly copy and paste it here): * A better concurrency model. Lightweight processes vs callbacks and futures. Or even channels. I find processes as concurrency units maps better to problems I had to solve. So there is less impedance mismatch. That makes a huge deal in a larger project. (eg.: a user request as an isolated process vs a chain of callbacks). OS design got this right years ago -- think how most modern popular operating systems represent concurrency - an isolated process. * Safety & fault tolerance. Processes are isolated. So you can build very robust systems. That simply puts money in your pocket just due to ops costs. A non-critical / experimental part of backend is crashing at 4am and restarting? No, problem, keep sleeping. Rest of the service will stay up and you can fix it in the morning. * Debuggability and inspection. BEAM VM comes with built in ability to debug, inspect and trace out of the box. That has saved so much time (and money) over the years. * Hot code reload. This is a first class feature. We don't rely on it to do upgrades. But it proved invaluable to fix an issues or two for a high value customer without taking down the services. Or simply to add extra logging to monitor a pathological edge case. Some people might prefer Elixir and that's fine, they are great friends. I personally like Erlang, I think it is simpler. Someone new coming from Python or Ruby might like it better and also it has very beginner friendly community. Jose Valim and and other authors really put user-friendliness and approach- ability at the forefront. I really like that, mad props to them. ------ slashdotdash Dave Thomas has described Elixir as follows: "Elixir took the Erlang virtual machine, BEAM, and put a sensible face on it. It gives you all the power of Erlang plus a powerful macro system."[1] [1] [https://startlearningelixir.com/elixir-for- rubyists](https://startlearningelixir.com/elixir-for-rubyists) ~~~ mnd Erlang is a great programming language after one takes the time to understand the principles underlying it and its design. Everything fits very nicely into place. There are definitely things that could be done better, but then that’s the case with most programming languages and technologies after they have accumulated some dust. Elixir on the other hand, in my personal opinion, is a false prophet simply because it looks like something which it isn’t. It looks like Ruby and gives the programmer the feeling that he’s right at home, except it is in fact a very different beast with very different semantics, Erlang semantics, as opposed to Ruby. Therefore, if you want to program on the BEAM (the Erlang virtual machine) you better make sure you actually understand the system, its design, principles and also some of the semantics of Erlang itself, point at which you might as well just learn Erlang. I’m not saying that you cannot learn those things coming from Elixir, I’m just saying that if you want to build systems of reasonable complexity (like the ones that Erlang is known for) on top of the Erlang virtual machine, as opposed to CRUD web applications, then you must understand a lot more than just Elixir or Phoenix. ~~~ digitalzombie Elixir is prettier than Erlang but it really mess up on certain things. Erlang have pattern matching via function with same name and you can tell if it's a group of pattern matching with semicolon and period. But with Elixir you can't tell it's just def and end. Erlang's: -module(recursive). -export([fac/1]). fac(N) when N == 0 -> 1; fac(N) when N > 0 -> N * fac(N-1). You can tell fac(N) both are in a group of pattern matching cause ';' and '.'. The '.' denote the last pattern matching function. Elixir: defmodule Factorial do def of(0), do: 1 def of(n), do: n * of(n-1) end You can't tell because there is no ';' and '.'. This is a trivial case but when your Elixir's module have a tons of function in it, this issue become relevant. ~~~ slrz I think you make the Erlang definition look unnecessarily awful. fac(0) -> 1; fac(N) -> N * fac(N-1). Or is there a particular advantage to write it using guards? ~~~ jknoepfler having a semantically significant distinction between ; and . is unnecessarily awful. That kind of crap is one of the reasons Elixir has so much support. ~~~ mnd What you said is equivalent to a Python programmer saying that adding semantical value to the “end” keyword in Ruby is unnecessarily awful because you can achieve the same by giving meaning to the indentation level. It’s an entirely subjective matter. I would also like to point out that Erlang has also very good support and has seen adoption in some very critical systems as opposed to CRUD web applications which is the main domain of Elixir. Most of Ericsson’s products use Erlang to a certain degree, there are a lot of banking systems and aviation systems which make use of Erlang as well, quite a few Internet companies use it to great success, and many more. And by the way, the semantic meaning of “;” and “.” is an awful lot similar to their use in the English language, you are blowing it out of proportions. This is a trivial thing which you learn after a 10 minutes introduction to Erlang. For me, personally, if one has a problem understanding the meaning of “;” and “.” or learning a new syntax for that matter, I can easily conclude that I probably should not give that person any decision power in designing systems. ------ lngnmn A practical language based on well-researched first principles. Details in the armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf * java is unsuitable * no pthreads, please (wrong concept) * immutable data (no locks - no problem) * isolated lightweight processes (share nothing) * communication by message-passing (grom Kay's OOP) * dynamic typing (good-enough, quick prototyping) * pattern matching (on receive) * supervision hierarchies (fault tolerance) * reusable components for server development I probably forgot something ~~~ XorNot I've not found immutable data to be the big win people tout it as. In most of what I do acting on _stale_ data is just as bad, which means I wind up needing a lock anyway. Doing a < b and taking an action based on that result is as harmful with stale data. ~~~ kqr I'd like to tell you that stale data will always be a thing in any serious application because light only travels so fast. Therefore, you'll need to have sensible logic in the face of stale data either way, so it's not so bad as you think. ...and while that's true, I'd still like to hear the opinion of someone more knowledgeable because it's an issue that's been bugging me too. ------ davidw This was back in a brief period when Erlang was being hyped by people as a potential Next Big Thing. Unfortunately it never really got that much momentum though, until Elixir and Phoenix came along. ~~~ derefr I've always thought that Erlang would be more successful if it had a better deployment story, along the lines of Go or Rust: e.g. if you had the option of baking an Erlang runtime into a static binary. As it stands, software like ejabberd and rabbitmq are pretty ugly in OS package form (because distro maintainers think such packages need to rely on a common, usually very old, Erlang runtime, instead of allowing them to vendor it in as you're supposed to.) Now that I think of it, Canonical's push toward "snaps" (sandboxed and vendored—but not fully containerized—software bundles, as a package format) might bring a flourishing of Erlang-based application software, given that it's much more compatible with Erlang's style of release-management. ~~~ lobster_johnson I think that would help, but in my opinion, Erlang's syntax and overall projected surface has always been its biggest hurdle to wide adoption. You can have the most amazing, powerful language ever, but it still won't receive popular adoption if you're too strange and you can only attract a certain type of highly-skilled senior devs. I'm not a fan of Elixir's quasi-Ruby syntax — I think something closer to Go or Nim would have served it better — but it's certainly a step in the right direction. The Erlang toolchain has a ton of ergonomic issues that could have been polished down a long time ago, but haven't been. Erlang simply _feels_ oddly quirky and antiquated for anyone used to modern GNU tools or modern REPLs. For example: Lack of Readline support (needs rlwrap to be usable, at least on Ubuntu), lack of GNU-style long options, the obnoxious ctrl-C behaviour that doesn't respect Unix conventions and gives you a prompt with confusing options (quick, what's the difference between "abort" and "kill"?) that seem aimed at developers and are completely wrong if you're just a user of an Erlang tool. (Couldn't they have relegated this to USR1 or something instead of INT, like a normal program?) On the server, the epmd process is a thorn in the side of any system administrator. Erlang devs also seem to think that emitting Erlang stack traces is a good replacement for proper English error messages, and if you're not an Erlang dev, you haven't seen stack traces until you've seen the kind of monstrous, obscure, deeply nested contextual dumps that Erlang programs can produce. And so on. Little things, but important things that can completely kill the joy when you're a potential adopter. Erlang shouldn't need Elixir to modernize, but there's probably very little incentive within the community to change quirks that they're all used to dealing with by now. (I encountered similar issues with OCaml, which has many parallels to Erlang: Quirky, odd syntax, antiquated toolchain, etc. Facebook's cleanup effort [1] looks very promising.) [1] [https://facebook.github.io/reason/](https://facebook.github.io/reason/) ~~~ derefr Oh, sure, there are plenty of things getting in the way of developers being _excited_ about using Erlang and thus deciding, in a bottom-up sense, to build more stuff in Erlang. But I think Erlang's use-case isn't really the type of software developers get excited about developing, either way. The type of software Erlang is "best at" (and where it would reduce codebase size the most) is exactly the type of big Enterprise-y bloatware-apps and business-process servers that make Java's market-share so large. Because Enterprise software gets designed top-down, how _excited_ developers are to be using the (dictated) language aren't very relevant. How easy the language is to _learn_ is relevant; how many engineers you can either hire or train to code in the language is relevant. But whether they enjoy their day- to-day lives writing in the language isn't, really. Thus, I think, why things like deployability are more important to Erlang: for the type of software projects Erlang _would_ be good for, considerations like deployability (and maintainability, remote debugging, easy hot-patching, etc.) are what guide language choice. Erlang wins on most of those fronts (as it should: its OTP framework is effectively "30 years of ops best-practices constraining development"), but for various reasons, [non-embedded] deployment has always been a pain-point. ~~~ lobster_johnson But did it have to become niche? I think Erlang could very well have branched out to become a more even general-purpose language, rather than doubling down on distributed computing to the exclusion of more quotidian tasks. Sure, Erlang will never be able to compete with certain languages such as C and C++ for many use cases. But I often grab Go to create small command-line tools, or do some minor parallel data processing where a lighter language like Ruby will not do well. There's nothing in Erlang that _conceptually_ prevents it from being a general-purpose language; it's just that its ergonomics don't really "scale down" to the stupid, simple stuff. I remember, years ago, trying to write a basic parallel non-OTP log-processing pipeline for some log files, thinking Erlang would be ideal... and being surprised at the number of roadblocks I had to deal with. Around the same time, Tim Bray went through the same process, but spent a lot more effort on it than I [1]. [1] [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang) ~~~ im_down_w_otp I don't think it helps that the largest non-Ericsson commercial entity that attempts to curate and bounding-box the community has a kind of identity crisis around whether or not it's a services or products company. For whatever reason they didn't do much in the way to create and maintain modern tooling to make on-boarding easier, which would have facilitated increased adoption, and lead to more revenue potential. Neither relx, nor rebar, nor erlang.mk, etc. were born out of said commercial entity, despite those kinds of things being _perfect_ candidates for a services company to produce to make their own lives and the lives of potential new users easier. There have been some _huge_ high-profile Erlang use cases that would normally feed a Silicon Valley/Hacker News style hype-cycle, but somehow those came and went with almost nothing to show for it. It almost feels like if Elixir hadn't shown up on the scene to attract new users and splinter off a chunk of the massive Ruby community that the Erlang side of the world would all but dead already. Sometimes I wonder how it is one goes about blowing a 15+ year technology lead and 10 years of huge and publicly visible wins, but that's sorta what's happened. In the curation of said community there's also been an overtone of nostalgia for "the good old days" & "yeah, that part is _supposed_ to be painful", and a sort of long-running tone deafness around on-boarding, usability, general- developer-ecosystem-friendliness, etc. complaints that certainly could have had a lot more done to be ameliorated by the commercial entities who stood to gain the most by Erlang having broader adoption. Frankly, much like Elixir breathing a bit of new life into aura around Erlang, if it weren't for people like Fred, Tristan, Alisdair, Garrett and a few others (who again aren't part of the core supports for Erlang commercially) being really passionate against all odds about making Erlang easier to use, and to explore new use cases, and to meticulously and engagingly document all of it... Erlang would probably be dead already. All of which might be overly harsh, but I'm having a very acute existential crisis around Erlang at the moment. I love it. I love developing in it. I love introducing it to teams and projects. And as time goes on I feel rapidly and increasingly more guilty about that given the decline it seems to be in and _has_ been in if I'm being honest with myself in retrospect. Blargh :-( edit: look at the increasingly dwindling sponsors list of Erlang Factory San Francisco over the last several years as an indicator of the above rant/cry- for-help. ~~~ lobster_johnson Thanks for the insight. Out of interest, what company are you referring to in your first paragraph? ~~~ im_down_w_otp Erlang Solutions ------ kriro I'm not well versed in the entire (phone) network space. Ericson switch uptime (powered by Erlang) is always cited and admittedly initially drew me to the whole ecosystem. Well mostly the "it's used in a network that has basically worked all these years so it must be rather robust one way or another" line of thinking. However what I'm wondering is...there's other vendors and Ericson isn't powering the entire network. What software stacks are used by other vendors? I'm assuming it's mostly C-ish stuff with some ASM sprinkles like in Cisco IOS? ~~~ hellofunk Ericson makes a switch that some other networks use. That switch contains lots of Erlang inside it. ------ B1FF_PSUVM Incidentally, does anyone have a screenshot of the "all Erlang" HN front page of similar vintage (perhaps 2009 or so)? ------ aaron-lebo I think the "more cores == faster" benefit is overstated. Without jit Erlang is so slow that languages without concurrency support will kill it. It's even more overstated when something like Go can mostly scale as well over multiple cores but be x times faster while doing so. Not to mention it's 10 years later and we haven't seen massively parallel architectures take off. I suspect other languages are going to fold the good parts of Erlang/BEAM into them and limit its long-term adoption. ~~~ stcredzero _I think the "more cores == faster" benefit is overstated._ I've tried to create servers for massively multiplayer games in Clojure and Go. What I've found is that it "takes some doing" to be able to efficiently use many processors in parallel. You can't just slap on a pmap call in Clojure or do the equivalent cheesy channel trick in Golang and have good utilization of all your cores in parallel. _It 's even more overstated when something like Go can mostly scale as well over multiple cores but be x times faster while doing so._ For what value of "mostly scale as well?" For me, that means doing a little extra design/architecting to break out your Golang server process into multiple worker processes. _it 's 10 years later and we haven't seen massively parallel architectures take off._ Because there are still barriers that are a bit too large. You either wind up having to do weird things to do what amounts to efficiently passing data between cores, or you end up using a slower language that's a bit far from the computing mainstream. ~~~ zazibar Can you elaborate on how you implemented those servers? Would you still use Clojure or Go for them now? If not, what alternative do you suggest? ~~~ stcredzero My first attempt was a server for a dungeon crawler that superficially looked like a rogue-like, but was actually 12 frames/sec realtime instead of turn based. It started out on Clojure, but I afterwards ported it to Go. In this server, the world was divided into 80x24 subgrids that did most of their processing in parallel. Processing would happen in two stages: 1) local data processing, where each entity got updated in a loop, sending out updates to clients and 2) collision resolution/movement. If I had to do it over again, I would relax the grid's invariant properties, and make each 80x24 subgrid completely independent, which would eliminate the collision resolution step. In my current server, I'm basically sharding my space-game into star systems, with free travel between star systems though "Hyperspace." There is a farm of "worker processes" that is coordinated by a master server. Any instance of a star system can be idempotently spawned when a client is attached to it. < [https://www.emergencevector.com](https://www.emergencevector.com) > I think Go is a good option for writing a game server. You'd have to be pretty profligate to make the GC pause overrun one 16.66 ms tick, and if you miss a tick here and there, who cares? ~~~ protomikron > In this server, the world was divided into 80x24 subgrids that did most of > their processing in parallel. Is there any reason why you do update() in parallel? There is certainly some interesting challenges to solve there but did you have a reason to make it parallel other than intellectual curiosity (e.g. better performance)? Afaik a game loop's update() is not the intense part in the game loop (maybe that's different for games with lots of world information update, like roguelikes), but rather render() and IO() are so I am wondering what your design thoughts are. ~~~ stcredzero _Is there any reason why you do update() in parallel?_ I wanted to come up with an architecture that could support an arbitrarily large world given enough resources. Up to a certain density (from 150 to 250 users per "subgrid") I was close to succeeding. _Afaik a game loop 's update() is not the intense part in the game loop but rather render() and IO()_ "Render" in the context of a server like this is the IO. One thing you should know, is that this game supported Conway's Life cellular automata at 12 frames/second, completely shared and multiplayer. ------ eternalban Erlang's secret sauce is OTP. ~~~ yellowapple OTP is what makes Erlang Web Scale™. ------ thinkling Are there online classes (eg MOOCs) teaching Erlang? I looked at Coursera, EdX, and Udacity recently and didn't find anything. ~~~ cxa There are some good introductory videos at [https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/ErlangMasterClasses/](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/ErlangMasterClasses/). ------ KirinDave For folks who like Erlang, also check out Pony. ------ soyiuz How to make sure I don't read your post: > Our site has been optimized for use with newer browsers. We also require > that your browser has JavaScript enabled. > It looks as if your browser has JavaScript disabled. > This site has information about enabling JavaScript, if that's something you > want to do. Really? I am just trying read a few paragraphs of text on a fairly static- looking site. ~~~ LukeShu It's even worse than that. It is static. It would work without javascript if they didn't put <noscript> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=https://pragprog.com/no_js"> </noscript> ~~~ LukeShu As a slight followup: In the Advanced settings panel for NoScript, there's an option to disable <meta> redirects in <noscript> blocks. ------ andrewvijay "How do programmers fix these problems? They don’t. They pray." :D LOLed at this!! ------ hota_mazi > How do programmers fix these problems? They don’t. They pray. Ah! No, Joe, that's what _you_ do. Most of developers have figured out how to do concurrency and parallelism with mutable state and locks. It's not as hard as you make it sound and it's supported in a lot of languages which, as opposed to Erlang, are statically typed, hence much more suitable to the kind of large scale software you describe. And yes, that was already true in 2007. ~~~ gamache Do you realize how silly this sounds? You are disregarding not only Erlang, but decades of research and development on concurrent programming best practices. Immutability has been promoted for parallel programming since the 1970s. For the past fifteen years, even languages like C++ have moved to promote this style of programming. (Also, Erlang has a compile-time static type checker, if type safety is something you're after.) ~~~ hota_mazi I'm well aware of the literature. The fact is that still today, we have millions and millions of lines of code that work in parallel and a crushing majority of it is operating in mutable languages (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, ...). Pushing immutable languages as the silver bullet to solve concurrency problems is trying to solve a problem that nobody has. We've moved on to higher abstraction grounds (fork join, work stealing, coroutines, etc...), Erlang is still stuck in the past. ~~~ toast0 I think immutability isn't really that important for concurrency in Erlang, since there's conceptually no shared state between Erlang processes -- if you use the mutable process dictionary, no other process could see it anyway[1]. In reality there is ets which is mutable with locks, and refcounted binaries which become immutable once there's more than one reference. That Erlang forces you to build a shared nothing system is the real win for concurrency. Of course, you can do that with other languages too. > We've moved on to higher abstraction grounds (fork join, work stealing, > coroutines, etc...), Erlang is still stuck in the past. Erlang can do fork/join, the schedulers can work steal, and erlang processes are approximately equal to coroutines -- I don't understand what you think is stuck in the past (other than the Prolog like syntax, but you get used to that). Immutability is a big win for garbage collection and memory allocation however, since there are no circular references, mark and sweep isn't required and a simple (generational) copying collector can be used instead. [1] actually you can look at other processes' dictionaries if you want, but that requires a lock on the destination process.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Enabling Offline "Facebook Likes" Via QR Codes For Your Brand - nreece http://www.dericloh.com/enabling-offline-facebook-likes-via-qr-codes ====== andrewacove My project ties QR codes to Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook profiles: <http://www.getaquirk.com/> So you can scan a QR and easily follow, check-in, etc. Currently debugging a change in the FB API that broke something. But still something to check out if you're into QR uses. ------ citricsquid How strange, this was just discussed over on Reddit! A user posted about their library having new vending machines, people were discussing QR codes for nutrition and stuff, I suggested QR codes for liking remotely. It's an excellent idea and will probably happen with the rise in smart phones, maybe blippy are in a position to do this, maybe they're already developing it! ------ brownie I like it but can't see it taking off until QR readers are standard on mobile OS'. I imagine the percentage of users with both smart phones and QR applications installed on them is pretty small. ------ alanh To me, this seems about as pointless as Foursquare; and yet just as interesting to marketing folks. ~~~ willstraf It may seem that way to you, but just look at how popular Foursquare is. The general public loves it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Best Buy charging $100 extra for some iPhone X purchases - gnicholas https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/27/16562228/best-buy-iphone-x-price-100-dollars-more-installment-plan ====== gnicholas TLDR: They're pushing people to their installment plans, so if you want to pay upfront they'll charge an extra $100. My guess is this is about profiting off arbitrageurs who plan to resell phones. These people have to pay upfront, and Best Buy wants in on the action.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Arrgh Facebook is lying about me - davewiner http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/28/facebookFraud.html ====== phwd Maybe I am wrong, but Dave you said you deleted your account. Are you sure that is your account, if it was shouldn't it resolve to your _username_ you chose? > But when I went to my URL, or at least what I remember my URL to be: > <http://www.facebook.com/dave.winer> The account Ben showed doesn't seem to be yours. <http://graph.facebook.com/100002526165063> (no username showed here) whereas <http://graph.facebook.com/dave.winer> (false i.e. gone) Unless Facebook releases usernames after deleting accounts (or you remember that this is indeed your Facebook ID) I think these are all different accounts. There is also another <http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001554391855> which as well does not show your username. ------ jpadvo The first comment on the post explains that the account in question appears to be set up by a spammer. It is an impersonation by a bad apple, not something Facebook did. Reporting it should result in its removal, hopefully. If that doesn't happen, _then_ Facebook is responsible. [http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/28/facebookFraud.html#c...](http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/28/facebookFraud.html#comment-374287112)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Who runs the world? - robg http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11664289 ====== nazgulnarsil people constantly ask this question because the idea that no one is running things is too scary to contemplate. this is the reason for both organized religion and conspiracy theories. ------ tx I like the bias of the article that becomes apparent from the beginning: _"Leaders of seven of the world’s richest democracies, plus oil-and gas-fired Russia"_ First, these "richest seven" aren't really the richest if judged by their GDPs, even among democracies. Second, there was no need to put Russia into special case: it also is a capitalism-fueled democracy (despite media's preference to suggest otherwise) and their GDP is bigger than Italy, UK and France. And finally, this G8 thing makes no sense without India and China in it, both are nuclear powers with economies that are in top 5 largest. ~~~ ardit33 maybe it is a mix between GDP and GDP per capita, and sheer product output. If you count GDP per capita, then Qatar should be there, but honeslty they are not an industialized country, they just have oil. So, if you count by GDP, then china, should be there, but it can barely feed its own people and its GDP per capita is in 100th place. Heck even my country is better than China. I am not sure what the exact formula is, but I bet is it is a combination of GDP, GNP, PPP(GDP per capita), and Nuclear Capability Like every velvet club, if you don't care about it, than it doesn't matter. Actually if you are cool enough, then you can open your own club, and the other people will start comming to you. China would be smart to create some kind of economic bllock in east and south-east asia, to give it even more clout. But other countries just don't trust them that much. ------ mattmaroon The freemasons. ~~~ omouse Very possible. Have you seen the list of famous Freemasons? Some crazy influential people there! ------ eyudkowsky The Conspiracy ------ xlnt America ------ ahold The Jews. ~~~ xlnt anti-semitism isn't funny because it's still killing people. ~~~ echair It's a bit much to jump on someone for giving a frivolous answer when you've posted 2 on this thread yourself. ~~~ xlnt what i said does not apply to either of my other comments. and even if it did, that would not change its truth. also i didn't jump on or even directly mention the OP, nor did my post have anything to do with frivolity. edit: btw your post "jumps on" me for "jumping on" someone else, and also complains that i shouldn't criticize others for doing things i did myself. by your own criterion your post is bad. ------ xlnt pg ~~~ nazgulnarsil if computer scientists were in charge things would be nearly so fucked up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sexbots development: Ethical? - waroc http://www.geeksnack.com/2015/09/16/sexbots-development-further-objectifies-women-and-children-says-ethicist-campaign-to-ban-them-already-underway/ ====== waroc Where there's demand, there's supply. On the bright side, sexbots may force women in sex industries to study and pursue other careers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Scientists discover Indonesian cave with 'stunning' record of tsunamis - kschua http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/scientists-discover-indonesian-cave-with-stunning-record-of-tsunamis-dating-back-thousands-of-years/story-fn5fsgyc-1226782895230 ====== jsaxton86 I can't find the original paper, unfortunately. With that said, it's interesting to compare the OP with the BBC's reporting of the same story: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-25269698](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25269698) ------ exodust A story about something "stunning and beautiful" found in a cave, without any pictures of the cave. These compact teaser stories have little substance. They're more about attracting clicks with "stunning" in the headline. ------ andrewflnr Wait, people thought tsunamis came on a schedule? ~~~ Someone I guess the original article concluded that it doesn't look like a Poisson distribution, and this is the journalist's attempt to explain that for the intended audience. ~~~ andrewflnr [skims wikipedia] So does that mean there's not even a nicely defined average rate of tsunamis? Can you explain that in a slightly less dumbed-down way for someone who doesn't really know about statistics? ~~~ Someone I haven't read the paper, so I don't even know whether they said anything remotely like that, but "not a Poisson process" could mean anything. For example, if you start with a Poisson process of tsunamis, but add a tsunami exactly one year after each tsunami of that process, the resulting is not a Poisson process. Such a theory can easily be proven incorrect, but the idea that an event may make it more likely to have further events soon doesn't sound that illogical. After all, for earthquakes, we talk of aftershocks. In a true Poisson model of earthquakes the idea of aftershocks, that is, of relations between earthquakes would be nonsense.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Cloud Maker – Rapidly create cloud architecture diagrams - t4l0s https://cloudmaker.ai# ====== arkadiyt Gave it a try. Here's my feedback in no particular order: \- I couldn't get into my account to start playing around for a while because your email verification is flagged as spam \- Basic resources like AWS Security Groups are missing. The product seems to heavily lean towards Azure \- I like that you provide an infinite grid for free (cloudcraft only has this on their paid plan) \- I don't like the clutter of having all the Azure/GCP/AWS resources grouped by type ("Compute", "Databases", etc). 99% of companies are single-cloud and it would be more convenient if I could filter down to just AWS \- Lots of UI buttons are missing tooltips - I have no idea what your icons mean \- There's no account editing, you can't change your password & there's no 2fa support ~~~ softwarelimits > I don't like the clutter of having all the Azure/GCP/AWS resources grouped > by type ("Compute", "Databases", etc). 99% of companies are single-cloud and > it would be more convenient if I could filter down to just AWS But it would be very cool to have details abstracted in a way that it would be easier to build architectures for several cloud providers with one diagram. ~~~ jcims This sounds great in theory but I would be interested to see if anyone has successfully abstracted the provider out if their architecture. In my experience the only way to do this is to limit your service to leveraging the lowest common features of services that are common to each privider. ~~~ toomanybeersies Really depends on what you're doing. If you have something like a simple Rails stack it's fairly trivial. From experiences it's easy enough to abstract NoSQL (i.e. AWS DynamoDB and GCP Firestore) and Serverless functions (AWS Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions), although you need to write abstractions for them in your code. I have no experience with ML, but I'd imagine that's where it gets a lot harder to abstract these out. Both Microsoft [1] and Google [2] provide tables with their equivalents to AWS services. [1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws- prof...