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Nationwide internet outage affects CenturyLink customers - elihu https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/28/nationwide-internet-outage-affects-centurylink-customers.html ====== elihu The Portland area got an emergency phone alert that 911 service was down in some areas. (Supposedly, the outage only affected areas around Vancouver, Washington.) [https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/aa85iv/911_lines_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/aa85iv/911_lines_are_down/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Heartbleed, 2 Weeks Later: A Graphical Report - zhongjiewu http://blog.trustlook.com/2014/04/24/heartbleed-two-weeks-later-4-4-ssl-enabled-websites-still-vulnerable/ ====== JohnTHaller For anyone who thinks it doesn't matter that apps like Candy Crush Saga are vulnerable to heartbleed, remember that the majority of users use the same password for multiple sites and apps. So gaining access to their video game password can give a baddie access to their email or bank account password. ------ random3 3D charts with perspective ftw	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
CPanel To Add IPv6 Support in 2013 - danyork http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2013/01/cpanel-to-add-ipv6-support-in-2013/ ====== bede If you're tired of cPanel and looking for a lighter weight alternative, Virtualmin has served me well for the last couple of years and it's had IPv6 support since 2010. The website doesn't inspire confidence, but the project appears well maintained, and even the GPL version (which I use) is very capable and has so far been rock solid. <http://www.virtualmin.com/> ~~~ SwellJoe Thanks for mentioning, and using, Virtualmin! We're not very good designers, I'm afraid. We're aware of our deficiencies in the area of UX and design (in Virtualmin/Webmin/Cloudmin themselves and the websites), and have been working hard on a new design for Virtualmin (with outside help). It's slow going, due to the size and complexity of the codebase, at about half a million lines of code developed over 14 years, but it is happening. But, as you note, it is definitely well-maintained...we do a new release of Virtualmin and Cloudmin roughly monthly, and a new release of Webmin every couple of months. I'll also mention that we have an active community of several tens of thousands of users, and a full-time person working on providing great support in our forums and ticket tracker and on twitter, so it's usually very easy to get help, whether you're using the Open Source version or the commercial version. And, while Virtualmin is lighter weight than cPanel, it does quite a bit more, particularly for developers and technical users. Being Open Source, the types of folks who use it tend to be a lot more demanding of some types of functionality and behavior (like being able to edit config files outside of Virtualmin). IPv6 is one example of our users being a _lot_ more demanding and technically advanced than cPanel; I'm shocked they could hold off this long. We were being hounded at conferences and in our forums about the issue years ago. ~~~ zokier I just went to poke around your demo, and noticed that some strings appear to be corrupted: <http://imgur.com/9mXDr> that's the status view in the system information page. ~~~ SwellJoe Thanks for the heads up. The demo gets fiddled with, and the language changed (which is what happened here; language changed to something your system isn't equipped to deal with; we still have a number of non-Unicode translations which can make systems without that language/typeface look goofy), pretty regularly, so it gets re-imaged a couple times a day. I'll kick off a re-image manually. ------ beefsack cPanel is one of the reasons why I became good at using a terminal to administer servers. ------ X-Istence cPanel should have started this much much sooner: Much like Y2K, this issue requires a proactive solution rather than a reactive response. That is why cPanel has been working diligently on research and analysis to incorporate IPv6 support into our products. A proactive solution would have been having this already implemented by the time that IPv6 day happened last year in 2012... cPanel has been promising some sort of IPv6 support for years now, and so far it still hasn't come. I guess it is good that they are publicly committing to it now rather than just in the support emails sent to them. I do feel that it is too late, and they could have been way more up front about it. ------ whichdan Are there any good hosting control panels at all right now? Like others have said, cPanel's interface is extremely mediocre, Plesk has turned into a total mess after Parallels acquired it, H-Sphere was equally confusing before the acquisition, DirectAdmin is stuck in the stone age, ZPanel is written in PHP4.. I tried out WebFaction's custom panel and wasn't a huge fan of it, and NearlyFreeSpeech.net is nice, but doesn't offer anything for resellers. ------ ck2 11.36 is going to be quite an upgrade and I hope it doesn't break things [http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/Chang...](http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/ChangeLog/CPanelVersion1136) The new UI in 11.34 is bad enough ~~~ benesch CPanel needs to hire a) some decent UX guys and b) some decent English- speaking translators. I've used dozens of CPanel-based shared hosting providers—enough to deduce that their product _must_ be mostly technically sound. Everything seems to get configured properly, there are no major security holes, etc. etc. But the interface downright _sucks_. It's slightly more polished (read: glossy) than it was about five years ago, but still an unorganized, cluttered list of unhelpful icons. Plus the text throughout the UI constantly misuses idioms (or sounds like it was written by an eight-year-old). I know it's de facto standard, but a little cleanup could go a long way. ~~~ SwellJoe _"Plus the text throughout the UI constantly misuses idioms (or sounds like it was written by an eight-year-old)."_ Imagine the frustration developers of other control panels feel when users expect, and occasionally demand, those misused idioms be used by everyone, because "cPanel is the standard". ------ jpswade This has been on request since 2005... [http://forums.cpanel.net/f145/make-cpanel-ipv6-compatible- ca...](http://forums.cpanel.net/f145/make-cpanel-ipv6-compatible- case-10334-a-35453.html) ------ meaty Joy - now that's another protocol it can suck over... cPanel is a positively horrible piece of software.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Map interfaces from enhanced disorientation to playful geo-imagination - chippy http://www.jammersplit.de/displayce/index.html ====== SchizoDuckie nice tech demo, I would say, but it hurts my brain. ------ TrevorJ the fourth one is really impressive.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I. - scottlocklin https://gen.medium.com/the-bs-industrial-complex-of-phony-a-i-44bf1c0c60f8 ====== atoav At the Biennale in Venice (one of the most important art shows there is) I saw a work which looked like this: There was a metal frame holding two glas plates with ventian sediment inbetween (sand, soil, mud). In the center there was another metal frame which formed a hole. There also were to PCB boards with ATMEGA micro controllers. In the text the artist claimed she controlled the biome of the soil with an AI using various sensors and pumps. This was clearly a fake, as you could see nothing like that on the PCB. Accidentally (?) she managed to create the best representation of AI I have seen in art: all that counts is that you _call_ it AI even if it is a simple algorithm. AI is the phrase behind which magic hides and people _love_ magic. Everything that has the aura of “humans don’t fully understand how it works in detail” _will_ be used by charlartans, snake oil salesmen and conmen. If even artists slap “AI” onto their works to sell it, you know we are past the peak now. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne >> Accidentally (?) she managed to create the best representation of AI I have seen in art: all that counts is that you call it AI even if it is a simple algorithm. Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm". So are many other AI algorithms, some of which are simple enough to be understood so well that most people don't recognise them as AI anymore: search algorithms like depth- breadth- or best-first search, game-playing algorithms like alpha-beta minimax, gradient descent/ hill climb, are the examples that readily come to mind. I think the above article and your comment are assuming that, for an algorithm to be "AI" it must be very complicated and difficult to understand. This is common enough to have a name: "the AI effect". A few years down the line I bet people will say that "this is not AI, it's just deep learning". There's no reason for AI algorithms to be complicated. Very simple algorithms can create enormous complexity, even infinite complexity. The state of deterministic systems with even a couple of parameters can become impossible to predict after a small number of steps if they have the chaos property. Language seems to be the application of a finite set of rules on a finite vocabulary to produce an infinite set of utterances. Complexity arises from very simple sources, in nature. ~~~ atoav The point was that her PCB wasn’t connected to anything at all. She claimed there were pumps and sensors, but there was literally nothing. There were cables etc and it certainly would fool someone who has no idea of circuit design and electronics, but I happen to know a bit about it and the circuit almost certainly didn’t do what it claimed it did. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne Ah, I see. I must have misread your comment. I thought you meant that the PCB didn't have anything like (a hardware implementation of?) an AI algorithm on it, not that it had nothing at all on it. ------ dreamcompiler This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve _every_ problem. Reality set in when we figured out: 1\. It didn't scale and 2\. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, _very_ hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%. Nowadays we don't seem to have problem 1 quite so much, but problem 2 is still there in a big way. Witness self-driving cars, where driving on an interstate highway in broad daylight is easy, but driving through a snow-covered construction zone at night is impossible. Or just dealing with a bicyclist on the road without killing them. We're not going to have AGI any time soon. ~~~ tintor AGI is not needed for self-driving. None of what is mentioned above is a deal-breaker for self-driving car service: \- lidar at night works just fine \- plenty of cities with no or very little snow \- construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes \- self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclists than manually driven cars ~~~ cm2187 > _plenty of cities with no or very little snow_ But what happens that rare day it snows? Hundreds of deads? Cars get recalled for much less than that. ~~~ laichzeit0 Drive it in manual mode like we do right now? I mean even an autonomous car that could handle 80% of normal driving just fine would be great. And by 80% I'm talking about driving on a freeway without crashing into a barrier in broad daylight. ~~~ mcguire Gonna suck for those people who don't own cars and are relying on the fleets of privately-owned pseudo-taxis. ------ pron In 1949, some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Weiner, one of the leading minds of the time, was convinced that AI (AGI as you may call it) or a full understanding of the brain is no more than five years away. Alan Turing thought Weiner was delusional, and that it may take as much as fifty years. Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence. I don't see any fundamental barrier preventing us from achieving AI, but if someone from the future came to me and said that AI will be achieved in 2130, I would find that quite reasonable. If they said it will be achieved in 2030 or 2230, I would find those equally reasonable. Our current scientific understanding is that we have no idea how far we are from AI, we don't know what the challenges are, and we don't even know what intelligence is. We certainly have no idea whether the approach we are now taking (statistical clustering, AKA deep learning) is a path that leads to AI or not. In the sixties, the leading minds of that time were also working hard on the problem and did not find it any further away from us as we do today. That some people are optimistic is irrelevant. The fact is that we just have no idea. ~~~ cr0sh > Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence. That's arguable: For instance, we have the entire connectome of c. elegans mapped out; we can easily simulate it, and it seems to act the same as the actual nematode. So, in one sense, we are at that level. However, we still have no clue how such a simple system actually works to produce the level of "intelligence" it has. So in that sense, we're not at that level at all. > We certainly have no idea whether the approach we are now taking > (statistical clustering, AKA deep learning) is a path that leads to AI or > not. One clue we do have: We may not be on the right path with that method; it's something the "grandfather" (or whatever) of AI (Hinton) has mentioned, and which I have stated before about... That is, the fact that we currently have no understanding of the mechanism by which biological neural networks implement anything like "backpropagation". From what we currently understand, as I currently understand it, we have yet to find such a mechanism that would allow for it. It's also one of the leading reasons why our current artificial neural networks consume so much power, as compared to biological systems... ~~~ pron > For instance, we have the entire connectome of c. elegans mapped out... So, > in one sense, we are at that level. Well, whatever "intelligence" C elegans has, I think everyone would agree that it's far from insect-level; it's microsocopic-nematode-level. But I am not sure a _simulation_ of C elgans rises to the level of "artificial". As you note, we don't understand it yet. But we may have already built systems that are more "intelligent" (whatever that means) than C elegans, and we may have done that decades ago. > From what we currently understand, as I currently understand it, we have yet > to find such a mechanism that would allow for it. True, but our path to artificial intelligence may not end up going through neural networks at all. We've not achieved flight by mimicking biological flight. I'm not saying it won't, either, but we cannot say for sure that it will. We really don't know. ------ YeGoblynQueenne >> Deep learning algorithms have proven to be better than humans at spotting lung cancer, a development that if applied at scale could save more than 30,000 patients per year. It's not easy to scale deep learning because deep neural nets have a very strong tendency to overfit to their training dataset and are very bad at generalising outside their training dataset. In a medical context this means that, while a particular deep learning image classifier might be very good at recognising cancer in images of patients' scans collected from a specific hospital, the same classifier will be much worse in the same task on images from a different hospital (or even from a different department in the same hospital). To overcome this limitation, the only thing anyone knows that works to some extent is to train deep neural nets with a lot of data. If you can't avoid overfitting, at least you can try to overfit to a big enough sample that most common kinds of instances in your domain of interest will be included in it. So basically to scale a diagnostic system based on deep neural net image classification to the nation level one would have to train a deep learning image classifier with the data from all hospitals in that nation. This is not an easy task, to say the least. It's not undoable, but it's not as simple as having someone at Hospital X download a pretrained model in Tensorflow and train its last few layers on some CT scans. ~~~ bodono This statement is false, as recently demonstrated by DeepMind on retinal scans. Not only did they generalize outside of the training dataset _but they were able to use the features learned by the model on an entirely different type of scanning device_. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0107-6.epdf?autho...](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0107-6.epdf?author_access_token=PAbvHEuv_YYmrPVbG5HqKdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0P43NEH20hFuvBoJk6cvICihn8kmL6tmejFlnuPlbT_0KmJgK6N07SPh_ZLy0Nxb0-LAGIDBaH1fjJTkD9ahUEQpRlEudtlG9E1v3ca9xNQcQ%3D%3D) "Moreover, we demonstrate that the tissue segmentations produced by our architecture act as a device-independent representation; referral accuracy is maintained when using tissue segmentations from a different type of device." ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne In the paper you link to, the researchers trained an image classifier on data collected from 32 sites of the Moorfiel NHS trust. The trained model was tested on, presumably held-out, data from the same dataset. This is an example of scaling a model beyond a dataset collected from a single site. It is not contrary to what I say in my comment. The researchers further tested their model on data obtained from a different device than it was originally trained on. This data was collected from the same hospital sites. The original model performed poorly on this new data and was re-trained to improve its performance. This does not demonstrate an ability to generalise to unseen data- only an ability to adjust a model to new data, by re-training. ~~~ bodono It contradicts your statement: "it's not as simple as having someone at Hospital X download a pretrained model in Tensorflow and train its last few layers on some CT scans" Because in this case it _was_ as easy as taking a model from a totally different modality and retraining the first (in this case) few layers to accommodate the new device. Furthermore the original training used 15k scans and the retraining only required 152 scans. This is totally reasonable and clear evidence of transfer and generalization. Moreover, even human operators require retraining on new devices! ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne My Tensorflow comment was a bit unclear. I meant that you can't just download a generic model like the kind that is readily available, e.g. one trained on ImageNet or CIFAR etc, and expect that you can retrain it easily and get a diagnostic tool that is competitive with an expert. The models in the paper you link were specifically trained on medical imaging data. My point is that you need a lot of work to make this work even for one hospital, let alone scale to many, even more so scale at the level of a national health service. I don't see that the paper you link contradicts this. Edit: if I may summarise: I said "it's not simple" not "you can't do it". Transfer learning is not generalisation to unseen data. If the pre-trained model and the end model don't have any common instances it doesn't work [Edit: "don't have any instances with a common feature space" is more clear]. Also, you're talking about generalisation to new devices. My understanding is that this is only one aspect of the difficulties with scaling image recognition for medical diagnoses to data from different sites. ------ Barrin92 In my opinion the term intelligence itself is misplaced for machine learning tasks. Every problem that is solved with ML and "big data" appears to me to be a perception problem (which wouldn't be surprising because the mechanism is inspired by human vision, not cognition, which it lends itself to naturally). As a specific example, a few months ago or so openai released their text generation tool and branded it as "too dangerous too release", claiming it could , with the help of AI, generate believable texts. But what it generated was simply natural sounding gibberish. There were plenty of sentences in the text along the lines of "before the first human walked the earth, humans did.."" What, for me at least, lies at the core of intelligence is understanding semantics. An intelligent system can recognise the sentence above as flawed because it could extract _meaning_. Everything coming out of the field of ML seems to me just like sophisticated statistics. In many ways symbolic AI to me still seems more valuable, profit aside. ~~~ Wiretrip In the text generation tool outlined above (and indeed many of the convnet- based visual networks), the hidden layers are there precisely to extract 'meaning'. The lower layers (closer to the source input) deal with syntax and feed upwards to hidden layers that extract semantic features, which in turn feed upwards to more layers, each with a bigger overview of the semantic features and thus ultimately the context. That's the idea anyway. ~~~ foldr >the hidden layers are there precisely to extract 'meaning That is just wishful thinking, no? I mean, there is no particular reason to think that the hidden layers will actually do this with any high degree of success. ------ xiaolingxiao I can attest. while doing research in a T1 university, all the professors were mildly disgusted by the hype pushed out by startups, and even Google's own internal marketing department. Nonetheless they too are minting the same nonsense in the "introduction" part of academic research, it's a clear case of everyone is playing the game, so "I have to play or be left behind." ~~~ ImaCake I used to work on fundamental molecular microbiology. We looked at what happened when DNA replication went wrong in E. coli. What I used to do when writing or speaking about it was to start with cancer or antibiotic resistance as if anyone in my field gave a crap about either of those topics. Sure, we do care about those things in the broad sense, but we didn't consider ourselves to be on the front line of solving either of those problems. ------ solidasparagus The author seems confused about what artificial general intelligence is. People have not meaningfully moved towards AGI - it's still a distant pipe dream. The closest we've gotten is probably a Dota bot that's pretty good as long as you give the bot a huge advantage. Which is an incredible piece of technology, but about as close to AGI as an ant is to a human. ~~~ Causality1 Not even an ant. If AGI is a human then what we have is the equivalent of synthetic RNA molecules. ~~~ klmr What? Ants don’t have general intelligence, and even ant colonies’ decision making (= simple swarm intelligence) is readily replicable in a programmed system, and has been, for a while. I don’t think a gradual scale is very helpful because I don’t think that the progression from current-generation AI to AGI is going to be gradual (it will require at least one paradigm shift). That said, if you want to compare AI progress to actual animals then our current-gen AI _way_ beyond ants. Note that, while we haven’t fully mapped the neurons/connectome of ants yet, this is unnecessary to emulate their decision-making power. And we _have_ mapped (and can simulate) the full connectome of simpler animals (e.g. _C. elegans_ , _P. dumerilii_ ) so we’re definitely a long way beyond single molecules. ~~~ computerex If you are referring to the open worm project, then the conclusions you have drawn are exactly the opposite of what I have drawn. As I understand it open worm is a hodge podge of statistical and numerical methods to try and replicate the sensorimotor behavior of c elegans. Open worm is neither complete, accurate nor elegant, despite knowing c elegans connectome and having mapped the some 900 cells in the worms body. ~~~ klmr I wasn’t explicitly referring to that, it’s just one of many efforts. Anyway, you’re certainly right that none of the existing efforts are “elegant” but that’s hardly relevant. What matters is that the connectome is fully mapped, and that we _can_ accurately simulate arbitrary behaviour. The issue with projects such as OpenWorm is that they have so far not been successful in generating new _insight_ (this may be connected to your issue with lack of elegance) but this is distinct from being able to accurately simulate behaviour. Another issue is that of simulating the physical environment because — surprise, surprise — simulating the worm neurons without any realistic external stimuli is a pretty pointless exercise for most purposes. But pick any set of stimuli you like, feed it into the models and you get a response that corresponds exactly with empirical observation. I’d therefore definitely call the neuronal model itself accurate and complete. ~~~ computerex No actually we can't do arbitrary simulation of c elegans. Can you link me towards a publication which contains validated results supporting your assertion? ------ derka0 The hype is BS but narrow AI in the context of automation is here. Job are so specialised nowadays (driving, cashiers, fulfilment, paralegal, diagnostician ...) that a narrow AI (i.e. a glorified automation algorithm) that can do just 10% better at a cheaper cost will take down the job. The confusion is real (AI, AGI, terminator...) but pattern recognition softwares powered with big data has already proven business value and are here to stay. ------ mindgam3 > The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers > have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called > “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how some technologists actually believe AGI is not just inevitable but around the corner. When to my naive perspective (as a machine learning rank amateur but with several decades experience as a professional human being) all I see is machines that can do some form of pattern recognition, but nothing resembling the common sense that the words “general intelligence” seemed to indicate at one point. Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does. ~~~ roenxi The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have fallen to what is basically pattern match and tree search. Extrapolating the trend of the last 30 years, there _is_ evidence that computers will be able to solve every task a human can using pattern matching. If that isn't AGI, it might turn out to be better than intelligence. The technological future is unknowable, so believing AGI is certain is too much. But believing it certainly isn't around the corner is also too little. If computers can do anything a human can intellectually, they have reached AGI. The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. If someone finds an objective function for deciding what decision parameters are important AGI could be upon us very quickly. As a postcript, I think people radically overestimate human intelligence. ~~~ rhacker I kinda see it this way: AGI is Data in Star Trek TNG - trying to be human, making decisions to want to be alive, eventually dreaming and finally using an emotion chip. Another alternative here would be Moriarty or the various doctors in Voyager. AI is the Ship in TNG - lots of heuristics to figure out what the user is trying to do. Past usage of commands and relating major events outside the ship with algorithms for battle, life support, etc.. Events categorized by importance and automatic handling to save lives when necessary. Basically an extremely advanced Siri that doesn't really misunderstand you - while at the same time not really caring about you or knowing anything about being alive other than the priorities built into its software. I think for the next 100 years we're going to have AI progressing like the ship in TNG. I don't think we'll have AGI until maybe 100-200 years. Then again when I was born no one had a fucking clue eventually we would have something like the iPhone and talk to someone in China with <1 sec lag. So my estimates could easily drop to half. ~~~ TomVDB Your comment reminds me of this xkcd cartoon: [https://xkcd.com/1425/](https://xkcd.com/1425/) It's 5 years old now (coincidentally the time span quoted to develop a solution), but recognizing a bird was already considered a solved problem 3 years ago, less than 2 years after the publication of the cartoon. Predicting the future is hard. ~~~ AstralStorm Surprisingly, recognizing a bird is much harder when you count rare species and running birds. Thus, sparse data. Does it recognize penguins too? AIs today still fail at it. Some folks were trying to train one to match endangered species and they had to pull mighty tricks to have some 70% accuracy. I think it was here on HN some time ago, but can't recall a link. ~~~ visarga And yet, average humans can classify even fewer species. ~~~ tomp With the same amount of training/data as NNs? I doubt it... ~~~ TomVDB Do you take into account billions of years of training due to evolution? ~~~ tomp Technically that’s network architecture, not training data... admittedly though humans are “pre-trained” from birth. ------ lkrubner I've been collecting examples of where the ads that I see are based on extremely simple algorithms of the type that could have easily been supported 30 years ago, and yet I keep reading articles that suggest that the advertising industry is deploying sophisticated tools to target ads to me. I wrote about this recently: \------------------------- Despite much talk about Machine Learning and AI improving advertising results, what I’m seeing is getting worse and worse. Despite billions invested, the ads shown to me are much less relevant than that ads that I saw on the Web 10 years ago. I hired 3 developers from Fullstack Academy. They were all great, so I went and checked out the website, curious about the curriculum. And now, every website I go to, I see an advertisement for Fullstack Academy. (See screenshot.) I’ve been writing software for 20 years. I’ve written semi-famous essays about software development. I am not going back to school. I do not need to go to a dev bootcamp. So why show me ads, as if I’m thinking of going to school? For the last several years I’ve been seeing articles about the surveillance economy. In theory, advertisers know more about me than ever before. In theory, they know about my entire life. And yet, the ads I see are less targeted than what I used to see online 10 years ago. [http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-will-machine- learn...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-will-machine-learning-and- ai-improve-advertisings-ability-to-target-people) ~~~ onion2k _So why show me ads..._ To keep the brand in your head so you post about it on Hackernews. ~~~ lkrubner That’s a “just so” story. You’re looking at something that is easily explained by incompetence, stupidity and irrationally, yet you’re working to transform it in your head into something rational. Take a moment to think of the money they’ve wasted and what do they gain? How likely is a sale? Did Fullstack imagine this scenario when they authorized their marketing firm to spend this money? Or is the marketing firm simply trying to spend money so they can bill for something? ~~~ onion2k I was being a bit facetious about you posting on here, but the point I was making was serious. In advertising there's a thing called the "effective frequency"[1] which is the number of times you need to see an ad before it has an impact on you. Obviously this series of adverts has worked on you - you know the brand and you use it as an example of which ads you remember. If the company is advertising in order to raise the level of engagement they're getting that's a fail; if their ads are intended to get people talking about the company that's actually a pretty good result. There are more reasons to advertise your business that simply "getting more sales". Indirect communication is _very_ useful. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency) ------ benreesman If everyone sophisticated enough to be on this site would just use the term “applied computational statistics” (even just in their own thoughts) instead of “deep learning” or AI, the world would be a better place. Gradient descent finds some fun minimia (my current venture is heavily based on that idea) but to assign more agency to Adam or RMSProp than they merit is just an exercise in feeding the trolls. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne Could you please explain in what sense deep learning is "applied computational statistics"? What about classical planning, SAT solvers, automated theorem proving, game- playing agents and classical search? Could you please explain how one or more of those are "applied computational statistics"? Further- I don't understand the comment about "agency". Could you clarify? Why is "agency" required for a technique or an algorithm to be considered an AI technique? ~~~ plaidfuji I don’t know anything about the underlying algorithms for the examples you rattled off, but deep learning trains a graph of neuron weights such that they are statistically optimized to minimize error in computed output labels for some domain of input data. Very much “applied computational statistics”. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne The examples I gave are classic AI algorithms that are very easy to look up on wikipedia. They do not compute any statistics. I'm not sure what you mean about "neuron weights that are statistically optimised". Modern-era, deep neural nets train their weights with backpropagation, which is basically an application of the chain rule, from calculus. They do not use statistics for that. For example, calculating the mean of a set of values or calculating the pearson correlation coefficient of two variables are computations typical in statistics. Could you please clarify what you mean by (applied) "computational statistics", so that I don't have to double-guess you? Edit: Do you really not know what a SAT solver is? Not to be rude but if that is the case, from where do you draw your confidence about the correct terminology to use for AI? ~~~ tnecniv He means that neural networks are applied statistics in that they solve a statistical regression problem. It's not conceptually different from classical methods of regression like least squares. The phrase "statistically optimized" is certainly a funky one, but regression is certainly as much a part of statistics as the two problems you mentioned. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne That doesn't sound like what the OP was saying. ------ kranner [https://outline.com/FP487e](https://outline.com/FP487e) ------ waynecochran Getting ready for the next AI winter.... this is a cyclic phenomena. ~~~ raverbashing Hopefully we don't take decades again for a simple but important change like changing tanh to relu activations. ~~~ dijksterhuis my bet is on capsule networks, Hinton is usually on point with his stuff ------ AstralStorm Next: NoAI, like NoSQL. All natural real intelligence, fully organic and explainable. Just add caffeine. ;) ~~~ j88439h84 Brilliant. ------ DonHopkins In 1996 I made this AIML (Artificial Intelligence Marketing Language) parody by taking an actual VRML article from some shameless trade rag, and globally replacing "Virtual Reality" with "Artificial Intelligence". (from "ArtificialPostModernIntelligenceInterActivity", V2 #4 April 1996, p. 20) [https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/SupportForAIML....](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/SupportForAIML.html) Another closely related technology is BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language. (Note: most of the features described in the BLINK tag extension were eventually implemented by FLASH!) [https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/bsml.html](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/bsml.html) At one point years later, somebody actually emailed me, asking me to take it down, because they were developing a "real AIML [TM]" product, and found my parody of their unique original idea to be beneath their dignity, distracting, and confusing to their potential customers using google to search for their prestigious "AIML" product. ------ throwaway287391 > In this way, Dynamic Yield is part of a generation of companies whose core > technology, while extremely useful, is powered by artificial intelligence > that is roughly as good as a 24-year-old analyst at Goldman Sachs with a big > dataset and a few lines of Adderall. For the last few years, startups have > shamelessly re-branded rudimentary machine-learning algorithms as the dawn > of the singularity, aided by investors and analysts who have a vested > interest in building up the hype. Welcome to the artificial intelligence > bullshit-industrial complex. As an AI researcher, I think a lot of people are a little too sensitive to the term "AI" and make a lot of big assumptions upon hearing it. It's a very general term that doesn't really imply any particular degree of complexity or sophistication. Labeling simple machine learning algorithms and heuristics as "AI" isn't at all unique to this era of hype that began in the last ~5 years -- rather that's how the term has been used in academia for many decades. If you took a college class called "AI" or looked up some of the most popular textbooks on AI [1], you'd find that a lot of it is dedicated to search algorithms (breadth-first, depth-first, A*), linear classifiers, and feature engineering. If you think "artificial intelligence" is a bad name for these things, fine -- but don't blame the recent wave of hype, this is what the term AI means and has pretty much always meant. So go ahead and call your startup's linear regression "AI", and if the VCs leap to fund you under the impression that it means you'll be behind the singularity, that's on them. AI != deep learning. AI != AGI. [1] e.g., "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig ------ Iv "Deep Learning projects are typically written in Python. AI projects are typically PowerPoints." ------ ackbar03 Of all the hypes going around (blockchain mostly lol) I think ai is going to have the most substance to it though. I would say the breadth of problems being solved are much wider and there is still a lot of research which hasn't really found its way to actual implementation yet ------ ecmascript I think honestly think westworld (yes the tv-series) has the best explanation of why general intelligence is a hard problem to solve. They mention consciousness but I think the same apply to intelligence in general. Humans in my mind aren't different from say a program you write except that we have a lot more input and possible outputs depending on a much larger variant of external variables. If we could build machines that have eyesight just as we do, muscles just as we do etc I'm sure we could reverse-engineer the human being. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S94ETUiMZwQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S94ETUiMZwQ) ~~~ toxik I find this analysis reductionist. You're basically saying "brains aren't hard to reproduce once you have biological sensors and actuators." Why not? They're _extremely_ delicate, intricate organs. Claim 2 is also a difficult one: of course you can easily claim consciousness doesn't exist, but it is impossible to argue by logic. You need a metaphysical philosophical framework, and then it's already left the realm of empirically observable truths. ~~~ dspillett I'm not sure the claim is that consciousness doesn't exist. More that it is an emergent property of complex systems rather than something that is (or can be) deliberately programmed. ~~~ ecmascript Precisely. It's the complex system that gives us an illusion of consciousness. At least, that is what I naively believe in since there is a lack of evidence for anything else. ~~~ goatlover So you think experience is itself an illusion? When you kick a rock and feel pain, you're not really experiencing pain? Is the rock also an illusion? ~~~ ecmascript Well it depends on how you view it. You feel the pain from kicking the rock and remember it, so you won't kick the same rock against a few minutes after. That is an experience to me. An experience is simply a memory of an event/feeling etc. Without any memories, you won't remember any events or feelings and will gladly kick the rock again since you won't have any memory of it hurting you. Or how else would you define an experience? A memory isn't an illusion, there is definitely something physical in your brain that say that that specific event has happened. But you can also remember things that haven't happened, which is probably why a lot of people believe in ghosts, religion etc. I don't know why, but it probably serves a biological purpose and people are probably more likely to survive if they are afraid of things and are careful. ------ mattigames Everything is bullshit until is not, humans were talking about transportation without using animal forces for decades before it became a reality, and a lot of people were highly skeptical of such thing being even possible until it actually happened in 1804 (first steam train), same thing happens with Artificial Intelligence, and we are in such uncharted territory that someone could say AGI is just 10 years away and someone else say 100 years away and both get the same amount of credibility, meaning near none cause we don't even know what is that we don't know to achieve AGI. ~~~ dboreham Your example isn't quite as it seems : "trains" (cars running on rails) were used in mining for hundreds of years prior. The steam engine was first documented in 1698. What happened in 1804 was someone figured out the manufacturing processes to make a steam engine light enough and powerful enough to usefully pull a train of cars over some reasonable distance. ------ m0zg There is a lot of froth, as in any hot field. However, unlike before, there are many cases where AI actually works now. Some perceptual tasks work better than a human, in fact. We can quibble about the naming and whatnot, but that's not something you can say about the last AI winter. It's sort of like dotcom bust of 00, sure things imploded back then, but there's no sign whatsoever e-commerce will implode at any time in the future because unlike before it actually works this time. ~~~ ethbro _> Some perceptual tasks work better than a human, in fact. [...] that's not something you can say about the last AI winter_ Eh. I'd say that's somewhat apples to oranges. A) There were some useful and successful expert systems. B) Things seemed to be going swimmingly, until they hit a fundamental wall. C) We're working with a few orders of magnitude greater compute than they had access to. ~~~ m0zg Sure, but we did figure out how to make things more robust and generalizable, at least for perceptual tasks so far. Knowledge representation and probabilistic reasoning are still non-existent, though. Moreover, nobody is even working on any of that, for fear of being compared to Doug Lenat. ~~~ Quetelet Representation learning and probabilistic methods are huge sub-areas of modern machine learning, just take a look at the proceedings of ICLR2019. ~~~ m0zg Representation learning != knowledge representation, probabilistic methods != probabilistic reasoning. I'm talking foundations of AGI, which as far as I'm aware, nobody is seriously working on at the moment. ------ yonkshi AGI is a gradient, not an arbitrary threshold. We are not capable of recreating human level intelligence yet, but our modern algorithms had become magnitudes better at generalization and sample efficiency. And this trend is not showing any signs of slowing down. Take PPO for example (powers the OpenAI 5 dota agent), the same algorithms can be used for robotic arms as it does with video games. Two completely different domains of tasks now generalizable under one algorithm. That to me is a solid step towards more general AI. ~~~ taurath It’s a gradient but according to the marketers it’s basically going to overtake humanity any week now. ~~~ misterman0 "AI any week now" What marketers proclaim that? Are they saying that or are they saying there is _utility_ in AI, now? Because me thinks, there is real utility, now, but it's going to take years until it overtakes us. Years! ~~~ tim333 I'm not sure anyone said any week now but Musk probably came closest [https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323278](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323278) ------ arbuge Consider this article: [http://fortune.com/longform/single-family-home-ai- algorithms...](http://fortune.com/longform/single-family-home-ai-algorithms/) If you read it, you'll find that their methods to value homes and renovations are based on algorithms written to value mortgages in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s. I'm going to bet that there's not much of what the average HNer would think constitutes AI going on in there. ------ galaxyLogic What's the most difficult thing AI should be be able to solve but can not as of yet? I would say it is writing a program which writes an AI program. Why? Because it is so difficult for us to define what exactly an AI program should be able to do. This shows that we have an issue with not being able to ask the right question. If we could answer exactly what the AI should be able to do then it would be much easier to create such a program and also create a program that writes such a program. We could say that an AI program should pass the Turing Test and many have written programs that more or less pass it. But so now, write a program that writes several different programs that all pass the Turing Test one better than the previous one. I don't really have an idea how I would start writing such a program that writes a program that passes the Turing Test better than previous AI programs. That makes me guess we are still far off from General AI. But I of course may be wrong, just because I don't know how to do something does not mean others would not. ~~~ chrshawkes We know what we want it to do, we want it to have some basic ability to think for itself. That is something we just simply can't do. Back propagation is far from a spanking for acting out of line. AI has no ability to understand it's acting like a fool or how to deal with uncertainty with emotions which cause us to act without regards to consequences and in many cases reality. It lacks understanding of what future consequences its trying to prevent such as our daily decisions to get up and go to work each morning. The AI has no understanding of it's future and the consequences of not going to work until it's fired 40,000 times for not showing up or it's children are taken from him/her/it. I'm glad people are finally waking up to the fact that AI is not ML and AI is all hype at the moment. Google used algorithms quite effectively to adapt and learn, but they have no greater understanding of what we want, just what we and others have wanted in the past. ------ moneytide1 These types of AI promotion seem to be a sort of cop-out that suggest we all look forward to a hands-off future where computers will be able to do everything for us. Then human minds will be allocated away from thoughtful interaction with their environment and into an all-hands-on-deck scenario where neural net operations are given top priority so they can churn out some answers. ~~~ tachyonbeam My main short-term fear is that increased automation will lead to an increasingly isolated society. I can already get almost everything delivered through amazon, order takeout through an app without speaking to anyone. Watch movies on Netflix without needing to go to a video store. What's the world going to be like when drone deliveries become a thing, and I don't even have to speak to a delivery driver? How will it affect kids if they do all their schooling online? I think that, even before AGI happens, AI assistants will become placeholder friends for a lot of people. You'll be able to have a conversation with Siri or Alexa. Eventually, people might have pseudo relationships with robot boyfriend/girlfriends. Imagine having a friend who is anything you want them to be, does everything you want, and most importantly, never challenges you or tells you anything you don't want to hear. People will get used to that, and it will become difficult for them to have real human relationships. In other words, technology is enabling everyone to function without directly interacting with others. People might choose not to interact with other humans out of convenience, insecurity, fear. Japan already has a population of "herbivores", people who choose not to get into relationships, and the rest of the world could become like that too. I hope we find a way to reverse this trend. Short documentary on hikikomori in Japan: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE1UIK85E3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE1UIK85E3E) ~~~ jcranmer I think your fear is misguided. People have been complaining about how technology is causing humanity to become more socially isolated for literally thousands of years, and the actual evidence has been that those complaints are unfounded. If anything, we've probably become more socially interconnected, but that's more due to the increased population density of our environs than technology changes. What a lot of people miss, I think, is that human beings are fundamentally social animals, and we crave social interaction. And I say this as a strong introvert--as someone who has to be alone to recharge myself emotionally. Things like distance learning or working from home are not well-received by most people, especially not on a long-term basis. Sure, some people will find it comfortable, but those people are a tiny majority, and I should point out that it's not a new phenomenon: Emily Dickinson for the last 10 years or so of her life or so refused to meet visitors face-to-face and rarely left her house, which is more severe than most hikikomori. ------ bernardv I totally agree with the gist of this article. This hype is being propagated by a lot of folks who are willingly clueless, as for example, in the data science crowd. This band-wagon is crowded and isn’t stopping any time soon. It irks me to no end to comme across tutorial-style articles proclaiming to teach an AI algorithm, also known as ‘linear regression’. What bugs me the most though, are the countless ‘influencers’ on LinkedIn which spew rubbish about machine learning, AI and all the wonderful things that are just around the corner. Lastly, it doesn’t help when countless articles/books are written on the subject of AI dangers, AI ethics and are ‘robots coming for us?’