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws- professional/services) [2] [https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud- plat...](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-platform) ~~~ antpls > Serverless functions (AWS Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions) Look for severless benchmarks on your favorite search engine. The performance and trade-off for what seems to be the same service are not homogeneous across providers. This could completely change your costs, and then your architecture. To compare cloud providers or build multi-providers cloud, you have to be careful at comparing apples and apples, or build some kind of simulator first ------ robot I think this is an idea with great potential. Making it work seamlessly would be a challenge. For example: Elastic Beanstalk for NodeJS gives you a good starting point for a web backend. However, I had to hand-edit the EBS environment configurations to add Redis, Postgres, force HTTPS, and so on. I'd love to add a CI/CD pipeline when I find the time. Could I do these with your tool? Probably not today. It would be awesome to be able to drag and drop gateways, firewalls, set in/out ports. Conceptually this is all one should need to get an EBS set up. ~~~ t4l0s That's the plan - the next feature we're working on will allow you to deploy the architecture you've defined in your diagram. ------ alephnan Cloud providers should auto-generate these kinds of graphs and make this available as part of their Web UI. ~~~ ForHackernews I'm sure they will, if it looks like 3rd party services are making money at it. This is the problem with building your product on one of these platforms: you're just doing their market research for them for free. ~~~ twistiti Or maybe even offer to acquire you? ------ t4l0s We’re building a visual design platform for cloud infrastructure. We’ve just released our public preview which allows you to diagram solutions for AWS, Azure and GCP for free. Included out of the box are the latest icons for each platform and we offer a streamlined experience for creating cloud infrastructure diagrams versus generic drawing tools. We’d love to hear your feedback! ~~~ zarmin I've always wanted a infrastructure diagram tool that would actually create the architecture using my AWS account. How feasible is that? ~~~ PeterBarrett There is also cloundcraft.co [1] which I have been using for a year or so now and would recommend. 1\. [https://cloudcraft.co/](https://cloudcraft.co/) ~~~ jhabdas CloudCraft is quite nice, I first saw it used here [^1]. Seeing diagrams drawn out in perspective is extremely useful. [1]: [https://serifandsemaphore.io/how-to-host-wordpress-like-a- bo...](https://serifandsemaphore.io/how-to-host-wordpress-like-a- boss-b5993fcfbd8e) ------ easytiger When i click "Sign Up Free", you go to a page that only has "Sign In" options. You then have to click (i did in a UI bruteforcing attempt) "Sign In with Email" to find a tiny font saying "Do you need an account" It's like you are trying to hide email sign ups. ~~~ t4l0s Thanks for the feedback - will take a look at improving the UX on that user journey! ------ andreareina Requiring a signup for a free trial of something that doesn't inherently need an account pretty much instantly turns me off. ------ sjbase Feature request: automatically generate architecture diagrams from Terraform (or other 'infrastructure-as-code') files. ~~~ OJFord You may be aware (and I understand that it's noiser than 'architecture diagram') but terraform can output for graphviz. I believe I've read AWS can too, so if you're 100% on AWS that's probably pretty close to what you'd want. ------ PanMan I was excited about this, as I need to update our architecture diagrams. However, first feedback: * Heroku didn't return anything in the search * AWS API gateway neither. * ok, I'll start from our webserver (on heroku). No general webserver icon either. * I'll start with the DB. No generic DB icon. MariaDB only for Azure.. So far, all my starting points are dead ends. I could work partially around them by selecting other services (mariaDb does exist as a Azure service), but that feels ugly/hacky.. ------ nodesocket I am fan of CloudCraft which has some awesome AWS specific features such as importing resources from AWS, cost reports, and auto-syncing resources. Adding Google Cloud is a heavily requested feature which I am sure they are working on. How does Cloud Maker differ, stack-up to CloudCraft? ~~~ nivertech Does CloudCraft allows generation of CloudFormation or terraform templates from the diagram? ------ gitgud A lot of these architecture diagram tools have been popping up lately. Seems like something that could be generated from accessing each of the cloud providers right? ------ ollybee This Seems similar to [https://www.happi.io](https://www.happi.io) ------ novaleaf what about the other way around? Generate a diagram from your existing cloud (and then maybe tweak the diagram then round-trip it)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Y Combinator by the Numbers - ssclafani http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ERQ7ZtseWo ====== rajeshvaya wow!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MongoDB Gotchas - vlucas http://www.vancelucas.com/blog/mongodb-gotchas/ ====== TrevorBurnham These seem a bit obvious to me. "String searches are case-sensitive"? "Strings and integers aren't equivalent"? I was hoping the article would be a bit deeper. ~~~ jkmcf For the majority of people migrating from MySQL, these would be deep enough for them to say "Oh $h1t, my codes will break!" since MySQL defaults to not caring.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN for comments: Popular math article: Sailing Hydrofoils - RiderOfGiraffes http://www.penzba.co.uk/Catastrophe/ ====== frig If the article's really about catastrophe theory I'd better-motivate the catastrophe reference; dropping it in at the last second is pretty much a wtf moment for a reader not forewarned. Motivate it in the abstract as like (but rephrased to match whatever style + diction constraints you're operating under): Informally, a catastrophe means bad stuff happens all of a sudden; in the area of mathematics known as 'Catastrophe Theory' we have a more formal definition, but the same intuition applies, with a slight caveat we will come to momentarily. Consider a car driving on an icy road. One minute it's handling smoothly, but then all of a sudden it starts drifting on the ice; the driver attempts to reacquire control but without success. The car spins out of control and lodges into a snowbank (thankfully everyone inside unhurt). Our intuition says this is a catastrophe (perhaps a small catastrophe, but a catastrophe nonetheless): one minute everything was as normal, but then something terrible happened. A catastrophe theorist would agree -- a catastrophe _did_ just occur -- but here the caveat comes into play: a mathematician's catastrophe _isn't_ the horrible crash into the snowbank. Instead, the mathematician's catastrophe is the loss-of-control, as in the moment during which the car transitioned from still-steerable to uncontrollably-drifting. Catastrophe theory is, loosely speaking, the attempt to characterize and understand the fine structure of transitions between different states-of- operation (like the transition from steerable to drifting). Thankfully not all "catastrophes" are catastrophes in the casual sense of the word. To provide a sense of the flavor of catastrophe I've prepared a much happier example of "catastrophe" involving racing boats (no crashes, I promise!) and as a bonus you'll also learn quite a bit about what makes boats fast or slow. ...then in the conclusion reiterate that the transition between the planing mode and the "normal" mode is the catastrophe (it's the road, not the destination, that matters). === Be careful with the use of "we". It's good b/c it makes it friendly + inclusive but it makes things very jarring when of a sudden you drop to a 3rd person neutral point of view (eg: "Our truck is now a sports car." is more coherent with your overall turn than "The truck is now a sports car."). === Then the idea of planing arose. When planing a boat is no longer displacing water, it's skipping over the top. Some of its "lift" comes from the dynamic force of the water hitting the bottom of the hull, and so less water has to be forced out of the way. Less pushing, less bow wave, more speed. ...is clunky. You introduce the concept (planing) before you define it. When in the next sentence you do define "planing" you do so indirectly: does "planing" _mean_ "a planing boat is skipping over the top of the water, instead of sitting amidst the water" or is "planing" some as-yet unspecified thing that has as a side effect the property that when a boat is planing it's skipping over the water? Not enough time to try rewriting this for you but consider defining-and- motivating planing first -- "If we could get out of the water somehow we could go faster" (but more accurate and better-phrased) -- and then introducing the term "planing" second (We can, and call this "planing", but again better- phrased). === But let's ask the reverse (actually "converse") question. For a given amount of drag, how fast are we going? -> Let's ask the converse: If we have this much drag, how fast are we going? ~~~ RiderOfGiraffes Great thoughts - thanks. I don't agree with them all, but you've given me to think, and I'll adopt most of them. I hope others provide their opinions too. ------ RiderOfGiraffes I'm writing this article, and while there are a few things left to do I thought I'd float it here (if you'll pardon the pun) to ask what you think is missing. What more do you want to see? What details should be added or expanded? Hacker News wasn't my initial target audience, but I've realised that it's a good target audience that won't hesitate to tell you when you've got something wrong. ------ jacquesm Thanks, I've never seen such a clear explanation of why a displacement hulls length in sail boats is a large factor in the theoretical top speed of the boat. edit: ok, I've read the whole thing now, maybe there is a way to tie this in with hysteresis for contrast ? ~~~ JimmyL Same here - I raced boats for years and knew that waterline legth was proportional to speed, but never why. ------ Radix Is this related to your post from several months ago? I've been wondering what you would end up putting together, and watching for it. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672067> ~~~ RiderOfGiraffes It's related, yes, but I'm building a body of popular articles that can then sit on top of deeper explanations. Short answer: yes. Longer answer: there's a long way to go. ------ tome Great diagrams! How did you draw them? Tablet? ~~~ RiderOfGiraffes By hand on an old Nokia 770 internet tablet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Humans are Liars - tckr https://coderbyheart.com/humans-are-liars/ ====== chongli This piece is interesting but it misses the elephant in the room: Work is transactional at its heart. When somebody is your boss and you depend on them to pay your bills and feed your family then they are not your friend no matter how pleasant your interactions may be. This is why people work so hard to protect themselves. You ultimately can't ask people to be vulnerable and honest about their true opinions without some kind of consideration to offset the risk. This is why tenure is so coveted in academia. ~~~ ianamartin Agreed. Friendships happen after work. Either after hours or (more rarely) after you no longer work together. I've got a handful of close friends that I used to work with. Including a couple of former managers. But that friendship and trust didn't really start until after we parted ways. It works the other way too. I recruited one of those friends for my team at my last job. I've known this guy seems like forever. I was at his wedding 12 years ago and took care of his dog during his honeymoon. Threw his divorce party. Started a business with him. Let him stay with me when he was feeling down about the divorce. Celebrated his new wedding with him and play with their daughter while we watch football and eat pizza. We've loaned each other cash when we were having rough times. But when he walked in the door on my team a few months ago, nothing needed to be said. Total professionalism. Just people trying to solve problems. We hang out and be friends on our own time. And work is just work. But the risk is still there in non-tenured situations. There was a situation at the company we started together when things were not going super well. And he had to let me go. I wouldn't want to do that anymore than he did at the time, but if I had to for <reasons> it's a thing that could be done without destroying the friendship. I'm also hoping to go back to a company I used to work for with a manager I really liked. We've stayed friends since I worked there before, and I'm excited to go back for a number of reasons. But the bottom line is that once I sign that piece of paper that says "at will employee", I have to treat it the same as any other job that has no guarantees. And I can't rely on any past friendship with that person. Work is work. In a culture that awards tenure only to a certain select group of people, work is always--as you put it--transactional. Trust really doesn't enter the equation. ------ jhiska Humans are liars; systems are dehumanizing. More precisely, humans are interested in preserving themselves, including their ego and social standing. One example of this is when we say "humans are liars" we are not thinking of ourselves, but projecting it to Others. And when I say "we" I'm distancing myself from the Others as well, because otherwise there would be negative focus on me. And when you read "I" you are being distanced from your own guilt, because I'm an Other to you. I don't benefit from calling myself a liar (which isn't always true, anyway, for anyone), and neither does anyone else profit from calling themselves liars. It's rational to preserve yourself given the circumstances. Should we change humanity or change the systems? Which side you consider the problem is political. >Transparency enables to uncover defects, if information and data is available without restriction, there is no use in lying about it or covering it up. This sounds like it should be true, but it's not. People can not accept certain revelations, and "increased transparency" about people's flaws just makes everyone dislike, hate or despise each other. This, too, is a human flaw. ------ vletrmx In several instances being honest has cost me socially. There doesn't seem to be a solution that doesn't ultimately result in rejection. Unless ofcourse you're willing to lie. ~~~ jondubois Recently I tried to help someone who I had known for a few years and who I respected then as soon as I did this, they turned on me and put me in a really difficult position. The irony is that this is someone who claims to pride themselves on their higher moral values. From now on, I'm going to be extremely cautious with people who present themselves as idealistic. Maybe it's also the sign of a manipulative psychopath. Our society is littered with psychopaths these days. So much so that even those who aren't psychopaths are forced to pretend to be psychopaths just so that they can fit in. For example in elite colleges/fraternities, they have some pretty twisted initiation rites... This is essentially institutionalized psychopathy. You have to prove yourself to be devoid of moral fibre just to fit in. ~~~ j9461701 During WW2, the Captain of U-boat 156 sunk a passenger liner. He then immediately set about rescuing survivors, and began broadcasting his position and the humanitarian nature of his mission on all available channels. An American B-24 in the area began to attack, despite the Captain's pleas they were killing their own men and the U-boat was trying to save lives. Afterward, U-boats were explicitly ordered to never render humanitarian aid under any circumstances (the Laconia order). The B-24 pilots were given medals for bravery. In 1757, the British admiral John Byng was executed for failing to sail his ships into a storm. The enemy was besieging a fort, and although Byng engage the enemy fleet he didn't pursue and annihilate them - heedless of the danger - and thereby the relief troops were unable to reach the fort before it fell. This was considered a capital offensive despite being sound strategy (the loss of the fort was bad, the loss of Byng's fleet would've been crippling) - making the right call got a man shot by firing squad. These two incidents are always in my head when people discuss morality or honor or any such topics. The truth is "moral" for most people means nothing so much as "Did a thing I like" and immoral means "Did a thing I didn't like". That B-24 crew attacks the enemy, which is good and therefore moral - that it was a supremely cowardly and bloodthirsty thing is irrelevant. It's just how people are, I suppose. Well, most people. Some are genuinely good eggs, and those are the ones to befriend. ~~~ dozzie > That B-24 crew attacks the enemy, which is good and therefore moral - that > it was a supremely cowardly and bloodthirsty thing is irrelevant. Note that they were _ordered_ to attack despite that they reported survivors on board. Attribute the cowardice and bloodthirst appropriately in the command chain. ~~~ j9461701 "I was just following orders" was not a valid excuse for the Nazis, and it isn't a valid excuse for our own men. ~~~ coddingtonbear Given that they received medals, I'm not sure that's true in any practical sense. ~~~ barrkel OP is arguing the moral principle in reply to someone trying to justify a moral wrong, but OP's original point is that the practicalities observably trump morals, despite this being wrong. I don't think it's helpful for you to switch tack back to practicalities again on this branch. ------ ianamartin I struggled with this a lot when I was younger and growing up in the South. I got really frustrated by things that just seemed so completely dishonest. Even the basic ritual greeting, "Hi. How are you?" is fundamentally dishonest. It's not a real question because the asker doesn't want an honest answer. And I felt imposed upon because the only socially acceptable response is almost always going to be a partially dishonest, "Great, how are you?" But as I've gotten older, I've decided that there is real value in these rituals, particularly in the workplace. And the value is that these kinds of interactions set a tone and a minimum viable behavior both in public and at work. Performing that little lie when you walk into work forces you to leave a certain amount of your personal life at the door. And this is a good thing. Environments I've worked in (notably, not in the South. NYC is awful about this) that do not adhere to these little ritualistic dishonesties empower the most negative people in the room to do the most damage to morale and productivity. Negativity is absolutely toxic and infectious. And I guarantee you, the person in the room who replies, "Oh, well, you know, it's not going so great right now. My kid is having problems at school, and I don't understand it. S/he is a great kid and really smart, but just isn't getting along well with other kids and not doing well on tests. I just don't get it." when you ask, "Hey, how's it going?" is going to be a problem down the line. (Or something like that. Doesn't have to literally be about a kid. Just anything that breaks the ritual.) It seems innocuous at first. Because we want to care about the people we work with. But this person is also going to gripe about the management and company leadership and bring up politics in ways that make people either angry or uncomfortable. And not in a healthy way in a 1:1 with the management. It will be at lunch, in small meetings, in code reviews, planning sessions, etc. On the coworker side, the idea of total honesty is not a good one. The people who either consciously refuse to engage in these rituals (or are just unaware of them) are guaranteed to cause problems for the entire team over time. If you bring it up as a talking point in, say a 1:1, the person will just say, "What's the problem? I'm just being honest. What do you want me to do? Lie?" I can't think of any reasonable way to create a policy around this. Teams just need to police themselves. When I hear someone invading the workplace with this kind of "honest" negativity, I have two responses depending on what's going on. If it's personal life stuff or politics, I'll offer to take them out for a bite to eat or a drink or something and listen to everything. If it's griping about management or leadership, I'll just say that they really need to have a conversation with <manager> about that because we really can't accomplish anything by brooding over it. And I'll do this even if I 100% agree with what the person is saying about management or politics. Because I guarantee you someone within a hundred feet of us doesn't agree about it. On the management side, I'd argue that total honesty is also a terrible idea. In my experience, the people in management roles who advocate for total honesty/total transparency come in two flavors: the first is the person who says he promotes these ideas but lies constantly anyway. The second is an absolute jackass who uses honesty as an excuse to act like a bag of dicks to people. It is possible do deliver hard criticisms without being a jerk. It just takes a little bit of time and a little bit of effort. Telling someone, "This sucks. You've got to stop being so terrible at your job." is not only lazy and asinine, but also completely unproductive. If someone on your team is performing that badly, it is your job to invest time in that person. Whether it's some coaching earlier in the dev process or extra time in code reviews or providing some educational material or designing a pip, that's your job. Being harshly critical because "honesty" is garbage. Grow up. And take the time to actually do your job. I don't need to say much about the "total honesty" liar category. They are either sociopaths or utterly incompetent (often both, but competent sociopaths are the worst) and can only get by through manipulating people and playing political games. The two best managers I've ever had as an individual contributor are what I would call transparently dishonest. Yes, sometimes they had to either be silent about a situation or whitewash certain organizational details, but they also let you know when that was happening. Their criticism was direct and effective, but not cruel. They focused on three key things: providing clearly defined tasks, guarding our time, and protecting the team from organizational politics. They were sometimes (often?) less than totally honest about what was going on, but we knew it and trusted them to know that it was okay to not know. My best manager as a manager is . . . well, I haven't had a good one yet. So I'll let you know when that happens. So, I'm going to go out and say it. A certain amount of dishonesty is a good thing. Social structures depend on it to function in a healthy and productive way. Go too far in the honesty direction, and you end up with a culture like NYC, which, as much as I like many things about the city here, it's only a barely functional society. Go too far on the dishonest side, and everyone is stilted and uncomfortable, and no one feels like they can say anything to anyone because we're all Stepford Wives at work, and it's all pretty on the outside but awful on the inside. Like in much of the South and Texas in particular. It's a balancing act. The Dilbert strip in the article is good because it's useful for us to remember that we are actually selfish and dishonest. But solving that isn't the real problem, and being totally unselfish and honest isn't the solution. That's like reading an article about how bad waterfall is and then moving to a 1-day sprint Agile system. (You laugh, but I've seen it. Seriously. 1-day sprints with 5 standups a day. Sprint planning in the morning, scrum coding sessions in the afternoon, retro just before end of day. You can guess what happened: every day every task ended up blocked. This went on for over a year. Literally nothing got done. But, wow, that team looked busy.) Apologies if I've offended anyone who is perfectly honest all the time, a coworker, a manager, an Agile practitioner, a Waterfall advocate, a sociopath, an incompetent, a New Yorker, a Texan, or even human. I'm just being . . . totally honest. ~~~ GavinMcG I think you might find _An Everyone Culture_ , by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey a worthwhile read. It challenges what you say, on some level, and reinforces it in other ways. Like you said, it's a balancing act. But one aspect you left out – and one of the things I took away from their research – is that honesty has big benefits _if_ everyone is on the same page about it. If one person is being "honest", and the rest of the team isn't on board, there's going to be the sort of friction you describe. Or if the honesty is only negative, rather than constructive, that's obviously not healthy. On the other hand, if the whole team is on board about honesty – including being critical – and if there are structures in place that make sure the honesty/transparency/criticism is a constructive force, then it can pay big dividends. ~~~ ianamartin I'll definitely give this a read. I think I'm going to disagree with it. But I will give it a chance. Frankly, I think that honesty/transparency are buzzwords that have little to no meaning. So the authors will have to convince me. But the whole approach seems cynically disingenuous in most of the places where it's applied. I also think that criticism doesn't deserve a place in the honesty/transparency group. Criticism is an inevitable fact of life that will happen to you at some point, and you will have to deliver it at some point, if you are a functional adult. Honesty and transparency are entirely optional. They are not in the same category at all, in my opinion. I encountered different types of criticism and management when I was around 10 years old at one of these things people call music festivals. They are practice gulags. You practice for 10 hours a day, and you work with a bunch of different teachers. It's every 11-year-old's definition of "festival." But one of the nice things is that you get to work with a lot of different teachers. I remember working very hard on a particular bow stroke called Martele. The hammer stroke. I was really bad at it. And one of my teachers was quite honest with me about how much I sucked at it. And to be fair, I did suck at it. It didn't work. At all. So he told me that it sucked, and that I wasn't trying hard enough and I should practice more, and he was going to spend his lesson smoking a cigarette while I tried to perform 100 martele strokes in a row on the same pitch. You can call that honesty. But you can also call that a number of other things. I had a different teacher a few weeks later who listened to me trying to do this, and his response was, "Well, this really isn't working out very well for us, now is it? What should we do when things aren't working out well no matter how hard we try? Well, we need to try something different, don't we? Let's try something different." The reason I'm bringing that up as an example is because this is actually not uncommon in the tech world. The first guy was being honest. Totally honest. I sounded like garbage. No doubt about that. The second guy was slightly dishonest, but he was more to the point of solving the problem. And, in fact, I got a lot better at that particular stroke of the bow rather quickly. I'll have to read the book, and I definitely will. And I don't like to leave unread books around. Especially ones backed by research. I hope I was clear to qualify my statements by being based on my own personal experience, rather than pretending that I've done any scientific studies. I would also argue that there's no such thing as constructive "honesty". Construction inside a team setting is always assumed to be honest. No one goes around telling people they did a great job when they sucked at it. Unless that person is a really bad manager. But teammates don't do this in reality. So I can't see how this really makes sense. Like I said, I'll read it. But I think it's questionable on the face of it. Maybe we are living in some sort of crazy place where honesty/transparency/criticism and just a healthy trusting relationship with your boss are all the same thing. But I don't think so, and pushing things in that direction is bad for all of us. On the other hand, I'm willing to be wrong. ~~~ lgas How was the second guy dishonest in any way? I don't see it. ~~~ ianamartin You can make the case that the second guy was dishonest because he wasn't telling me how bad I was at playing that one note in that one way. The he was doing me a disservice by shielding me from the harsh reality of how rough the music world can be on young performers. That if you suck that badly at that one note in that one way, there are probably tons of other things that you don't even know about that you also suck at. There is a lot of truth in what the first guy was saying in the sense that this is how a lot of the music world works. And there was honesty in treating me that way because that's how people get treated. Even little kids. Some people will argue that this is important for people to understand right from the beginning. And that shielding people from that is dishonest. All of these things are true, to a certain extent. And all of them are things that need to be talked about. I've struggled with this as a teacher with my own students. People in teacher roles do need to talk about hard truths. Pretending that every student is going to be amazing and going to have a great career is a lie. For better or worse, I've decided that context matters, and I don't bring big picture _truth_ into lessons that are focused on execution. I set up regular sessions with my students that are totally separate from an actual lesson about the violin or even music. We just sit down and talk for a while about what the student wants and expects, what it's like to work in the field professionally, and what the expectations are going to be from other people. I don't know for a fact that this is superior to the hard-ass jerk approach, but it's the approach that I think is the right mix of honesty and kindness and productivity. You can't only take the second approach and focus on what is or isn't working with someone and completely shield them from the reality of the world. That's being dishonest about the world. But what you can do is separate the issues and deal with them straightforwardly. You don't want to hammer a kid with, "HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO COMPETE IN THIS WORLD WHEN YOU PLAY LIKE THAT!" while they are actually trying to play something. That's unproductive garbage. But not having a serious conversation about their expectations vs. the reality of the business and the life is also dishonest. I operate the same way when I'm managing/mentoring people in technology. There is absolutely a time, place, and sometimes a need for tough criticism and hard talks about the way the world works re: their current capabilities. But that time isn't when we are trying to get a release out the door and their code doesn't work. Because, frankly, if someone is so bad that it's affecting release deadlines, that's on me as a manager. I'm the person who should be getting yelled at. And if I'm communicating effectively with my team and having the right kinds of 1:1s, these conversations happen naturally as a part of the progression plan for each person on the team. The 1:1 is actually one thing I've taken from my technology experience back into my music world. It's a great idea if it's done well. Anyway, long story short, it's possible to lie by omitting information. And people can and do argue that not being a complete dickhead is a lie of omission. Like almost all of this conversation, I think it's mostly a grey area. But also like almost all of this conversation, reasonable people can disagree. The radically honest school of thought has produced some amazing technology, technologists, and musicians. I'm just not convinced it's worth the price, and that there might be a better way. But my argument is humanist, anecdotal, and weak. All the data we have suggests that the "Be a total prick" method of teaching and management produces the best results. I just happen to think that life is long enough to try something different and see if it works. ------ ourmandave There's always Ray Dalio's of Bridgewater school of Radical Transparency. [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/bridgewaters-ray-dalio- the-l...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/bridgewaters-ray-dalio-the- leadership-strategy-behind-my-success.html) If you enjoy crying at your desk anyway. ~~~ sowbug Building on the idea of more transparency in the workplace than we're normally comfortable with, there's also Kim Scott's _Radical Candor_. The missing ingredient this book brings to the discussion is that transparency generally works only if the messenger also personally cares about the recipient. Without caring, the messenger (often the boss) is simply a jerk, regardless of the validity of the message. [https://www.radicalcandor.com](https://www.radicalcandor.com) ~~~ devmunchies She was on the board for my last company and I was so sick of hearing about "radical candor". Almost everyone had a copy on their desk. ------ ravenstine I recognized the fact that humans are the lying species a long time ago, and I've tried to counteract that in the workplace. I find opportunities where I can naturally push the boundary a bit, which isn't too hard for a young male with nothing to lose. I do it both for myself and to create room for others to rightfully express themselves and be able to get away with it. It works a little bit. People are still very protective of their position, but I'd like to think people on my team are a little more open about things than when I started. I don't have a way to measure that, though. I can say for sure that we're much more trust-based than when I joined. The truth is a funny thing, literally. I'm not a naturally funny person, and the jokes that I make are often one that only I seem to understand. But it's when I'm honest about things that I get the most laughs. I remember one time when the conversation I was having lead me to say "Some of Charles Manson's music is pretty good" to this one woman, and she laughed at that but I don't think she realized that I meant what I said. ------ jimnotgym I went to work at a long serving SME that had a lot of staff with very long service and was given the job of moving some things forward. > It should be safe to be vulnerable The number one cause of stress for me is that management did not protect me enough. When I changed something, it would have some minor knock on impact that upset someone (sometimes someone very junior), who would go and see a director, who would go and see the MD and then I would get career threatening back room deals going on that I was not party to. If you are going to get someone to come and push the company forward at sub-boardroom level, make sure your directors are 100% committed to the changes.'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs', make sure you are ready to accept broken eggs. Make sure when petty stuff is brought to senior people they divert it straight back to the project sponsor (or whoever). Make sure individual managers know this change is happening, and it is their job to allow it and make their staff happy with it. There is nothing worse than when you are in the heart of a technical change, than to find out you are in trouble with the boss because a secretary in another dept is sad that you changed their UI. Worse still when you are passed over for a promotion because the MD is concerned that you upset a few people, _when it wasn 't your job to manage the people side in the first place_. Transparency is part of the answer, but in the situation I describe it actually becomes a matter of giving people far too much info, so they can't claim they were not consulted! This is counter-productive too. Senior managers need to take a very firm line with passive-aggressive behavior that is trying to stop change, or not start the change off to begin with. ~~~ tckr Thanks for sharing this, Jim! ------ Spooky23 You can be honest with your spouse, priest and lawyer. Everyone else is a shade of grey. ~~~ antisthenes I'd remove spouse and priest from that list. The lawyer is the only one motivated to keep secrets because they have skin in the game. ------ unabst You will find dishonesty between managers and workers. This is because workers try to get away with things, and managers are paid to catch them. You will find dishonesty between executives and shareholders. This is because executives are paid to lie about performance, and share holders exist to punish them. But this is just as systematic as it is human. Dishonesty is rarer among workers. Their gossip is honest, and hence cathartic. Dishonesty is also rarer among the executive team. For running a company can only be done with facts, and in almost all cases of corporate scams, the executives were all in on it. And even the whistle blower would have had to known the truth. ------ pdkl95 > Humans are Liars Lying may be common, but it isn't universal. I never understood why you would want to make a habit of having to waste memory and mental effort to remember the map of what lies have been told to which people. It's hard enough to remember one version of reality. Regarding social consequences: I'm not sure. I was already a socially awkward nerd, which makes makes it very hard to isolate any lying/not-lying consequences. Politely declining to answer when a lie is socially expected (or, when possible, finding a way to respond that doesn't require lying) has worked out reasonably well so far. ~~~ klibertp > what lies have been told to which people In practice, this is not a problem. People who lie very much, in my experience, have a couple of strong narratives they build their lies on. Because they follow some vague set of rules (which is easier to remember, especially if you use them repeatedly), it's possible for them to re-invent the same lie for the same situation, every time. On top of that, they are prepared to cover any minor differences that can occur one way or another - mostly by diverting the attention of others to something else. As long as they stay consistent with their lies and manage to stay within the bounds of what others consider plausible, it's very hard to recognize their lies. It's even harder, in practice, because what we consider probable is greatly affected by the flow of conversation and what's happening around it, so with a proper preparation, it's possible to sell almost any bullshit to almost anyone. Well, that's the deep end of conmen and people who use lies - one way or another - for work. However, many people are able to lie easily and they are almost never challenged, at least if they don't exaggerate too much. Our brains are great at filling the holes in the narratives, which has both a good side - art - and dark side - lies. ------ tckr OP here, thanks for all the great comments and anecdotes. While nobody disagrees that this kind of culture would be worth striving for, the majority's opinion seems to be that it is impossible to achieve. But we all share the desire for living/working in an environment like this and this gives me hope! Anybody who start the discussion in their team or company about the way they interact, will quickly and most certainly find allies and can grow a team of change agents from that. _Everyone culture_ was already mentioned and I would also recommend books like _Unboss_ [https://coderbyheart.com/unboss-a-compendium-for-future- orga...](https://coderbyheart.com/unboss-a-compendium-for-future- organizations/) or _Joy, Inc._ [https://coderbyheart.com/joy- inc/](https://coderbyheart.com/joy-inc/) ------ Synaesthesia I think people are for the most part honest and good, I think it’s overlooked how much goodness is inherent to our nature. ------ sulam > It should be free of incentives that promote individualized results I love to complain about sales people, but good luck getting the really good ones to work at a company like this without the usual compensation structure. ------ phkahler I may be guilty of some defensive tactics at times, but I don't lie. By lie I mean making statements that are false. I have rarely seen overt lies, but... In one case a PhD in my group claimed a certain level of system performance (which he could not meet) was mathematically impossible. Our boss could not refute it, but I quietly went back to the lab and achieved the goal. I filed a note about that man's integrity under my hat. ------ erikpukinskis I suspect on some level, Scott Adams likes the idea that _all_ humans are “dirty, rotten liars” because it eases his fear that he might be more of a liar than some of his adversaries. ~~~ kelukelugames haha, Scott Adams cracks me up. Adams blogged about persuasions and writing techniques for years. I learned a lot from reading those posts. Then he uses the same techniques to promote Trump. Which is fine. People can support whichever candidate. But Adams adamantly denied his support. ~~~ olivermarks I think the idea that Scott Adams is 'promoting trump' isn't helpful on a number of levels. He is very, very perceptive about humans and their failings, and brilliant at lampooning corporate and bureaucratic group cultures and rat races. I've learnt a lot reading his articles about the way the current crop of republican politicians are operating. He is one of the few people making sense and understanding the zeitgeist of half the American people. I'm not a trump fan fwiw, you can take this more in the Sun Zu sense: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ~~~ wavefunction >the zeitgeist of half the American people I'd like to point out that this is wildly overstated. ~59.7% of eligible voters voters cast a ballot in 2016.[0] Of those votes cast, Donald Trump received ~46.1% of those votes or 62,979,879 votes.[1] So Donald Trump represents at the least the zeitgeist of ~27.5% of eligible voters. It's hard to determine how he represents the zeitgeist of non-voting-eligible inhabitants of the US but when you compare his popular vote total to the total population of the country, or ~323,100,000 in 2016, one can claim with certainty that Trump represents the zeitgeist of at least ~19.5% of the country. I point this out because it is often said that Donald Trump represents half the country, likely because he was the candidate of one of the two major political parties in this country and 1/2 is 50%. However repeating this falsehood of Trump representing the beliefs of half the country lends legitimacy to Trump and his agenda that is unearned and provides cover to people who would like to believe that the beliefs they share with Donald Trump enjoy some sort of popularity that is more widespread than can be justified. The same is true of course for Hillary Clinton and those Americans that cast their ballot for her, though of course the breakdown would be very slightly larger in her favor given her winning of the popular vote by some ~3,000,000 votes. [0][http://www.electproject.org/2016g](http://www.electproject.org/2016g) [1][http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump- hillary-...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary- clinton-popular-vote-final-count/index.html) ------ billsimms I was surprised by sections in "Lying" by Sam Harris where he wrote "Why don't we agree that you won't ask me that so I won't have to tell you the truth." A much more extreme position is Brad Blanton's "Practicing Radical Honesty" and other books by him. He admits in one of his books the huge personal cost he has seen people suffer when people tell everyone all the truth all the time, but he still thinks it is worth it. ~~~ Spooky23 Truth isn’t black and white and is based on your perception and knowledge. You can’t offer radical honesty as a solution if you hold information back. Radical truth tellers forget about the sin of omission, and happily lean back and watch others bang themselves.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things - kiyanwang https://launchdarkly.com/blog/the-fallacy-of-move-fast-and-break-things/ ====== jasode The _" move fast and break things"_ is just a web app version of previous sayings in other domains: \- _" A ship in harbor is safe but that's not what ships are made for."_ \- _" If I've made more shots than you, it's because I've _missed_ more shots than you."_ \-- variations of this from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, other athletes \- _" All great writers got better by writing a lot of _bad_ sentences."_ \- _" If you want to learn how to ride a bike, roller skate, ski, snowboard, etc you're going to have to _fall down_ a lot."_ All of them are trying to be provocative in the same way: expect _repeated failures_ when experimenting/exploring what success looks like. So MFABT when compared to variations of previous quotes is pretty standard advice. Nevertheless, everybody likes to poke holes in it because it came from a source a lot of people don't like: _Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook_. Should programmers[1] at NASA _" move fast & break things"_?!? Of course not. I know what the original _context_ of MFABT was about so it doesn't apply to NASA. [1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right- stuff](https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff) ~~~ wwweston I more or less like FB as an application (and I have no idea whether I should like Zuckerberg or not). But MFABT is different as a formulation: it articulates broken things an _imperative_ rather than a side effect that needs to be persevered through. There's also context to it that matters -- everything from the great documentation diaspora from a decade back where they blew away a developer wiki that represented years of community effort to describe how to use the various APIs without having anything remotely like an adequate replacement, to changes a few months ago which temporarily had access to the "Friends Lists" features unavailable which made managing privacy settings more difficult. There's a lot of things FB does right too, but when looking at blunders, it's easy to have the catchy phrase come to mind and wonder if maaaybe someone overconfidently strode forward MFABT in mind when more caution might have been warranted. You can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, as they say, but if you say that often enough, you start to get some people who think cracking a few open means breakfast is ready. ~~~ jasode _> But MFABT is different as a formulation: it articulates broken things an imperative rather than a side effect _ No, it only looks like a desirable "imperative" if you read it with a _hyper- literal interpretation_. MZ's aphorism is just using the _rhetorical device_ of taking something _undesirable_ and acknowledging it. Yes, the literal words might appear like an "imperative command" but the _underlying meaning_ of the message is actually _" failures are the path to success"_. The rhetorical language is a form of reverse-pyschology. Another similar example is salespeople or romantic suitors trying to get "yes" instead of "no" from prospects. The "no" is undesirable but _rejections are inevitable_ in the process. Thus, one reverse-psychology approach is to frame it as, _" How many _rejections_ did you get today? Only 10? Go make some more phone calls until you get 50 more rejections!"_ It still doesn't mean rejections are the real goal. We're just humans _playing with language_ to get past the fear of rejections holding us back. ~~~ wwweston > No, it only looks like a desirable "imperative" if you read it with a hyper- > literal interpretation. "Break things" is objectively an imperative. There's no hyper-literal or otherwise careful parsing necessary to arrive at that realization. It's the default. Careful thinking is actually what you need to arrive at the more useful non- literal understanding. And unfortunately the phrase itself doesn't encourage that. Something like "Move fast, even if there's risks" or "Prefer momentum over risk aversion" would be the face-value formulation. > We're just humans playing with language And being played with by language. If language is powerful enough to orient someone on the benefits of preferring momentum over risk aversion, it's powerful enough to distract from the threshold where there's inadequate anticipation of consequences. Any given formulation may do one job better than another. MFABT is not an optimal expression. There are better ones. ~~~ jasode _> "Break things" is objectively an imperative. _ I wrote _desirable_ imperative. You are focusing on grammar (objective interpretation). I was talking about the _meaning_ ("imperative" as synonym for "importance"[1] instead of grammar). Likewise, "go get more rejections" is also an imperative (via objective lens of pedantic grammar categorization) ... but that's not what the underlying message _means_. _> MFABT is not an optimal expression. There are better ones._ It may have been fine as an _internal_ mantra within the walls of Facebook when it was a smaller private company. The engineers would know what it really meant. But then MZ publicized it in an investor letter before the IPO which opens itself to misinterpretation by the outside world like journalists, bloggers, etc. [1] [https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/imperative](https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/imperative) ------ PaulRobinson Lot of answers so far seem to have missed the points being made in the book the article references. If you have the ability to ship things fast - and so do regularly - you will find that your releases: \- Have a small blast radius if there are bugs, because how much blast can you have in an hour's work versus a quarter's? \- The tooling that you build to let you go fast will tell you that a blast is indeed happening right now \- Your Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) is lower because you can just roll it back. It's not days or weeks of work to get a rollback out, it's minutes. \- That having a culture of being able to release continuously and quickly allows you to go fast, and the occasional breakage is tolerable, because the cost is low. You can go slow if you want. And if you don't have LEST metrics or have slow release processes you _must_ , but if you work to get to the point where you are able to move fast, you'll find that you break things less and fix them quicker when they do break. The alternative is you still break things, but the problems incurred are much, much greater. Also note: there are some environments where continuous deployment is never going to be an option or desirable. Thankfully these environments tend to be ones where the market will tolerate the higher costs of formal methods and a more deliberative quality control process (medical devices, aerospace, nuclear reactors, etc.). ~~~ altcognito I like everything except the small blast radius point here. You can do a lot of damage in a short period of time with computers. ~~~ PaulRobinson `sudo rm -rf /` is a very big thing to do in a very small amount of code, sure. I'd adovocate thinking about probabilities then: If you have a shorter period of time to produce a smaller change, are you more or less likely to have a smaller blast radius than if you have a longer period of time to produce a much larger change? There are no absolutes, but we're talking about risk here, and risk is about impact and _likelihood_. Your impacts are going to be smaller and your likelihood of big blast radiuses are _less likely_, but not ruled out. ~~~ zepto I’d say that change duration is irrelevant to blast radius, because bug impact is independent of code size. Having said that - a smaller piece of code is easier to understand, so there is more potential to notice problems. However that depends on whether you do that diligence. And the dangerously false belief that the blast radius is going to be smaller because of change size rather than understanding works against you. ~~~ roosterdawn I don't know whether a smaller change means necessarily a lower probability of small blast radius, but the larger a code change is the higher the probability is of a high blast radius. Blast radius isn't necessarily going to be smaller because of change size, but the chance of it being smaller certainly does decrease in relative terms as it becomes smaller even if it never reaches zero and is still in absolute terms quite high. It's still a noticeable improvement and because of that still a worthy goal to pursue, nevermind the ancillary improvements to product/design/engineering/business coordination and delivery volume as a result of lower iteration cycle time. That's the larger win for me. ~~~ zepto The chance per change size may be reduced, but you are are going to more changes, so the overall probability is unaffected. ------ Finnucane "Move fast and break things"\--said no carpenter, ever. Imagine if doctors, engineers, plumbers, electricians, and all the other real world folks we depend on decided this was a good way to operate. Would you drive across a bridge knowing that was the motto of the people who designed and built it? ~~~ mrlala >"Move fast and break things"\--said no carpenter, ever. Worst analogy ever. If we had GIT for woodworking you would see productivity skyrocket. But you can't restore wood like that. You can't restore pipes, wires, structures like that. Code.. you can. So get out of here with your analogy. I can move at a very fast paced coding new ideas at times, or implementing random stuff knowing I will probably break stuff. But you know what? I can fix that afterwards. It doesn't matter that I broke something to get something else to work. ~~~ DoofusOfDeath I think the carpenter analogy is actually very good: it gives us a starting point for thinking about where MFABT is / isn't a good idea. ------ gorgoiler Great article. Move Fast and Break Things always meant “and don’t be afraid that you might accidentally break things, because you eventually will and you should just fix them if you do”. The saying isn’t itself a fallacy but doing the moving fast part without adequate resources to do the fixing part is indeed reckless. Don’t push on a Friday night. Don’t push without metrics on error rates. Talk to your team. Append instead of overwrite. ..etc. ~~~ mtberatwork Adding: Hire and retain enough experienced staff. Too often these things boil down to one or two engineers shouldering the entire burden of keeping these systems online. ------ bigpeet My current company seems to apply the following variation of the motto: Move slow, break things anyway, disable tests to hide it. Yeah, I've quit. ~~~ karatestomp Having the wrong things broken is a great way to _move slow_. Heavily manual (so, insufficiently documented) deployment processes, difficult, manual correctness testing, slow feedback loops in development, that kind of thing. Poor rollback planning. ~~~ bigpeet Pretty much spot-on. ------ saurik At an F8 keynote, many years ago, Zuck admitted on stage that when you "move fast and break things" all the time, well, everything is constantly broken (duh) and it made it so hard for even their own engineers to maintain their own applications (which exist on a very large number of platforms) that he appreciated it must have been impossible for third parties to use their developer platform, and so he formally changed the motto to "move fast with stable infra". ~~~ gentleman11 Do you have a link to that by chance? ------ codingdave It is not a motto, it is an anti-pattern. When you are still prototyping and have not found product-market fit, it might work. (And that quote comes from the early days of Facebook, when it was still morphing into its final form.) Once you have established yourself as a viable product, found your fit, and have paying customers, "break things" becomes a path to poor service. ~~~ dasil003 I feel this reasoning easily slips into no-true-Scotsman territory. Did FB have product-market fit in 2006? 2008? 2013? They didn’t just move fast during prototyping, this went on for years and years of hypergrowth. There was customer backlash at each major release as they overhauled the product but it turns out they knew better than the customers themselves knew what they wanted. Friendster and MySpace by contrast slowed way down once they hit traction, but it didn’t enable them to solve their scalability issues. ~~~ jcelerier > it turns out they knew better than the customers themselves knew what they > wanted. do we live in the same universe ? facebook has already one full step in the big storage room with myspace, omegle, etc. most teens I know laugh at you if you say you're using facebook like you're some decrepit old person. ------ mtreis86 In summary; don't move so fast that you stumble, and be wary of what you break. I think a better one would be "don't run your company based on aphorisms". ~~~ hef19898 Also, make sure you are running in the right direction. Ideally before moving fast. ------ vbtemp I might not have a multi-billion dollar company, but Think deliberately, Code carefully, Test thoroughly seems to maximize success for minimal stress... ------ Traster Move fast and break things has always been more marketing than real ethos. It's an obviously obtuse thing to say to signal people you're an asshole savant (whilst writing mediocre php in your bedroom). I don't know why people bother with it so much. People act as if because "Move fast" is a good thing, it has anything to do with "Break things". Does everyone at facebook sprint around the office and break limbs when they bump into each other around a blind corner? No, because they're not morons. ------ tabtab It's a matter of knowing your audience and knowing your funder's/owner's goals and expected risk-reward trade-off profile. A "cowboy" mentality may indeed help a start-up edge out competitors. But applying that to an established company can ruin your reputation: you have more to lose by playing fast and loose. Startups by nature are a gamble, but if an established corporation gambles too often they may poke a hole in their dam that they can't patch fast enough. Venture capitalists usually factor in a high failure rate to startups they invest in. Their plan is that enough will succeed in a big way to counter the high failure rate. A lot of "fads gone wrong" happen when a technique or technology that works for one situation or size is misapplied to another. Your office printer inventory tracker doesn't need microservices and web-scale databases. Pilot projects with new technology is often a good thing, but don't bet key organizational functions on such a project (sometimes called line-of-business systems). ------ dahart > The 2019 report showed elite companies have 46 times more frequent code > deployments than low-performing teams and a 2,555 times faster lead time to > move from code commit to deploy to support their initiatives to move faster. > Yes, elite teams ship faster. But, their changes are 1/7 as likely to fail, > and they recover from incidents 2,604 times faster than low-performing > teams. Since the report is behind a form, and the form is having trouble loading for me right now, I’ll just ask if anyone knows the context behind these numbers? These numbers seem very large for any kind of average; are they choosing the most extreme cases? I feel like they also only make sense in units of seconds or minutes, otherwise we’re comparing hours to weeks or days to years. ------ vanderZwan I think it was someone on HN who said _" I wish we focused more on moving slow and fixing things"_ and I still think of that remark whenever something breaks or isn't quite working as intended on my computer or phone. So quite often, I guess. I do think "move fast and break things" has a place, but that place is mostly limited to so-called _transcendental problems_ : situations where the status quo don't work and we need to try something outside of the established solution space. It's kind of comparable to the over-use of brainstorming; quite often brainstorming is not going to help you find the solution to a problem. ------ comprev Original article: [https://devops.com/the-fallacy-of-move-fast-and-break- things...](https://devops.com/the-fallacy-of-move-fast-and-break-things/) ------ ragebol I've always thought that you can only apply this mantra when you can _afford_ to break things. Which you can only do when the thing you break is not critical to anything. ------ gentleman11 I am reading Bob Martins Clean Architecture right now. The introduction takes the opposite stance: that there is no such thing as moving fast in a sloppy way, because even in the short term quality code yields faster development times. This is meant to include changeability: quality code should theoretically yield faster iterations too. This “break things” aspect is something I believe he opposes. Is he right? Wrong? ------ downerending Reminds me of a quote I cannot locate, but will paraphrase: _Any career, no matter how successful, will ultimately feel like a series of failures._ That's not meant as a downer, but rather just that it's often hard to tell. As to MFABT, the proper adjustment of that knob in a particular situation is difficult and is what expertise is all about. ------ dang [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22move%20slowly%22%20%22preserve%20things%22&sort=byDate&type=comment) ------ fleddr From the article: "As consumers and end-users of software, our expectations are continually rising." A very agreeable statement, but no they're not. Expectations are that your service works, makes sense, is easy to use. This is not a rise in expectations, it has always been there. ------ tmcb What are the consequences when you try to move fast and not just break things, but fail? - It takes longer to resolve incidents. - You lose customer confidence and sales. - Employees burn out, and you have a high turnover rate. The main idea behind the approach is making sure that you can move fast and break things _whilst_ minimizing those consequences. It means absolutely nothing if you just let things break; that would be even unethical. \- Taking longer to resolve incidents will allow you to anticipate minor issues that could add up during a worst-case scenario, which is a valuable thing. \- Impact on customer confidence is less critical in earlier stages, when you are not expected to make a profit. Once again, these minor impacts on it will, ideally, bring attention to things that matter. \- Employee burn out is uncorrelated to this approach. It is all about having the right policies in place, replacing blaming by accountability and treating other people with due respect. ------ Koshkin There are some things I wouldn't want to break, ever. _Think_ before you move. ------ zackmorris The basic assumptions behind move fast and break things: * We don’t know what the final solution will look like, because of things like scope creep and client demands. * The more agile the team is, the higher the velocity and ability to iterate. * The more specialized roles we have (like project manager, team lead and junior developer) the more we can focus on completing tickets to increase velocity. Which I counter with: * We actually do know what the final solution will look like. I normally have an idea of what clients are asking for before they finish their sentences. Then I extrapolate to the fundamental problems and meta concepts around their specific problem. I’ve already formulated solutions and am solving them in my mind, until I isolate the unknown steps (the hard steps), whose odds of me being able to solve them are the basis of my estimate. Most of my work today goes into research, setup, glue code, infrastructure and maintenance. Solving the client’s actual problem constitutes perhaps 5% of the work I must do. * We can always iterate faster in our minds than in the real world. With a proper architecture budget, we can take time in the beginning to brainstorm the complete solution before we ever start writing code. Then if we follow proper quality assurance practices like test-driven development, we can write code that is free of technical debt and bugs. All the while exerting substantially less effort than writing the same thing several times. * Agile programming wasn’t really a thing until the rise of large internet companies and the marginalization of individual software developers. It’s curious to me that the people with the most say in writing solutions have the least clout in organizations. I feel that this is due to supply-side economics and wealth inequality. So today we cater to client first, then organization, then software developer. That’s what the specialization in agile is really all about. But we should be doing something more like movie production, so the client is the producer, the organization is the director (or movie studio) and developers are the actors. The industry should have more confidence in the process and have conventions which mitigate the churn caused by clients’ fickleness and low understanding of the problem domain. But right now it feels like the emphasis is on getting every scene filmed as fast as possible. We pretend that developers have no gravitas and are just interchangeable cogs in the machine. It’s no surprise to me that most productions bomb in the box office. To use construction as an analogy: programmers used to be akin to architects, spending time in the beginning to draft a plan that includes all contingencies so that the building doesn’t fall down (a right-brained or politically-blue approach based on creativity, insight, seeing outside the box, etc). Today we’re being told to be framers, hammering out solutions as fast as we can over and over again in order to get things done until the building is finished (a left-brained or politically-red approach based on a strong work ethic, discipline, loyalty, not getting distracted, etc). I think these are both important, and over the last year I have been working on my “getting things done” side to improve my execution ability. But I will always be a dreamer and value the intuitive side of software development. The idea that we can manifest solutions in the real world with the power of our minds is what got me into programming in the first place. The trend towards application and turning programming into just another job has soured me on the field in general. I’m actually not entirely certain that I can do it anymore. So to me, the true cost of move fast and break things is the loss of people like me who thought that this was all going to go a different direction. ------ brosinante The HN crowd (and related ecosystems) have been using this as a mantra for a decade or more now. Interesting to see it only took worldwide attention and derision of this "model" to make us even consider it as a fallacy. To me it further confirms it - don't trust either the industry, or the people in it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to make a stop-motion video in Ubuntu Linux - robotico http://www.jcopro.net/2012/11/14/how-to-make-a-stop-motion-video-in-ubuntu-linux/ ====== robotico Would also like to hear about any better and/or different ways of doing this. ~~~ qbrass <http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Examples-5>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pipistrel Velis Electro: first fully electric aeroplane to be type certified - jka https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/pipistrel-obtains-first-ever-type-certificate-in-the-world-for-an-electric-aeroplane-from-easa/ ====== jka See also a video from a couple of years ago covering some details of the aircraft and in-flight experience: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124271)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What would you do with $5k/mo basic income for rest of life? - throw99887 ====== Cshelton If assuming that everyone was also receiving $5k/mo "UBI"... Nothing different, because the cost of everything I buy will go up by a total of $5k/mo. Hence why UBI is flawed. My total purchasing power will be unchanged. Edit: Maybe I missed it but... I can't find this post anywhere on the HackerNews pages anymore. That's rather funny. It was quickly pointed out how flawed a theory UBI is by multiple commenters and then _poof_. Funny... ~~~ ronilan It will most likely be worse as inflation will hit widely consumed products (basics) harder than least consumed ones. Quantitive easing 2.0. Anyone said housing? ~~~ eesmith Including all the cheap housing available in the small towns which have lost population because people are leaving for the big cities for jobs? ------ SilasX Pay it all to keep up with rent increases that resulted from everyone having $5000/month. (When you call it a "basic income", that suggests everyone is getting it; "free money" would be more appropriate if you didn't mean that.) ~~~ throw99887 Thanks for clarification. It's "hard-earned money" ------ briga Quit my job. Travel the world. Although one thing that's always bothered me about the UBI idea is that if