. These add fuel to the fire of hype. In the end, this behavior will only guarantee the eventual blowing-up of the bubble, when promises are not delivered. ------ nottorp Is Medium for pay now? They told me to sign up to get "one more free story". ~~~ Veedrac Medium lets writers opt-in to a paywall. It is not the default, but does come with some perks for authors. ------ mikorym So can I call it "second year linear algebra" now instead of "AI"? ------ plaidfuji Sure, “AI” as it is used today implies “software that codifies decision-making using data”. No, it’s not the T3000. But as the author acknowledges: > Dynamic Yield can pay for itself many times over by helping McDonald’s > better understand its customers Ok, so it’s not hype - it is delivering real value. “AI” is just a marketing term to help C-suite suits and Silicon Valley sales reps get on the same page about what’s being sold with as few words as possible. What’s being sold is software that helps make optimal decision using data. AI isn’t a rigorously defined academic term, so people will use it how they want. It’s only hype when real value isn’t delivered. ~~~ epr > What’s being sold is software that helps make optimal decision using data Doesn't this apply to virtually all software? ~~~ plaidfuji In an extremely reductionist sense, maybe. Do I use Microsoft Word to automate decision making? No. Does Facebook help me make important life choices? Heh. How about this: Amazon.com is not AI, but their recommendation engine is. ------ cirgue There is a massive positive, though, for the 'geeks building the future": AI is where everyone else is looking. If you know where you _should_ be looking, you have a decisive advantage over the rest of the market. ~~~ bombingwinger Doesn’t your last sentence go for literally everything? ~~~ cirgue Of course it does, but we can say with confidence that attention and capital are misallocated toward a specific, identifiable set of activities. _That 's_ rare. ------ soobrosa Been deleted, cached is at [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RV8OOz...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RV8OOzgmjJsJ:https://gen.medium.com/the- bs-industrial-complex-of-phony- a-i-44bf1c0c60f8+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=safari) ------ chewz > The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player > (German: Schachtürke, "chess Turk"; Hungarian: A Török), was a fake chess- > playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its > destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an > automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax.[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk) ------ colechristensen Progress of civilization could be summarized in the slow march of BS elimination parallel with the creation of creative new forms of BS (people don't actually learn anything, they just form the same crazy opinions about something new) Strikeout "of Phony AI." The BS-Industrial Complex is huge and the rise of the Internet has made it worse by empowering the less-informed to share ideas. That is somewhat the price you pay for progress. The hopeful idealistic information superhighway myth of the 90s turned into something else. ~~~ ethbro I look at BS as an inevitable symptom of the Singularity. As we approach the capacity of human reason, fewer people are able to keep up with the world, and are therefore more susceptible to it. ~~~ colechristensen I don't know, look back two thousand years and you see plenty of it. More like it's a symptom of humanity. Animals are stupid machines, humans aren't nearly as far away from them as we'd think ourselves. ------ nl AGI will arrive as soon as someone can arrive at a reasonable definition of intelligence. Try it. Everything I've seen is already achievable by computers. ~~~ AstralStorm Solving novel problems. Show me. By novel I mean multiple categories. A system that can serve as archive, mathematician, calculator, can move a robot, drive a car and additionally make coffee from scratch. Oh and talks (speaks and understands and acts upon orders) in 3 human languages at decent levels plus can roughly explain what it's doing. Oh and can learn more unrelated skills. Hey, people do it all the time. ~~~ nl _A system that can serve as archive, mathematician, calculator, can move a robot, drive a car and additionally make coffee from scratch. Oh and talks (speaks and understands and acts upon orders) in 3 human languages at decent levels plus can roughly explain what it 's doing. Oh and can learn more unrelated skills._ I'm a bit unclear if this is supposed to be a definition of intelligence. Stephen Hawking would fail this test, but no one would argue he isn't intelligent. ------ bjoernbu Imho it has gone further. In a way, all the things described as not actually AI now "are" AI, because the term AI has been used in that way so many times. I don't think we'll ever use a better (more accurate) term for the ML- and data-driven value current systems create. Instead "true" AI will get a new fancy name to build the next hype around in several year. ------ dr_dshiv We should be focused on designing "smart systems" that optimize measurable outcomes Who cares how complex the algorithm is! What matters is that it _works better_. Is there a measurable outcome that matters? Can the system optimize that outcome over time, through a coordination of human processes and technology design? That is what organizations need. Not hyperparameters. ------ nsajko It seems the author has deleted the post. Maybe Dynamic Yield asked him to take it down? Anyway, currently it is accessible through [https://outline.com/FP487e](https://outline.com/FP487e) ------ a_imho It is pretty much spot on, but I'm not convinced anyone should really care. When was software not hype driven? ------ JustSomeNobody This is no different than anything else. You hype what you're working on so people get interested and throw money at you. AR/VR glasses, AI, self driving cars, it's all the same. You generate interest, make lots of money and who cares if it ever gets to market. ------ orpep90nxkfo This reminds me of the article the other day about the internet being an SEO wasteland Basically our business networks run the same way (not a shock at all): sycophants spam aristocratic investors with half assed bullshit solutions to juice the odds of hooking one ------ East-Link Rudimentry machine learning algorithms are indeed AI, by common usage. Try typing into Google Images something like "ai machine learning deep learning venn diagram" and you'll see that by common usage, machine learning is a strict subset of AI. ------ Wiretrip For a real emperor's new clothes moment, look at SpinVox! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinVox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinVox) ------ diehunde The problem is when you work at a company that tells you, "we are different, we are not BS like the other A.I. companies" ------ tabtab Just AI? IT is _filled_ with BS and fads. Dilbert is a documentary, not just a comic strip. ------ holografix Repeat with me: Machine Learning != AI ------ dijksterhuis I _despise_ the term Artificial Intelligence. This is all _PROBABILISTIC MODELLING_. Nothing to do with AI/AGI/whatever. The computers aren’t thinking or learning. It’s just modelling fancy probability statistics. E.g. classical neural networks are basically a load of linear regression equations with an activation function stuck on the end of each of them. No magic. Just lots of linear regression. This stuff only works when: 1) you are trying to solve a specific problem that is suited to probabilistic models 2) you have a data set that is sufficiently large, varied and specific 3) the model is developed, trained, tested, implemented and updated in a rigorous and sensible manner ~~~ Quetelet Actually most modern neural networks are not probabilistic, they are deterministic function approximators. Also your point 3) isn’t quite correct either, often a “standard” architecture and training procedure (e.g. ResNet50 with Adam) will work on a new task with sufficient training data and minimal modification of the model. ~~~ dijksterhuis The only nnets I mentioned were “classical” as a purposefully over simplified example. Yeah, they can model any function, but historically they were used for probabilistic density functions (if I remember correctly). Most of what the article talked about can be done with much simpler models, which is what I get peeved about. Also, yes, you can transfer learn with resnet. But if I throw my bank statements at it, it’ll do bugger all. Similarly, if I throw new images at resnet in a silly way, it won’t transfer properly. ~~~ Quetelet You might be confusing the historical use of the sigmoid activation function with probabilistic modeling, neural networks in the 80s were used similarly to how they are today, albeit at a much smaller scale due to hardware limitations at the time. The development of neural networks is a major contribution of the machine learning community, so even if you’d like to split hairs about whether the “computer is learning” (“learning” has a a precise technical definition by the way), NNs are not “just statistics.” ~~~ dijksterhuis Ok, it seems like there are some crossed wires or missing context here. Also, widely off topic. I never said anything about the term machine learning. Check my bio, see what I’m working on. Fully aware of neural network contributions. I’m all for machine learning. Just not “AI”. “AI” is hype bullshit. “Learning” when used by the people who spout this BS is not the technical definition version, and is what I was referring to. Could probably have made that clearer, but I’m 1.5 days without sleep. What does feeding test data into a network yield? Inference results. Inference seems vaguely familiar from probabilistic modelling? Bayes rule applies to neural nets too. Two different models may give vastly different results. Whilst they can be very good approximators, they can also be very unreliable if care is not taken during training. G(x) ~ f(w.f(w.x+b)+b) is literally a fancy weighted sum. A linear regression. It is some easy stats combined together with a few other things that aren’t explicitly necessary, eg activation function can be identity to cancel out f(). EDIT Both the parameters of a network and the training data are variables in the application of Bayes rule. Which inherently deals with likelihoods (probability). /EDIT So at their fundamental, they are “just some stats” stuff. They may have a few more bells and whistles to make them complex (and better) systems, but they still output a classification/regression based on inference. You can, of course, approximate many functions with them. I’ve built a network with only weights of +1/-1, for example. But those examples have extremely specific use cases that are not applicable to anything the article discusses. ------ luc4sdreyer Seems like the post has been taken down. ------ wolfi1 if there is no natural intelligence around, you need an artificial one ------ module0000 TLDR; _machine learning == "AI"_, just as much as _colocated servers == "cloud"_ ------ macawfish Ben Goertzel. ------ antonvs Paywall. ~~~ 3xblah Not when you have Javascript turned off. ------ stareatgoats > The BS-Industrial Complex of Brilliant! This is really a thing, and the computer industry is (and has always been?) rife with it. ~~~ harry8 IBM Global Services. Oracle. Accenture. Any company with 100+ employees who does consulting involving the design, implementation and maintenance of computer systems for _any_ government bureaucracy. Is there anyone around here who thinks this industry sector is something else than industrial grade BS and if every single one of those companies disappeared overnight that we would not be in a better place as a civilization very, very quickly as we were forced to pick up the pieces. Industrial quantities of BS are the norm, right? Most of us do startups to do _something_ more than to schmooze, threaten and ultimately bilk customers paying with other peoples money. We kind of want to do tech. ~~~ adev_ > Most of us do startups to do something more than to schmooze, threaten and > ultimately bilk customers paying with other peoples money. Do you know Theranos ? That's the definition itself of bullshit and it was a "startup". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos) Bullshit comes from 5000+ employees to companies with 5 dudes. Scale does not change anything. _Business culture_ , _profit as only value_ and the culture of _fake it until you do it_ are the source of the problem. And against that their is not magic solution, excepted trust _a lot less_ the ones that speak and trust _a lot more_ the one that do. In the good old Nerd world, we named that _Show me the code_ ------ gok "I was able to bullshit about A.I., so the whole field is bullshit."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Founders in China personally liable to pay back investors? - cwxm Hi,<p>My father has a startup in China. Apparently there startup founders often take investments for which if the startup fails, the founder is personally liable to pay back investors, even if it was started as an LLC (or whatever the chinese equivalent is).<p>It seems like he is now worried, because the startup is not doing so well, and the investment he took outstrips what personal assets he has.<p>Does anyone with experience such contracts have recommendation into what recourse he has? ====== billconan yes I have heard of that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Chat with people around you - vasanthv https://oyoy.app ====== vmednis If I understand correctly the "people around you" is decided purely by distance. In that case is there anything done to avoid seemingly nonsensical conversations for a random observer? With this I mean if two people are in distance close enough to chat and the third one (the "observer") is only in range to one of them would the observer only see half of the conversation. ~~~ phalangion Interesting. The hidden node problem for people. ------ shubb NSFW - embedded images are references to other websites. My local chat was mostly shock images. Not great if your internet is not your own. ------ rgovostes Perfect for the dinner table. ------ augustocallejas Last time a "Show HN" was posted with a similar nearby chat app, I was in Disney World and there was not much engagement ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16976287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16976287)). I'm in Disneyland now, and I've tried it out now, but not much engagement. I will check it throughout the day, but I mirror the suggestions made, either increase the 1 km radius (the park here is longer than 1 km) or include the closest 10 users. ~~~ vasanthv This is the rebranded and improved version of Ping.gy. [https://medium.com/@vasanthv/introducing- oy-2664a5c95d75](https://medium.com/@vasanthv/introducing-oy-2664a5c95d75) reply "either increase the 1 km radius" \- I understand the problem you are facing, will try to address them. ------ scotty79 There should be an option to change how far 'here' is. ~~~ d0ee670a Agreed. I'm in Maine - not many of us 'here' to begin with :) ~~~ kumartanmay The network effect needs to come into play and yes, one should get the opportunity to expand the geographical boundaries. ------ slx26 oh, I like it! specially that poetic moment when you find out that you are all alone. waiting for someone is nice. no, seriously, I think the idea is great. in general, I like the idea of using internet to bring closer people who are already geographically close, so they actually have a decent chance to share something outside the screen. a chat might be the most dangerous way to do this, but anyway, still cool. a "simple" idea to dynamically adjust areas, if you aren't doing it already, at least for lonely people, is setting a timer and progressively expand/reduce the "here" area, up to a more generous limit? (basically, automatic population density control, _in an evil way_ ) ~~~ vasanthv Thanks for the suggestion. Will add to the todo. ------ wtmt Got this error with Firefox 61 (latest release) when I tried it, but it seems as if it can continue. No one else around though. > Messaging: This browser doesn't support the API's required to use the > firebase SDK. (messaging/unsupported-browser). ~~~ tommymachine same on Safari Version 12.0 (14606.1.36.1.9) ------ neom All the nerds in Brooklyn are still asleep I guess. :'( ------ vasanthv Hi all, I am the maker of the this product. Covered some use cases here [https://medium.com/@vasanthv/introducing- oy-2664a5c95d75](https://medium.com/@vasanthv/introducing-oy-2664a5c95d75) ~~~ neom It would be interesting to be able to have a view-only mode for chats going on in places you're not located. I'd be curious to see what London or Sao Paulo are chatting about, even if I can't join in. :) ~~~ vasanthv Ok. Something like Peek feature in YikYak. ------ FabHK Wechat has that feature (but none of the other standard chat apps I’m aware of). ~~~ yorwba And it seems to be used mostly for hook-ups. Most people probably can't think of any other reason to look for strangers nearby. ------ d--b Nice design. I'm the only one there though ;_;. ------ 7373737373 The same thing with directional voice would be cool. ~~~ vasanthv I didn't get the point. Can you please explain little more detailed? ~~~ hackeraccount An audio version of this app - maybe with push to talk. It's essentially be a walkie-talkie. Though without the bluetooth range limitation that typically comes with that flavor of app. ~~~ 7373737373 Yeah, with the schizophrenic twist that you can listen in and talk to voices from very far away, from the direction they come from. ------ msl09 it would have been nice if the text box would have remained focused after the message is sent ~~~ vasanthv Nice suggestion. ------ tommymachine not working on safari?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Introduction to runc - prakashdanish https://danishpraka.sh/2020/07/24/introduction-to-runc.html ====== nezirus In addition to runc, I'd like to point out an alternative OCI runtime implementation, crun ([https://github.com/containers/crun](https://github.com/containers/crun)). You can play with both either directly, or through Podman ([https://podman.io/](https://podman.io/)) Useful for cgroups v2 too. ~~~ vishvananda There is also a rust implementation that I wrote in my time at Oracle. Unfortunately they no longer maintain it, but there is a fork with some more recent updates: [https://github.com/drahnr/railcar](https://github.com/drahnr/railcar) ~~~ sitkack Sounds like you are no longer at Oracle. Was this at Oracle Cloud in Seattle? Can you talk about their Rust adoption? ------ eatonphil Unfortunately on mobile the zoom is fixed (I can't zoom out, didn't know that was possible) and I can't see the left and right edges of the text. ~~~ Tepix I hate when they do that. Here is a bookmarklet that will fix those pages: javascript:document.querySelector('meta[name=viewport]').setAttribute('content','width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=10.0,user-scalable=1'); The real fix is of course to complain to the page author. ~~~ aorth Reader mode on Firefox does a great job too! ~~~ sli Reader mode in Safari on iOS works great as well, but the zoom level doesn't seem to be fixed, either. It's initially zoomed in but I'm able to zoom out and it will stay. ------ eatonphil Are there any runc shims that just use processes (I know, containers are just processes) ignoring network/user/etc namespace isolation and other Linux- specific security features? For example a shim that could run native MacOS processes on MacOS, native FreeBSD binaries on FreeBSD, etc. just by executing the processes directly. The point of this would be to take advantage of the Docker ecosystem for _scheduling_ particularly in developer environments. Specifically I'd like a "docker-compose for processes" that can run on any system and just handles scheduling multiple processes together but without requiring root access to modify init scripts or systemd services at the system level. ~~~ JamesSwift Isnt that what Foreman and its Procfile handle? [https://github.com/ddollar/foreman](https://github.com/ddollar/foreman) ~~~ eatonphil Maybe, but I don't want to learn a new config system. Developers are so familiar with docker-compose I just want to use that. ~~~ pjmlp This developer not. ~~~ eatonphil Sorry for the overly broad brush. :) But the existence of this shim doesn't mean you have to use it. ~~~ pjmlp Nor do I have to use Docker. ------ mlang23 wget directly to /usr/bin. Am I the only one who cringes upon such a pattern? I am probably too old. I recently almost doubled over when I saw that /sbin is now a symlink to /usr/sbin on bullseye. Even worse, /lib/modules is a symlink to /usr/lib/modules. Try $ find /lib -name \ _mlx5\_ and learn how find treats symlinks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Bookreadin.gs – assisting bookstores with content hosting - jlazer https://bookreadin.gs ====== jlazer Hey guys -- I wanted to show you my side project I've been working on for awhile now. It's angular.js with firebase. I'm also using a node.js server on heroku for Elastic Search. Filepicker.io and AWS S3/CDN for serving images, content -- and the entire thing is responsive and still a work in progress. Basically, bookstores generate amazing content that goes to die on pages like these. [http://www.politics-prose.com/audio](http://www.politics-prose.com/audio) I hope to be _the_ site that helps consolidate all that awesome content.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why does software development suck so much in finance? - superhater I've been working as a dev at a hedge fund for less than a year and I just can't believe how awful it is:<p>- all I do is operate and maintain hacky old ETL jobs<p>- I spend hours and sometimes days editing databases and config files<p>- there are no best practices<p>- issues are swept under the rug or just passed around the team until people forget about them<p>- my manager is a manger because he's the only person that hasn't left the team over the years<p>- everybody has an opinion on everything even though they have zero proven experience on the subject<p>- people are not focused at all<p>- people don't grow, they just get comfortable and complacent<p>- it's like a 9 to 5 except that you're supposed to work for 10 hours a day<p>and the list goes on..