everyone else is getting this basic income, wouldn't it effectively make that 5k worthless? Perhaps someone with a greater understanding of economics could enlighten me? ~~~ encoderer It is not necessarily inflationary, just redistributive ~~~ andai Where does the money come from in the most common UBI scenarios? Is it the richest people subsidising the entire rest of the world? ~~~ djrobstep It would come from the entire rest of the world subsidising the rich slightly less. ~~~ andai Could you elaborate? ------ martygwilliams I'd probably take six months and do nothing at all, except for maybe work on the house. Then I'd start picking up every online college degree that tickled my fancy. At some point I'd probably find some places to volunteer and help out the community. Also, maybe I'd have time to get around to music and art... probably not, but maybe. ------ db48x Try to hedge against the inevitable inflation, as suddenly there is more money chasing the same amount of goods and services. ------ inputcoffee For those worried about the inflation risk: it depends on how the money is generated. Theoretically, if it is created by, for instance, taxation (redistribution over people) or bonds (which is redistribution over time), you shouldn't risk too much overall inflation. It will, however, change which goods increase in price. I suspect restaurants will become more expensive and yachts will be cheaper if it happened by taxation. Having said that, inflation itself seems to be blind to the theory and does whatever it feels like. For the purposes of this exercise, let's suppose I get $5k/mo and others don't. I think it depends on when I got it. In my 20s -> Travel and grad school In my 30s -> Supplementing my meager income to enjoy myself In my 40s -> Investment ~~~ andai Wouldn't it be better to start investing as early as possible? I'm in my early 20s and have been thinking that if I got a time machine the first thing I'd do is go back ten years and tell myself to get a job. ~~~ linsomniac Agreed. In my early 20s I was tempted to take my "signature loan" account of $10K and put it into investments, as a sort of enforced savings, and pay that off. In some ways, that's stupid, but 20+ years on, I wish I had done that. I mean, not as much as I wish I had held onto those bitcoins I sold for $15, but still... :-) ------ partisan I have about 7 different business ideas in my queue. I would pick the first, related to increase charitable giving, and would commit myself to that. ~~~ throw99887 That's my plan too (charitable open source software). But, something else besides just work? I worked so hard past 6 years I almost don't know how to find other stuff to do. ~~~ partisan I can relate. I've thrown myself into work and family in the past 4 years. It's been a while since I read a book or drew a picture. I was browsing around B&N today thinking I should get back to doing that. ------ seorphates Is it taxed? Do we have healthcare? Will a spouse have the same benefit? Rent takes a fifth of that net, minimum, and you guys are talking about retiring, travel, lounging around and lives dedicated to charity? It's not 5k a week. Am I missing something? Given what I see here, a stinkbutt stance of a question, I'd say the greatest impact to myself would be some stress reduction, slightly relaxed job requirements and a helluva better outlook for a tired, aging body. ------ stuffaandthings Start investing $5k/mo while keeping my day job. ------ ajross Probably quit my job and spend time pontificating on how someone managed to provide a BMI at a level which is above the US median household income. Sorry, that number just doesn't work, even granting a government willing to do redistribution on that level, you're looking at an outflow that is something like 3x current total government tax revenue. ------ cellularmitosis Spend the rest of my life writing FOSS all day ------ dopamean Move to Jamaica to be closer to my family. Write code for small businesses there who need it badly but cant afford it. ~~~ reustle I wouldn't be surprised if most types of UBI require you to spend most of your time in the US. Otherwise they be pouring free cash into other economies. ------ pan69 I can't remember where I read this, but I really liked the idea that UBI was compared to VC funding. I.e. most startups fail, yet investors still invest in startups because the few that succeed compensate for the ones that fail, making investment in startups still worth while. What I read was that UBI can be seen as a government investing in it's people. Not everyone will be doing brilliant and innovative things, but, the person who'd normally would get a secure job at big corp might now feel secure enough to undertake starting something or working on an idea living in the middle of nowhere and when successful, adding an enormous amount of value to the rest of society. So, to answer your question. I'd also be more than happy to live in the middle of nowhere working on ideas and open source etc. ------ arithma Since this is talking about basic income, please allow me to digress a little and ask a few things that have been on my mind for a while. World GDP per capita is $1,400 Only need to make all people capable of 3.5X more productive, and we'd all be able to live at that rate with some universal income + universal work. Maybe the UBI idea shouldn't be decoupled from universal work. If we truly believe humans are worth giving $5K a month, surely we can devise a way that they can be given that no for free (without inflation, or whatnot, just plain old more distributed production.) Should making people more productive (distributing the means of production) be concentrated on much more than just redistributing the already existing wealth. ------ ghaff Consider how stable it is. Save it for now. Consider whether I might move up retirement. ------ hysan Work on the many educational and political tool ideas that I have kicking around in my head. Then get involved in local volunteer work in those areas (primarily teaching). ------ mistermithras If it was a viable option and not a flawed economic theory, I'd return to school and learn more languages/arts to go with all the STEM stuff I already know. ------ ben_w Assuming $5k USD per month _with current purchasing power_ to avoid the concerns about rent inflation. $5k per month is what I’m expecting in my next job, except my next job will have (hopefully German) taxes. I’d save as much as I can to buy (another) house, write more, and start a family. ------ tomasien I would do exactly what I'm doing now (building for profit companies and doing non-profit work @ spreadthevote.org) except I would be much more thoughtful between for-profit projects. I would likely work on slightly bigger problems. ------ DonCullen Start a business. Until then, it’s debt management, making ends meet, and hopefully get enough handle on finances to be able to sufficiently save/invest for retirement. Survival vs thriving, pretty much. ------ deweller Spend a little of it, save most of it. I would quickly adjust to my new standard of living and continue doing everything else the same. $60k/year is not near enough for those of us with a family. ~~~ cannonedhamster Depends where you live. My wife and I lived on less than $50k. I know some families that live on $40k. We live well above that now, but our standard of living is drastically higher. ------ jmcgough Quit my day job, work on ideas for companies, build OSS. ------ LinuxBender Retire. Relax. Perhaps tinker and work to better the internet, after I have recovered from being a desk jockey for quite a few decades. ------ jepler Retire. ------ andai I'm already quite comfortable living off less than $1,000, so I would split the rest among four of my best friends. ~~~ reustle But won't they also get $5k/mo? ------ quxbar1 Write open-source web app platforms that enforce transparent administration of schools, prisons, and local governments. ------ Overtonwindow Absolutely nothing. Live happily ever after. ------ drivingmenuts Woodworking. Start small with a few tools and work my way up to a shop area. Possibly start a shared shop area with interested friends. ------ thex10 Live somewhere great, have myself chauffeured everywhere, donate to some choice people. ------ alphabettsy Go back to school full-time through Grad school and keep working on side- projects. ------ cdancette Work part time for a NGO ------ abakker Start a business making tools and machinery for makers. ------ Casseres Volunteer full time. ------ SirRhosis Finish some novels, work on a side business perhaps. ------ jshaqaw Pay some of my rent ------ justin1364 Get involved in local politics. ------ blacktulip Start going to the gym! ~~~ andai Why would you need basic income for that? ~~~ drivingmenuts Presumably, 5K would cover income lost from time spend at the gym vs time spent working. Also gym membership and insurance (just in case). Plus, those t-shirts aren't going to rip themselves. ------ king07828 I would consider retiring so that I could write and open source robot trading platform that utilizes the latest advances with neural networks to analyze and _successfully_ trade in the stock market that is simple enough for any high school graduate to use so that UBI would no longer be needed ~~~ djohnston wouldn't this fail as it became ubiquitous in the market? ~~~ king07828 If it failed, and it would not meet the criterion of _successfully_ trading. A successful algorithm would likely need to be able to adjust based on the amount of capital being controlled using the algorithm and the number of parties that are using the algorithm ~~~ djohnston Is it a paradox then? At 100% ubiquity you couldn’t satisfy the criteria. ~~~ king07828 Is Alpha Zero is a paradox when it plays itself, since it can never truly beat itself?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Have scientists found a crashed UFO on the seabed? - harold http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2021174/Have-scientists-crashed-flying-saucer-seabed.html ====== paulhauggis "Now, however, his team do not have the money or resources to examine the shape further." If it really has any chance of being an alien spacecraft, there will be many companies (and governments) that will jump at the chance to fund this exploration.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Enough about the NSA, already - orchdork10159 Are there any tech blogs that aren't currently flooded with NSA foolishness? ====== obstacle1 Do you think that maybe it's an extremely important issue for people who live in the tech space, and that is why it is dominating the discourse right now? ------ mikecane When your company is a lynchpin of information sharing, you'll get a knock on the door from the gov't -- not just in America, anywhere. _That 's_ why this matters. ------ to3m No. The hivemind is doing its best to brainwash you into finding these things interesting, but sadly the process is not 100% reliable. You may therefore find there are periods when everything posted here is rather dull to you. Please use any remaining free will to visit another site. ------ subsection1h OP, you previously submitted the following page to HN: [http://thetoqueandapron.com/cookbook- corner/2012/12/18/benga...](http://thetoqueandapron.com/cookbook- corner/2012/12/18/bengali-5-spice-chronicles-by-rinku-bhattacharya&#x2F); If you want articles about Indian cuisine, I think you're at the wrong site. ------ venomsnake Why? There is certainly enough interesting tech involved even if we overlook the "insignificant" stuff like spying and fishing for information in a way that can make a trawling flotilla proud.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Poloniex loses around $50,000 in Bitcoin - taybin http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/03/yet-another-exchange-hacked-poloniex-loses-around-50000-in-bitcoin/ ====== sp332 This story was already discussed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7340908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7340908) ------ taybin I'm getting a bit of fatigue with these stories. ------ knocte Exchanges are a thing of the past, use a much thinner intermediary-layer such as localbitcoins.com (only mediates, doesn't hold fiat). ~~~ haakon They hold bitcoin, however, probably tens of thousands of them.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The problem with Facebook - loisaidasam https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976563870322999296 ====== astalwick [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360) He goes on to defend his work at Google, arguing that they're similar on the surface, but Facebook is truly dangerous where Google is not. I'm not sure I agree with that. Google is quite a bit more distributed across products and platforms, so Facebook has a simpler loop centered around the newsfeed. That said, Google can track a user's behaviour across nearly every website on the internet. Facebook can run these "reinforcement learning on a global scale" experiments through its newsfeed. Google, it seems to me, can run them across the web as a whole. ~~~ petters Facebook also tracks users across the web, isn't that what the like buttons are for? ~~~ ecommerceguy Sure but how about Pixel. Or Google Analytics, Clicky, Alexa (analytics not the talking thing), Adroll , ... I mean the amount of trackers I can toss on a website is mind boggling and super easy, all hoovering as much data as possible. This is not exclusive to Facebook nor do I think they gather the most data. After sorting through this guys first half dozen tweets I finally realized he's talking about AI and advertising. As an ecommerceguy here's my take. I'd love to be able to upload a product feed, have FB or whomever evaluate those products and push them to whomever the adbot/algorithm/ai/hall9k whatever we're calling it today; as long as it returns good ROI, happy customers and less work for me I'm happy. This is already somewhat possible with Google Shopping Feed. So again, besides this helped Trump, why the outrage? All I see is people freaking out at what has been public knowledge for years albeit obfuscated under a massive sheen of PRSpeak. FWIW I have always actively stayed away from Facebook as much as possible to the point I tell my sister to take photos off her feed of me. But here I am tangentially defending them. I wanted to add a link to this site, It connects to over 200 trackers. [https://segment.com/](https://segment.com/) ~~~ simion314 I am not from US so I don't care about republicans or democrats, I am happy the people got outrage because of Trump connection because it has the side effect and pulling hidden things into light Also the fact that you know how Facebook or Google makes money does not mean that the public knows, so my father does not understand why someone would put videos on youtube or would put fake articles about things, or click bait , most of the people do not know about trackers, about the fact that ads on pages make money for the website, that ads on the videos make money for publishers. I hope this scandal will make some light on exactly what Facebook collect when I visit a webpage with FB buttons, I want us and the public to find out about the shadow profiles, about any experiments done on users, it would be good if we find if similar things happen in other countries elections and I am wondering how well this things work. Also it would be good if we could get less crap on FB, I do not use it that much but I have people in my family that read articles posted in FB and most of them are fake news(not politics but other crap like medicine) I hope we get some laws about tracking people outside your webpages and making shadow profiles illegal. So even if you don't like Hillary or her party, I think you should desire the entire truth surfaces and we see all details, elections are done so it is nothing you can do now but maybe with more information the next ones will be better with less dirt and fake news in social media and more actual debates. ------ m_ke He's ignoring the fact that YouTube is as bad if not worse than Facebook. They might demonetize some radical channels but they're still making money on users who get to YouTube through those channels. [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube- politics-radical.html?referer=https://t.co/LLAotgmEoG?amp=1) [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube- kids-paw-patrol.html?referer=https://www-avclub-com.cdn.ampproject.org/) [https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes- algo...](https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes-algorithm- prioritizes-conspiracy-theories) ------ fortythirteen The work Chollet is doing at Google is reaching an equally nefarious end. There are studies showing how manipulated search results have the same effects on perception, and YouTube is manipulating their feed in the same ways as Facebook. His analysis is correct, but this: > If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't > participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience is a clear cut case of the pot calling the kettle black. ------ t3chn0SchO0lbus The Twitter essay is my least favorite thing about the future we live in. ~~~ psychometry Seriously. You can set up a blog in under a minute these days. There's no excuse. ~~~ kawfey the other sad reality is that on mobile, the number of people who read the tweets is arguably going to be higher than people who click to the blog, and a spam of tweets attracts attention and audience. I can't remember the study, but people are generally rather unlikely to navigate out of an app to read something, hence everything having a built in browser. ------ minikites [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776) >Essentially nothing about the threat described applies to Google. Nor Amazon. Nor Apple. >It could apply to Twitter, in principle, but in practice it almost entirely doesn't. I don't believe this for one second. Google does the exact same "algorithmic curation" with its search results. Different people get different results based on internal profiles that Google has built: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble). Over time that shift in search result content acts upon people in exactly the same way as the Facebook example he describes. ------ throwaway84742 A Google employee points out a problem with FB that’s also very much a problem with Google. That’s rich. Someone is about to receive a STFU email from HR. ------ spdy For the discussion we have to decouple that he works for Google. But he is right we are at a crossroad and the path that will be taken is clear for me. Manipulating/controlling populations is where the money will go and people will create those tools because those jobs pay well, its that simple. In the next elections we will see deepfakes videos of candidates instantly responding to problems or defaming videos will be put out were you cant judge on the spot if its real or not. The trend of echo chambers will continue as we see it right now. The only thing i can see is education if we look back at the recent history going from only a certain amount of people can who read/write or have access to books to everyone has to learn and has access to libraries. This is the next level. And on the other side we have to fight for our right of privacy and kill some business models on the way. Right now this is for me on the same scale as Atomic / Chemical Weapons. ------ jphalimi It saddens me that someone that brilliantly summarizing the problems of extensive AI-driven content organization in tech companies does not seem to understand that the company he works for suffer from the same exact problems. The real question I am having reading this thread is: is this guy being very naive, or just dishonest? ------ mkrum As someone mentioned in a comment section elsewhere, "It is very easy to sacrifice another person's job." ------ dblotsky I think the nefariousness is overblown. I present to you, a contender: an elementary school curriculum. No AI, and way more influence over basically everything you will hold as truth for decades. ------ TACIXAT The problem with social media is that it isn't social. Telling me which article to read isn't social. Showing me someone's status isn't social. Posting a tweet and getting 2 likes is not social. Commenting on HN is probably the closest thing to social because someone might actually interact with me. If you have all this data, make my life more fulfilling. I get more community out of IRC than I do on any of the major social media sites. They are really just media sites. ------ antisocial I agree with everything. Going by that logic, I think we should all celebrate that Google Plus is not as successful as Facebook. But for all your concerns, Mr.Chollet, what assurances can you give us about Google being not involved in something similar? ~~~ isthatart For my past use Google Plus was far better than FB or Twitter, but I have no illusions about it. Anecdata: [https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-f...](https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted- facebook-twitter-and-entered-the-invisible-college/) ------ panarky _We’re looking at a powerful entity that builds fine-grained psychological profiles of over two billion humans, that runs large-scale behavior manipulation experiments, and that aims at developing the best AI technology the world has ever seen. Personally, it really scares me If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience_ When Facebook does something awful, their defenders rush to say "what about Google, they're even worse!" There's a lot of false equivalence in HN discussions, but these two are not in the same galaxy when it comes to abusing the privacy of their users. ------ kough I can't take this genre of tech/opticon commentary seriously when they remove all human agency. Reading this argument, there's an implicit judgement that (1) humans have no choice but to be influenced by Facebook, and (2) other methods of information retrieval are somehow neutral. Sure, I agree that understanding power structures is important – what a novel and interesting point /s. ~~~ jonathanyc If you think understanding power structures isn’t novel or interesting, it’s surprising that you think discussions like this “remove all human agency.” Agency doesn’t mean you have the freedom to do whatever, it means you are acting in your own self-interest according to the limitations of your environment and your knowledge. When we acknowledge the agency of people in early states, for example, we are saying that they are taking part in the process of state formation, often to their own benefit, and that it isn’t just one person magically creating a state. We are _not_ saying that they aren’t to blame when they get burned at the stake by that same state because they had the “agency” to just say no. ------ artursapek I can never take seriously someone explaining something in detail over a long series of tweets. What ever happened to personal websites for god's sake? ~~~ fenwick67 The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter. ~~~ Slansitartop > The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the > idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter. Not really, if twitter is a good platform for him to get his message out, I'm all for it. I also like the irony of using social media platforms to spread ideas that could hasten their downfall. Its sort of like in some martial arts where you exploit the weight and strength of your opponent to _defeat them_. If you're arguing against social media, social media reaches the exact people you most need to reach. ------ 0majors And Facebook is selling these capabilities to the higest bidder regardless of their moral or ethical standing. ------ evc123 Nah, fchollet just doesn't want pytorch to minimize keras: [https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120](https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
FBI asks public for help breaking encrypted notes tied to 1999 murder - garrettgillas http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110329/ts_yblog_thelookout/fbi-asks-public-for-help-breaking-encrypted-notes-tied-to-1999-murder ====== garrettgillas Quoted: The bureau isn't offering any reward for assistance in solving the case at this time, but the FBI is asking people who believe they may have some insight into the notes write to the address below: FBI Laboratory Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit 2501 Investigation Parkway Quantico, VA 22135 Attn: Ricky McCormick Case	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
UK Rejects International Court of Justice Opinion on the Chagos Islands - yasp https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/02/uk-rejects-international-court-of-justice-opinion-on-the-chagos-islands/ ====== yasp >I have taken it for granted that you know that the reason the UK refuses to decolonise the Chagos Islands is to provide an airbase for the US military on Diego Garcia.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How does one help a teenager teach himself how to read? - markessien I live in Africa, and in many houses there are these "gateboys" who are typically teenage boys that came from some small village far away to the cities looking for work. Their jobs involve opening the gates for visitors, gardening, cleaning and so on. They have a lot of free time on their hand. And many of them are saving up with these jobs to be able to go back to school and learn to read.<p>With the power of the internet, surely there must be some kind of material that one can print out that can act as a self-learning course for a person to learn how to read. The boys may or may not know how to read the alphabet, but they certainly know how to read numbers (from their phones).<p>My ideal would be if one could print out some kind of book that the teens can use to figure out how to read, and just distribute it to them. What is the best approach to go about this? ====== sillysaurus2 Tangential question, but: can anyone here remember learning how to read? I've never thought about it before, but... I don't remember at all what it was like to learn to read! There's a big blank spot in my head for kindergarten, and then I remember reading some spooky children's books in first grade, but I have no idea how I came to acquire that ability. So does anyone remember how you picked up your ability to read? If so, which learning techniques were effective for you? Maybe there's a way to transfer those techniques into book form. Although I wonder whether it's even possible to learn to read just by looking at squiggles on paper. At the very least, it seems like there would have to be text + images. But how do you print out a sequence of text + images which somehow teaches the reader the meaning of that text? There's so much to cover: the alphabet, then the individual words, then the meaning of particular word combinations... It almost seems like going to school would be the most effective way for them to learn, because they'd be learning from someone and they'd be able to ask questions when they get frustrated. ~~~ t0 Most people that don't know how to read probably know how to pronounce almost every word, so they're just associating the letters to something they already know. That being said, I don't think anything on paper could really help, aside from a picture of an apple next to the word to just memorize. ------ keiferski I can't help you with the specifics, but I do have a suggestion: look into how people learned how to read pre-mass literacy via the school system. Before 19XX, a sizable portion of people learning to read were adults. You might be able to glean some ideas from their experiences. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States) ------ LarryMade2 I remember when learning how the read was getting down letter sounds then syllables. Then trying to picture the words as you sound them out. I think for some of the beginning basics you need more than a book to translate the written into the appropriate sounds, etc. Once you can get a handle on that it get easier. Another tool to employ is to get them to learn the most common words (i,e, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolch_Word_List](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolch_Word_List) ) that will help them trough most words in sentences... ------ waivej How about "graphic novels". Perhaps pick some comic books young boys would read more than once. I've puzzled over some Dutch ones for years and heard of others using them to learn a language.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Terms of Service; Didn't Read - dz0ny http://tos-dr.info/ ====== IvyMike Step 1: Write a .dll that interposes on common windows controls used to display EULA messages. Step 2: Whenever this .dll sees common EULA agreements, it randomly modifies them before displaying them. Changes "SHALL" to "SHALL NOT", changes "GPL" to "Public Domain", changes "may not be duplicated" to "ok to post to piratebay", etc. Step 3: Embed this DLL in a self-replicating, self-destroying virus/worm. It spreads, stays on a computer for a random amount of time, then erases all evidence it was ever there. Step 4: "Your honor, there's no way of knowing _what_ I agreed to, since there is no permanent record and the current license does not match what I remember. Perhaps I had the EULA-modifying virus at the time." ~~~ snarfy Step 4 does not matter when every EULA starts with 'This Agreement may be modified at any time'. What's the point of having contracts with terms like that? ~~~ hugbox Judges typically strike down EULAs with provisions like that, at least in the states. So really, if they try that, it just makes it easier to ignore the EULA. ------ contingencies I used to look at Steam as a good example of DRM; works, does what it says on the cover, cross platform, etc. Then I bought 'Dwarfs!?' for OSX. I painstakingly downloaded 1.5GB on a third world connection. And it didn't work. Not just "had issues" or "crashed sometimes" but literally _didn't even start_. Multiple complaints through Steam forums, the developer's forums, etc. came to nothing. Emailing the developer personally with an appeal to resolve the issues also came to nothing. And they have a 'no refund' policy. What a scam! As much as I love Bitcoin, here's an example of a situation where credit cards provide some protection for the consumer; I can issue a chargeback on the transaction. ~~~ nacs Sorry but I'm not seeing the relevance of this post to OP. So a single game didn't start/work for you on Steam so not only is all of Steam and their DRM broken and a scam but Bitcoin is somehow also slighted as a result? ~~~ contingencies Steam terms are highlighted in the post. Bitcoin is an area of interest to the wider community that effects the removal of financial services terms. The example highlights that simplistic financial services sometimes fail to meet consumer expectations. ------ meomix The killer of this site to me: Nothing here should be considered legal advice. We express our opinion with no guarantee and we do not endorse any service in any way. Please refer to a qualified attorney for legal advice. Reading ToS;DR is in no way a replacement for reading the full terms to which you are bound. Disclosure: a list of donors and supporters is published. All legal information and Imprint. \----------- Get me a service with real lawyers writing up info and now you have something. ~~~ SEMW Not sure if you're trying to imply that information written by lawyers wouldn't have such a disclaimer. If so, that's nonsense. The language is there to make clear the site doesn't put its authors in a lawyer-client relationship with its readers, and directing them to retain a lawyer themselves if they want Advice they can rely on. No lawyer is going to offer free advice in a manner that makes them liable to every one of tens of thousands of readers in the event that the advice is negligent. (IANAL). ------ dmoney Could installing this extension, and therefore being "aware" of the TOS of a given site, make you more liable in the event that you inadvertently violate it? I.e., does it make a TOS any more legally binding than it already is? ~~~ largesse Good question. I'm tempted to just allow the courts to nullify TOS provisions. They periodically do, calling them "unconscionable." ------ mayneack Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907> ------ Aardwolf Very nice, but I think you should put somewhere on the website what Class A, B, C, D and E mean. It's not on the main page, and it's not on the "Learn more". This is something very interesting to know though... Also, due to how the web looks in recent years, my mind is trained to ignore anything containing Facebook, Twitter, etc... at the bottom of webpages because it's usually meaningless footer content. However the "Ratings" part on your site looks exactly like that. I only discovered the second time that it is content. If more people unconsciously ignore such stuff, you may want to present it in a different way. ------ lucb1e Wanted to submit a review of WhatsApp's ToS (spoiler: they're horrible), but the method of communication is so untransparent... They use mailing lists apparently, and there are a dozen threads on Whatsapp's ToS already. I don't get it. This needs fixing if they want non-techies to contribute. ------ jacquesm The problem with terms of service is not that you can't read them or that you don't. The problem is that even if you do you're going to have to come back to reading them every couple of weeks in case they suddenly change and pull out the rug from under you. Terms of service from the time of signing up should be binding and a service should be suspended until you accept new terms of service should they change. That way at least you'd have a loud and clear warning. ~~~ Monotoko Most online games make you agree to an updated ToS (Apple do as well with the App Store) when they come out, not that anyone is actually going to spend hours reading 27 pages of legalese, but still. ------ armored_mammal You could just take the obvious shortcut and rate them all as 'D's or 'F's, because you know they pretty much all will be 'D's or 'F's. ------ twistedpair What's the point? Oh no, G or FB have evil terms. Where are you going to go now? They've got you. You agreed to the terms.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Cavity-Fighting Liquid Lets Kids Avoid Dentists’ Drills - aaronbrethorst http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/health/silver-diamine-fluoride-dentist-cavities.html ====== msie W/O reading the article I'm guessing that this technology is 10 years away? Edit: I'm delighted to be wrong. But the problem is uptake by practitioners...hopefully dentists advertise this use and force other dentists to take a look at the technology. ~~~ toomuchtodo You are your own greatest healthcare advocate. Bring this to your dentist. If they won't use it, go to another dentist. ------ cphuntington97 Let me guess, fluoride? Well, what do you know? ~~~ aaronbrethorst I had the exact same response when I saw the headline...And was also pleasantly surprised to discover that it was something else. :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots - vectorbunny http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/extending-legal-protection-to-social-robots?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrumFullText+%28IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text%29 ====== bediger4000 Shouldn't we first grant legal protection, and perhaps citizenship, to non- humans we know for a fact are conscious and intelligent? I speak primarily of dolpins (and maybe other toothed whales), gorillas, chimps and elephants.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Best-Paying Companies For Software Engineers - negrit http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-highest-paid-software-engineers-work-for-these-25-companies-2013-4 ====== mynewwork I wonder how this works out for take-home pay. Many of the companies listed have offices in Austin as well as the bay area (Cisco, Paypal, Oracle, VMWare, Intel). Even ignoring housing costs, the california vs texas state income tax means a 10% difference in take-home. Are facebook and bloomberg engineers really coming out ahead, or are all their developers just living in palo alto and manhattan?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Phtevenize Me - marvwhere http://phtevenize.me ====== newmetl Haha, that's a nice idea. But still needs some polishing!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Python Resume - lukasm https://github.com/lukasz-madon/resume/blob/master/resume.py ====== Winterflow3r A fellow Caplin alum! ------ lxw experience is misspelled :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook hiring monetization principle - robot https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=data&req=a2KA0000000LtgxMAC ====== askimto You mean principal. Pretty sure they try to avoid principles. ------ robot Its funny they do this after the IPO.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The C# compiler and ‘Lowering’ - matthewwarren http://mattwarren.org/2017/05/25/Lowering-in-the-C-Compiler/ ====== dfox Coming from Lisp background one would take this as pretty obvious approach. In fact I somewhat suspect that CL's tagbody is explicitly designed such that every non-trivial control structure in the language could be expanded into that. ------ johnbender "Lowering" (though I've never heard it called that) is also handy in the course of working with formal semantics especially in the case of proofs and other serious reasoning. You can "port" your reasoning from the "lower" construct to the special case of the higher construct. In general this also translates to simply understanding the semantics of a language. If you can describe something in terms of another concept the listener already has an intuition for, often it makes the new thing easier to understand and learn. Though it's easy to imagine cases where the "lower" thing is so abstract that it's hard to apprehend in the first place (e.g. "everything is just a closure!"). ~~~ fanf2 I thought the usual term is "desugaring" ~~~ saurik I have been caring a lot about languages and compilers for almost two decades now, and I have heard the term "lowering" often... but it means something different (and broader) than "desugaring". Essentially: I disagree with the linguistic argument of this author :/. Here is a comment I left elsewhere on this post with a bunch of examples from a variety of compiler projects showing how I have always heard and understood the term "lowering": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429533) . ------ maxxxxx The C preprocessor allows you to do lowering to some degree. If I remember correctly Lisp is pretty much built on the idea of extending the language by itself. It would be nice if other languages allowed implementing "syntactic sugar" in an easy way. A lot of stuff that's done with reflection in C# could be replaced. ~~~ matthewwarren > It would be nice if other languages allowed implementing "syntactic sugar" > in an easy way. A lot of stuff that's done with reflection in C# could be > replaced. They're talking about allowing that in C#, but it's not there yet, see [https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/107](https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/107) ~~~ maxxxxx Nice. It's a little disappointing to read that Visual Studio is holding this up. ------ DonbunEf7 The E and Monte programming languages do this too, lowering from Full-E or Full-Monte to Kernel-E or Kernel-Monte via a canonical "expansion" phase. In Monte, this indeed is the bulk of the work done by the compiler, and the optimizer only operates on Kernel-Monte. ------ WorldMaker Yesterday I was doing some debugging on the async/await downlevel support in Typescript and found myself exploring the ways Typescript lowers code in the source itself (as much to satisfy curiosity as anything else, similar to this article series' experiments/explorations of the Roslyn codebase). In its case the similarities between Typescript itself and its target language provide a particularly interesting question of what counts as lowering to Typescript versus lowering to JS/ES, particularly in places where one becomes the other as JS/ES standardizes different pieces into the wild. For Typescript "lowering" seems a more accurate term than "compiling" in just about all cases. ------ jstimpfle The way I understand it, "lowering" is just another word for "compiling" to intermediate representations. It probably exists because traditionally there aren't many IR, or none at all. There have been attempts to express compilation as a series of many more, maybe 50, intermediate steps, implemented in some LISP. I don't know if there are success stories. I think there is always a tension between modeling data structures close enough to your understanding to enable clean implementation and not modeling so many data structures that one loses track of them. ~~~ infogulch The difference between compiling and lowering is that the syntax of the output of lowering is a strict subset of the syntax of its' input, whereas the output of compiling produces a completely different format, e.g. an AST, an in-memory graph, assembly, machine code, etc. This makes implementing the next layer (compiler perhaps) simpler because it has to understand fewer syntax elements. This also makes a difference is that you could manually write the output of the lowered code yourself in the original language. Another effect is that (ideally) applying the lowering function L() to any code a second time should produce no change i.e. L(code) == L(L(code)). This is not true of compiling. ~~~ saurik I am pretty sure you have added a lot of personal context to this word that is unrelated to how it is actually used: I will argue that for decades, the term "lowering" has meant a transformation to a "lower-level" representation, and that this representation often is "a completely different format". [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cart/Scale/lowering.html](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cart/Scale/lowering.html) > Lowering is the transformation of higher level representations to lower > level representations. For example, subscript expressions are lowered to > address arithmetic operations. A compiler traditionally lowers a high level > language to machine code in one or more steps. [https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/GNU_C_Compiler_Internals/GNU...](https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/GNU_C_Compiler_Internals/GNU_C_Compiler_Architecture_4_1) > As a result of lowering a function its control-flow graph is generated. [http://tap2k.org/projects/WIL/](http://tap2k.org/projects/WIL/) > Generally each data value will start with an abstract representation, which > will in turn go through a sequence of lowerings as representation choices > are made. These lowerings will eventually transform both the representation > and the operations upon it to fully concrete forms, down to the level of the > actual bit layout of the value in memory, allowing for easy low-level code > generation. [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92ea/93e93a77b80465e7aeb53d...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92ea/93e93a77b80465e7aeb53df679fee2203caa.pdf) > Instead of the compiler backend lowering object operations to machine > operations using hard-wired runtime- specific logic, XIR allows the runtime > system to implement this logic, simultaneously simplifying and separating > the backend from runtime-system details. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Burke9/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Burke9/publication/2649955_The_Jalapeno_Dynamic_Optimizing_Compiler_for_Java/links/00b7d518a8b2b3cb67000000/The- Jalapeno-Dynamic-Optimizing-Compiler-for-Java.pdf) > After high-level analyses and optimizations are performed, HIR is lowered to > low-level IR (LIR). In contrast to HIR, the LIR expands instructions into > operations that are specific to the Jalapeño JVM implementation, such as > object layouts or parameter-passing mechanisms of the Jalapefio JVM. For > example, operations in HIR to invoke methods of an object or of a class > consist of a single instruction, matching the corresponding bytecode > instructions invokevirtual/invokestatic. These single-instruction operations > are lowered (i.e., converted) into multiple-instruction LIR operations that > invoke the methods based on the virtual-function-table layout.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you handle debates with non-scientists? - seertaak I find myself getting into arguments with non-scientists and coming out of them satisfied that I've argued my case well and fairly, only to find my friends subsequently insisting that I've been "aggressive" or "rude". It bothers me, because I'm convinced that I argue in a fair- and open-minded way; it's not my fault if they're not well-informed or wrong! ====== lacker If your friends think you have been rude, then you have been rude. That's how "rude" works. There's no official definition for what is rude behavior or not. Why don't you ask your friends why they find you rude and aggressive. They probably can explain better than we can. ~~~ seertaak That's assuming that your friends' behaviour is rational. For example, during the debate, while I certainly held my ground confidently, I didn't raise my voice, swear, engage in ad-hominem, belittle my opponent, or anything else that I would consider rude. What I _did_ do is counter every statement he made that I considered false, which was quite a few statements. Clearly this riled him. But is it me who is to blame, or is it him for getting emotional about the fact that he is in the wrong? I have been a great many arguments where I have found, eventually, that I am wrong. I can't provide any evidence, obviously, but I can assure you that I am gracious in defeat. I simply say: "oh, that's interesting." Or "huh, I didn't know that, maybe I'll have to think about it again". But again, I think that comes from a) being quite confident that I'm not stupid, so that I don't have anything to prove to anyone, and b) being a scientist and thus having had these types of arguments with, shall we say, the creme-de-la-creme of smart- ass debaters ;) ------ RiderOfGiraffes I read recently (sorry - can't remember where) of a scientist at a party that was also attended by a number of astrology (not astronomy) practitioners and aficionados. He noticed that they were in discussion, and although some clearly disagreed with others, they were accepting of positive points, and offered alternatives to those points with which they disagreed. In constrast, he noticed, the science types would attack every statement, poking, prying, stressing, stretching, twisting, and generally trying to find weaknesses. This is what scientists do by nature and training, and non-scientists often find it aggressive, intrusive, and downright rude. I've found that striving for agreement and then working from that, is more successful than presenting what you think is a robust rebuttal, followed by a water-tight case. Find good points in what they say, and then lead them step by step. Be constructive, and respect that their opinions are their opinions. Telling them they're wrong won't help your case. In short, you can't debate with non-scientists in the sense you mean. You need to create consensus and build on that. ~~~ seertaak > In short, you can't debate with non-scientists in the sense you mean. Yep, that's the conclusion I'm led to. In this case, it wasn't possible however: straight off the bat, for example, he declared that he's left-wing. I happen to be a republican from the libertarian wing of the party (we seem to be a dying breed of late), although I'm quite moderate. So the potential for consensus was small. The argument kicked off when he said "thank god Obama is going to get in power because he'll redress the excess of hardcore conservatives" -- which is a bit of a howler, and I took him to task for it. Now granted, I didn't back down, but nor did he! I don't see why _I_ should be blamed for being rude simply for being better-informed. In fact, and my friend agreed with me on this point, at least _I_ didn't engage in any underhanded debating techniques that I list elsewhere on this thread. ------ khafra If you're trying to get someone to change his views by debate, it most likely won't work. You'd probably do well to read up on influencing people, Dale Carnegie or NLP or something. If you're trying to convince undecided, rational third parties, and your interlocutor is "playing fair," you could trying proceeding from a set of assumptions, getting agreement on each assumption, then presenting your conclusion as necessarily following. For example, say you're trying to convince someone that String Theory is bogus pop physics: Seertaak: "NonScientist, would you agree that a framework must make testable predictions to be considered a scientific theory?" NS: "Sure, yeah." Seertaak: "As you can see by these references I've just pulled up on my iPhone, many physicists agree that ST hasn't made any testable predictions, so until that changes it can't be considered a scientific theory." NS: "You were right all along, Seertaak! You're so smart!" ~~~ seertaak That's funny, the example you gave sort of happened during the argument. I would painstakingly establish A. Then I would do something like A => B. Then I would remind my opponent that we'd established A, whence B followed. At that point, the opponent would deny that he'd agreed on A, and we're back to square on... very frustrating! ------ russell If you are arguing evolution against ID, forget it. Their minds are cast in concrete and wont change. This is pretty much whenever arguing facts against beliefs, particularly true believers. If you are arguing pseudo-science, you are the one needing a little head cleansing. ------ yan _it's not my fault if they're not well-informed or wrong!_ Maybe it is you? ~~~ seertaak In this case it wasn't; the discussion was about legal activism and judicial review. I've read several books on the subject, some essays, and several transcripts of supreme court cases, just because I find the subject interesting. On a more basic level, I can name the supreme court justices -- so in terms of factual knowledge, I'm quite confident I was on solid ground. My debating partner, however, didn't really have any facts at hand, but instead had strong opinions and essentially parroted oft-repeated truisms, like "the supreme court is full of ultra conservatives", a claim that certainly begs some evidence. During the argument, I made a persistent effort to back up any claims I made with examples or evidence. When my opponent said things that I thought were false, I would wait for him to finish, and tell him: "I think you're wrong because of XYZ". The first few times, it was ok, but as the argument progressed, he just got annoyed and would become irrational. For example, he would: \- say he hadn't said something which he patently had said just two minutes before. In other words, a po-faced lie. \- he would ask for evidence when I made a claim, and when I then provided evidence, he would say he knew it and didn't want to be bored with details, without acknowledging that it was a datapoint in favour of my position; \- he would claim I was "oversimplifying", and when I would ask him how, he would refuse to tell me, saying "oh it doesn't matter". I personally really enjoy vigorous debate, and I'm quite happy to be proven wrong. Really. For two reasons: \- I learn something, and learning something is cool; \- I'm better prepared for the next argument! And I think to certain extent, scientists are more at ease with the idea of being proven wrong. I think we realize that it doesn't mean you're stupid; far from, you're just entertaining a theory, and if the evidence contradicts it you have no particular emotional attachment to it. Whereas I've found non-scientists to be less accustomed to having their theory shot down, and as a result they become more defensive (and hence irrational), which leads them to use what I would regard as quite underhanded and dishonourable debating tactics, a la "38 Ways To Win An Argument". ------ DanielBMarkham What's the purpose of your argument? If it's to prove that you are right and they are wrong -- well, sounds like you're pretty good at that. If it's to understand what the other person is saying and to come together towards a common understanding of a respectful disagreement? That's mature discussion. It's like level 20. I find from working with really smart people that proving yourself right is not an extremely difficult thing to do. Actually getting inside the skull of another human and helping them understand something is much harder (and more useful) Depends on what you want, I guess.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Thoughts about transitioning from SysAdmin to DevOps - m4b0 This is my article about the transition from SysAdmin to DevOps where I navigate through some considerations:<p>- Version control - From pets to cattle - Logs and observability - Idempotency and automation - Security<p>Hopefully will help to others. ====== m4b0 The link to the article: [https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/sysadmin- devops](https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/sysadmin-devops)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Were you watching on TV when Challenger broke up? - DavidWanjiru I've just watched footage of the Challenger space shuttle breaking up in this documentary [0], and although I knew what happened, I've instinctively reacted like I didn't know it was going to happen. You know how they show replays of a sports person getting a nasty injury in slow motion and you react now that you're seeing it properly? Like that.<p>So, if I'm reacting like that, I can only imagine what it was like for people watching it live. It must have been horrible. Did you watch it happen?<p>[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGh9eg2kNgc ====== brudgers Growing up in Orlando, watching a shuttle launch was something we did outside. I think the only one I watched on TV was a day junior year we skipped high school and Phil drove to Titusville. He had a 72 Impala hardtop with the small block 400. We hung out in his sister's apartment drinking beer and watching the broadcast of Shuttle on the pad until just after lift-off. Then we stepped out onto the back balcony and there it was just a few miles away coming up over the landscape. I was living in Gainesville (you can't usually see anything from there) and sitting in a morning sociology class when Challenger launched. I came back from class, flipped on the TV and there was Dan Rather and a talking head with a shuttle model. The thing I remember most was going to statistics class that afternoon and some student saying they couldn't believe it had happened and asking if it really had. I was kinda' stunned because I figured any intelligent educated person would know that blowing up is something rockets tend to do. Of course the big deficiency was in my model of other minds. ------ FiatLuxDave I watched it live (not on TV) in the sky from the playground of Ocean Breeze Elementary, about 20 miles south of the Cape. It was my 12th birthday. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that it had exploded. We knew something was wrong, but the teachers wouldn't confirm that it had exploded - I think they didn't want to deal with a bunch of crying kids. We observed a lot of debris falling from the explosion. Some of the kids in my class speculated which of the pieces was the escape pod. We presumed that there had to be one. Then we went inside and turned on the TV, where they just showed it blowing up over and over. We were all kind of numb. A couple of kids were worried about their parents losing their jobs. I remember kids at lunch making the joke, "what does NASA stand for? - need another seven astronauts!". ------ mindcrime I was watching live when it happened. I remember I had stayed home from school that day for some reason, and I lying in bed watching the launch when it happened. I don't remember much about how I felt though. I think maybe I didn't know how _to_ feel, as I was pretty young (13 or so) at the time and had never experienced anything quite like that before. ------ therealgimli I was in elementary school at the time. Many of the teachers brought TVs into their classrooms to show the launch. It was horrifying to watch the shuttle disaster like that-- from what was supposed to be a celebratory, fun thing to watching a live tragedy. ------ jayrox This happened on my 3rd birthday. Can't say I remember exactly what I was doing at the time but I've heard my parents talk about seeing it on TV. ------ FroshKiller I wasn't watching live, but I want to say we watched on the six o'clock news that night. I was four at the time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter Data Up For Sale: 1 Billion Connections - lrm242 http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/11/12/12readwriteweb-twitter-data-dump-infochimp-puts-1b-connect-51616.html ====== akkartik Nice to see Scoble referred to as journalist rather than blogger.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Faster arithmetic by flipping signs - ingve https://nfrechette.github.io/2019/05/08/sign_flip_optimization/ ====== benj111 I thought this was going to be about 2s complement bit flipping. But no it's for floating point! ------ MayeulC Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a quite recent game, and was not released on Xbox 360 (according to my memory and the helpfully linked wikipedia article). Wouldn't this piece be about Rise of the Tomb Raider instead? Of course, this nitpick only concerns the introduction, the rest is a good piece. ~~~ tntn > tasked with optimizing the cloth simulation code in Shadow of the Tomb > Raider. It had been fine tuned extensively with PowerPC intrinsics for the > Xbox 360 but its performance was lacking on XboxOne (x64). Sounds to me like they were recycling some old cloth simulation code from previous games and it needed to be optimized for Xbox one for the release of the new game. ~~~ zeno490 Correct, their game engine has been around since the very first Tomb Raider and even before that. The code evolved over the years of course and the cloth simulation code as well. Shadow of the Tomb Raider used much more cloth in the environment and on the characters than previous games and it needed a bit of help. I don't remember off the top of my head how much I managed to speed it up but tuning the assembly for x64 and SSE yielded a 1.5-2x speedup over the old code due to various optimizations. ------ lawlessone Does this work with GLSL? ~~~ Asooka You'll need to examine the binary generated for a particular architecture by the driver. It may work on one driver+GPU combination, but be slower on another. Also, the semantics for floating-point math are somewhat looser in GLSL so the driver is given more power to reorder expressions and might exploit this trick on its own. As usual, you should profile and benchmark. ------ jamewatson That's a nice little optimisation! Would you mind sharing the aarch64 assembly from before and after applying the optimisation? It would be good to know the compiler flags used too :) ~~~ filleokus OT, but, this account seems to be reposting comments from the original article as HN comments. I wonder if it's automatic or manual. Regardless, it doesn't really seem to work (-6 karma as per the writing of this comment). ~~~ pfortuny Possibly someone playing with that AI text generation software whose name I forget. Looks similar.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PriceTea – Simple Amazon Price Guides - ajaymehta http://pricetea.com/ ====== smadam9 Lovely. Exactly the sort of thing people into "economical order quantity" ordering are into. Plans to expand? ------ guci22 The alert box ruins your website. ~~~ xur17 Agreed. It's showing up any time I click on a link on your site. I highly recommend removing it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: About to interview for Android Developer role. What should I read up on? - drepricruf iOS Developer about to interview for Android Developer role. What should I read up on? ====== amacalac Activity and Fragment lifecycles are a good topic. Understanding commonly used libraries often comes up e.g. Volley, Gson, Okhttp. Are there specific requirements for the job? ------ miguelrochefort Anyone can pick up Android programming. What matters here are the requirements for the job.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Michael Crichton: “Why Speculate?” & The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (2002) - emptybits http://geer.tinho.net/crichton.why.speculate.txt ====== secondbreakfast One of my favorite talks ever, up there with Munger's "psychology of human misjudgment" Disagree with the conclusion (that climate change isn't worth worrying about) But models aren't science	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Extracting timestamp and MAC address from UUIDs - mooreds http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/2014/06/mysql-extracting-timstamp-and-mac.html ====== geofft There's a story that the creator of 1999's "Melissa" virus was found via a GUID in the Word document that included their MAC address. (I'm having trouble confirming the veracity of this, since the web is full of citogenesis that links to [http://www.zdnet.com/news/tracking-melissas-alter- egos/10197...](http://www.zdnet.com/news/tracking-melissas-alter-egos/101974) which isn't super clear, but it's a good story nonetheless.) ------ elmin An alternative that was posted here a week or so ago: [https://eager.io/blog/how-long-does-an-id-need-to- be/](https://eager.io/blog/how-long-does-an-id-need-to-be/) ~~~ klodolph Or you could just use type 4 UUIDs. We know 64 bits is likely too small, and 128 bits is likely enough. Why bother saving a few bits here and there, if you already have a working solution? ~~~ girvo For unique IDs in databases, you want them to have common prefixes such that they are kept in rough time order in the database's backend, otherwise your indexes can end up huge and degrade performance (especially in MySQL, that's where we got bitten by it). That's where Type 1s are great, but of course this article shows a major downside. ------ pbbakkum We encountered some of these same issues and wrote this library to mitigate them: [https://github.com/groupon/locality- uuid.java](https://github.com/groupon/locality-uuid.java). I think UUIDs make good unique ids overall, particularly in distributed environments where id generation can't be coordinated, but should be used carefully, as the article notes. ~~~ X-Istence Why not just use UUID 4: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#V...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#Version_4_.28random.29) This will have an better distribution for when they are used as keys as well. ~~~ e12e As far as I can tell, neither MySQL, nor MariaDB has a function for generating type 4 UUIDs. It's of course possible to generate the UUIDs on the client side, but then it's not really an alternative to auto-incrementing surrogate keys. ------ eridal Why tapping on any text will navigate to another page? I've seen the same before, on blogs using the same theme. Is that to increase hits? It's really annoying for the reader experience! ~~~ pmontra That theme has a slide-to-next/prev-post feature. Tapping shouldn't activate it but maybe it's buggy with some browsers. Opera Android doesn't (same engine of Chrome).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Music Animation Machine Notation - acqq http://www.musanim.com/mam/closer.html ====== acqq For examples see <http://www.musanim.com/watch/> J. S. Bach's Air on a G-string, from his 3rd orchestral suite in D major on youtube (just for convenience, note that vimeo has better quality of his videos): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2j-frfK-yg> Or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1st movement, Allegro I've listened and compared my impression to the animation and now I see, even when looking at it the most interesting parts are not obvious _to see_ but to hear: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QHzI5HmXl4>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Linux kernel 5.1 data loss bug when using devicemapper and SSDs - djsumdog https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/62693 ====== dreix Nice, I match ' the other people ' too	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mailgun hack day: Making our API documentation smarter - safun http://blog.mailgun.com/mailgun-hack-day-making-our-developer-docs-smarter/ ====== jstoiko I am curious. What did you use to spec out your documentation? Have been using RAML lately.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Visit to the R&D Dept of the New York Times - keltecp11 http://www.headshift.com/blog/2009/03/a-visit-to-the-rd-deparmtent-o.php ====== bkudria This is the same exact coverage of the R&D lab we hear about every time - the large collection of gadgets (look at us! we can spend money!), the living room of the "future" (if you can build it, so can others. Yet, no one does...hmmm), and the interactive newspaper stand (I've no words...). I'm generally disappointed with with the NYT R&D lab. Shifd was kinda cool, but, it's nothing groundbreaking. It seems to me all the real innovation is coming out of the nytimes.com dev. team, while the R&D Department shows off it's gadgets. (Disclaimer: I worked for the NYT for a summer. I got this same exact tour of the R&D floor. They are high up, the view out the windows was the best part.) ------ jerryji No in depth coverage of the actual R&D that someone like me expected to read and learn from, more like a sales pitch from the BizDev department. ------ keltecp11 Video: [http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/05/the-new-york-times- envision...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/05/the-new-york-times-envisions- version-20-of-the-newspaper/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook and Twitter are creating a vain generation of self-obsessed people - rblion http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2020378/Facebook-Twitter-creating-vain-generation-self-obsessed-people.html#ixzz1U21zZjzi ====== pyoung I highly doubt vanity is a unique trait of our generation. It has been around forever. Facebook and twitter just make it easier for individuals to demonstrate it to a wide audience.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Would a Google car sacrifice you for the sake of the many? - 147 https://medium.com/@dweinberger/e9d6abcf6fed ====== japhyr I have been thinking about this the last few days. My first thought is that I would accept being sacrificed so that the overall impact of any collision is minimized. When I get into a car, I'm not really worried about my chance of getting into an accident on this one trip. I'm interested in my overall chances of getting in a serious accident over the long term. I would happily drive in a car that will sacrifice me for the greater good, knowing that every other car out there is programmed the same way. I will get in a car each day knowing that my overall chances of surviving the trip are pretty good. That said, I do pay attention to short-term factors such as impending severe weather and unusual road conditions. The real question is, how do we help people who are less statistically minded accept cars that reason like this? The current US political climate does not seem like one that will accept this level of rationality easily. ~~~ jgeorge My first thought is I would never get into a personal vehicle if the decision to "sacrifice myself for the greater good" was not my choice. [1][2] How do you program "greater good" in a split-second decision making scenario? How do you decide who wins and who loses, and by what criteria? I'll answer those rhetorical questions for you: you don't. The guy that darts into traffic, which results in a network of cars deciding to kill me in order to minimize "overall" damage to humanity? You've killed a person with a family, with people who rely on me to provide for them. The guy that darts into traffic is running from the police after having committed a serious crime. How do you programmatically determine that his life is more worth than mine or the others who may be impacted by avoiding just running over him in the first place? You don't. Not with a set of programmed rules in a decision making system that doesn't have the ability to take in external variables in the process of making that decision. That guy jumping into the road, with the cop chasing him that I can see on the sidewalk? I'm running over him instead of killing myself in the process. If I see that "guy in the road" is the entire soprano section of the Angelic Children's Choir, then maybe I aim for the light pole and pick a deity to pray to. I do not trust ANY piece of software to make that decision for me, or for anyone, for any reason, and in any situation. [1] I have intentionally ditched my car in a way that I thought would result in my own demise in order to minimize damage to others. It was my choice to do so. [2] I understand by getting into a vehicle that I don't control (plane, train, bus, taxicab, etc) that I am giving that decision-making process over to someone else. But that someone else is also human, with the same ability to process external input as I would, and I entrust them to not sacrifice both of us foolishly.