<p>This is my first full time job so I'm super confused. Is this how all tech jobs in finance are? Why? What's your experience as a dev in finance? ====== badpun IMO, the issue is that finance industry is: (1) flush with cash, (2) not really understanding tech, or wanting to. Being flush with cash means that they can tolerate tons of inefficiencies. That's how you end up with low performers and wankers everywhere. Not wanting to understand tech, just focusing on end result, means that the difficulty of tech is underappreciated, best practices are often not followed, developers are treated like cattle instead of valueable contributors etc. There's plenty of issues really. Not to mention that finance it is more ok (than in other fields) to have Trump-style "aggressive" personality, that is in essence anti- intellectual and is super counterproductive for working on complex problems. My advice is to avoid finance (maybe insurance is better, I've never worked there) unless you just want to suffer for a couple years and stuff your mattress with money. ------ elamje I would imagine this is what it's like to work at any organization where developers are second class citizens. I work in Tax Accounting and it is similar, because teams are minimal, and the applications and processes only support the 1st class people at the firm. I would imagine quant hedge funds and market makers like Citadel have a developer culture that is much better. Of course, this is just a guess. Anyone have comments from the quant, HFT side of things? ~~~ superhater Small note: my company is a quant hedge fund, where all researchers are technical. ------ dumbmatter Alternative title: Why does software development suck so much in _______? ~~~ muffa I was thinking exactly the same! The bullets he listed, I recognize every single one of them and I work for a self-driving car company. ------ fpalmans The issue is not that software development in finance in sucks, this particular job is likely not a good fit for you. Now, as you said, this is your first full time job. My first full time job after college was also in development, for a military subcontractor of all places. And I hated every second of it. We had floating hours, which we could use to build up overtime to take additional days off. After about 9 months, when I finally quit, I had accrued negative 90 hours (over two weeks of work I had missed)! Sometimes it is not a good fit. It can be the environment, your colleagues, the actual job, or even the industry. In stead of droning on here, maybe you can start looking for what would make you happy professionally? ------ ltr_ All my dev life was in finance, they don't give a shit about how its done, they just throw money at the problem until its finished. your boss and your boss's bosses are just worried about making their bosses happy. Another thing that happens a lot: here it comes the big tech company sales man with swag, hookers and travel tickets to their next conference in the most exiting city in the world, the guy in charge will buy any tech from them. and most of the time is pure crap. ------ osullivj You're working for a small buy side firm, which is quite different than large sell side institutions like JPMorgan, BoA, Citi, GS, Deutsche, UBS, HSBC etc. The big sell side broker dealers have big staff, lots of bureaucratic rules and process, and better defined career paths. But they are still be frustrating environments. In my experience retail banking is similar... ------ lostsoul8282 Also because their core business is not a technology anyone who is not in finance is treated like a commodity. I suspect this is true of tech firms treating their finance folks also. Generally, the firms where you are directly attributed to their revenue is where you'll be treated the best. ------ ryansmccoy Hey super, I consult with hedge funds to fix this type of behavior. send me an email, maybe I can help you fix your situation: hn (at) gotem.co ------ tmaly I have done a lot of similar work over the years in Finance. I took the glass half full approach and looked for ways to automate things and apply Pareto's law. Creating good documentation of the processes or even designing the operational processes is extremely useful if you are on boarding new developers or if your taking a long vacation. And if you do hire a new team member, you can assign them some of the stuff and you already have the training built. This xkcd has also been helpful [https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/) ~~~ hhs That's a useful solution - "looked for ways to automate things and apply Pareto's law". If you're starting early in your coding/development career, what other skills would you work on? ~~~ tmaly Good communication skills and dealing with people. Good writing skills. Make it a habit to write clean code and practice something like test driven development. I still have code that has been running for 14 years. If you don’t put effort into making your code easy to read and maintain then your in for a world of hurt. ~~~ hhs Interesting, this is very helpful. I like your points. And I'll be sure to work on "test driven development" as I learn more about coding and software development, thank you! ------ qualsiasi Don't forget the mighty spreadsheets, the only software deemed as useful in finance :) ~~~ superhater I've heard legends about entire ETL processes being coded in Excel, but I haven't encountered them (yet). ~~~ qualsiasi I have, multiple times but in the same company so let’s count as one. VBA is still a thing in banking/insurance and big consulting players are still selling VBA projects and/or XLLs in this world ------ ruri Assuming you are in a relative large company. and the issue is not only inside finance company ~~~ superhater Nope, the company has < 300 employees in total and < 100 working in technology. ------ repolfx I've worked in finance and at a big tech firm (the BTF). Here's how it breaks down. Firstly, you say this is your first full time job. There are some things in your list that are just life, buddy: • Everyone has an opinion on everything despite zero experience • People get comfortable and complacent • People aren't focused Show me a profitable, stable company where these things _aren 't_ true! Don't assume this is finance specific: I saw tons of unfocused, comfortable, complacent people with strong opinions on everything at the BTF. Don't blame them. You'll be like that one day too, and it's not even a bad thing. People get older, they get married, buy a house, have kids. That in turn makes them more risk averse because the cost of losing your job is higher, so why take chances and rock the boat? Hungry youngsters might be willing to do whatever it takes to achieve career growth but they were like that once too. Corollary: a highly experienced engineer in his late 40s without kids, a wife or a mortgage is a terrifyingly productive thing to behold. Rare, but often found in CEO or CTO positions. As having a spouse and children is no bad thing, don't resent them for it. Some things are more finance specific: • There are no best practices • Meant to work 10 hours a day • Hacky old ETL jobs Oh, though I hate to say it, but I had to spend lots of time pissing around with config files and editing databases when I was at the BTF too. Config files and databases are just a part of life even if you're a programmer. Finance is very heavy on long work hours, not because it actually needs them but because ultimately all developers report to people who are not developers. Virtually nobody in finance or indeed most industries has to really think or concentrate hard for long periods in their work. Even traders in intense conditions may be trading largely on intuition and gut instinct. Also they don't tend to be able to automate their own work well. As a consequence more hours = more money is somewhat true for them, however for developers you quickly reach your mental limit beyond which the mind breaks. For me it's about 8-9 hours of solid coding, and that's in excellent conditions after a great night of sleep and completely without interruptions. Beyond that it's pointless and it used to be less. I've found finance types fundamentally _do not understand this_. To them working normal office hours just looks like complacency, lazyness, not being a part of the team etc, which they cannot abide (inter-personal loyalty being a huge part of the culture in finance vs nearly non-existent in software). As for "no best practices". Two things to understand here: 1\. Best practices are overrated. You can s/best practice/groupthink/ quite safely at least some of the time. The BTF routinely violated what many people think of as "best practices" and was hugely successful by doing so. They say that to break the rules, first you must master them. It definitely applied there. Given that this is your first full time job, _be careful of sponging up anything you find labelled as a best practice and looking like an idiot in front of your more experienced colleagues_. That said ... 2\. Finance firms in particular can suffer from low professional standards because the people who run them can't tell the difference between skilled and unskilled tech workers, which means they can't reliably hire skilled developers. Whether they get them or not is largely a matter of luck. In fact they often struggle to understand that there is even such a thing as skilled vs unskilled developers, hence the frequency of outsourcing it all to India! Moreover many _developers themselves_ don't understand how to hire good developers. So building a team of competent professionals that can self- replicate over time is largely a matter of luck. In the tech industry companies are founded by software engineers so hiring standards are imposed by the CEO downwards, and as founder CEOs tend to stick around for a long time when successful good hiring practices become embedded. There is some good news! Firstly, if you actually _are_ really good at what you do, get on reasonably well with business-side folks and have a track record of delivering good stuff, you are gold to them and can practically name your price. They tend to treat you very well indeed pay-wise, because they know that they would have no chance to reliably replace you if you left. But for this to work you need to learn about their world, how the business operates so you can talk to them in their language. Secondly, finance is a big industry, and there are places doing pretty advanced and cool stuff. Thirdly, as a developer you can easily move into other industries if you want. But be warned: you'll see the same issues everywhere unless you join a BTF - the culture will only be significantly different if everyone in your management chain is a developer themselves, right up to the CEO and board. ~~~ crazypyro >the culture will only be significantly different if everyone in your management chain is a developer themselves, right up to the CEO and board. Couldn't agree with this more. At my current company, the COO and CTO are both developers, although the COO doesn't code anymore. The CTO is basically the most senior developer and developed the core solutions at the company. I mainly joined the company because I was able to talk to those two (along with my direct management) and I was extremely impressed in the interview phase at their (apparent) ability to maintain development skills and hold a conversation about weedy topics while also being at a 10,000 foot executive. I could say more, but it'd probably give away my job. Basically, you can definitely find some "finance" companies where the at least the technical operations are run by devs/former devs.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Do any small profile changes increase usage in your app? - nr123 http://rypple.com/blog/2009/09/21/uploading-your-logo/ We found that adding an avatar can increase response rates in Rypple by 20%. ====== patio11 Yes, small profile changes increase usage in my app. However, I've got to be that guy because "natural experiments" like this one are tempting and _highly suboptimal_. Finding a correlation between uploading a picture and higher response rates isn't useless, but it isn't fabulously useful, either: the photos might well be a symptom of an account that someone has put more effort into, and people could be responding to the higher quality pitches, etc. Happily, there is a solution: the humble A/B test. Take the SAME company with the SAME text targeting the SAME list and let half of them see your mug shot, while half of them get nothing there. THEN you can have a statistically quantifiable amount of confidence that the lift in response rates is actually due to the photo, as opposed to due to unmeasured causes. ~~~ jsatok Hey, Jordan here from Rypple. I spoke to the team about the stat, and we agree with you that the uploading of a logo might not be the only cause for that increase in response rates, but we feel it is a big reason. Based on a sample of our enterprise customers, we feel this is a valid stat that shows the increase in usage across all users. We A/B test a lot of different things in our app, and I agree it would be interesting to further test this stat. Thanks for your comments!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TensorFlow Distributions - dustintran https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10604 ====== captainpete "TensorFlow Distributions is widely used in diverse applications. It is used by production systems within Google and by Google Brain and DeepMind for research prototypes. It is the backend for Edward" Some docs: https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/distributions https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/distributions/bijectors Thanks Dustin and the Google team!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple Confirms 2018 MacBook Pro Has 'Membrane' to 'Prevent Debris from Entering' - okket https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/19/apple-confirms-2018-mbp-keyboard-prevents-debris/ ====== kristofferR It's absurdly douchy of Apple to not to install the membrane on older MacBooks in for keyboard replacement, due to the design flaw. [1] Fixing a fatal design flaw shouldn't be a unique selling point for the newest models. [1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17577478/apple-replace- ma...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17577478/apple-replace-macbook-pro- keyboards-third-gen-components) ~~~ nakedrobot2 Agreed. But maybe it doesn't fit. Someone will try to install the new keyboard in an older laptop, and then we'll know... ~~~ 8draco8 The chassis are virtually the same, the new MBP is just a speed bump. They could design new keyboard to be backwards compatible with the old mounting points and connectors and simply replace old keyboards with the new ones. There is no new ground breaking features between old and new keyboards apart from that membrane. I think they just hope that after replacing old keyboard with the same ones will be enough to push those units trough warranty period and if keyboard fails after warranty then a lot of people will be pushed towards buying whole new unit. The second reason is that during the recall Apple is able to push out old stock of keyboards, if they would use new design keyboards the old stock would have to go to recycling witch is costly. ------ xnyan From the article: "A torn membrane will result in a top case replacement." It seems ridiculous to me that a single torn membrane junks the entire top case, a $500-800 part. ~~~ toast0 Apple products are simply not designed to be serviceable. I have fond (ish) memories of Dell shipping me several $90 keyboard assemblies for my latitude, under warranty, when keys would start acting up; before requesting the third replacement, I noticed there was a bit of aluminum that just needed to get bent back to shape to fix the issues, and saved a bunch of hassle. But I'm not sure if anybody still makes laptops where they've used the space to made things modular enough for economical spare parts. ~~~ 8draco8 I think Thinkpads are still pretty good at this although even they started to fall behind. I remember the days when Apple was designing hardware in a way that was allowing easy access to internals for a pro user. All those handles, easy access doors and trays sliding out with the internals, good old days. ------ mkong1 I had an early 2016 that had a keyboard replaced, then a complete replacement under warranty with a new 2017, and I'm sending it away for another keyboard replacement tomorrow. For a work machine, it's pretty ludicrous that I'll have been without my primary computer on 3 separate occasions within 18 months. The woman in the apple store hinted that if I had to get it replaced more than once, they _might_ just upgrade it to a new one like they did with my 2016 -> 2017.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Macro-Benchmark with Django, Flask and AsyncIO - GMLudo http://blog.gmludo.eu/2015/02/macro-benchmark-with-django-flask-and-asyncio.html ====== falcolas Disclaimer - I have not used AsyncIO. I have, however, tried to implement things on top of Twisted, from which this framework derives many concepts. Asynchronous programming in Python is a real pain in the butt. If I were writing a web frontend where performance mattered enough that Django/Flask would not cut it, I would use a language designed for performance. I'm not the only one: the python development market has collectively chosen Django won out over twisted. No matter how bad Django can be with all of its corner cases, writing for it is still better than writing Twisted code. I imagine this will carry over to AsyncIO as well. As a side note, note terribly impressed with the source. Hiding the word "dick" in unicode doesn't mean it's not there. ~~~ IgorPartola It has been long established that using Twisted's web capabilities is a bad idea. It has been broken from the usability point of view for a very long time and I don't think it will ever be fixed. Without reciting the entire history, Tornado got a lot of crap for not just fixing what Twisted had going on, but creating a new framework from scratch. Having worked with both, I see why they did it. Basically, if you have a bad experience with Twisted + web, you are very much not alone but the fault is with Twisted, not Python. Here's how I break it down: If you need async networking at the TCP or UDP level, use Twisted. If you want a web application, use Django. If you want a one page landing page type application, use Flask. If you are on a restricted budget and need really good performance for your web application that you tried and couldn't extract from Django, go with Tornado. ~~~ klibertp > that using Twisted's web capabilities is a bad idea Isn't async just a bad fit for a typical Web page? Two things which take most time per request (in my experience) are DB queries and rendering templates. While you can have async DB driver (only for postgres right now), all the template engines do their job synchronously, which - with async event loop - blocks _everything_ until finished. There's deferToThread in Twisted, but if we're going to use a pool of threads anyway, what's the point? I also thought this problem was mostly solved with Nginx and uWSGI. This setup works extremely well in my experience, eliminating problems with handling too many sockets and such but allowing to write Django code as usual. Async is good if you mostly do things which can be asynchronous, like fetching things over the net, reading files from disk, communicating with Redis and DB. You really need pre-emptive scheduler for tasks (not necessarily threads, see Erlang) for anything that's going to be CPU-bound. And it's not true that rendering web pages is 100% IO-bound - not when you're using Python, Django and need consistently ~100ms response times. ~~~ IgorPartola Well, you answered your own question ("what's the point?"): because not every application is "app stack + RDBMS". There are many situations where your backing store is not an RDBMS. There are many situations where you are not rendering templates. There are many situations where queries take seconds, while rendering the result takes microseconds. While nginx is a very useful tool, it's not the application layer. What if you need your application layer to be fast and complex? What if your application layer works on streams, not rendered HTML pages? What if you want to support server-client notifications via WebSockets? There are so many different situations where a "block this request processor until the request is served" does not work. Having said that, I'll repeat again that async is not what you should reach for unless it makes perfect sense for your application. If you are building an RSS fetcher, sure go for it. If you are building a product for which you see peak usage of, say, 1m users, go for it. However, for most people, time to market is much more important than peak performance after you can't scale the hardware cheaply. That's where Django (Flask, Rails, etc.) make more sense. ~~~ klibertp "What's the point" referred only to the use of deferToThread in Twisted. And I was specifically talking about "typical Web _page_ ", you know, login, logout, comments and such. Other than that we actually agree 100%. I wrote that "Async is good if you mostly do things which can be asynchronous", you in turn listed a couple of examples of such things (WebSockets, not RDBMS). We're violently in agreement here. One additional point I made was about Erlang. Really, if you're building " a product for which you see peak usage of, say, 1m users" go for Erlang (or rather about pre-emptive scheduling, but it boils down to Erlang anyway). In my experience it's the only environment which provides both concurrency and parallelism for both IO and CPU-bound tasks and is easily (transparently!) distributable to many nodes. ~~~ IgorPartola That's a good and complete summary. I have been curious about Erlang for some time. The syntax keeps sending me running in the other direction, but perhaps I just haven't found a suitable project to work on where I could have an excuse to really dig in. any favorite resources you can recommend on learning Erlang? ~~~ klibertp Of course LYSE ([http://learnyousomeerlang.com/](http://learnyousomeerlang.com/)) and then "OTP in Action" after you know the basics. But! There are at least two languages that work on Erlang VM and offer alternative syntax. There's Lisp Flavoured Erlang ([http://lfe.io/](http://lfe.io/)) and Elixir ([http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/)). Elixir, in addition to syntax, improves on some aspects of Erlang which make newcomers uncomfortable, adds more powerful metaprogramming utilities and adds modern features like browsing the docs from REPL. I found "Introducing Elixir" ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do)) rather good as a starting point and you can do quite a lot with it. But, in the end, you have to at least know how to read Erlang docs, because Elixir won't (and doesn't even try to) cover all of Erlang libraries with friendly wrappers. Personally I'm used to Erlang syntax, which is small and consistent and I like the "explicit is the only way, no implicit things ever" language philosophy of Erlang, but Elixir is a fine language to learn and use. There's a web framework called Phoenix which despite being very young is already better (subjectively) than pure Erlang frameworks. I used Erlang twice professionally: for writing a kind of reverse HTTP proxy with caching and for writing a backend for web app using WebSockets. It performed very, very well and was quite pleasant to write. Both things are running non-stop for over a year now and never crashed and were not restarted even once, despite being changed significantly in the meantime (that's just an anecdote, of course). Erlang is a bit odd and has much smaller community than Python. Lack of libraries may be a problem. I'd never use Erlang for something I'd use Django. I would consider using it for things I'd otherwise use Flask, but probably wouldn't chose it in the end. But it's my "go to" tool for situations where I'd use Twisted/Tornado or gevent now. ------ DasIch Just a quick look over the code of the Django and Flask benchmarks reveals, that they are both run in debug mode introducing significant overhead. In addition that that database access isn't performed asynchronously, which leaves the question about what is actually supposed to happen asynchronously. ~~~ mrj The json serialization is also very different. Flask is using json.dumps while the django code is using a custom JsonResponse class that includes an isinstance check. ------ acdha A quick look at the repo shows that persistent connections are enabled for every application but Django, which should have CONN_MAX_AGE set to something greater than the default 0 to avoid being a benchmark for how quickly Postgres can open connections: [https://github.com/Eyepea/API- Hour/blob/3e43b61cbaa3045ec3d0...](https://github.com/Eyepea/API- Hour/blob/3e43b61cbaa3045ec3d0fc579c4ca8d296bd172e/benchmarks/django/benchmarks/benchmarks/settings.py#L58-L76) ------ MayanAstronaut Not a good comparison. At least gevent monkey patch all the flask and django for a async comparison. Can you make a fourth comparison with this line added "from gevent import monkey; monkey.patch_all()" before the apps are init? Thanks. ~~~ rspeer To me, running gevent's monkey-patches in production is a sign of desperation for speed over all else. And the desperation isn't necessary, because there are better options now. Code stability matters. ------ korzun Flawed benchmarks. If target produces errors during the test, the result should be invalidated immediately. You can't compare data from failed result to another failed result or a normal one. In instances where flask/django started to output errors, the test case should have been adjusted until they could have completed operations. Otherwise you can't compare the results, since you have no baseline. What this test tells me now is XY gives errors for this test while Z seems to process it. That's not a benchmark of any sort. ------ bohinjc AFAIK Flask does not aim for performance first, it aims for developer productivity and code readability first. The whole thread-local thing is a good example of those trade-offs. I'm not saying it's the best choice (nor the worse), just that it's a choice and it has consequences. At some point you need to make compromises, depending on your goal. ------ raverbashing And no uwsgi? ~~~ Beltiras THIS! I took a hard look at gunicorn a couple of years ago because I found the learning curve of uWSGI steep. I've found the time used fruitful.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Is Censoring Search Results to Hide Russian Corruption - sahin-boydas https://futurism.com/google-censoring-search-results-russia ====== luckylion Misleading headline. Google is censoring their results IN RUSSIA according to whatever local law is in action there. They do the same in European countries and, be strong now, in the US.