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: WebMTG, manage Magic the Gathering games, tournaments and decks - bartzon https://github.com/bartzon/webmtg ====== bartzon I've added some screenshots! [https://github.com/bartzon/webmtg#features](https://github.com/bartzon/webmtg#features) ------ fiatjaf After some time, this becomes a website for managing Bitcoin accounts and keys, grabs your Bitcoin keys, loses them, everybody is poor.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Conversation with Arthur Whitney (2009) - radicalbyte http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 ====== rubyn00bie This little section just blew my mind... ================================================= BC: Do you ever look at your own code and think, "What the hell was I doing here?" AW: No, I guess I don't. BC: Wow! I confess that I tend to write comments for my future self. I know that when I come back to code I've written, I often don't recall instantly what the problem at hand was or how I solved it. Now you've got me thinking that maybe I'm just in the wrong language. When you're at this higher level of abstraction, maybe it's easier to see your intent. In terms of debugging your code, obviously the power of a terse language such as K or Q is that, presumably, it's easier to find bugs by inspection. How do you debug them? AW: In C I never learned to use the debugger so I used to never make mistakes, but now I make mistakes and I just put in a print statement. K is interpreted, so it's a lot easier. If I'm surprised at the value of some local at some point, I can put in a print, and that's really all I do. BC: That works well when you have deterministic inputs. What if the nature of the problem is just less reproducible—for example, if you were in an event- driven system where you had a confluence of events that led to a problem? AW: It has been 20 years now that I've had Wall Street customers—they're doing 2 billion transactions a day and they have trillion-row databases—and in those 20 years, there was one time where we couldn't reproduce the bug. That was nasty. I knew the kinds of operations that they were doing and I finally found it by just reading my code. ================================================= I can't believe, well I guess I can, and have to, that people out there can be this good. Is there something missing from the reality painted here? In general, Mr. Whitney seems like a freakin' genius, and I'm gonna take a stab at learning some K just to see what it provides. For those interested, from a previous thread today about Mr. Whitney's work, is Kona an open source implementation of K: [https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona](https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona) ~~~ fidotron I had dealings with him about 15 years ago, and he really is that good. However, you need to appreciate he's that good because he's able to see solutions that are easy to implement, and not that he has any special implementation talent. K itself is tiny. The programs he's written in it are an order of magnitude less, yet do a frightening amount for their size. ~~~ stuntprogrammer Yes, he is that good. I worked directly with him for a few years and it deeply changed my long term approach. Side effect is that it became harder to deal with the "normals" ;-) seriously though, it made me very impatient with the sorry state of the "state of the art" in the valley. ~~~ beagle3 Just grokking K had that effect on me ... I can't even estimate how much farther that will go if I had a chance to work with Arthur. And I keep thinking "ignorance is bliss" might have been right in this respect - perhaps I would have been better off had I not lost my appreciation for the (now obviously sad) state of software construction. (Engineering it is clearly not, by and large). But I wouldn't go back. Would you? ~~~ stuntprogrammer No, I wouldn't go back. That said, it has made it rather difficult to fit comfortably in standard settings. I've been successful so far but taking Arthur's lessons and applying from various domains, to software, and into cluster/system/soc arch in my case, has been viewed as rather unorthodox. I find that especially in the valley, adherence to buzzwords and fashion of the day is a little too common for my taste now. ------ radicalbyte I really like Arthur's philosophy of rewriting code, it's something we don't often have the chance to do. ------ juliangamble I didn't 'get' K until I read an interview with Arthur Whitney in the ACM Queue. Apart from performance, you're also getting craftsmanship. [http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242) It turns out he rewrites the whole compiler from scratch in C every four years. This is a snapshot from the source code of 'J' also by Arthur Whitney - the precursor to 'K'. [http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm#incunabulum](http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm#incunabulum) This is it described by Ken Iverson: "The final impetus that got J started was the one-page interpreter fragment that Arthur wrote, recorded in Appendix A of An Implementation of J [29] and also reproduced in Appendix A below. My immediate reaction on seeing the page was recoil and puzzlement: it looked nothing like any C code I had ever seen. (“Is it even C?”) However, Ken counselled that I should reserve judgment. " [http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm](http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm) ~~~ theoh There's a thread on Reddit from a few years ago that gives a more mixed picture. Sure, the C code is terse, but that comes partly from doing things like deferencing pointers without checking they're not null. One of the Reddit commenters describes it as "optimistic" coding. [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8cckg/arthur_wh...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8cckg/arthur_whitney_on_apl_k_q_and_elegant_code/) Without wanting to psychologise this too much, when I put the reckless coding practice together with a paragraph like "Whitney is no respecter of rules. One of the scariest things I ever did as a young man was following him through central Toronto on a bicycle." I get the impression Whitney thinks he doesn't have to follow other people's rules because he is an infallible genius. Seriously unbecoming and offputting. ~~~ lobster_johnson Well, clearly Whitney has been hugely successful with his odd little language. There's the case for a kind of extreme pragmatism — writing code that does the one thing it needs to do, without particular concerns for things like abstraction. We all write one-off scripts that are short and precise, but for a myriad of reasons won't scale to anything bigger or more general: we cheat and use global variables; we target one specific use case but don't allow parametization/configuration to support others; we target one OS and a certain constellation of dependencies; and so on. What Whitney has accomplished, I suspect, is that he has found a way to reduce the problem surface by going for extreme simplicity in absolutely all areas of his system, which is by making certain assumptions. Everything is lists or simple data types, there are no abstractions (by which I mean things like interfaces, generics, abstract data types, even custom types), almost everything is in-memory. You can do this with a Lisp or a Scheme, too. But the temptation is always to reach out for abstractions and patterns and build complicated systems out of subsystems. A database would have a cache manager, a page manager, a planner, an index manager, an SQL parser, a transaction log manager, etc. etc. K shows that you don't _need_ go for this clean, compartmentalized, layered subsystem approach if the whole program is small enough to make it easy to see the whole system on the screen. You can use global variables because it doesn't violate any layering. You don't abstract things like indexes and operators into abstract internal APIs because you know at any point what they are. An example of this kind of extremist simplification is how kdb+ stores tables: It memory-maps the entire table file and treats it as an in-memory list. Instead of having to invent a paging mechanism and create functions that work on tuples in pages, they can simply reuse all the vector-oriented K operators, which work on the tuples exactly the way they work on other in-memory lists. I don't think I could write K, but it is certainly a source of inspiration when designing systems. We developers have a tendency to pattern-match and generalize, when often "ad hoc" techniques would be better. The old adage is "make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler", but it's actually possible to make things simpler. ~~~ theoh I don't understand your last sentence. Things can be made simpler than possible? If you focus just on inner loops, this kind of simplicity is widespread and essential for performance. APL and its derivates are great specification languages for array manipulation. If you are writing a networked window system, on the other hand, a "high ceremony" language is more appropriate because you need to cope with protocols and abstractions. Right? ~~~ lobster_johnson My point is that it's wise to challenge assumptions about what "simple" means. Self-imposed constraints often yield more novel, more optimized solutions than when you have all the freedom in the world. Maybe flat files interacted with via fopen() works better; maybe we just don't need our layers to accrete until we have AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. A networked window system — perhaps not the best example. With that one I think the assumptions are flawed (ie., that you can make one without introducing painful leaky abstractions) to begin with. ;-) ~~~ theoh Well, in terms of whether the example is a well-posed question, a networked window system isn't too different from the WWW, which as we know by now works pretty flawlessly. Perhaps the key contrast here is between the tendency toward static mathematical perfection of the APL family and the notion of dynamic languages for building systems that Alan Kay et al would propose. "APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can’t add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don’t get a bigger diamond." \--Joel Moses There's a talk by Ian Piumarta that tries to get to the core of what the VPRI guys feel is important. I'm not sure about it but it seems worth mentioning in this context: Ian Piumarta "Building Your Own Dynamic Language" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn7kTPbW6QQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn7kTPbW6QQ) Also, this: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/objects- essay.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/objects-essay.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Federal Privacy Board Is Reviewing DHS’ Airport Facial Recognition Programs - lp001 https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2019/10/federal-privacy-board-reviewing-dhs-airport-facial-recognition-programs/160341/ ====== sarcasmatwork The data will be leaked. It's a matter of time. Not if, its when. History has already proved this will happen. I will deny and reject facial recognition, or biometric data requests. ~~~ lp001 In addition, it's for sale to entities which are not lawfully entitled to such data. ------ user49383 Biometrics is just a chip that you can't remove from under your skin	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you measure developers productivity? - jsifalda Hey guys, i am wondering, how do you measure productivity of developers in your team? I have been using RescueTime app but is too general, not focused on developers. Also, i tried WakaTime plugin into code editor, but it is saying a much... just general stats. Any tips which data collect? Or how to measure collected data? Eg. number of commits a day, number of pull requests? Lines added vs lines removed? Etc?<p>Thanks in advance George ====== bemmu This sounds like trying to judge a visual artist based on how many liters of paint they used, or installing a security camera to monitor how long they sat in front of their canvas. ~~~ jsifalda Nothing like this... mainly i want to know for my personal benefits like... am I productive or not?! ------ iamben When I worked as a dev in an agency - I _hated_ with a passion anything that felt like it was tracking my time or productivity. It made me not want to be there and made me felt like the time I spent figuring out how to do my job was wrong. Maybe I'm being oversensitive, but it just felt so untrusting. Working for myself I use Harvest. Start the clock when I'm working on something, stop it when I'm not. That gives me a decent idea on how to charge for what I do. ------ jki275 give reasonable deadlines and ask them to meet them. any of the metrics you're asking about are useless for measuring developer productivity. ~~~ howard941 I completely agree about the uselessness of the proposed metrics, and sort of agree with you on deadlines but even those shouldn't be coming down from on high if they're to ever be met. They need to be arrived at after thoroughly consulting with the people who'll be doing the development, and then refreshed after one or both feel the need.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Website Hackers Slip Under the Radar with Impersonator Bots - carlchenet http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/14/website-hackers-slip-under-the-radar-with-impersonator-bots/ ====== SCAQTony Reminds me of a line from a short story by William Gibson titled, "Burning Chrome: "...“Congratulations,” I heard Bobby say. “We just became an Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority inspection probe...” That meant we were clearing fiberoptic lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but in the simulation matrix we seemed to rush straight for Chrome’s database...."” Excerpt From: William Gibson. “Burning Chrome.” iBooks. [https://itun.es/us/iD40W.l](https://itun.es/us/iD40W.l)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
29 Days with Android - sandipc http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/13/3082261/29-days-with-android ====== stcredzero _There are a number of things in this picture that can only be done via iPhone jailbreaking, and even then, it may lead to a very unstable system. Just on this screen we have:_ - App-specific status bar notification icons (note the Facebook and mail icons) - Environment-specific status bar icons (plugged into USB, phone in vibrate mode, headphones plugged in, etc.) - 7 apps in the dock, with ample screen space for all of them. As a bonus, the dock is scrollable. - Instant access to current weather conditions - One-tap access to toggles like WiFi, Bluetooth, and brightness. - One-tap access to functionality like using a camera flash as a flashlight. 1 - I think that's not such a good idea. 2 - Likewise - all of those don't need an indicator so much 3 - Not a good idea for users who aren't deft enough to figure out where the tangential contact point of their fingertip is. (Which is most folks.) 4 - Unnecessary if you're outside. If you're inside, there's the window. If you're interested in somewhere else on earth, then start an app. 5+6 - These, I like. That's 0.333 - excellent for a batting average, but not so much for a review. ~~~ dbaupp Why is 1 not a good idea? Telling at a glance what sort of notification you have is really nice: takes <5 seconds to turn on the screen, glance at the top bar, make an assessment of the urgency of the notifications based on their origin, and then turn off the screen (if they aren't urgent). 3 _is_ a good idea for the other people, and shouldn't be counted as a point against, because having the option to customise the dock doesn't mean you have to. (It is a neutral feature, at worst.) ~~~ stcredzero _Why is 1 not a good idea?_ Tragedy of the commons. The space gets crowded. Let users decide which icons are there, and then it becomes a pain for the users to manage. _having the option to customise the dock doesn't mean you have to. (It is a neutral feature, at worst.)_ Neutral at best. If you're savvy enough to manage such a dock, you don't need it. If you're not, then it will cause bewilderment. (Seriously, I've had students who can't double click.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
React-app-rewired: override create-react-app webpack configs without ejecting - mxstbr https://github.com/timarney/react-app-rewired ====== captainmuon react-app-rewired looks cool, I'll have to try it the next time I hit a wall (and just need a little tweak)! One rant while I'm here: I don't really like create-react-app's approach of forcing me to "eject" to make certain changes. I am just a react beginner, but in one of my first experiments I already reached the limits (I think it was because I wanted to use Sass, not sure). I'd much rather have it expose the webpack config etc., so I can "fork" and edit it, and merge changes back when they make an update. Even if that would mean breakage every now and then. I think that model would be strictly superior to the current situation: \- If you don't modify your config, then merging will work fine, just like now. \- If you do make changes, then it might merge, or it might require manual updating. But in the current model it _will_ require manual updating, because you ejected. So you only gain. Last but not least, in a real project you will at some point diverge from tracking the boilerplate, and use `npm outdated` anyway. Does anybody know if there is a create-react-app alternative along those lines? Preferably a bit more lightweight? ~~~ ice109 i don't understand what you mean by "merge"? ~~~ captainmuon As in "git pull", but you've changed a file in the boilerplate code, and have to merge changes. ------ ice109 potentially very useful; I've been committing the sin of manipulating the CRA scripts in node-modules and writing down diffs in my build docs up until now. anyone have experience with this? ~~~ Morantron You can fork react-scripts and add it to your package.json as a GitHub dep ~~~ ice109 sure but then i have to keep track of upstream changes	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Realistic Facebook Privacy Simulator - ColinWright http://toys.usvsth3m.com/realistic-facebook-privacy-simulator/ ====== crazygringo Don't not make everything not private [ ] Not No [ ] Not Not Not Yes My brain was too slow! Great game. ~~~ Sektor Took me another 30 seconds just staring at your post here to work it out. ~~~ judk The trick is to just cross out pairs of negatives. Same thing for reading news stories like "court overturns ban on prohibiting suppression of car share services". Is that positive or negative for car2go? ------ nwh It's not just Facebook, Apple does this too with their "iAd optout" pages too. Limit tracking: [ off \| on ] I'm still not sure which side I want really. ~~~ atlanticus Facebook and Google make money selling your personal data, Apple makes money selling hardware. ~~~ dcsommer Can't speak for Google, but Facebook certainly doesn't sell personal data. Facebook internally uses personal data to show targeted advertisements. Big difference. ~~~ disgruntledphd2 Nor does Google. Twitter, however, does. That being said, Twitter is default public and they've been really open about it since day one. Note: I have no special knowledge of Google, so maybe they do. Given that it would be really dumb to do so and lie about it, I believe that they do not. ------ jonathonf Please, make a version suitable for kids. This would make an excellent teaching tool. ~~~ sebkomianos If they haven't by the time I am done with my current project (middle of next month) I'll do it! ------ sarreph I just watched the zealous Zuckerberg dance for three, straight minutes. ~~~ mam8cc Its his face photoshopped over the woman from this video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-50GjySwew](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-50GjySwew) ------ tzs This would be amusing if I were Commander Data, and so could actually see my score in the brief moment it shows the results before switching to taunting me for losing my privacy. ------ shocks I got to level five. This simulator is not realistic enough. ~~~ DannyBee It's not not not realistic enough ------ jhartikainen This is too realistic, I'm super stressed out now because I didn't have time to answer everything right. Next thing I know, there's probably going to be something embarrassing on my FB timeline! ------ alexvr Dancing Zuckerberg is the new trollface ------ chrislomax Conditioning has taught me never to press the blue facebook button on another website! I took a leap of faith though when I read the comments here. Good game, although I was checking my FB profile every five mins to make sure it hadn't posted any crap! ~~~ mewm I swear, I was about to post exactly the same thing! I had to try it a few times, as I was laughing too much too, even have chance, when I first saw the line up of "settings" ------ Karunamon I'd like to take a moment here to be "That Guy" and throw a wet blanket on the Facebook hate train: * The options given here are not at all representative of the actual Facebook privacy settings, which my freaking mother can understand. * There is not a countdown attached to usage of the real privacy settings * Privacy is not a binary thing you either have or don't. Checking the wrong option in Facebook might result in some piece of information being available for certain other people to view. That doesn't mean they necessarily did. Nor does it mean that you can't go back and change the setting around later. * Facebook's redesigns were all centered around the goal of misleading people into publicizing information they didn't want to. /s * Whatever point this game is trying to make is completely overshadowed by its tone. ~~~ logn People take the internet too seriously. It used to be a fun place, I promise. And there used to be lots of terrible shareware games you could buy on CD-ROM or floppy disk, and they were often much, much worse than this game. Take these games for what they are, which is basically like the little puzzles on the back of a cereal box. ~~~ Karunamon If this were posted anywhere else but Hacker News, I'd agree. But this site has a downright pathological hatred of it. It's like listening to conservatives banging on about how terrible liberals are. ------ CoryG89 This is the best game I've ever found on the front page of HN! Absolute awesomeness. ------ znowi I suspect there's a whole department at Facebook, Google, and other companies that sole purpose is to come up with cleverly puzzled opt-in questions for users. ------ 10098 I noped out of there when I saw the triple negative :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The One Wheel Micro-Cycle - flippyhead http://rynomotors2.wordpress.com/ ====== JoeAltmaier Is its top speed really the snails pace shown in the video? For heaven's sake, why not ride a bike? ------ signalsignal It only goes 20 mph? ------ flippyhead I know seems so slow	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pet Peeve: "You Guys" - clintonb11 http://avc.com/2014/05/pet-peeve-you-guys ====== calciphus Curious, as I've stumbled over this one myself - do you have a non-gendered group pronoun you prefer? I feel odd saying "you guys" to mixed groups, but I feel odder with "you all" and "you folks". I've had many female coworkers not care, and others care deeply, but haven't arrived at a solid replacement for "this group I am addressing" ------ ryandvm Meh. This is the kind of absurd handwashing that is more about making someone feel better about themselves than actually improving the general situation. The term "you guys" will be heard frequently in pretty much any work environment in the U.S. I won't pretend to have all the answers, but I can assure you that women aren't avoiding tech because someone said "you guys". Spending 20 minutes with a bunch of cheerleaders should convince you of that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Y Combinator Needs to Teach Better Business Communication Skills - hexagonc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h66PNIUtaaE ====== angersock Pretty good customer reaction to an overly-familiar business email and a solid criticism of a botched customer interaction.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Blacklists bit.ly - avinassh http://blog.sucuri.net/2014/10/bit-ly-blacklisted-by-google-safe-browsing.html ====== andygambles This is why it is a good idea to use your own custom domain with bit.ly ~~~ avinassh Yes, here's the official tutorial link for the lazy: [http://support.bitly.com/knowledgebase/articles/76741-how- do...](http://support.bitly.com/knowledgebase/articles/76741-how-do-i-set-up- a-custom-short-domain)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Blekko Review - obelix http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekko-search-engine-prepares-to-launch/ ====== moultano I'm really excited about having a new search engine to try. More competition isn't just good for consumers, it's also good for the field of IR. I work in search quality at Google, and it's really exciting for me to see a result that another search engine returns that I don't understand. It inspires me to think of all the ways they might have returned it, and leads to a lot of neat ideas. For the same reason, I enjoy reading the reaction in the SEO community to major changes to Google's rankings. Sometimes we're too close to a change to see what it does effectively instead of in principle. What the SEOs conclude often ends up being a really good first-order approximation of an unintended side-effect. If you believe that your competitors are doing incredible things, it's a great inspiration to try doing incredible things yourself, regardless of whether you're right about what they're doing. ~~~ prakash _I'm really excited about having a new search engine to try._ Give DuckDuckGo a try for a couple of weeks, you probably won't go back to whichever search engine you are using currently :-) ~~~ jerguismi It doesn't work very well in Finland. I guess I'll be using google for a while, since internationalization usually isn't much of a concern for smaller startups. ------ ora600 I liked the idea of "unprecedented level of access to the algorithms and data that Blekko uses to determine relevancy". This is a great differentiator from Google. Google can copy features like slashtags easier, but I can't imagine a large company known for its secrecy suddenly exposing their algorithms. ~~~ teebes Yes, I wonder how involved they will be with Open Source. Could really shift things a bit if a startup like Blekko shoved Google further to the center by being more 'Open' (whatever that word has come to mean) than them in the eyes of the media. ------ SandB0x The Slashtags concept looks _awesome_ , and as buzzwordy as it sounds, adding a social aspect to search by allowing Slashtag sharing could really take off. For example, a lecturer could put make a /thiscourseonly Slashtag, searching only hand picked sources. What would be especially great is a smart form of autocomplete. Eg once you typed /date you would get dd/mm/yy or dd monthname year or similar ghosting in front of the cursor. The only concern would be that Google and Bing could copy it fairly quickly, so hopefully their other features are strong enough. ~~~ evgen As they VC query used to go: "is this a feature or a company?" So far Blekko looks like a feature, but I will reserve judgement until I can actually play with it a bit. I really hope that this slashtags bit is not the only interesting thing they have to show after several years of work. OTOH, this does fit what seems to be a pattern for Rich Skrenta and his team: find an already occupied niche and crank out something that has 60-70% of the polish of the leader with a few new features and then flip the whole thing to someone who is desperate to get in or stay in the game. ------ mey DuckDuckGo provides some of this now as I understand it. <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html> and <http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html> ~~~ agscala Kindof, I think that DDG's bang searches take you to the respective website's search API. This one seems like it shows results in blekko's website simply filtered any way you create. ------ krishna2 The screencast: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/blekko-screencast-and- found...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/blekko-screencast-and-founder- interview/) ------ qeorge This is wonderful news. In addition to the slashtags, I'm excited about all the ranking data they're showing off. Right now your only source of ranking data straight from a search engine is Yahoo's Site Explorer, and even that data is quite limited and its future availability uncertain. I've never seen duplicate content exposed so openly. And as ora600 said, that level of transparency is something Google exceedingly unlikely to copy. ~~~ evgen The problem with making ranking data a "feature" is that the only ones who care about this information only care about what the ranking data is on Google. What the rank is for your site on Blekko is of no value whatsoever. ------ amichail Google could combine its search engine with its app engine to allow third party developers to implement custom searches. Third party developers could even get paid via ads that appear whenever their algorithms are used in the search results. ~~~ yurylifshits Actually, you just have described Yahoo BOSS ("Build your own search engine") program :) ------ obelix Slashtags are a neat idea, can't wait to try it out. ------ speek Anybody here from Blekko? I'd love a special HN invite :-) ~~~ jsrfded Yes, being an HN reader is definitely a plus. :-) The best way to get an invite is hit us on twitter or facebook (see links from blekko.com). Then we can DM you an invite when we have them ready. ~~~ retube Oh man why does everything have to be via facebook, twitter et al? I only do email... ~~~ joubert Why don't you try an email address on the contact page? <http://blekko.com/contact.html> ------ TotlolRon _"alternatives are a prerequisite to the illusion of choice"_ \-- just made it up 2010	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The four year vesting schedule doesn't make sense - groth http://stuckinthevalley.tumblr.com/ ====== tptacek I don't invest in companies, but if I did, having nonstandard vesting schemes would be a no-deal red flag, at least for any team that didn't have a mile- long pedigree starting and successfully building companies. Vesting is one of the most important protections the operating team has against hiring (and foundational) mistakes, and anybody who has ever started a company knows those mistakes happen routinely. Some things to keep in mind when you feel the urge to twiddle the nods on how vesting works: * It can take 2-4 months, maybe even more for senior hires, to discover whether a new hire is going to fit with the team. * Your rational incentive for allocating ownership of the company to someone who doesn't belong on your team is zero or worse. You are helped not-at-all by the warm fuzzies a fired employee gets when they contemplate their options, but you are harmed immensely by the share of the long-term upside that those employees take from everyone who comes after them and executes well. * Equity grants are not just a proxy for future money. They're legal contracts that can drastically complicate later bizdev events. You don't want a large pool of former employees wandering around with executed options. Think of every such person as a P>0.10 risk of a lawsuit threat. * It is very hard (often virtually impossible) to claw ownership stakes back from former employees. You will, P>0.90, discover candidates later in the life of the company that you'd love to entice with an ownership stake. You will, P>0.90, have a cofounder or employee<4 that doesn't work out. At the same time, a cofounder or employee #1 that's still with the company 3-4 years later almost certainly earned their stake. Vesting balances these needs out. Don't fuck around with vesting. Do what your lawyer says, or get one to sign off on the standard four-year+1-year-cliff scheme for your state. If you want to incentivize people to stay with your company for a year, pull other levers to make that happen. Don't pull the vesting lever for something as simple as "students just out of school have shorter time horizons". ~~~ glimcat Just from an efficiency standpoint, you don't _need_ other levers for new grads. A reasonable engineering salary will already be highly motivational for someone who is coming off a student's budget, probably with loans just kicking in. Some percentage of them are going to flake. That happens when you take people who have spent their lives in an environment with one eval loop and place them in a new environment with differing expectations. Of those who would flake, some of them can be made into great employees. But a bigger carrot is _almost_ _never_ effective at accomplishing this. The real need is generally along the lines of "effective mentorship" - which is far harder to implement than a revision to your employee benefits plan. ------ georgemcbay I think there's plenty wrong with the way most startups handle equity assignments (particularly as it relates to dilution without subsequent regrants, etc), but the viewpoint here just seems bonkers to me. A year is a _LONG_ time to a 6 year old, but to a 22-24 year old (avg. age of college grad)? Really? When I was that age I could easily imagine committing to things for a year. And even if that makes me an anomaly (which I seriously doubt it does), why would you bend over backwards to reward people that are going to jump ship right away due to their own ADD? Particularly considering they're the least likely to be making really useful contributions to the code and are basically (hopefully) mostly learning the ins and outs of professional development (IME, very different than school work, or even open source projects) on the company's dime at that point. On top of all that, a lot of companies still use traditional options and other than in some very extraordinary circumstances, anyone quitting prior to a year of service and also prior to a major liquidity event would be foolish to actually exercise their options, which they'd almost certainly have to do to avoid losing them within 30-90 days (or so depending upon terms) of leaving. Sorry, but this is just a half-baked idea all around. ------ powera What a terrible idea. If people don't want to stay for even a year, they don't need equity in a startup. That's what salary is for. And getting 1/4000th of the first year's equity grant after the first month won't motivate anybody who understands math, which is probably a trait that startups are looking for. ~~~ Firehed The idea is that the longer you stay with the company, the larger percent of your remaining equity you get per period. Hockey-stick equity, if you will ;) I think it's actually a pretty reasonable approach. I've had people straight- up tell me during interviews that they're leaving their current position because they've reached either their one-year cliff or their four-year package and want a new opportunity with potentially higher gains. While leaving after four years if your options package isn't extended isn't unreasonable, the one- year cliff does seem a rather broken approach for keeping all but the most- dedicated people more than a year. Of course, if your employees don't want to stay more than year and are only doing so because of the vesting cliff, you probably have bigger problems that need sorting out. But let's assume that your employees are only going to stay 12 months no matter what - would you prefer to give them 25% of their options, or ~3.6%[1]? That assumes that the exponential grant continues for the entire period, not just for the first year as the article suggests. I'd also be a bit concerned about possible tax implications of that approach; three years in you only have 31% of your stock, and you get about 10% of the total in the last month. Here's a graph, assuming my math is right. [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0AgIFMGYSPNuPdH...