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Science is Failing Us - quasistar http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 ====== mindstab I don't quite know how to adequatly articulate my displeasure with this article but lets try. The article basically seems to be relying on some philosophy and muddy and different definitions in different contexts (philosophy vs science vs standard usage) of words like "fact". Then it talks about how things are getting more complex and we're spending more effort to learn things now than we used to because "we know all the easy stuff". And seems to conclude that we'll still be no better than religious shamanistic people once we "know all there is to know" and it still won't do us a lot of good. It seems to be advocating give up on science now, with some rational like "while we're ahead". I honestly don't get it. It seems like cloudy wooly thinking, bad arguments. Sure, things are getting more complex and will continue to, but that doesn't mean we should give up, or that "it's mysteries all the way down". Every year we learn more and fix more problems. And we have to and always have had to make a lot of mistakes in the process. The author seems to think we're making more mistakes now and that's an indication the game is almost up. I disagree, medical science is still churning out amazing breakthroughs, like HIV and cancer vaccines this year. And physics is still coming up with amazing things. Just because it's getting harder doesn't mean we should stop or that we'll hit a wall and be able to go no further (and if we can see that wall coming we might want to think about stopping prematurely?) Everytime we thought we'd learned everything we've been able to push on and learn more, discover more depth, and use it more to our advantage. I don't strictly speaking see why that has to stop just because it's getting harder. At least any time soon. Each new level also gives us better tools to work with. And there have always been people saying we know enough now, or it's getting harder so lets stop now. And some have, and many haven't and that's why we still have progress. This is a age old endless reoccurring trend and bares the same ignoring it has always gotten. Or you can step off the train of progress and be left behind. I do not think science is failing us at all in anyway. I think this article is poor on many standards. ~~~ rayiner The article makes a lot more sense if you think of "science" not as the idealized process, but the actual process as practiced by people at Pfizer, Merck, etc. Read the Hume reference not as a criticism of the scientific method, but rather as a reminder of something we already know (correlation != causation), but that we in practice assume all the time in order to apply science to certain problems. He's saying not that the method is bad, but that things are getting complex enough, at least in medicine, where we're hitting some limits on how easily we can practice science to the necessary level of rigor and precision. ~~~ polyfractal To nitpick, Pfizer, Merck et. al. don't actually do science. What they do is more akin to spraying buckshot into the bushes and hoping to hit a furry animal hiding somewhere inside. Not that this is a particularly bad approach. It worked amazingly well for the last few decades and has churned out a lot of blockbuster drugs. It is, however, starting to fall apart as all the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's time for the big pharma's to start doing science again. The problem is that big pharma is thoroughly infatuated with quarterly stock prices and not developing new drugs. They are cannibalizing themselves in an effort to keep stock prices up and profits growing. It's better to think of big pharma as remarkably successful marketing engines, not medical science companies. For instance, I know of many scientists that work for big pharma companies which do not have access to _any_ of the scientific literature (past the freely available abstracts). Management will not allow them to purchase these articles. Consider that for a moment. The companies producing your drugs are not even remotely up to speed on cutting edge biological knowledge. *Obligatory "I'm in biology so I'm not making this stuff up" disclaimer. ~~~ epistasis Let me chime in as a biologist that thinks you've hit it right on the head. This is _precisely_ the way to think about the large pharmaceutical companies: marketing companies. They've fired most of their scientists, instead buying positive research results from smaller companies, and market the hell out of the few compounds that have survived the clinical trial lottery. More than that, the pharmas are absolutely resistant to embracing technology that can save them; they discard scientists that are driving their respective fields forward, and resist the notion that understanding the cell as an information system can provide better returns on their trials. There are exceptions, when Genentech was run by Art Levinson (a scientist) he was capable of discerning science from bullshit and was an effective CEO. However, I would sell any stock in a pharmaceutical not run by a scientist; such a company may be able to post short-term returns but they're only doing that by selling off any possibility of future success. ------ tokenadult This is an important article with well chosen examples. But I think the headline points to the wrong "cause" of failure. Scientists, the directors of science research funding projects, and the general public can better understand what we know and what we don't know about causation from correlation if science teachers and journalists do a better job. For a long time, members of the journalistic community and members of the general public have been overinterpreting tentative scientific findings, <http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html> and if we learn the lessons of how to interpret research findings more cautiously, we can all do our part to guide further research better. As the author of the submitted article points out, "This doesn't mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally problematic. Some explanations clearly work better than others, which is why, thanks largely to improvements in public health, the average lifespan in the developed world continues to increase. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, things like clean water and improved sanitation—and not necessarily advances in medical technology—accounted for at least 25 of the more than 30 years added to the lifespan of Americans during the 20th century.) Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints—which limit modern research—those correlations have still managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and bad diets." So with caution about assuming causation where the data cannot reliably show causation, <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz> the huge task of biomedical research can still go forward, eventually yielding other findings that can improve health or longevity compared to today's baseline. AFTER EDIT: The question posed in the first reply below is interesting. One reason that biomarker interventions are tried more often than "hard endpoint" interventions is simply that they are faster and easier. To really check carefully for hard endpoints--reduced mortality and morbidity, for a medical treatment--takes time in a clinical trial. Sometimes an effective on a biomarker, for example serum cholesterol, can be observed right away, but if the subjects in a study are at an age at which few subjects die from any cause, it can be a long while before a study reveals which treatments actually increase rather than decrease the risk of death. The case of the drug rimonabant, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant> which had reasonably strong support from animal experiments as an antiobesity drug, is instructive. Studies of human subjects after the drug was approved in Europe revealed a huge increase in suicidal risk among patients taking rimonabant, [http://www.pharmacist.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Pharmacy_N...](http://www.pharmacist.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Pharmacy_News&template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=24206) and eventually approval of the drug in Europe was withdrawn, and the drug was withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer, before rimonabant was ever approved in the United States. ~~~ aidenn0 Also, it's not a failure to e.g. notice that high levels of biomarker X are correlated with disease Y, so let's try lowering X and see what happens. That's just the next step in determining causality. What happens is doctors read the correlation and start massively prescribing biomarker targeted remedies (such as vitamin B) before any causation is shown. Why does this happen? ~~~ alextp > Why does this happen? I'd guess it's because promoting this possible causal link as a cure for diseases is pretty much the easiest way to get it tested---where else will you find 25k volunteers? As always, when people are involved, the reason for failure seems to be in the incentive structure. ------ refurb Wow, that article was a little annoying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that he thinks our current approach to science is wrong due to our tendency to attribute cause and effect to things where we have no conclusive proof of cause and effect? Well, if he has a better suggestion on how to approach research, I'm all ears! First off, I don't think ANYONE who was involved with the development of torcetrapib thought it was a "slam dunk". The success rate of drugs that have reached phase III is only slightly north of 50%. Second, there is no way you could possibly figure out all the effects a particular drug has on the human body. You'd be doing research for the next 100 years and you still wouldn't come close. So what we do is we come up with a hypothesis (high HDL is good), we gather evidence in the most efficient manner we can (other drugs that raise HDL help prolong life in humans and animals), then we move forward with our BEST GUESS. That's how science works, you create a hypothesis, then test it. Are our hypotheses wrong sometimes? Of course. Do we learn something from the failures? Yes. Trying a being successful 10% of the time is far better than not trying at all and being successful 0% of the time. Merck's CETP inhibitor is in phase III right now and there is a chance that it will fail too. And I don't think any scientists feels that high HDL is the cause of reduced cardiac risks. A more accurate description would be to say "High HDL is associated with reduced cardiac risks, this drug increases HDL levels, so it stands a chance of reducing cardiac risks". I think the author does a bad job of describing how scientists approach their work. If anything a scientist would be the first to call out a claim that something _causes_ something else. That's how their trained! ~~~ shubble The articles criticism I think stems from the same feeling of discomfort I got when I understood a bit better how drugs are developed. As a culture I think we have a certain faith in the medical system to save us from death, the same way previous generations looked to priests to save the spirit. The inference you mention 'high HDL is associated with low cardiac arrest, therefore a drug that increases HDL might help is more vague than a layman expects. It's like saying 'I want a safe car, and German tend to be safe, therefore I will buy a German' - it's valid in the absence of a real understanding of how to specify and select a safe car, but it's more vague than you'd be comfortable with. You expect an engineering company to be able to specify a safe car based on deep knowledge. But because our understanding of the disease, and of what different chemicals can do is incomplete, a drug company can't do that. Instead, they follow as many hints as they can to select a chemical that might work, and then advance it through a series of progressively more expensive trials until they are pretty sure it does more good than harm. That's a valid way of doing things, and at the moment it's all we can do. But it's not what a layman imagines, or certainly not what this one imagined. It undermines our sense of control - our sense that we are immortal and can get on with making an angry birds clone to get rich because there will be plenty of time to do the projects we want to after the payoff - it's not like we are going to die of heart disease, science has our back on that one! Or maybe I'm generalizing my personal feelings too much? ~~~ mattgreenrocks No, you're onto something here. Modern medicine is not all powerful. It does some things very well, and we live much longer because of it, but there is still so much we do not understand. I'm thankful that there are those that put the time and money into this research that furthers our comprehension. However, there are plenty of conditions you can develop where modern medicine is only able to contain the symptoms, rather than fix the problem causing them. Autoimmune conditions (such as MS) come to mind here. ------ kenjackson I think scientists see this as a success. You get data and you revise your hypothesis. You get more data and you revise it again. A lot of people want science to be like politics. They want you to pick a side and stick to it regardless of the data. IMO, when conventional wisdom isn't at least occassionally overturneed -- that's when I'll begin to think science is failing us. ~~~ SoftwareMaven The problem is we are publishing the wrong answer too many times. The bias in journals to publish positive responses (not to mention the drive to create company profits!) means people aren't rewarded for finding out they are wrong. Fix the incentives, and I think we'll have better science. ~~~ Joakal The incentives are research companies offering money for successful researchers. Since having failed attempts makes a researcher appear less successful to businesses, they hide it. Not sure how you would 'fix' those research companies. ~~~ Karellen One possible way is that, if you are in the position to make decisions based on, or make use of, the research results of others (e.g. you're the FDA, or the journal Nature) you require that companies publish/register the methodology of any research they intend to conduct before it begins. If someone submits/relies on the results of a study which was not pre-registered, the data is ignored. Any by pre-registering, you can follow up on research that has been silently "forgotten about". If too much research is forgotten about, you stop trusting the results you do hear about. ~~~ Joakal It sounds like a good idea! But: What if they instead do research secretly. Then on research success, they publicly notify the journal of what they intend to do and that it will take 5 months to research. Then 6 months later (an extra month to look plausible), they publish their successful data. ------ winestock The advice of pnathan, elsewhere in this thread, is good. This _is_ a better article than what I've come to expect from Wired. The main point of the article is that scientists have exhausted the low- hanging fruit of useful correlations and are now grasping at the more dubious correlations. The author claims that things are complicated by the concept of causation. He cites David Hume: "...causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered -- they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a 'lively conception produced by habit.' When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity -- we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact -- it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts." It's been a while since I've taken philosophy, but Hume's skepticism of causality is itself a story by its own criteria. ~~~ saulrh A slight amendment to your statements: in _some fields of research_ , we've exhausted the low-hanging fruit, and "low-hanging" is defined differently for every field. In mathematics, for example, we ran out of obvious things in the 1700s, but there are still "low-hanging fruit" because the cost of investment is so low. My field, robotics, is currently new enough that we're still finding things that are obvious in hindsight. In pharmaceuticals, things are pretty easy to come up with, but really ridiculously expensive to test and verify the safety of. Making sweeping statements about "low-hanging fruit" doesn't work. ~~~ giardini "Making sweeping statements about 'low-hanging fruit' doesn't work." Sure it does! Extend the analogy a bit by letting the tree be a living thing. That today you picked some fruit doesn't mean that tomorrow a new pear (apple, guava, grapefruit, etc.) won't grow where you harvested. And when the tree dies, there's always that "making lemonade from lemons" metaphor... (OK, so that's engineering, not science, but it will keep you busy and productive). ------ zasz "Another meta review, meanwhile, looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003. Most of these were the culmination of years of careful work. Nevertheless, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect." If science was really failing us, I don't see how we would have managed to retract those incorrect studies. It feels like the writer had no bigger point than "biomedical research is hard, let's go shopping." It's sensationalist to consider science a failure every time it makes a mistake. I thought the Hume references were pretty bad, too. If you read what he says, he questions the existence of relations such as "A causes B" and prefers to phrase them as, "In the past, we have observed A-like events are always correlated with B-like events." For practical purposes, that's enough to behave as if causality "really" exists. You just have to avoid mixing up causality with mere correlation, which every good scientist already knows. ------ blix This article misses the mark completely, both by extrapolating medicine to science as a whole, and by attacking the idea of causation rather than the sketchy practices of medicine. All of the examples are pulled from medicine, notorious for its lack of experimental rigor. To say that "Science has failed us" implies that either medicine is the the only important science or that all science is equally as sloppy, which is pretty insulting to a scientist in any harder field. His focus on causation is even more misguided. The very purpose of science is to understand the way the world works; to understand what causes what. To attack the idea of causation is to attack the very idea of science, and in turn all of the advances it's brought about over the past 300 years. Beyond that, we implicitly accept causation in almost every aspect of our lives (Pressing the space bar causes a space to appear, etc). Certainly causes can't be 'seen' like facts, but to suggest that this trivializes them, or somehow makes them less useful is nonsense (and, for what it's worth, is total misreading of Hume). Complexity isn't a valid reason either. Some very well understood systems are incredibly complex (look at the computer you are using now). What is true is that like all other humans, scientists make mistakes. We often make the incorrect causal links or are influenced by our biases. This is why experiments exist (instead of pure data collection); to make sure the causes we have assumed are correct. To point to a couple of experiments with an unexpected result and then say that all of science has failed isn't even a little bit right. ~~~ bmahmood Agree that the author's extrapolations of the problems of medicine to science are cringe-worthy. The focus on medicine though makes me think it was just a bad editorial decision for the headline. That said, I think he is correct in his critique of medicine/pharma. The cost of drug development has gone astronomically high these past decades, with billion dollar pipelines to account for the cost of failure. The pharma drug development model has not really evolved beyond a lottery system of testing random compounds to treat diseases, and going back/forth until the right permutation of a compound is found. This might have worked before for initial "easy" diseases (that had easy drug targets, or single gene mutations), but the problems we face now (Alzheimers, Cancer) are too complex for our lottery-based drug development system. ~~~ refurb I would disagree that the pharma drug development model hasn't evolved. There are many recent advances that have helped improve drug development (human cells used in pre-clinical screening, more advanced clinical trial design, etc). What I think has really changed is the cost of failure. The best example I can think of is the discovery of benzodiazepines (the drug class that includes Valium). The first benzodiazepine (chlordiazepoxide, Librium) was discovered in 1957 (we're talking, the FIRST set of pre-clinical tests) and it was on the market in 1960. 3 years from the first tests to market. Nowadays, you'd be lucky to get to market in 15 years. A great example is Qutenza. The product is nothing more than a patch that contains a very high level of capsaicin (the stuff that makes peppers hot). When you apply it to the skin, it can reduce the pain that sticks around after an attack of shingles. I can't think of a product with fewer safety issues, yet it took 10 YEARS for the company to get FDA approval. This is due to a combination of increased FDA scrutiny around safety along with a high standard for efficacy (i.e. we don't care if your drug reduces cholesterol, we want you to prove it reduces heart attacks). So in the past, when a smaller, shorter trial was sufficient for FDA approval, you could take a promising drug all the way to the FDA without a lot of expense. Not so anymore. ------ thesash I find this article troubling for two reasons: it fails to back up with evidence some of its boldest claims, and it suffers from the same problems presented by it's own argument. Claims like this one: > "First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists > are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain > of facts for the tiniest of associations." May be true, but the author presents no evidence to support them, with relevant studies, articles, etc.. The second, much more troubling problem however, is that the argument suffers fromt the very problem it presents! The author's conclusion that the returns on scientific research are diminishing due to an inherent flaw in conclusions being drawn from correlations-- is _itself_ a correlation. He's correlating the increasing cost of research to the increasing difficulty of finding new correlations in the data. There are other, simpler, less circular and philosophical explanations for why the returns on pharmaceutical research have decreased, such as increasingly strict regulations and fear of risk on the part of regulatory organizations. See this TED talk, where Juan Enriquez talks about these issues: [http://www.tedmed.com/videos- info?name=Juan_Enriquez_at_TEDM...](http://www.tedmed.com/videos- info?name=Juan_Enriquez_at_TEDMED_2011&q=updated&year=2011) ------ ggwicz Science isn't failing us. Big bureaucracies getting in the way of science are failing us. Even just to experiment with semi-controlled drugs, for example, is a massive headache and ungodly expensive. Everybody wants to get into journals and paid by government institutes, so a lot of science being done is very safe and not venturing out to the controversial as much. Studies are being funded by corporations looking to get some cooked data to support their bullshit. Science has never failed us, as science is inherently just human curiosity. The continuing structural growth and big bureaucratic developments that many governments, schools, and businesses are implementing are failing us. _"Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible."_ \- Javier Pascual Science can't fail. It only illuminates. But a lot of shady assholes run this place, and the last thing they want is a light shone on them. ------ dean This is a very wrong-headed article. The author seems to think that science should be able to get the right answers on the first try, and that if we can't, it's somehow a failure of science and any attempts at understanding should be abandoned. I think he has a basic misunderstanding of science. He doesn't realize that "made up stories" to explain how things work are just a starting point to understanding. They have to be tested and revised and re-tested until we come up with an explanation that reliably predicts how something works. And failures are an integral part of the process. Failures advance understanding. It reminds me of the quote by Thomas Edison, after a thousand failed experiments, "We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb". ------ polychrome This article does a great job of pointing out how science has limited it's thinking. It's not that science is wrong or is going to perish, it's simply needs to open it's perspective more. Take for example the first time you came up with a cool new product. You took it to a VC/someone who's done it before, and they ask you about your market, price, revenue etc. Science is still creating cool new products, not paying attention to everything else around it. Here's another good example: wind farms. We've been creating massive new wind mills that are more efficient bigger, etc etc. Have we ever looked at how to install them in such a fashion that they become more efficient as a team rather than an individual? And have we looked at how wind patterns change because of them? ------ adharmad The title itself is really bad - trial and error is the only way science works. You observe a cause and an effect, propose a theory, and tweak it based on more causes/effects. There are very few instances in the history of science where someone without any contact with actual experiment sat in a closed room and came up with an a theory that was eventually proved correct. If the author of the article was alive in the 1920s-1950s, and observed the chaotic scientific development of Quantum mechanics, he would have the exact same opinion that he has of the current state of medicinal research. I am curious to see if the author has any actual suggestions on how to do science. ------ pnathan That's one of the best Wired articles I've read in a long time. I recommend reading it. ------ marshray I was helping do data analysis at a spine surgery clinic in the 90s. I remember when that healthy-person MRI disc study came out. It was interesting, but I don't think it slowed us down one bit. :-) ------ 6ren The author seems surprised that we don't understand everything. Feynman: Nature's imagination is greater than your imagination. A more interesting limit is relationships that cannot be understood in isolation. When these exceed our working memory, we can't perform our usual trick of hierarchical abstraction to look at one part or one aspect at a time. Perhaps _that_ could be our limit of intuitive understanding, unless we come up with a fundamentally new way of understanding complexity. ------ thisisnotmyname The standard test for causality (at least in biology, where I work) is to test for rescue. You first establish that under conditions a, event b happens. You then reverse a, and observe b returning to normal. This, followed by controls demonstrating that you're only changing a and are actually measuring b serve as a stringent test for causation. ------ jbjohns pg one wrote in an essay about how if you manage to stumble onto something tabu you probably found something interesting (heavily paraphrased). A lot of people are seriously offended at this article.... just sayin'. ------ guscost Odds of this article containing the answer? Not good. ------ saturn > At any given time, about 10 percent of Americans are completely > incapacitated by their lumbar regions How can this possibly be true? _Completely_ incapacitated, ie bedridden and immobile? Surely the country would be in near collapse if 30+ million of its inhabitants were randomly bedridden at any one time just by that one medical issue. ~~~ giardini Thank goodness for aspirin, ibufprofen and acetaminopen! It is an overstatement. But if you merely ask around, especially of men, you will likely find a majority of them have had serious back pain and have some trepidation that it might, at any time, for little or no reason, return. I've got to try to get my socks on, now. ------ Trey-Jackson TLDR Way too long, meandering, full of anecdotes. How is it at all surprising that trying to "fix" problems with the body is uber-complicated? Plus, there's the obvious missing bigger point - all these companies are trying to find a solution that is a pill, as opposed to changing the underlying problem: bad food, bad environment, bad physical conditioning, etc. Billions spent on finding pills, very little money in solving the root causes...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
World's tallest skyscraper to be built in just 90 days - bitcartel http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57552186-1/developer-reaffirms-plan-to-finish-worlds-tallest-building-in-90-days ====== ChuckMcM This should be interesting to watch, as others have noted on the 30 story building they did it is both 'boring' since the floors are mostly identical, and largely built off site and then simply erected. I'm sure The Register will call it the "worlds fastest erection" :-). At the MIT affordable housing design competition there were some entrants that had similar features. (pre-fab sections, erected on site relatively rapidly) By pre-wiring/plumbing the walls and floors you cut out a lot of things that slow people down. Having watched Hotels get built in Las Vegas really rapidly (for them, which is 18 months, ground breaking to opening night) you could see there are lots of things that can be disrupted. Staging carpet for example, when you start carpeting its rolls and rolls and rolls of carpet, lifted by crane to various floors, and later cut to order. If you install the floor with all the carpeting already installed at the factory you've managed to parallelize floor construction and finishing. That is a huge savings. This building will house 31,400 people, (@ 11M sq ft that is like 350 sq ft per person so not really roomy) But an interesting way to throw together shelter. Building these things for Haiti could do wonders for that country, assuming they don't burn down. ~~~ mbenjaminsmith I don't know if building cheap housing really solves any problems however. C.f., the famous housing "projects" in Chicago. You can replace those with any low-income housing project anywhere in the world and see the same effects. You might put roofs over people's heads but you create a new set of problems by throwing all of those marginally functional people together. I imagine increasing population density would just amplify those problems. This building is supposed to have a mix of low and high income housing (how does that work?) as well as schools and other social services. Given that space in China is _not_ at a premium I don't think you can call this anything but a social experiment. Maybe if it works they can export it to HK where it might actually be useful. (Though it does conjure images of a sort of neo- Walled City.) Given that this type of construction produces boring, utilitarian space I don't understand why they're not using it for offices. I imagine this would be much more tolerable as office space and the footprint / usable space ratio would make sense for commercial districts. ~~~ JungleGymSam I think it may be worth considering that the discipline and follow-the-herd mentality of Chinese people is a lot different than those of Americans who would qualify for "the projects" style housing. ~~~ potatolicious You may not have intended it that way, but I do find this comment to be rather racist. The stereotype that the Chinese are "follow the herd" is both untrue and damaging. Us Chinese have a hard enough time being taken seriously in the West, what with stereotypes of a hive mind and mindless obedience to authority, and this doesn't help. ~~~ JungleGymSam I definitely didn't mean it that way but if thought it was "racism" you should read up on what racism is. To call out the differences between two cultures is not racism. Having said that, Asian culture has been, and is still very much, strongly influenced by the ideas of honor and shame. That's much less the case here in the US and that is what I was pointing out. I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'". Why is that? ~~~ vacri You may wish to follow your own advice there. Calling out the differences between cultures is a fundamental part of racism - "we're better than them and their funny ways". Yes, it can be done in a non-racist way, but the way you've phrased it is just plain wrong. _I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'"._ [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20Olympics) ~~~ JungleGymSam What? It sounds like you've really misunderstood my comment(s). ~~~ vacri I'm saying that you have a peverse understanding of what racism is, and that you should 'read up on racism'. Your first paragraph is saying that calling out differences in two cultures isn't racist. This isn't true. Yes it can be done differently, but if you start talking about 'fried chicken and watermelon' (as an example), you're talking about the difference between two cultures, yours and the stereotyped one you're referring to. The second paragraph was a straight-out derailment:"oh, if you're really against racism, why aren't you against this other kind?", the subtext being that the speaker is biased or selfish because they didn't evenly address the other potentially racist stuff. Seriously, if you're going to be correcting others on 'what racism is', you do need to spend some more time reading up on it. There's a few subtleties that have bypassed you, from your comment above. ------ ericHosick Working on an app a while back, I watched people constructing a building outside of my office window. Watching hundreds of people working together, they got that thing up in around six months. I looked at how far we had gotten on the software we were working on in the same time period. It was, frankly, disheartening. ~~~ nandemo In one of his talks Alan Kay compares software development with civil engineering, claiming the former is still at the level of pyramid building. ~~~ drsim There are certainly similarities, but civil engineering when compared to software engineering methodologies is closer to waterfall. And waterfall isn't the most efficient way to turn out software. ------ twelvechairs Whilst putting up a building at speed is a great marvel, it should be noted that what holds this kind of prefabrication back is not generally technological innovation but the reality that transporting prefabricated components to site is often more expensive than just building them in place. If this ever really gets built and isn't one giant PR excercise ('tallest building' proposals have a long history as such), it will require a huge factory space of temporary workers not far from the base of the building basically doing all the usual building tasks and won't be any cheaper than a traditional slow concrete construction which requires long times to dry (unless they are hiding something more fundamentally important than the headline from us). ~~~ lmm I was under the impression it was mostly regulation holding prefabrication back (presumably less of an issue in china). Here in the UK many (admittedly somewhat low-quality) prefabs were built immediately after the war to replace lost housing, and it was seen as the way forward - then they suddenly became illegal once they were no longer such an obvious necessity. ------ bofussing A 220 floor building is a hugely complex engineering feat to pull off which will have little in common with the 30 floor hotel that Broad previously manufactured and erected. The difference cannot be overstated; from the structural elements needed to support something approaching 3000 feet (including the sheer loads from wind) to the highly specialised services required (lifts, water, drainage, fire services, power distribution etc.). On top of this there are the technicalities and logistics of manufacturing and assembling something this big and tall in such a short time. There will be a lot of specialist and custom engineering involved. So what is the point? If Broad's mission is manufacture cost effective, easy to erect and energy efficient tower blocks then the 220/F monster seems an unlikely direction to take. The average tower block in any but the most crowded city is unlikely to much over 30 floors. And from a cost and energy efficiency standpoint there are diminishing returns on very tall buildings anyway. All in all I think this is more of a publicity stunt than a reality. ------ alwaysinshade Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry. There's so much regulation and risk- assignment involved in construction that only the biggest players can afford to bid and execute on a medium-large project. The result is little innovation, lengthy project completion times and high costs. Forget the construction companies for a moment - the amount of training and accreditation required for a tradesman (e.g. electrician) is unheard of anywhere else in the world. My friend has three different Working at Heights tickets, and the various state licenses have cost him a small fortune. If we could shift much of the fabrication to local factories/warehouses where working at height and weather exposure can be reduced or eliminated, we might be able to encourage more competition and speed up production times. ~~~ D_Alex >Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry. Agreed (though why smaller?). Do you know people who might be interested in looking into this? ~~~ alwaysinshade Smaller, relative to this megastructure, because its a new fabrication process - better to see how it performs on a smaller-scale both in terms of desirability (is it pretty - will people happily work/live in it) and structural integrity. Plus there needs to be demand for huge amounts space. I know people from the engineering side of things who would be interested. ~~~ D_Alex I also know people who may be interested. I put my email in my profile, if you want to look into this, send me a note. ------ forbes The more impressive headline will be "World's tallest skyscraper constructed in just 90 days." The Burj Khalifa took five and a half years to complete. Even completing this new building in twice the predicted time will be remarkable. ------ wolf550e It seems to me that many (most?) rooms in that building will not have windows and most of those that do have windows will not have windows that open. So this building might as well be underground. ~~~ javert I bet not. Rather than just building a big "square", the image depicts a shape that provides a lot of outside surface area for windows. A significant part of the internal non-window space will be elevators. But you could be right. ------ oxwrist Awesome feature by Wired about the man behind this: [http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable- buildi...](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable-building- instant-skyscraper/all/) HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574100> ------ ck2 China also has entire empty cities, some newly constructed: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19049254> <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/> So one has to ask why. ~~~ seanmcdirmid Simple: Changsha is not an empty city. ~~~ mkr-hn I always assumed the stories about empty cities were like street interviews. Pick what fits the target narrative and toss the rest, even if the rest contradicts the narrative. ~~~ seanmcdirmid There is a lot of truth the empty city/empty building story, mostly just classic overbuilding. Its just not the issue in Changsha, which is a booming city coming into its own right now (though they may be overbuilding). I've only been there once about 10 years ago, but I go to Hunan relatively often. Its not like Inner Mongolia where you could just build an empty city on the plains. The area is heavily populated. ~~~ mkr-hn It's always good to hear straight from people who aren't a continent or more removed from the subject. Where's a good place to look if I want to find out more about the real estate situation around China? ~~~ seanmcdirmid I'm not sure, China is a big place and many local factors apply. Natural resources in the west and northwest dominate, which is why there are ghost boom towns (people looking to do something with that money). Shanghai/Guangzhou are financial centers and become incredibly expensive, Beijing is the center of government but will always trail Shanghai. The south is dense but not that much arable land (compared to say India, China is mostly mountains). Yunnan (out west) has great weather and ethnic diversity; you'd think Kunming could eventually become China's San Francisco but capital and skillz are all concentrated in the east. You could probably pick a city or region and analyze it to death. ------ quorn3000 > using 95 percent prefabricated modular pieces that are sort of similar to a > giant Lego set What terrible writing. ------ james33 Isn't this the same group that had one of their '90-day' buildings collapse not long ago? ~~~ forrestthewoods A variety of buildings have collapsed in China in recent years. Here's one good example with great pictures. I don't know if it's the same company or not. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196064/Tumbling- tow...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196064/Tumbling-tower-China- Amazing-pictures-13-storey-block-flats-toppled-over.html) ~~~ wisty And that's not a 90 day pre-fab building. IIRC, they had a dodgy underground carpark, which subsided. It had nothing to do with the actual building. Also, the pre-fabs they are starting to build have a lot of steel, which is easy to engineer. Concrete can be more difficult to get right, especially when you don't trust the suppliers (bamboo rebar anyone?). ~~~ seanmcdirmid But concrete buildings are so common in China because they can be assembled with low-level migrant workers. The move to steel typically requires much higher-level expertise, and so only the tallest buildings get that treatment. But with prefab, this is interesting, they might be able to continue using low-level migrant workers in the factory and during assembly? ------ blahedo That's not a building, that's an arcology. ------ smackfu Note that the article says "90 days to finish" or "90 days to complete", NOT "90 days to build". The site prep work like foundations for a supertall skyscraper are easily glossed over but are very important. ------ sazpaz This is being built under the same principles that we build software on. I think that it is huge that many industries are using what I would call DRY development on their manufacturing. ------ ck2 WTF is with the phallus symbol race for biggest buildings around the world. How about a contest for the least warmongering nation with the most free, productive people? Denmark? Norway? Costa Rica? ~~~ lucian1900 That would be much harder to evaluate. Measuring tall things is pretty straightforward. ------ freddealmeida I'm noticing this trend in numerous projects. Clients expect so much in 90 days. Sigh. Pretty impressive if they can do it. ------ ComputerGuru I almost had a heart attack when I saw that picture of it in Chicago. It would be such a monstrosity and a real blemish to the the subtlety of the current skyline. Fortunately, that's just CNet being creative and this is far, far away from Chicago. ------ sown Can someone summarize how they manage to do this? I once read that it involved that they sell a product rather than a service. I don't know where I read that but I'm curious why this doesn't apply more often to other products? ------ riffraff did anyone else notice that the two pictures show different buildings? ------ stonekeeper09 What could possibly go wrong? ------ gaborcselle Is there enough demand for office space in Changsa to support this structure? ~~~ ramate Apparently the housing market there is doing better than much of China's real estate market, but that isn't saying much. The growth of inland cities like Changsa has traditionally been slower than the coastal giants (pretty intuitive) but now with further central government investment, an increased infrastructure the growth is really picking up. The real problem with this building though is that there are increasing costs the larger a building gets from increased maintenance, climate control systems, etc. and it doesn't scale linearly with size. The question here is whether to have one monolithic building or several large buildings. I'd imagine the latter is the better bet, but the cost savings from the modular build may largely outweigh this. ~~~ seanmcdirmid A lot of it has to do with face though. Hunan/Changsha get lots of face projects because they are the home of Mao. Changsha itself is at best a second tier city and not really even on the level as Wuhan or (definitely) Guangzhou that it lies between. Looking at the designs, the building looks like it will be an eye soar pretty quickly, on par with the Ryugyong. ------ sixQuarks I call B.S. on this ~~~ ChuckMcM Actually not BS, see the Broad Group's web site and their timelapse of the 'demo' project [1]. They don't count the time to put in the foundation and drive the pilings, just the erection part. That part consists entirely of lifting pre-fabricated sections in place, connecting pipes and wires, welding to the rest of the building and moving on to the next one. [1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf- MQM9vY&noredirect=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY&noredirect=1) ~~~ sixQuarks I've seen that already, and yes, it's impressive, but watch and see, this isn't going to be built in 90 days, or next year. Probably never.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Personal data of a billion Indians sold online for $8 - djrogers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/04/india-national-id-database-data-leak-bought-online-aadhaar ====== aag8 It's ironic how two-faced the Aadhar system is. On one hand, this is the largest scale modern public identification system I can think of with more complex biometrics than just fingerprints. The Indian government made a concerted effort to create Aadhar IDs for even the most remote villages in India. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the security of the Aadhar database is already outdated. Even if the database is secure, corruption in the Indian government is so widespread that it would be easy to bypass.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vendor Lock-In - hhs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in ====== 1cvmask The biggest vendor lock-in is institutional inertia or “laziness”.