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0AgIFMGYSPNuPdHQyMGhxV2hEZC1uVlVqS19WbVBlYUE&oid=2&zx=9a33xzyohuq8) Seems to me that this would be a pretty good way to get people to stay for longer than a year, the issue is when employees still leave early. With the cliff, there's one less shareholder around, helping the company stay under that magical 500-shareholder limit. You lose that benefit with the exponential grant. [1] I've probably done the math wrong, but roughly solving m^48=100 (percent), getting about 1.1007^(month#) = total percent of equity granted at the end of that month ~~~ tptacek _I've had people straight-up tell me during interviews that they're leaving their current position because they've reached either their one-year cliff or their four-year package and want a new opportunity with potentially higher gains._ The person who told you "I'm looking because I just hit my first-year cliff" actually told you "DO NOT HIRE ME". Listen harder. People do leave when they hit four years. Four years is a long time! Some teams are O.K. with this, but if you're not, there's no reason to mess with vesting to solve the problem; just grant them more of the employee pool to stay. Everyone is always looking for better opportunities. That's fine. Be the best opportunity for everyone on your team, or get better at recruiting. Vesting can't help you with this problem, but it sure can hurt you. ~~~ loceng Makes me wonder how hard they worked those 4 years, or perhaps just that last year they didn't necessarily care to be kept on afterward. ~~~ j2labs If they were there four years without being let go, the company was clearly fine with the performance. ------ jaredstenquist Terrible idea, and based on the title of your blog, it's no surprise to me that you'd like all your equity in year one. There are reasons for 3,4 or N year vesting - namely keeping employees invested in the business. If employees at a startup turned over every year, it simply wouldn't survive. Salary is used to keep employees for a year. Salary and/or equity is used to keep employees for a meaningful period of time. There will always be the ones there to simply collect a paycheck, and likewise there will be ones who stick around for their 50,000 shares of equity without doing the math to realize their potential upside near 0. ------ trotsky If there is only one thing I wished someone had told me when I started out it would be not to include grants as part of your compensation calculations. It is rare that they'll ever be worth a dime and even rarer that getting a little less/more will make any real difference. I'm assuming we're not talking about public companies here or ones obviously on an ipo track (very short list). They are like getting a portion of your money in lottery tickets - sure there is a minimal real value to them, but the only rational way to use them in planning is to value them at zero. Rank and file grants are only about retention. If you are bitching and moaning about a cliff and your finances you really misunderstand how business works here. But that's very understandable - silicon valley thrives on misleading the young and energetic on this very topic. ------ cbsmith This is ridiculous. For starters, in what world is vesting based on value to the employee? It's also more than a bit ill informed to think that time at a company is less "costly" for an employee the older they are, particularly when it comes to equity. Based on success rates of startups, once you are older you likely only have a few more shots at "winning the lottery", the costs of losing benefits (particularly medical) is higher, and showing forward career progress is so much more crucial. The cost of a few early setbacks is trivial as compared to setbacks towards the end of your career (unless you've already won the lottery, in which case, the discussion is moot). ------ snprbob86 Why would I want to treat new-grads better than experienced folks? And why would I want to incentivize somebody who doesn't like it after 3 months to stay for 4 months? The 1 year cliff prevents disinterested parties from holding equity in my company and helps me retain people who have become important over time during that first year. You're proposing improving my retention of lesser experienced people with lower bus factors in my organization. That seems backwards... ------ jakejake Equity is an incentive for loyalty and commitment to the company. If you aren't even sticking around for year then chances are you are barely finished training. You split just about the time you are actually becoming useful and productive. So the company has invested in you - but you ditched the company. That's the opposite of commitment. This kinda reminds me of when I was a grade-school student and I used to wonder why the teachers got paid because it was us students who were doing all the homework! ------ vampirechicken There is a reason that stock options are called Golden Handcuffs. ------ mattmaroon I really don't think young people think/care much about equity until you're one of the hotter startups, at which point 1 year doesn't seem so long. If you're hiring on at Dropbox now, you're working that year. If you're hiring on at some company that's 6 months old that nobody has heard of, the equity is just a batch of lottery tickets. Put another way, I doubt anyone has ever said "I would have worked there if the cliff was only 6 months". ------ prostoalex "After a couple of months at a company, a new grad may think “hey, this isn’t THAT great’, and not stick out the next 9, 10, 11 months, because that seems to them, an insanely long time." Then he made a mistake during the interview process. Remember, it's not only them interviewing you, it's also you interviewing them. Bring up issues you care about (work ethic, work load, flexibility), and you'll have fewer surpises later on. "On the other hand, for someone who has been working for a few years, 8,9, or 11 months might seem to be a much shorter period of time, and proportionally it is. They might stick it out, get equity, and become much more committed to the enterprise." Yes, the company can issue additional grants, there's no law in place to say that what you get on day 1 is the only equity you're going to get, ever. The company can structure performance (equity for shipping major products) or retention (equity for 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 10th, 50th anniversary with the company) however it pleases. ------ wellthat Suppose someone (highly qualified, not from the startup world however) can tweak your marketing message for a couple of weeks (i.e. work on your startup for 80-150 hours intensively) and as a direct consquence get you an audience of millions, because your message is now awesome. This person doensn't care about startups. Say you are pre-money. How should you pay for this person's time? You would think, if this person can really work for two weeks and give you a company that is worth seeding at a high valuation (due to traction), which also becomes a good signal and thereafter with the company's fantastic traction, money, and engaged audience, it has fantastic growth prospects - but without these two weeks will simply languish as another "project" - then a two percent stake with no cliff whatsoever is a no-brainer. ~~~ ghaff And, if you're a consultant, with few exceptions, taking an equity stake rather than cash is not a good idea. Happened a lot in the dot com bubble. Not pretty. Sure, if you're looking for work and a genuinely intriguing opportunity that only takes a couple weeks comes along, why not? But bad idea as a business model. ------ whackedspinach As an undergraduate at a top tier CS school, I have seen a lot of companies boast about these vesting schemes. Honestly, I don't think most new grads consider them due to the 1 year cliff. Most people I talk to will say "Well, if I want to leave, the new signing bonus/RSU package will just make up for the lost RSUs." What really hurts companies is the drawn out exponential vesting periods. I believe Amazon does a package that is 15% after the first year, 40% after the second, 75% after the third, and 100% after four. Maybe my numbers are off, but you are rarely going to get new grads to commit to four years, even with that scheme. I'll take my 25% at another company after a year and move on. Anyways, the work/experience/location/culture/salary is usually more of a factor than the vesting schedule. ------ ajdecon _For someone who sees 1 year as a long time, the one year vesting cliff may be a reason to discount the equity portion of the compensation package altogether, especially at a small startup where the chances of cashing out are low anyway. After a couple of months at a company, a new grad may think “hey, this isn’t THAT great’, and not stick out the next 9, 10, 11 months, because that seems to them, an insanely long time._ 1) From the employer perspective in a startup: do you actually want an employee who's going to stay longer than a few months, based on any reason except the company and the work? 2) From the employee perspective: unless you're an _extremely_ early employee, discounting the equity portion of a startup compensation package is probably the correct thing to do... ------ gojomo A company is unlikely to want the overhead of option/equity paperwork (and cap-table complications) for some restless joker who leaves after a few months. Nor are they likely to want an official policy of offering discriminatory vesting-schedules by candidate age. ------ jaynate Not an HR specialist and this may be beside the point, but i believe if you do this for the new grad you'd also have to give that option to the tenured folks as well otherwise you'd basically be discriminating based on age which is illegal. ------ ChuckMcM They make sense in the same way that dollar cost averaging makes sense. Whinging that a year is too long to wait for the vest is pretty shallow. Now if it didn't _start_ vesting for a year, sure that would be something, but since your 25% vested on the day of the 'cliff' your good. But the bottom line is that shares are compensation and compensation is money. A startup needs to extract the most mileage out of the money they've got, this vesting schedule has been shown to be a reasonable choice over the last 50 years. ------ dguido Nice try, new grad. ------ pm24601 As someone with his not yet successful company, I am against 1-year cliffs. I believe in the 6-month cliff and am considering dropping it to 3 months. When I make a poor hiring decision, I usually know within 2-3 months. A shorter cliff forces me to evaluate new-hires faster. No one needs 1 year to determine if a new hire was a good fit. ~~~ tptacek But it works both ways; there will be people who you like who decide not to stick with _you_. You want to minimize the number of outsiders who hold shares in your company. If you don't grok this, you need to talk to more experienced people; this has to be one of the top horror story themes in startupland. Also, stop kidding yourself. Evaluating startup team members is very hard. You probably have a longer ramp-up than you think you do, during which you have very little ability to evaluate people; also, there is a huge class of bad hire that starts strong and decays rapidly. There are all sorts of ways you can motivate yourself to evaluate new hires quickly. Use salary or sign-on bonuses instead of vesting. Messing around with your company ownership to accomplish such a simple tactical goal says something about how seriously you take ownership; it's probably not something you want to be saying out loud. ~~~ pm24601 I am very experienced. Re: the number of "outsiders" - not as big a deal as you might believe. Good lawyering helps. Its better to be considerate and balanced. The cliff only exists to protect against bad hiring decisions, 6 months is plenty enough time to figure out that someone is a bad fit. You are correct about shares not being a very good tool for motivating people. Your suggestions about salary or sign-on bonuses are actually worse because that takes away from the working capital. ~~~ tptacek You don't sound very experienced. I mean that factually, not as an insult. For what it's worth, I've been in "key" roles (lead engineering, founder, and m-team) since 1996; I've spent my whole career in startups. I am not making the horror stories up, and they've happened in places with extremely good "lawyering". ~~~ pm24601 There are always people with different experiences to learn from. That said, 1 year cliff is an arbitrary period of time. 6 months is an arbitrary period as well. Your statement about experience is fine. I have my own collection of experience. In my experience, forcing a fit/retention decision about a new hire to be earlier is a good thing. I do this with a 6 month cliff. When I look at the people I have had to fire, I always saw the handwriting on the wall by the 2nd-3rd month. A 6-month cliff gives me and them a chance to correct the issue. Yes I could do this review process with a 1-year cliff. The 6-month cliff makes sure the issue is addressed consistently early after a new hire joins. So if after 6-months I know I want to keep the person, why not say it with a stock plan? Conversely, if the goal is to reduce the number of outsiders with stock: * do you then support a 2-year cliff? * a 5-year vesting schedule? If going earlier than a year cliff is bad then, using your argument, going longer must be better. ------ photorized 4-yr vesting with a cliff works, and the concept should probably be left alone. The are plenty of other mechanisms to provide incentives to good people, for the business owner/founder to experiment with. ------ yresnob Give new grads a faster vesting schedule..is that a joke? Give everyone who is good enough to get hired alot more shares and be upfront about their % it's real easy ------ zaroth I don't agree with this at all. Vesting schedules are an extremely important component of how equity in a company is awarded, and the one year cliff is an essential part of the formula. Options are priced, when they are awarded, to have no present value. The exercise price of the option (the cost to buy a share) is equal to the current market value of the share. Furthermore, you can only hold the options for as long as you are an employee of the company. If you leave, you typically have 30 - 90 days to exercise (buy) whatever options you have vested, if you so choose. Options are worthless when their exercise price is <= the market price. So, in the first place, it wouldn't make sense to vest options immediately (or "exponentially") in order to accommodate employee drop-outs. The ex-employee would have to exercise the option before the shares could have had time to appreciate significantly relative to their beta. The value of incentive stock options is simply the value of being able to profit from increased market cap without having to actually risk or tie up any of your own money. On the CBOE (options market), you can buy options with a strike price equal to the market price, but with a set expiration date. The option has no inherent value, but the farther out that expiration date, the more "time value" the option has. I think LEAPs max out at expiring 3 years out. Incentive stock options however will typically have a 10 year expiration date. Just look at the time value of 3 year LEAPs and you will start to see how much time value a 10-year option actually has. More importantly, the primary purpose of giving your employees options is to increase employee retention and align employees' and investors' goals. The secondary purpose is to reward employees when their contributions add long- term value to the company well beyond the scope of their salary. That type of exceptional contribution is never about 'cranking out code' for a few months to add some new feature. It happens when key employees bring with them a sort of magic which helps their team or even the entire company perform at a higher level. These are the people you want holding a meaningful equity share of your company. If you ever run a company, it will fundamentally change how you look at these things. For example, you start to see _all_ the taxes being confiscated from the money you are paying your employees (payroll, income, state, etc.) are taxes that the _company_ is paying in order to reward their employees. There is no "company share" / "employee share". All that matters is how much money actually makes it to your employee's bank account. The more efficient the company can make the transfer of wealth, the less money comes out of company coffers. Options, at least for now, are a more efficient way to pay your best employees so that they are equitably rewarded for the contributions they are making. After a certain point it's just too inefficient to try to compensate your key employees with a pay check ("the taxes are too damn high"). When options are part of an offer letter, those options should always have at least a 1 year cliff. It's pointless handing vested options to a new hire if they're going to be leaving and exercising them just a few months after they've been priced. In that case the options likely haven't appreciated, the employee has likely not made an unpredictable and lasting contribution, the employee is demonstrating they don't believe in the company, and furthermore the first year you work at a company is the likely the easiest year to establish a value for the services you'll be providing, and that should be paid out as salary. ~~~ tossit1234 This is a throw away account for a couple of reasons...but I wanted to make a point from the engineering grunt point of view... >The value of incentive stock options is simply the value of >being able to profit from increased market cap without having >to actually risk or tie up any of your own money. That may be true of the value of the option from a purely market point of view. That said, unless you are part of the rare group who is part of a facebook, twitter, or related that can actually trade on the private markets before an exit event. The reality is, most engineers working for a startup are gambling their time and efforts for a single investment. More often than not, those investments of effort and time do not always result in much of a return. From experience - a number of startups will push for rates that are "below market" for the promise of returns. That said, in the same time, day to day engineers (not the founders) who have experienced an exit has been on the order of basically $20-30k/year (over the term of one's employment). Often finding an arrangement with a more established company will result in a better return during the same time. If you are in the market to join a startup for the exit, weigh your options closely. If you are in it to learn, work with a close bunch, and want to build something interesting, by all means pursue it. Joining a startup is an investment of time and effort, you should not enter as a non-founder with the expectation of a monetary return. Most fail. ------ ryguytilidie I agree that the current system is broken, unfortunately this proposed system seems more broken. ------ michaelochurch It makes sense when there's real equity being disbursed. One person has $500,000. The other has sweat equity. How do you calculate the relative value of the latter? Come up with a fair salary, and turn it into equity. Four years is a good starting estimate, but if the person leaves early, then the assumption on which the equity level was set is invalidated. I'm against cliffs, though. ~~~ tptacek Being against the one-year cliff means you either (a) believe you will never make a hiring mistake or (b) believe that it doesn't matter who holds equity in your company. Both are dangerous assumptions. Not having a cliff doesn't even help employees. It creates a culture where new hires need to be on the defensive from the moment they're hired, because management is strongly incentivized to release new hires as soon as they can to contain the damage of bad hires. In cliff vesting companies, management has a full year to figure out whether someone's going to work out, which is good, because most equity-compensated jobs have ramp-up periods.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Stanford students asking, how to help out with the coronavirus response? - davidtsong Hi HN,<p>My friend and I are Stanford CS students pursuing biocomp and AI. We are terrified at the thought of hospitals being overwhelmed soon and we want to do whatever it takes to help save lives from Coronavirus in the US.<p>We have some thoughts on how to proceed, but we are still reaching out to people in the field (gov, hospitals, etc.)<p>How should we best contribute in terms of problems we should solve? Is there anyone we should talk to? ====== mtmail These have been posted recently, maybe you can join those teams "Crowdsourced list of tech projects relating to Coronavirus" [https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/](https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/) and "Show HN: Engineering group to help medical staff against Covid-19" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22537426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22537426) ~~~ davidtsong This is really helpful, thank you for sharing! ------ mehh Wash your hands ;)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Utter Disregard for Git Commit History - hodgesmr http://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/ ====== QuercusMax Sounds like the author wants something like Mercurial's [https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution](https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution). It will allow you to rebase and do all kinds of heinous things to your history, but still maintain the original commits that things came from. ------ prodigal_erik Commits are forever. What happens to your history of pull requests if github shuts down or turns evil? ~~~ lewisl9029 Are there any GitHub clones that record PRs, issues, wikis, etc as commits on separate branches? GitHub has proven that discussions around code are every bit as important as the code itself, so why not give it first class treatment by storing it in the same medium?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What motivates MOOC subscribers? - sunflash5 For those of you who take online classes from organizations like Coursera, EdX and Udemy, what motivated you to take the class?<p>I'm interested in MOOCs and wanted to get a perspective on what motivates people taking the class, how long they stick with the class, and what their biggest difficulties are. ====== nixhope My thoughts on some of the benefits of MOOCs: \- Learning from professionals, industry/research leaders who can offer personal experiences rather than discussing other peoples' research/results \- University-level educational material for zero or no cost. A university education is a massive commitment of time and money, and in many cases the qualification itself, rather than the knowledge, is the end goal and thus the investment is largely lost if you stop partway through \- Convenience. Learn what you want, in your own time, at your own rate. \- Internet/forum culture. The communities tend to be cooperative and interested in teaching and explaining, and the atmosphere is positive. For people used to forums this can be easier to deal with than a classroom environment. Overall, I find MOOCs tend to cover an excellent middle ground between the rigid style of teaching commonly found in established educational institutions and the individual learner mentality that educates itself by looking for tutorials, reading books, and learning by doing. As to "what motivates people to take MOOCs?", they are convenient options for educating and furthering oneself. For some people, learning is a lifelong goal or a fundamental interest in acquiring new knowledge/skills. Learning can be useful for people looking to upskill in order to access new opportunities (self-employment, change of careers/employer). I recommend it to people who find themselves stuck in a rut (feel like life isn't going anywhere). Visible progression has positive feedback and can be stimulating. ------ nayefc The material and what I'm learning. I finished 4 courses so far and what got me through them is strong interest and the drive to learn the material. I only enroll in a MOOC class that I am very interested in; which gets me to the end of it. I've spent more time on some MOOC classes than on college courses for an entire semester which I did not care about. ------ agibsonccc Simple: self directed education is simply a superior learning method for some. Lectures in digestible formats alongside the ability to take on whatever material you can think of. Frankly, I couldn't stand my university and felt like I got almost nothing out of it. MOOCs have allowed me to really dive in and explore more.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
McKinsey warns banks face wipeout in some financial services - jeo1234 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a5cafe92-66bf-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html ====== grandalf _“Most of the attackers do not want to become a bank,” said Mr Härle. “They want to squeeze themselves in between the customer and the bank and skim the cream off.”_ I'd argue that most of the new entrants would happily become banks if the regulations were more startup friendly. So while the article paints banks as the victims of tech firms cutting into profits, the reality is that tech firms have been forced to the periphery of banking because few have the appetite or budget to even remotely consider becoming an actual bank. This creates a lower bound on the fee Stripe can consider charging, for example, and is why bill.com's ACH payments take a week to clear. Because of the cozy relationship between too-big-to-fail banks and their self- created bureaucracy, the business is out of reach to startups which are forced to compete on the margin. ~~~ princeb >cozy relationship between too-big-to-fail banks and their self-created bureaucracy don't know who is cozy but almost everyone in the sell side is being saddled with endless amounts of compliance requirements and unless you enjoy staying into the middle of the night reccing books 500 ways and tagging customer forms and tickets the life has become less and less enjoyable. i am pretty sure i am right when i say the life was good when the regulators were more laissez faire in the early 2000s. ~~~ grandalf When there was market discipline causing firms to avoid bad underwriting practices, many of those regulations were not necessary. But now nearly everything but the actual incentives has been blamed for why the market crashed. Now, when it crashes again, it will of course have been totally unexpected and impossible to predict, so of course a bailout will be necessary, etc. My overly simplistic take is that the finance industry effectively practices "risk laundering"... ------ henryw Google redirect for those who can't see it: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QqQIwAGoVChMIwsCEqfmfyAIVgiiUCh0ULQHG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa5cafe92-66bf-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html&usg=AFQjCNGENRJZuY3Tx0AD8gk2AZhLoF0Zpw&sig2=D23PEYblinU14gO9_PFgYg) ~~~ fuzzieozzie Thank you ------ quanticle I agree with McKinsey's analysis of the strengths of technology companies in driving down margins. However, I disagree with their conclusions. Time and again (at least in the US), banks have proven to be masters of legislation and regulation, putting up legislative and administrative roadblocks that prevent technology companies from competing with them head-on. This is why the payments space is such a difficult one for startups to compete in - the amount of reporting work necessary to ensure regulatory compliance is absurd. Combine that with the fact that the regulation oftentimes limits you to the same technologies that the banks themselves are using, and I don't see existing banks losing their profit margins any time soon. ------ nugget Bank of America wants to pay me 15 basis points APR on my savings deposits. It's so low the bank managers can hardly explain it with a straight face. Ally Bank offers me 100 basis points. Who do you think is earning my brand loyalty? Mobile check deposit eliminated the last need I felt to be near a physical branch and for the first time I can foresee a future where I move all my banking needs to Ally or one of their competitors. ~~~ PhantomGremlin _Ally Bank offers me 100 basis points ..._ _Who do you think is earning my brand loyalty?_ Ah yes, the company that made billions of dollars in subprime loans to deadbeats. The company that required a $16 billion bailout from the US Treasury. The company that had a fun time robo-signing foreclosures.[1] But it's OK. They changed their name, so we can all forget that they were a major contributor to the financial crisis. They're no better and no worse than BofA. None of those companies will get any "brand loyalty" from me. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Financial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Financial) ------ 7Figures2Commas As it relates to lending, banks absolutely have a lot to worry about. But so too do many of the alternative lenders that are stealing their business. Many of these lenders are products of the 2008 economic crash and they have thrived because of the interest rate environment coupled with a period of historically low defaults. When the next downturn arrives, we'll see how the portfolios of the balance sheet lenders fare. The alternative lenders in the business of securitizing loans avoid the biggest risks balance sheet lenders have to deal with, but to generate revenue, they have a never-ending need to originate more loans that they can package and sell to investors. When interest rates rise, or the economy sours, that could get more difficult. A lot more difficult. Alternative lenders are here to stay, but a "wipeout" for banks would take a long time to occur, if it occurs at all. The alternative lenders are going to have their own problems to deal with soon enough. ------ pbreit The only catch is that the new lenders don't seem very good at lending. For example, I can get a 7% loan at a credit union and 10% at a bank but Vouch/Affirm/Avant/Prosper/LendingClub/etc want 20-30%. ~~~ ac29 You must have terrible credit. As someone who has taken part in the lending side of P2P companies, 20+% APR is the lowest grade of credit and represents a substantial default risk (real returns are <10%). ~~~ pbreit Well, I definitely have an inordinate ability to repay. But the newer lenders, unlike the older lenders, aren't acknowledging that for whatever reason. Maybe they only want the high rate business? ------ gatsby Full article (because it's behind a paywall, then a survey): The digital revolution sweeping through the banking sector is set to wipe out almost two-thirds of earnings on some financial products as new technology companies drive down prices and erode lenders’ profit margins. This is one of the main predictions by the consultancy McKinsey in its global banking annual review to be published on Wednesday, portraying banks as facing “a high-stakes struggle” to defend their business model against digital disruption. McKinsey said technological competition would reduce profits from non-mortgage retail lending, such as credit cards and car loans, by 60 per cent and revenues by 40 per cent over the next decade. It predicted a smaller, but still significant, chunk of profits and revenues would be lost from payments processing, small and medium-sized enterprise lending, wealth management and mortgages. These would decline between 35 and 10 per cent, McKinsey said. Philipp Härle, co-author of the report, said: “The most significant impact we see in price erosion, as technology companies allow delivery of financial services at a fraction of the cost, and this will mostly be transferred to the customer in lower prices.” He said most technology companies were focused on picking off the most lucrative parts of banks’ relationships with their customers, leaving them as “dumb” providers of balance sheet capacity. “Most of the attackers do not want to become a bank,” said Mr Härle. “They want to squeeze themselves in between the customer and the bank and skim the cream off.” McKinsey said banks last year made $1.75tn of revenues from origination and sales activities, on which they earned a 22 per cent return on equity, while they made $2.1tn of revenue from balance-sheet provision at a return on equity of only 6 per cent. The consultancy said the industry had two choices. “Either banks fight for the customer relationship, or they learn to live without it and become a lean provider of white-labelled balance sheet capacity,” it said. While predicting upheaval in the future, McKinsey said there was no evidence that digital disruption had started to eat into banks’ market share yet. Banks’ share of global credit provision has been constant over the past 15 years. Mr Härle said one factor that could slow down the erosion of banks’ market share was if regulators decided to clamp down on the disrupters by imposing similar capital and compliance rules as those faced by banks. McKinsey calculated that profits from all banks reached a record of $1tn last year, helped by rapid growth in Asia and particularly in China and as US lenders rebounded from the financial crisis. The average return on equity was stable at 9.5 per cent, as cost-cutting offset falling margins in the low interest rate climate. Almost two-thirds of developed market banks and a third of those in emerging markets earned a return on equity below their cost of equity and were valued below their book value. “Many in the industry are waiting for an interest rate rise or some other structural lift to profits, but even if rates rise, that will be insufficient to fundamentally improve economics,” McKinsey said. “We expect margins to continue to fall through 2020, and the rate of decline may even accelerate.” ~~~ kuschku Let me get this straight, banks complain about returns of only 6 per cent? This is ridiculous. Stop complaining, you still make more than inflation.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to (Scientifically) Pick the Best Company Name - rharris http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/03/05/test-company-domain-name-with-mturk-survey-data/ ====== JohnyLy Very interesting approach. Choosing a company name is very important. I especially like the name-association part. I would just add 'meaning in foreign languages' because sometimes a company name can sound well in English but could mean something bad in a foreign language. ------ tajen Excellent posst in the wake of Paul Graham's new essay! ~~~ brudgers For an established company launching a new brand or product, this approach makes sense. For the sort of startup that historically had office hours with Graham, it's a distraction from working on the product. Early stage startups can't afford to waste time bike shedding in lieu of working. It's so much easier to play house picking a name than building a product and finding customers and that's why it's so dangerous. ------ rebekah-aimee I'm glad they went with ThingsWeStart. That was a much better name... I've already forgotten their other ones. Their previous favorite didn't sound as credible, either. Plus, ThingsWeStart is probably not the Ukrainian word for an item of ladies' underwear or something.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Persistent PostgreSQL inside Docker - myacce https://crondev.com/persistent-postgresql-inside-docker/ ====== jmnicolas A benchmark to see how much perfs you loose by virtualizing Postgres would have been nice. ~~~ kennu It would be interesting. But I would also note that Docker doesn't do virtualization. It uses e.g. mount namespaces to mount an existing Linux volume inside the container ([http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/namespaces.7.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/namespaces.7.html)). ------ koffiezet Isn't this docker 101?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mir vs. Wayland Drama commencing - iso-8859-1 https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts ====== iso-8859-1 IRC log: <http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