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Today's the last day to apply to Startup School - ladybro https://www.startupschool.org/ ====== ivan_ah Will the videos be posted somewhere public as they become available? YouTube channel? RSS feed? ~~~ ladybro If you didn't find this already, you can subscribe for content updates at [https://www.startupschool.org/spectators/new](https://www.startupschool.org/spectators/new)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise from structured expert judgment - howard941 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/05/14/1817205116 ====== evandijk70 EDIT: The title has been updated: it used to say: "Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise to exceed 2m by 2100" _________________________________________________________________ Incredibly misleading title. The expected ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise are, per the article: 26 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions from the Paris agreement) 51 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions in line with current emissions) 69 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions in line with current emissions and incorporation of thermal expansion) The 2m value comes from the large error bars in the predictions. Global climate change is a huge problem, but misrepresenting results from a scientific study like this is just presenting ammunition to climate change deniers on a silver platter. I suggest replacing 'to' with 'may' in the title, as that is a better summary of the article. ~~~ briandear It’s definitely ammunition, deservedly so. This sort of misrepresentation is par for the course. “The world is ending in 12 years.” I seem to hear that every 12 years just when people have forgotten about how the world was supposed to have been flooded already. Activists seem to have a ha but if exagération, if not downright lying. ~~~ coldpie Please read the IPCC reports, not ... whatever your current source is. ------ Jigg To be clear, the 2m increase is the analyzed 95th percentile (very high end) of the estimates of this meta-study, when you take both glacial melt and glacial expansion. The median values for low and high estimates are 69cm and 110cm. Not that this isn't still terrifying, worth of action, worthy of international collaboration, and so on. Just let's be accurate about our titles. ~~~ mc32 Doesn’t Earth’s being a spinning oblong sphere mean some places will experience only minimal change while others will see significant change? So all this is “average” rise. ~~~ parhamn It's a much more complicated process (e.g. the weight of the ice changes the shape of the mantle). The Verge did a good high level overview of some of the different factors in play here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA5zh3yG_-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA5zh3yG_-0) ------ ridicter If you're interested in getting involved in addressing climate change, here are two options for citizens to get involved: 1) The Citizens Climate Climate Lobby has been around ten years, and it currently has a bill in Congress that has bipartisan (1 Republican) support: The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act ([http://energyinnovationact.org/](http://energyinnovationact.org/)). With this plan, all the revenue from a carbon tax* is directly returned to citizens as a yearly check--no enlargement of the state. This is the organization cofounded by NASA scientist James Hansen, who first testified to Congress about the perils of climate change over 30 years ago. 2) If you're a millennial/gen Z, and you're more skeptical of a market-based solution, the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement are making waves. Rather than a concrete policy in Congress, they have a set of principles/values that they are pushing forward. This includes economic and social justice issues. *Carbon pricing (which can come in the form of a tax or cap and trade) is the single most effective mechanism to address climate change. The idea is to internalize the _real_ costs of climate change into the price we actually pay--ramping up the price on carbon over time until it is prohibitively expensive to use fossil-fuel-expensive products, and incentivizing the economy to adapt. That fundamental price signal, where renewable energy becomes cheaper relative to fossil fuels (and similarly less fossil fuel-intensive goods are cheaper relative to fossil-fuel-expensive ones) reverberates throughout the economy. However, it's worth noting that while this solution should theoretically appeal to Republicans, almost none have stepped forward... ~~~ sampo > Green New Deal Aren't they strongly anti-nuclear? Putting science behind ideology is not a very good position to take about climate change. ~~~ ridicter I think their position is: 1) don't shut don't existing nuclear plants to replace them with fossil fuels and 2) wind and solar should make up the new energy mix. But for what it's worth, the membership has diverse views. I'm pro-nuclear. CCL tends to be more pragmatic and have many more nuclear proponents. ------ lazyjones So how much was the actual global sea-level rise in the past 10 years and how does it relate to previous estimates? ~~~ mythrwy Maybe something like this? [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm) I don't doubt humans are affecting the climate. I do doubt that humans can extrapolate the effects of what they are doing out into the future very well. ~~~ cheerlessbog That article describes one scientist's hypothesis based on an extreme year - another more conservative scientist is quoted also. The thing to pay attention to is peer reviewed consensus, which is still alarming. ------ kisamoto Not to hijack this thread but does anybody know of a list of companies/start- ups who are trying to combat climate change/protecting the environment especially if they are hiring? With a brother who has a master's specialising in glacier reduction (and a keen interest in data science) he is finding it a demoralising experience looking for companies who actually seem to be taking action. ------ foxyv If you are interested in seeing a map of sea level rises, the NOAA publishes a website with one. At 7 ft there are significant coastal differences. [https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/](https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/) ~~~ lazyjones Here's a more complete picture for the case when _all_ ice melts and sea levels rise by 60+ meters: [http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html](http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html) (note: by a "skeptic") > _Today the Earth has 148 million sq. km of land area, of which 16 million > sq. km is covered by glaciers. A sea level rise of 66 meters would flood > about 13 million sq. km of land outside Antarctica. Without polar ice, > Antarctica and Greenland would be ice free, although about half of > Antarctica would be under water. Thus, ice-free land would be 128 million > sq. km compared to 132 million sq. km today._ I can't check all the calculations, but this result doesn't seem too terrible since we'd likely be able to migrate affected people in time. ~~~ beatpanda The amount of migration that has completely upended political systems in the United States and Europe since 2010 or so will be a historical footnote compared to the migration we will experience due to climate change. The United States elected a professional wrestling character to the Presidency because he promised to be cruel to immigrants. Forgive my pessimism but I do not think "we will be able to migrate affected people in time" barring a major transformation of our society. ~~~ SlowRobotAhead > United States elected a professional wrestling character to the Presidency > because he promised to be cruel to immigrants Seriously, if that is what you honestly think happened without hyperbole... I worry for 2020. ------ chiefalchemist Anyone have any idea what a 1m and 2m rise in sea level looks like in terms of impact to land that is currently dry but will eventually end up underwater? ~~~ dexen I wholeheartedly recommend the 2006 _An Inconvenient Truth_ [1] as it shows nice animations of expected flooding of, for example, the Manhattan. [1] ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth)) ------ seibelj It’s quite clear that in 2019 it is not possible to get all powerful entities in the world to work together on an issue like climate change. We should focus on band-aid solutions like reflectors in space above the poles that prevent sun from hitting the earth at all. We are past the “if only everyone bought electric cars” phase of solutions and need special projects that assume the amount of CO2 emitted stays the same or increases. ~~~ zatertip There's no stationary orbit over the poles ~~~ seibelj I have no idea if that’s possible, what I mean is we should stop trying to get the US and China to agree on anything let alone climate change so we need grand silver bullet solutions. ~~~ simias China does accept the reality of climate change and is enacting policies against it. It might not be nearly enough but it's not fair to lump them with the USA on this one. ~~~ briandear Have you been to Beijing? China is in a class all of its own when it comes to pollution. It’s not fair to lump the US in with China. ~~~ flukus Have you bought products manufactured in China? That's your pollution. ------ LinuxBender Are humans advanced enough to engineer around sea rise and temperature changes? ~~~ maxxxxx Humanity should be fine. The problem is how to deal with millions of displaced people. We will probably need a few wars to figure that one out. ~~~ onemoresoop Humanity may be fine but we're also disrupting other life on the planet that we can't predict the impact of. Humanity may not be so fine after all.. ------ zuluwill potentially very dumb question but could you build hydro power solutions(from the ice melt/run off) that you then get clean power from / help cool ice...? So out of my depth here but genuinely curious. Also appreciate building a hydro power plant on a very unstable platform (ice) is problematic just curious of other solutions to generate hydro power... ~~~ simonh Most of these ice sheets are already quite close to sea level and distributed across vast areas - like most of the coastline of Antarctica. Hydro power works best with significant altitude drops across very narrow choke-points. ------ danschumann Can't we make solar powered ice makers on a huge scale and just re freeze it? ~~~ maxxxxx You understand that a refrigerator puts out heat so in the end it’s a zero sum game? ~~~ cookingrobot Not exactly a zero-sum game because the earth isn’t a closed system. We’re constantly getting heat energy from the sun and radiating it back out into space at an equal rate. The composition of the atmosphere (greenhouse gasses) decides what equilibrium temperature will be. So if we had big refrigerators refreezing the arctic (without creating greenhouse gasses), they would put a ton of heat into the air but it would radiate away into space just like any other heat captured by the sun, and wouldn’t really affect the earth’s average temperature. ~~~ maxxxxx By that thinking you could just cool down the air. No need to freeze the arctic. ~~~ danschumann freezing is white and reflects more ------ ThomPete This is speculation not actual scientifically demonstrated furthermore it's speculation based on the most catastrophic predictions. On top of that, sea-level rise is not some even distribution around the globe, some places will get more others will get less. It's a very local phenomenon. This is so misleading yet this level of inaccurate reporting is the basis for the current political debate. Meta studies are to often used as political tools NOT science. I 10 years when the climate catastrophism hopefully have subdued we will se a host of lawsuits against the words offenders of this scaremongering and "cry wolf" Yes the climate is changing yes it's getting slightly hotter. No there isn't any scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change we don't know how to deal with.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Gender Graph: Quantifying Gender Bias - kedmi http://gendergraph.tk ====== snayz Thanks for checking out the Gender Graph project:) The binary model is made by word2vec: [https://github.com/dav/word2vec](https://github.com/dav/word2vec) Gender graph uses word embeddings trained by word2vec, the implementation is in the source repo under: src/gender_word_plotting.c ------ djsumdog So the source repo has a binary file in it, which seems to have been made by vec2bin: [https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/gender-word- plots](https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/gender-word-plots) The python scripts are pretty simple. I'd like to see some methodology drill down / peer-review to make sure these models are sane. I don't really have the mathematics background myself.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Can I ask for your help with testing some js loop syntax? - arash_milani http://jsperf.com/am-js-loops ====== michaelw I gave this a try and added the functional form (i.e. bigArray.forEach). I was a little surprised at how much slower this was. I ended up creating another test where every case had a function call overhead. All three functional forms (forEach, map and reduce) were slower than the plain old loop <http://jsperf.com/am-js-loops/7/edit> ~~~ arash_milani Thank you for contribution and addition of that functional form. yeah they are much more slower that plain old for loops. ------ arash_milani There are various articles on the web that you can improve your javascript loop performance by modifying the way you code them. I wanted to know what is the current state for these techniques due to improvements in browser engines. Thank you for your time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Operation Sunrise (World War II) - AndrewBissell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II) ====== 082349872349872 related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401308)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Wall Street takes advantage of very confused Ivy League graduates - ilamont http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wall-street-steps-in-when-ivy-league-fails/2012/02/16/gIQAX2weIR_story.html ====== joncooper This article jibes with my analysis. I worked in finance (as a proprietary trader) for 6-ish years, including several years as a VP at Deutsche Bank. As the article says: "What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next." I call these folks "try-hards". These folks have knocked down goal after goal for their whole life, and they are damn good at it. The field of possibility has been constrained by their parents and their social milieu for years to reveal a very small set of viable goals at any given time. And they are talented, motivated, and absolutely crush anything in their way. In college, these folks need to develop their own superego and internalize their own constraint set. The low-hanging fruit is right there to grab: finance, consulting, law, medicine. Each of these is prestigious, pays well, and has a relatively deterministic process by which one can enter, grow in responsibility, demonstrate achievement, and increase their pay. It's a no- brainer. The paradox of choice is one of the great anxiety-producers of our age for the professional set. Honestly, it must be refreshing to have such a strong set of constraints guiding you toward such a bounded set of outcomes. This is something that people like me[1] have a hard time understanding: for the try-hard, this outcome is not something to be fought or to be overly questioned--it's the inevitable, desirable continuation of a lifetime worth of achievement. [1] - A hacker from a lower-class background who did not ride the academic achievement path ~~~ plinkplonk "I worked in finance (as a proprietary trader) for 6-ish years, including several years as a VP at Deutsche Bank. - (I am a) hacker from a lower-class background who did not ride the academic achievement path" Very interesting. So how _did_ you get to be a wall street trader,( without the academic credentials)? ~~~ rdouble Wall Street seems pretty meritocratic in the sense that they will try out anyone who seems promising and just fire them if they suck. (For anywhere besides Goldman Sachs and D.E. Shaw, that is.) I had an easier time getting interviews on Wall Street than in Silicon Valley. (but the Wall Street interviews were harder) ~~~ joncooper Depends on role. In sales / trading / research there is way more demand for jobs than supply, and a lot of talented unemployed people floating around out there. For example, here in SF, one PM told me that he was going to interview one candidate per day for 30 days and then make a decision. For a junior trader / analyst position. Granted this is a C-list at best town for finance, but that struck me as indicative of a huge imbalance. ~~~ rdouble Maybe finance firms are just more together with interview scheduling. I realize your comment meant there are few positions in finance, but I've never known any startup sized companies to do something like that, even though everyone says they are desperate for talent. The interview process is usually super disorganized, and people just get called in if it's an employee's girlfriend's roommate or other arbitrary criteria. It's usually like 2-8 people interviewed in a month, not 30. ------ AznHisoka I have no problem with Wall Street recruiting the smartest. Naturally, people will go to where the money is, and the money usually resides in the industry that produces the most "value" to society. What I have a problem with is that Wall Street has already proven it doesn't provide as much value as it warrants (20% of GDP or so)... but we artificially pump it back up by bailing out firms. The fall was going to happen, but the government interfered with things, which irritates me. It's like spending hours and hours climbing a mountain, then when you reach the top, a deity increases the mountain twice as high to piss you off.. What the hell? ~~~ publicus There is a reason Goldman claims to be doing God's work on Earth... ------ ivan_ah Seeing my analytically minded friends (physicists and mathematicians) go into banking and finance really pisses me off. I really hate the "it is just a job" mentality. You have your life before you. You can do anything you want. Instead they lure them in with the six-figure salaries. In fact I have made it my life mission to do something about it, because I feel that if we cut out the lifeblood (the new recruits) of "the system" then it will crumble. ~~~ ImprovedSilence You can do anything you want. But you can do anything you want better, with a big salary. ~~~ sopooneo Not if earning the big salary takes so much time that you can't dedicate yourself to something else. Like being in the lab researching cancer. ------ nwj Not knowing what to do next =/= confused. The article makes it sound as if Wall Street is preying on or exploiting hapless, vulnerable graduates. Isn't it possible though that many Ivy Leaguers take these jobs because they pay well, are high status, and don't foreclose future career options. And if that's true, it sounds more like a reasonable exchange rather than a predatory relationship. ------ helmut_hed It's interesting that "Excel" is listed as one of the valuable skills students learn in their Wall Street internships.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012) - whoishiring Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.<p>Please also see: "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" (May 2012) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3914001 ====== dgunn If "INTERN", "REMOTE", or "H1B" candidates are _not_ welcome to apply to your position, you should not use those words in your post. That defeats the purpose of using those key words if those candidates _are_ welcome. For example, if I am looking for H1B opportunities, ctl+f finds basically every listing because those who aren't willing to accept H1B say, "no H1B". If you don't accept these candidates, the convention assumes that by default. Don't explicitly say it. ------ kamens Khan Academy - Mountain View - (full-time and intern, designers and devs) Our mission is to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We're scaling quickly. Our students answer over 2 million math problems per day (over 500M total so far), all generated by our open source exercise generation framework (<http://github.com/khan/khan-exercises>), and our videos (now from a variety of authors including Sal) have been viewed over 145MM times. We're tracking all that data and using it to customize each student's experience. We could use your help. Working for Khan Academy is one of the highest educational impact positions you can imagine. We're hiring designers and all types of devs -- mobile, frontend, backend, whatever you want to call yourself. Big plans ahead. <http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs> ~~~ sycren Would you take interns from the UK? ------ phillytom Monetate - Conshohocken, PA (Philly suburb) - No remote, but we will help you relocate. Monetate is a SAAS provider to internet marketers. We do real-time DOM modification on our clients’ sites to put the right experience in front of their users. We’re looking for engineers who want to do highly visible work on great brands and solve tough problems with great coworkers. About us: * Founded in 2008 * Funded by First Round and OpenView * Market comp * Respect - it's our core value. We have a great team and we work well together. Our vacation policy is the same as Netflix (we don't have one). Our technical teams have full authority over (and responsibility for) the problems they work on. What we're looking for: * Problem solvers who like to code - we take things apart, figure out how they work, then build software to solve problems * People who like to ship - we're focused on building and shipping great products - if you like to see your work in production quickly you'll see it here * Use the source - Google Closure to Python, Hadoop and Mahout to Solr and Lucene - we're open source across our stack * People who like hard challenges - we have great problems across our products - data, UX, 3rd party JS, high volume / low latency APIs - we have no shortage of deep problems to work on We're looking for people not positions. We have people who have joined the team with no background in our primary languages and people from non- traditional backgrounds. Check out our blog at <http://engineering.monetate.com/> and see more about our open jobs at <http://monetate.com/jobs/> We've hired great people from HN in the past. Feel free to email me with any questions or to apply - tjanofsky monetate com ~~~ jawns I found out about Monetate last year in one of these "Who's hiring" threads on Hacker News. I applied, was hired as a frontend engineer, and began working in August, and it's been a great experience. I'd be happy to answer any questions. If you're just curious about life at Monetate or about the interview/hiring process, here are a couple of recent posts from our engineering blog that should be of interest: [http://engineering.monetate.com/2012/04/23/dom-doodles- from-...](http://engineering.monetate.com/2012/04/23/dom-doodles-from-actual- interviews-at-monetate) [http://engineering.monetate.com/2012/03/27/get-to-know- monet...](http://engineering.monetate.com/2012/03/27/get-to-know-monetates- engineers) And if you'd like to find out if you have what it takes to get hired, feel free to try the CSS, Javascript, or Python mini-challenges at the top of our blog pages. ~~~ epi0Bauqu Would just like to add that Philly is a great place to live, and has a rapidly growing startup scene. This article is from a couple of days ago: [http://www.fastcompany.com/1835775/philadelphia-sets- sights-...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1835775/philadelphia-sets-sights-on- becoming-americas-next-big-tech-town) Oh, and DDG is always looking for new people to get involved :) <http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387> ------ MattRogish New York, NY (we'll cover relo except no H1B) - <http://fundinggates.com/jobs> We're a well-funded (angel, strategic - not VC), pre-revenue (just starting development, please help me! :D) company in NYC hiring awesome Rails and JS (Ember is nice, but not necessary) developers. We believe strongly in quiet work environments, work whenever, wherever you want (<http://www.gorowe.com>), the best tools money can buy (unlimited computer/desk budget), 20% time to do whatever you want (but you _must_ share it with the team), hiring smart people and getting out of their way, and generally making the best software company in the world. We're hiring for engineers #1, 2, 3 - so at this time our core team should be either in NYC, or relocatable (we'll cover it!). As we grow the core team we'll be more flexible and able to take the culture hit a remote person brings, but not at this time, sorry! I hope to hear from you. rogish [at] fundinggates dot com ------ lpolovets Factual is hiring in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and Shanghai. Local candidates preferred, but remote work is possible for exceptional U.S. candidates. Full- time only. H1B is okay for very strong, non-remote applicants. Factual's vision is to be an awesome and affordable data provider, so that developers, startups, and big companies can focus on innovation instead of data acquisition. We believe in openness and transparency rather than proprietariness and obfuscation. We have a terrific team that is still fairly small, and an incredible CEO (he was the co-founder of Applied Semantics, which was sold to Google and became AdSense). In late 2010, we raised a Series A from Andreessen-Horowitz, and our customers and partners include Facebook, Newsweek, Yelp, and Blekko. We have lots of challenging problems to work on at all layers of the stack: data cleaning and canonicalization, deduping, storage, serving, APIs, etc. If you love data, Factual is the place to be. We have job openings for software engineers of all levels. You would ideally know Java and/or Clojure, and you'll get bonus points for experience with machine learning, NLP, algorithm design, or Hadoop. If you're interested in the Bay Area office, it just opened in December of 2011 and is very small, so you'd have a significant influence on the culture there. You can email me personally at leo -at- factual.com, or view our job postings and apply directly via Jobvite: Palo Alto Software Engineer: [http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oTR1Vfwq&s=Hackernews](http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oTR1Vfwq&s=Hackernews) Los Angeles Software engineer: [http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oQR1Vfwn&s=Hackernews](http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oQR1Vfwn&s=Hackernews) Los Angeles Data Engineer: [http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oSS1Vfwq&s=Hackernews](http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oSS1Vfwq&s=Hackernews) ------ btucker Brattleboro, VT / Cambridge, MA / Remote - Rails Developers Green River (<http://greenriver.com>) is looking for two experienced Rails developers to join our team. We're a Southern Vermont-based consultancy which was founded in 2000. We started writing production apps in Rails in '05 and have grown to a team of eight developers, two project managers, and a UX designer. We focus in the areas of Education, Health and the Environment, and have many great projects ranging from a scoring system Starbucks uses to facilitate the inspection of 90% of the farms they buy coffee from[1] to storytelling software for people with memory loss[2]. If these types of