He can’t smoke weed and drink whiskey at least not on a podcast - marmot777 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/elon-musk-nasa-spacex-commercial-crew-safety-review/576997/ ====== mimixco The suggestion that Apollo astronauts were burned up on the launch pad might have something to do with weed (or whiskey) is really just too much.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Using Wayland from Rust, Part 1 - steveklabnik http://blog.levans.fr/rust_wayland_1-en.html ====== kibwen If you have any questions for the author, he's present over in the /r/rust thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3uwtz6/using_wayland_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3uwtz6/using_wayland_from_rust_first_steps/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Are there any other topics in FP then simple composition and CT - eskimobloood Most of the articles about functional Programming are either simple descriptions on composition and currying or about how a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. I wonder if there are no other topics in this field. ====== nlawalker The articles on [https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/) are pretty good, particularly the ones about "Railway-Oriented Programming" ([https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe- part2/](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe-part2/))	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
San Francisco Legalizing Airbnb - larryzhou http://dnwbl.blogspot.com/2013/01/san-francisco-legalizing-airbnb.html ====== larryzhou I want to make some money through Airbnb especially when the rent is so high in the city.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
UFO VPN claims zero-logs policy, leaks 20M user logs - DyslexicAtheist https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/ufo-vpn-data-exposure/ ====== outworlder Unsecured Elasticsearch, once again. ([https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo_vpn_database/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo_vpn_database/)) So ES has insecure defaults, I get that and it's been discussed to death. But who the heck, in this day and age, exposes clusters directly to internet traffic? I don't care what the defaults or security measures you have. DONT EXPOSE SERVERS. Place them inside a VPC, preferably a private one(in AWS parlance, behind a NAT GW). Use _something else_ to send traffic to them. If you are on AWS or similar (but not Azure I guess), add a load balancer to it. So now access would require creating a new load balancer, pointing to the servers in question, adding listeners on the desired ports, and configuring the appropriate security groups. Only then you can send external traffic. On the specific ports you configured on both listeners and security groups only. Do this everywhere and you are in a much better shape. You still need to configure servers correctly, but if you mess up, nothing happens, unless you mess up many other things in an error cascade. ~~~ dcow What's the difference between a VPC and iptables? I agree that you shouldn't expose insecure services. But why do I need to introduce an entire private address space and cloud-managed SDN services to achieve that goal? If it weren't industry status quo, I'd almost call you a shill for the union of ops teams working to secure jobs for years to come. Almost.. (; ~~~ llarsson I would think that the post you respond to either supposes a hosted service (you do not control the server and its iptables) or that it multiple layers of protection is good for something critical. But yes, if it's your own server, everyone should remember that regular Linux features are darn powerful, too. ------ SAI_Peregrinus According to The Register, UFO VPN is just white-labeleing a parent service[1]. The full list of compromised providers is thus UFO VPN, FAST VPN, Free VPN, Super VPN, Flash VPN, Secure VPN, and Rabbit VPN. [1] [https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo_vpn_database/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo_vpn_database/) ~~~ ffpip Never buy a VPN with these kinda names. You can tell they are shady from their names and websites. UFO, Secure, Pure VPN, etc ~~~ allarm Which name is better in your opinion? PIA? Nord? Express? All their web sites look alike as well. ~~~ merlinscholz IMO, this [https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/](https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/) is currently one of the best sources on deciding for a VPN provider. Or you could host your own on a cheap VPS. But, there are few reasons to actually use a VPN nowadays, there was a discussion on HN a few days back, but I cannot seem to find it at the moment. Edit: Found it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566390) ------ crusty This feels like someone scuttling the ship. \- VPN based in Hong Kong. \- VPN claims to not keep logs but does (ie. willing to descieve customers and secretly compromise their security). \- New national security law effecting Hong Kong speech and liberty. \- VPN likely to be challenged to turn over user data to Chinese authorities in the relatively near future. \- Hong Kongers acquiring VPN services in droves for the explicit purpose of avoiding Chinese state monitoring of their internet traffic and communications records. If I was working at UFO and saw the risks to my fellow citizens created not just by the company's poor security but their willingness to descieve customers I'd worry the company would quietly hand over whatever the Chinese authorities asked for - no "warrant canaries" or truth in advertising - and if probably look to throw a figurative grenade into their operations. If that meant data exposure, better now before they perfect the application of the new security laws then later when everyone feels comfortable and the CCP is just sucking up all of UFO's traffic and logs. ------ solarkraft VPN providers are something you should have especially high standards for. They are largely unregulated, can see all of your meta data and have an economical incentive to sell it (IIRC some big player has been caught doing that). If a provider shows even the slightest amount of fishiness, instantly discard them (NordVPN immediately comes to mind, with their weird influencer marketing campaign). ~~~ llsf How? I mean how do you measure VPN services? I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service? A VPN is seeing all your traffic, and you have to take their word that they do not log any of it? I use free tier AWS servers across the globe with wireguard. It might not be perfect, but I still prefer that than using a VPN service. ~~~ Causality1 The only standard you can really trust is when they actually get subpoenaed and don't have anything to give to the court. An example of this is Private Internet Access. ~~~ bitxbitxbitcoin Piggybacking off of this, Private Internet Access (PIA) has actually had their no logging policy "proven in court" via this method multiple times. [1][2] Full disclosure: I work at PIA. [1][https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-providers-no-logging-claims- tes...](https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-providers-no-logging-claims-tested-in- fbi-case-160312/) [2][https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no- logging-...](https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging- claims-proven-true-again-in-court-180606/) ~~~ pbhjpbhj Is there any way to prove that is not NSA, say, and set up to only catch the biggest fish, or to always present parallel construction for criminals caught this way? ~~~ bitxbitxbitcoin That's an interesting philosophical question.[1][2] [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_$philosophy$#Proving_a_negative) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence) ~~~ pbhjpbhj I like you. I tend towards pyrhonism (or maybe I don't!) so I appreciate that response. Degree of proof is a relative: Maybe a terror organisation use PIA, NSA go fishing for evidence PIA has nothing. Terror org assassinate NSA head. PIA could be a front, but NSA head had to be willing to lose his life to hide the fakery, and terror org wasn't a big enough fish ... more likely you're currently in a coma. Lots of places for false premises to creep in. Dial it back, is there a point where there'd ever be enough evidence? ------ grensley I wouldn't trust any VPN under China's sphere of influence. ~~~ hangonhn That's actually not an entirely crazy idea if you're trying to hide from Western governments. Are you more worried about the Chinese government coming after you? Likewise, if someone in China is trying to hide from the Chinese government, it might not be a bad idea to use an USA based VPN. Maybe string up a bunch of VPNs in regions that are at least somewhat hostile to each other and it might be too hard to track an IP back to its source. I guess trust no government and use their hostility towards each other to your advantage? Just an idea prompted by your comment. ~~~ maerF0x0 > That's actually not an entirely crazy idea if... Except that it gives them a direct avenue into your network for their own surveillance and other network attacks ... If you think comcast injecting their own JS into http pages is bad, wait you see what the d̶a̶r̶k̶ ̶a̶r̶m̶y̶ CPC could do with such power... ~~~ vangelis What's stopping any domestic TLAs from doing the same though? ~~~ maerF0x0 Its more about trust. I trust them to try their best to be benevolent ------ Mandatum Oeck claims no-logs and details how they've achieved that (they don't even have hard drives). Support is responsive, you'll be responded to by those who actually built the platform. They're planning support for WireGuard. Unfortunately they have admins in Australia which has some pretty hefty laws similar to those in the US (look at gag-orders issued, and recent responses to media outlets for publishing vetted and leaked data). You can find their intro post in Whirlpool forums. They configure a PXE and have a system in place for distributing the OS in each region (and thus each data center). For debugging issues they try to replicate things on a local environment and my assumption is if there's any networking issues, they likely have a node on the same data center they can remote to, to test connectivity issues - however functional issues require replication locally. No SSH access to the box. So I think for now, Oeck or Mullvad are good choices. I only wish these services did 1 thing differently - and that is, release a live video stream of their server farm's rack and video-document the entire process of compiling and shipping their hardware, as well as the systems in place for loading the OS to ensure no exfiltration data from malicious services or agents on the box. This could be done relatively cheaply - I'm surprised none of the VPN providers have yet. A fish-eye lens attached to a webcam on a rack would be cheap to install. It's the closest thing we have to proof a VPN server hasn't been owned without a zero-day. If you're using up-to-date services, a LEO, government or APT using a zero-day to own your server is really the only means of exfiltrating user data in this environment. ~~~ throwwwaway > I only wish these services did 1 thing differently - and that is, release a > live video stream of their server farm's rack This is security theatre. Anyone wanting to surreptitiously access the server farm only has to stream an alternate video to defeat this. ~~~ movedx But it still builds trust in the brand. No one is safe from a state actor. ~~~ throwwwaway Trying to gain trust against something you have no control over is the very definition of security theatre. ~~~ movedx Um, no. I'm saying that staff can be observed as behaving correctly, professionally, and more. This would build trust in the brand from multiple perspective, not just security. There are been a few cases in which this has turned around public opinion re: trust. ------ novok I've come to the sad realization if you want anything approaching no logs, you're going to have to use something slow like tor, or you're going to have to do the illegal thing and make a botnet. VPNs are only useful for avoiding ISP / local network surveillance like comcast, your workplace, your school, airports, etc and to avoid DCMA scare letters. Making your own with a VPS is worse, since VPSs log on some level and directly forward the DCMA scare letters to you. ~~~ solarkraft What about chaining VPNs? Even at 2 they'd have to cooperate to unmask your traffic, right? Somewhere in the back of my mind is stored that minimaxir does this, but I couldn't confirm it with a quick search. Edit: I was actually thinking of mirimir. ~~~ amscanne Provider#1 only knows all traffic goes to provider#2. Provider#2 knows everywhere your traffic goes. They don’t know your IP, but you need to login, so they know who you are anyways. ~~~ pbhjpbhj I think you need 3 levels. First level gets you to the second level. 2nd gets access to web-based email and bitcoin or single-use credit card payment to get the third level, which accesses data. Obviously you use assumed identity. With only two layers you'd need to access emails, say, for account confirmation direct from your own system; with 3 you put a VPN in that gap. Do VPNs re-pack and modify the timing on packages they pass on to clients? It seems like they're need to if they're too avoid coordination attacks. I'm recalling how a research paper showed an extraordinary high number of pages visited (80%) over HTTPS could be identified using page size alone. If a TLA is watching all traffic into and out of a VPN's server can they pair upstream traffic to downstream clients at all? ------ chmod775 This was necessarily going to happen at some point and I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to not blindly trust "no logs" claims. ~~~ boogies This isn't the first time VPNs with those claims have turned out to have them, they've been used as court evidence IIRC. Edit: [https://proprivacy.com/privacy-news/no-logs-ipvanish- hands-l...](https://proprivacy.com/privacy-news/no-logs-ipvanish-hands-logs- homeland-security) ------ orliesaurus What's the most trustworthy VPN that HN users recommend? My 3 year subscription to my local one is about to run out! Looking for advice on what is trusted nowadays! ~~~ nullc No such thing. You would be better off renting an inexpensive VPS and running your own VPN on it. Public VPN services have to be the one of the greatest lemon markets to have ever existed: You want people's private data? People will _pay_ you to give it to them. Go ahead and sell the service for less than it costs due to the boatloads of data that you get. People realize this, so you end up getting a disproportionate number of customers that don't worry about you getting their data because they're only using the service to behave abusively... which drives up costs. So an honest provider has to deal with dishonest competition selling below cost and a customer base that is saturated with problem customers because good customers are savy enough to avoid VPNs. ~~~ SAI_Peregrinus Running your own VPN provides no privacy, since you're the only user. Of course other VPNs don't provide privacy either. The belief that they do is due to marketing, and misunderstanding what the "Private" part of VPN means: it means that two non-publicly routable IP networks (10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16) are virtually joined into one network. VPN companies took advantage of this (and that the connection is usually encrypted) to imply that they offer a privacy product. The main use of a commercial VPN is to bypass region locks and other legal controls that depend on location. Pick a VPN provider (or VPS host) in a jurisdiction that won't cooperate with your home law enforcement. Assume the VPN provider spies on all your traffic. ~~~ mlthoughts2018 This is such a deeply misleading statement. Privacy fundamentally is about keeping things private ... _from someone_. If that someone is everyone, then nothing is private. Any sufficiently powerful entity can just overpower you, torture you into submission, guarantee a backdoor into a system you thought was cryptographically private, etc. I for one do pay for a VPN service, because it keeps my home traffic stream private from _some people_ \- namely my ISP - with high probability. It also obfuscates various types of traffic I generate and makes it harder, though I agree not impossible, to collate my traffic into a usable form for spying agencies. For me that’s easily worth paying ~$100/year for someone else to manage, and if they base their business reputation on not collecting logs, etc., there’s enough incentive to trust that while also staying vigilant to verify what I can and switch providers if they are shown to be lying. Self-hosting a vpn is utterly not an alternative for my use case, not even for technical reasons as I am an engineer who works on production web services all day. Just from a cost effectiveness / value POV, third party vpn vendors are a good solution for me. ~~~ SAI_Peregrinus Right, I overspoke. It provides no _extra_ privacy, against anyone except your ISP. If they're the threat, AND you're able to safely assume that the VPN provider is less of a threat, THEN it provides some privacy. ------ notyourwork The old saying trust but verify always seems to come up. Companies claim x and we find it to be untrue. They apologize, share statement they will do better and the cycle continues. Is anyone else tired of the tomfoolery? ~~~ tremon Do you have a suggestion on how to verify the claims of a company you only interact with over the Internet? (edit: not that I disagree with you, I honestly don't see a practical way to do that. It's not like security seals have proven their worth in pixels either) ~~~ Enginerrrd The sensible thing to do is to assume a cynical mind. Unfortunately, with stuff like this, you'll probably be more often right then wrong, though you may never find out. ------ scalableUnicon With WireGuard, it is easy these days to setup a VPN on our own server([https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-set-up-a-vpn- server...](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-set-up-a-vpn-server-at- home/)). Obviously it won't give us anonymity, but it is a good choice for security when browsing from public wifi. ------ neurostimulant On a reddit thread about this news, they mentioned that the company behind ufo vpn (dreamfii hk limited) is actually owned by lippo limited, which is owned by lippo group. I can't find any information on the web that back this though. But if this is true, this kind of shenanigans (saying they don't keep log but actually keep them anyway, then leaks it due to sheer incompetence) is not surprising considering lippo group's well known history of corporate malpractice and screwing up their customers and partners alike. How companies this shrewd (so shady and well known they became a meme) continue to survives (and thrives!) is beyond me. Maybe there is money in screwing people after all. ------ ornxka I don't know why anybody ever cared about logging policies. How would you even know if they keep logs or don't, or what they do with them if they do? ~~~ jliptzin You can’t possibly know. You have to just assume all VPN companies are logging your activity indefinitely regardless of what they say. Though I suppose you’d rather go with a VPN company that claims it doesn’t do any logging, over one that says it does. ~~~ dhaavi Exactly. The only way is to make logs useless to begin with. See my comment earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148) ------ motohagiography Know what's valuable? Internet traffic from people who think it's important enough to hide, and who have technical skills to get jobs with them. The value of privacy viewed this way would mean that a truly private VPN service would be hugely expensive, like the way a new Rolls Royce is priced at 50x that of what you need to get from A to B. ------ vmception VPN providers are just internet resellers with a side business of affiliate marketing other VPN providers comparing “privacy” claims and acting unbiased I’m amazed at the smart people that fall for that The best test are court cases where investigators were stonewalled by a particular VPN provider If you dont want the US knowing something but dont mind China knowing something, Express VPN got you ------ sys_64738 More importantly is that all this internet traffic is routed through China. Explicit MITM attacks are a courtesy. ------ mywacaday Why would you trust a VPN when any TLA/CIA/NSA/FBI can set up 1/10/100 options relatively cheaply. Unless you go through TOR or use a false MAC address you have no guarantees, even then fingerprinting and fake TOR exits points are a serious risk if you are trying to be truly anonymous. ------ thecleaner I think that at this point it is far easier to just setup a socks proxy with an vloud based machine than to research which firms have shady practices and which dont. I went into a womrhole over NordVPN vs PIA vs ProtonVpn and then just went with a proxy server. Costs peanuts with the cloud compute ecosystem. ~~~ gruez >then just went with a proxy server. Costs peanuts with the cloud compute ecosystem. The problem with personally operated VPN servers is that all the traffic ties back to a single user: you. This is fine if you're on a malicious network and need secure exit node for your data, but for anonymity (eg. ad tracking, DMCA) it's objectively worse. ------ paulie_a If they promised no logs why did they take the extra steps to log. That's the opposite of a lazy mistake. ------ M2Ys4U How can you tell when VPN provider is lying when they say they don't collect logs? They say that they don't collect logs. ~~~ dhaavi The only way is to make logs useless to begin with. See my comment earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148) ------ noxer [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21326484](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21326484) still valid ------ neycoda Why does anyone think with the prevalence of "free" VPN that these companies aren't storing and selling the crap out of your info? ------ kristopolous Entrusting a third party to only play the role of protecting your privacy always sounds like a dangerously bad idea. They've got no dog in the fight. ------ jijji if you want a vpn ur better off running squid on a $5/month vps box , less likely this kind of nonsense happens ------ scoot_718 You can't trust firms hosted in HK anymore. It's as tainted as China is. ------ LargoLasskhyfv Must have had an encounter with an unidentified filing object... ------ HungryHarold There needs to be a serious rethink of VPN services ~~~ dhaavi We did exactly that. See my comment earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148) ------ hdjrkrmfkt Can you chain two VPNs? ~~~ bitxbitxbitcoin Yes you can. ~~~ dhaavi While you can, this is really hard. Let us do it for you. See my comment earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23881148) ------ strombofulous Can the title be updated to include the name of the "firm" (article says "Hong Kong-based VPN provider called UFO VPN")? @dang ------ triceratops @dang: can the title be changed to "UFO VPN claims zero-logs policy, leaks 20M user logs". So users don't have to click through to the story to find out which firm? ~~~ dang Ok done. Edit: I also changed the URL from [https://www.hackread.com/vpn-firm-zero- logs-policy-leaks-20-...](https://www.hackread.com/vpn-firm-zero-logs-policy- leaks-20-million-user-logs/) to what seems to be the original source. ~~~ triceratops Thanks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Everything Became the Culture War - paulpauper https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/02/culture-war-liberals-conservatives-trump-2018-222095 ====== sbierwagen >Politics has always been adversarial. Traditionally, though, we’ve had a fairly robust national consensus about a fairly broad set of goals—a strong defense, a decent safety net, What? The "consensus" on the safety net is 70 years old. There are people alive today who were around when senators were denouncing Social Security as vile Bolshevism.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deja Vu: Google Settles Age Discrimination Lawsuit for $11M - rmason https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2019/07/20/deja-vu-google-settles-age-discrimination-lawsuit-for-11-million/#456d9f5971f1 ====== btown > In 2010, Google settled a lawsuit filed by a one-time Silicon Valley > superstar, Brian Reid, then 52, who was hired by Google in 2002 to serve as > director of operations and director of engineering. Reid was transferred two > years later to head up what was supposed to be new program to retain > engineers. He was given no budget or staff and the program was quickly > disbanded. Reid left Google in 2004 with a two-month severance package. I wonder if this was the basis for the similar storyline in the Silicon Valley show. ------ rmason It's clear why tech companies keep practicing age discrimination, the fines aren't meaningful. ~~~ thrwaway34847 I'm perplexed by age discrimination (I don't get it) so I was excited when you wrote "It's clear why tech companies keep practicing age discrimination," \-- I thought you'd finally give the reason. You didn't. What's the reason? What do they get out of it? ~~~ kop316 From what I have read here, the underlying theory is that someone younger doesn't have kids/spouse/family/etc. So they are more willing to work long hours (I guess without pay since salaried?). Also the theory is that someone older means they would want more money for their experience. Note that I don't actually know, this seems to be the running theory as I understand it. ~~~ bigmit37 Younger workers also seem to want/care more about recognition and praise and are willing to work those extra hours without monetary compensation. ------ jammygit How exactly do you prove that you didn’t get an interview because your LinkedIn photo had some grey hairs or wrinkles? ~~~ brooklyn_ashey Are you asking because this happened to you? You can subpoena the CVs of the people invited to the interview and you can cite the hiring/interview practices of the company and its record on age-related hiring and firing. That said, it's usually after the interview and rejection that you bring a successful case. If your point was that so many people over a certain age don't even get asked to the interview in the first place, and that's where the discrimination gets most people, you'd be right! In that many "elderly" (wink/over 30) workers have some valuable experience and maybe some great ideas, not to mention wonderful facility, we may have to consider: does high level work actually need doing?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stripe Launches UK private beta - lifeisstillgood Just got my mail - looks nice folks. And the timing is perfect - was about to unleash my inner jasonkester and patio11 on a side project! ====== oliverdavenport This isn't new - I was invited to the UK beta in early April.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Uber and Lyft can be just as bad as taxis when it comes to racial discrimination - buckbova http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/31/13478102/uber-lyft-race-gender-discrimination-study-findings-mit-stanford ====== hackuser Many repeat the story that Lyft, Uber, etc. improve service to minority communities. Was there ever data supporting that claim, or was it based on PR and anecdote?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: what are some essential theoretical computer science books? - zeitg3ist ====== primitivesuave Sipser's Theory of Computation is the closest thing I could think of to an all-round essential. ------ ddp [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Game Developers Are Flocking to Sony and Fleeing From Microsoft - keepitkosher http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/sony-indies/?cid=co6980084 ====== bashinator It's interesting how Sony seems to be finally "getting it" with regard to attracting developers. I just read about how they interviewed software developers from a bunch of different companies when designing the PS4 architecture, rather than making it a hardware-led project a la PS1/2/3. That would explain why it's a less "innovative", but perhaps much saner system than previous generations. ------ chrisbennet Whatever happened to "developers! developers! developers!"? * (*) famous Steve Balmer quote	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: HN Sakura – see quick rising/falling HN posts before they're gone - dosy https://hnsakura.xyz/ ====== dosy The Sakura season is short-lived. So too are some posts on HN. The rise sharply (blossom), only to fall even faster Off the rankings forever. This re-ranks HN by how fast the posts are moving through the HN rankings. A chance to see the "fringe" posts that rise quickly and then are swallowed up. A sort of reverse HN. A way to catch the HN Sakuras before they are gone forever. Hope you enjoy. ~~~ kseistrup That's a nice idea. Does the UI auto-refresh, or do I have to reload? ~~~ dosy You must reload. In my experience the Sakura rankings do not change very often, maybe once every couple minutes. I guess I could add a meta refresh on the frame but I guess I also don’t want to overload my server without user directed demand. Hmm, trade off. I think I will not auto reload for now. Thanks for idea tho. ~~~ kseistrup That's fine. Thanks. ------ O_H_E Oh, nice	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
FOUC with Firefox Quantum - vinayakkulkarni After all the hype, I finally downloaded Firefox Quantum and the first thing i noticed, while opening GitHub, FOUC happened! I was like, OK, it might be an anomaly but happened again on multiple websites with loads of css & javascript. ====== mtmail If anybody else is wondering: "FOUC stands for Flash of Unstyled Content." [https://webkit.org/blog/66/the-fouc-problem/](https://webkit.org/blog/66/the- fouc-problem/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What tools do you still run on DOSBOX and why? - neatcoder ====== binarydinosaur ShareGenius - Came free on UK ComputerShopper magazine in early 90's. Still nothing as good. QLAY for DOS (Sinclair QL emulator).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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