projects sound interesting, we'd love to hear from you. You'd have the option of either working out of our beautiful Vermont office overlooking the Connecticut River, joining our new Cambridge-based team, working remotely, or some combination thereof. Email us: jobs@greenriver.com -Ben [1]: <http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/sourcing/coffee> [2]: <http://www.timeslips.org/> ~~~ btucker Green River is also looking to hire a full-time user interface designer: <http://www.greenriver.com/people/jobs.html> ------ jblz Worldwide Telecommute / REMOTE Automattic is currently hiring for the following positions: \- Account Engineer - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/account-engineer/> \- Code Wrangler - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/code-wrangler/> \- Community Handyman - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/community- handyman/> \- Designer - <http://automattic.com/jobs/designer/> \- Growth Engineer - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/growth-engineer/> \- Happiness Engineer - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/happiness- engineer/> \- Mobile Wrangler - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/mobile-wrangler/> \- Systems Wrangler - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/systems-wrangler/> \- Theme Wrangler - <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/theme-wrangler/> We build WordPress.com, contribute to the WordPress Open Source project (<http://wordpress.org>) and work on a lot of other really cool stuff. Join us if you are passionate about making the web a better place. <http://automattic.com/> <http://automattic.com/work-with-us/> ~~~ jarek Is there any particular reason you have positions with "engineer" in title that have nothing to do with even the most watered-down meaning of engineering? I'm looking at Happiness Engineer in particular. I realize tech support isn't the most glamorous of titles, but it's at least somewhat descriptive. Similarly, Account Engineer is a client-facing sales position with no technical component. ~~~ jblz Many Happiness Engineers write significant amounts code as well as respond to customer requests. Also, much of what we do (as a company) is data-driven. Since we apply scientific methodology to our support and CRM systems & processes, I think it works. That being said, our job titles aren't exactly hard and fast representations of what we do day-to-day. Check out the subtitles here for examples: <http://automattic.com/about/> ~~~ jarek Understood on the happiness engineering role. Don't get me wrong, I think you can give yourselves any title you want, but when listing job postings you're just creating barriers by using non- descriptive, non-standard titles. Your potential applicants have to check the job description for "Account Engineer" to see if this is something they would be interested in (for most it won't be), if someone was actually looking for a client/account director role they might not notice this one because of the "engineer" part, and if someone was looking for a blended support/coding role they might miss "Happiness Engineer" while scrolling down the page. ~~~ evansolomon Lots of things might happen based on any non-standard terminology, but in general it's not something we worry about. It's meant to be a little fun, a little different, and attract people that are a little fun and a little different. If someone wants an account director job at Automattic and never makes their way the Account Engineer link, that's okay. If someone is a bit intrigued by our non-standard titles and looks a bit closer at them because they stand out, that's cool, too. Anything that isn't normal might confuse people. The goal of our jobs page isn't to confuse the fewest people possible. ------ seldo San Francisco, CA (Mission District) - awe.sm - H1B okay We're building conversion tracking for social media: think "Sendgrid for social media". What's that mean? It means we're building a platform that lets other companies abstract away a complex problem that lots of people have been reinventing the wheel for: measuring traffic, page views, signups and sales generated by users sharing with each other on Twitter, Facebook et al. We have a bunch of APIs and are building more all the time, as well as a GUI that attempts to make our data easy to use. We're hiring front-end engineers, back-end engineers, and those who fall into both categories, who we call "full stack" engineers: <http://awe.sm/jobs> On the back-end, we use a variety of languages including PHP and Ruby (and bash) to build high-performance, high-volume, real-time data collection and processing systems, connecting to a bunch of different data stores including MySQL, Redis and Sphinx. We are more concerned with the "smart and gets things done" type than a specific line on your resume, and are willing and eager to provide training and mentorship, both internal and external. We're a team of 13, rising to 14-16 once we hire you people. Our perks include offices with an awesome view ( <http://www.flickr.com/photos/seldo/6326815086/in/photostream> ) at 22nd and Mission, catered lunch 3x a week, and a company IRC server, which should tell you a lot about the kind of devs we are. ------ eli Industry Dive - Developer Intern & Editorial Intern Washington, DC (just off Dupont Circle) Industry Dive builds mobile apps and websites that help business executives excel at their jobs. We're a young company with experienced founders and a bit of seed money. We are hard at work building out our publishing platform and creating apps for each industry vertical. Pull up constructiondive.com or utilitydive.com on your phone to get a rough idea of where we're headed. (I'll let you in on a little secret: B2B isn't as sexy as working on the next Instagram of Spotify, but there's a lot of money there and the B2B publishing industry is ripe for disruption.) We've got a variety of projects that would be a good fit for a developer intern interested in web design, mobile apps, and/or stable and scalable architecture. Our primary stack is Python/Django (with a little bit of PHP), but being smart and eager to learn is more important than any prior specific technical skills. We're also looking for editorial interns interested in aggregating content and writing features & news summaries. Email eli-at-industrydive.com for details. ------ flyingyeti Irvine, CA or Remote, full-time The Prometheus Institute is looking for developers to help architect and build our web and mobile infrastructure and support our goal of revolutionizing the way citizens interact with their government. We a civic technology startup whose mission is to pioneer innovative software to advance freedom and civic engagement. We build tools, such as our iPhone app, Do-it-Yourself Democracy, that make it fun and easy to help citizens protect their freedoms and hold government accountable. We are currently focused on rebuilding the DIY Democracy experience as a full web and mobile platform. Our technology stack is built around Python, Django, Postgres, PostGIS, Redis and similar tools. Web Application Engineer: [http://prometheuscivic.theresumator.com/apply/Tia2pG/Web- App...](http://prometheuscivic.theresumator.com/apply/Tia2pG/Web-Application- Engineer.html?source=hn) Web Front-End Engineer: [http://prometheuscivic.theresumator.com/apply/bYzV4d/Web- Fro...](http://prometheuscivic.theresumator.com/apply/bYzV4d/Web-FrontEnd- Engineer.html?source=hn) ------ j4mie Brighton, UK - <http://dabapps.com> DabApps is looking for a junior to mid-level software developer with minimum one year of experience. May suit graduate with internship or sandwich year experience. DabApps is a growing company based in the centre of Brighton. We concentrate on web and mobile application development, and are passionate about producing high-quality work that we and our clients can be proud of. Our values are based on standards compliance and best practice and we are constantly working to improve and streamline our development process. We use open source technology wherever we can, and contribute back to the open source community as much as possible. Below is a list of core technologies and skills we are looking for. We are not expecting any candidate to have experience or knowledge in all of these areas. What we are looking for is the ability and desire to learn in a self-motivated way to fill in the gaps in your knowledge as required. Python, Django, Objective-C, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Relational databases, Redis, MongoDB, CouchDB or other NoSQL databases, Solr, ElasticSearch or other search solutions, "Big Data", distributed systems, data analysis/indexing, Linux server administration, Mac or Linux desktop experience, User experience analysis and design, prototyping See [http://dabapps.com/careers/current- vacancies/2012-04-softwar...](http://dabapps.com/careers/current- vacancies/2012-04-software-developer/) for full details. ------ simonholroyd TriBeCa, New York, NY At GO TRY IT ON (<http://gotryiton.com>), we're developing a platform to help the world answer the question, "What should I wear?" We build slick iPhone apps and desktop experiences for a passionate and helpful community that spans the globe. We build fast API's to power social sharing and networking, and fashion discovery. We're growing a database that maps large datasets of user preferences to a growing fashion catalog of products from all over the web. We're working to harness and democratize the value of personal stylists through technology. Tech we use: PHP, jQuery, Node.js, Compass, MySQL, S3, Chef, Capistrano, Jenkins, Github We have: Series A funding from SPA investments and Index Ventures, a small, growing team of very smart people, a sweet office on the 21st floor with awesome panoramic city views [n: <http://twitpic.com/6udocv>, e: <http://twitpic.com/6udp0j>, s: <http://twitpic.com/6udphj>, sw: <http://twitpic.com/6udpsx>] ios developer: <http://gotryiton.com/jobs/ios> front end developer: <http://gotryiton.com/jobs/front-end> REMOTE & HB1 considered Email simon@gotryiton.com ------ adrianhon Six to Start (<http://sixtostart.com>) - London, UK Mobile Engineer / Full Stack Engineer, Fulltime We're the creators of Zombies, Run! (<http://zombiesrungame.com>), a running game and audio adventure for iOS. ZR was #1 Top Grossing Health and Fitness across the world for two weeks and continues to stay in the top 5; we have an Android version coming out soon and are working on extending and expanding the game. We're a small team of five people, but we're growing rapidly off the success of ZR since we're already profitable and not reliant on any investors. At the moment we want to continue developing ZR across mobile platforms, as well as begin development on new and highly innovative mobile games. You'll have the opportunity to make a big difference on the games that we make - games that aren't like anything that people have seen before. At $7.99, ZR is the most expensive game in the Top 200 Paid, and the third most expensive app after Apple's. In other words, we make games so attractive that people are prepared to pay eight times the going rate. That's our business model. We're not interested in gamification or making casual games - we treat smartphones not as faster Gameboys, but as the very first wearable computers. Are you? This position is for London, UK. Email hello (at) sixtostart.com ------ DavidChouinard FlightAware (flightaware.com) — Houston, TX (no REMOTE, no H1B) Front-end (UI/UX) Developer Here’s a profile of us from 37signals (we do flight tracking software, 2M+ pageviews a day): [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2780-bootstrapped- profitable-...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2780-bootstrapped-profitable- proud-flightaware) We have very interesting data visualization and UI problems and your work will reach millions of users. We've also released a bunch of open source projects. You get top-of-the-line Apple gear and our kitchen is always stocked with snacks and beverages, including a free (!) beer kegerator. We’re a fun, high- caliber team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to be brilliant. We’ve been around for a while and are profitable, but we’re still growing like mad. Compensation is very competitive. Who you are: • You have a trail of cool projects you’ve worked on, including some you’ve written to scratch your own itch. • You obsess over the design of everyday things, from door knobs to teapots or light switches. • You have a passion for software and desire to change the world. • You have excellent implementation skills, including deep expertise in Javascript (jQuery). • You enjoy working on tricky UI problems with equally smart people. You can apply on our website: [https://flightaware.com/about/careers/position/frontend_deve...](https://flightaware.com/about/careers/position/frontend_developer) or shoot me an email: david.chouinard@flightaware.com ------ TwoSigma Two Sigma Investments – New York, NY (Full Time Positions) At our core, we're a technology company applying our talents to the domain of finance. We've created a system that combines artificial intelligence and keen human insight—a system that's constantly improving and advancing. We are looking for a diverse set of technologists to join our team. Our challenges require mastery of areas such as kernel level development, machine learning, and distributed systems. Our team includes a Unix Lifetime Achievement winner, Putnam medalists, ACM Programming competition finalists, and International Mathematics Olympiad medalists. We are proud of our individual pedigrees, but even prouder of our teamwork. We teach and learn from each other. We tend to hire people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a technical or quantitative field and experience with C or languages that target the JVM, but we are open-minded in our search for critical thinkers who are passionate about technology. We analyze the data-rich domain of finance, but financial experience is not a requirement. We hope to hear from you. Stacey.Winning@twosigma.com <http://www.twosigma.com/careers.html> ~~~ chittis I had a bad experience with Two Sigma in 2007 - After spending half an hour on the phone, and then a further two hours writing code for a couple of programming problems, I never hear back from either the hiring manager or the recruiter. It didn't hurt me so much that I wasn't selected, rather they consider ~5 minutes of their time to compose a rejection email to be more valuable than ~2 hours of my time. ~~~ jrmurad I had a similar experience with them in 2009. I went through the same first interview plus the problems plus another technical interview. The did, however, call me back and invite me for an on-site interview. While awaiting the details, I was informed by the HR rep that the on-site interview would not take place because his boss nixed my application due to my GPA being too low. Why didn't they say so in the first place before wasting all that time? * I had graduated 4 years earlier. Many companies don't care about GPA at that point. ------ mcholly San Francisco, New York or anywhere if you are pro. We've got lots of engineering work to do, with some cool technologies like rails 3.2, html5, node.js and redis. We've got internal and external projects, and flexibility for you to settle in at any part of the stack. We look forward to the day when all the content on the web is interactive and we need help to make that happen. Help us get the ad world off flash and into html5. We do interactive ads and ads pay. Spongecell is spryly booming with a 3 year growth of over 3,000% and a recent $10 million investment. We've got a supportive and flexible development environment with a small but great team of experienced entrepreneurs, tech startup leaders, Railsconf and MySQL conference speakers, a competitive water skier, a restauranteur and a Starcraft wizard. We know where to get good sushi and like bacon and beer. The company offers a very competitive pay, equity and benefits package along with flexible meatspace arrangements. We need good additions to team. If you'd like to talk more send stuff here <http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/spongecell/list> or email at matthew.cholerton@spongecell.com. ------ adoherty Downtown Chicago, IL – Full time Java Developer/Web Developer/DevOps Engineers/QA IMC Financial Markets is a proprietary trading firm. We're primarily a java shop but we're also looking for web devs and sys admin types. We're open to new technologies and open to change; your job will be to use whatever is available to solve the task at hand the best way, and not to waste time reinventing the wheel. Depending on what role you think you’d be best for, you will be writing code that runs on boxes colocated in exchanges all around the world, writing scripts that manage these boxes and tuning them for increased performance, or working on ways to improve testing our code. Perks include: Opportunities to travel - we have offices in Amsterdam, Zug, Chicago, Sydney and Hong Kong Commuter Benefits Free Gym Membership Annual Company Trip A fun environment – Pool, foosball, ping pong Massage Therapist on site everyday Fully stocked kitchen, bar, breakfast, lunch all week, and a happy hour every Friday You can apply on our website: [http://www.imc-chicago.com/Financial- markets/Offices/Chicago...](http://www.imc-chicago.com/Financial- markets/Offices/Chicago/Vacancies/) or shoot me an email: heather.corallo@imc- chicago.com ------ dmarble Spurfly - Palo Alto, CA or Arlington, VA - Python/Coffeescript Developer - LOCAL or REMOTE (full-time preferred) • Full-stack Developer, and • Front-end (UI/UX) Developer for desktop web and/or mobile web Help us scale and meet demand for real-time location-aware planning. Our focus is on groups and events ("spur of the moment, on the fly"). We think we have something unique to offer the world and are launching a native iOS app in a few weeks and expanding to web and mobile web next. The founders are straight shooters who value clear communication and getting stuff done. We're obssessed with creating a product that fills what we see as a major hole in social networking software -- helping people more efficiently connect in real-life with close networks so they can spend more of their time building and enriching real relationships. Technologies: • frontend: coffeescript, jQuery, backbone.js, socket.io, compass • backend: python, django, gevent, gunicorn, nginx, postgres We need some knowledge/experience optimizing and scaling some or all of the above technologies to handle growth, and building real-time single-page architecture sites or mobile web. Immediate front-end needs include design and development of our desktop web and mobile web versions and giving thoughtful consideration to iPhone workflows as we get feedback from users. Full-stack devs are needed to help optimize and expand our API, re-assess our real-time web architecture, add background processing for actions triggered by the API calls, optimize queries, and support what's going to potentially be a wild ride as we do launch events over the next few months. gmail - davidmarble (main tech guy on the founding team) ------ MikeKaplan Retroficiency -- Boston, MA (no REMOTE, H1B for right candidate) Retroficiency is a venture backed start-up that's developed cloud-based software to change the commercial energy efficiency game. We aim to put a significant dent in building energy consumption (more than 40% of the U.S. total), and our approach – driven by sophisticated energy analytics and rapid building modeling – is uniquely positioned to enable current manual processes and scale the evaluation of energy conservation measures like never before. Want more proof we are the real deal? We just surpassed 100 million square feet evaluated in our first year of availability. We are growing rapidly and need great developer talent. We are looking for great Front-end Software Engineers, Server-side Software Engineers and Web Developers Check out our openings at: <http://www.retroficiency.com/careers/> ------ gustaf Voxer, San Francisco (SOMA), Full time Voxer is a Walkie Talkie application for iOS and Android. We launched in 2011 and have since become the fastest growing mobile voice application in the world. We're also the largest user of Node.JS in the world. What we've built is already an important part of the daily lives of millions of people. We're making voice communication faster, more efficient, and more social. Our goal is ambitious - we're building the next generation communication service at the intersection between phone calls and SMS. We're a surprisingly small team doing this. Only about a dozen engineers who previously worked at Danger, Android, Apple, Twitter and Heysan(YC07). We helped build things like redis for node.js and are contributors to the node.js community. Ryah Dahl talks about Voxer: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Fc26auhSLqM#t=1150s) We use a lot of: ★ Node.js ★ Riak ★ Redis We try to stay out of the spotlight and focus on building something amazing. The problems we're facing are at a scale only seen at companies like Twitter and Facebook and we're looking for exceptional people who can help us tackle them. We're hiring for: ★ Node.js / Infrastructure Engineer ★ Analytics / Hadoop Engineer ★ Data Scientist ★ Android Engineer ★ Engineering Internship ★ Growth Engineer ★ iOS Engineer ★ iOS Product Manager ★ QA Client Automation Engineer ★ Engineering Recruiter / Talent Lead <http://voxer.com/jobs> <http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/popular-like-voxer/> <http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/11/walkie-talkie-app-voxer-> goes-big-ivp-and- intel-lead-30-million-round/ ------ ScIMed SciMed Solutions, Durham NC, Full-time www.scimedsolutions.com/employment- opportunities Send resume and cover letter to employment@scimedsolutions.com. We are passionate about building software in the medical, scientific, and academic communities. Our work has enabled our clients to make a difference in vaccine discovery, cancer treatment, energy- efficient building construction, and social change. We are looking for someone equally passionate as well as self-motivated, disciplined, driven, a decision-maker, and a team player. We want employees who are not solely driven by personal success, but are invested in the team's success. Although this position is for a Ruby on Rails developer, Ruby experience is not required. If you have a 4 year degree, are a talented coder, can work quickly, and work across multiple technologies and projects, we'll train you on Ruby. Experience or understanding of Agile development, experience in coding technologies such as PHP, Python, Perl, .NET, JSP, XML, JavaScript, or AJAX are a plus. The best applicants will bring valuable skills beyond computer science and software engineering. We strive to find the best fit for every employee and value personal growth. If you are interested in working in an environment of accuracy, teamwork, openness, respect, and would like to limit your work week to 40 hours, apply today. Send your resume and cover letter to employment@scimedsolutions.com. ------ mikebabineau Rumble - SF Bay Area (Redwood Shores) Lead/senior/mid-level engineers, data scientists, BI, producers, artists, designers, writers, and more: <http://www.rumblegames.com/careers> Rumble is a developer and publisher of connected games. We were founded in 2011 with a mission to create the most engaging and fulfilling online game experiences on the planet. All of our games are free-to-play and available across your favorite devices and social networks. We are unique in our focus on the gamer audience and our exacting standards around quality gameplay. Our passion is to create experiences that surprise and delight our players. By combining the best of AAA game design with free-to-play accessibility, we believe we will change the way gamers play together. We have an all-star team of game industry veterans from Zynga, Activision, BioWare, Blizzard, Playdom, Electronic Arts, Turbine, FooMojo and RockYou. Check us out: <http://www.rumblegames.com/about/our-team> We are backed by Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures, and recently announced our first title, a Flash 11-based 3D multiplayer action RPG -- check out the trailer: <http://www.rumblegames.com/kingsroad> Drop me a line: mike.babineau@rumblegames.com ------ derwiki San Francisco, fulltime systems/ops and engineering, Causes - <http://www.causes.com/joinus> At Causes, use your programming powers to help nonprofits effect change on the world! Ruby on Rails + jQuery stack, 12-ish person engineering team, the usual startup perks (catering, snacks, soda, etc), gym membership reimbursement, etc. Ways we're trying to make ourselves better engineers: \- deliberate practice with our tools. If you are a vim user, we have the programmer who wrote Command-T on staff and he's a great person to learn from - every changeset gets pushed to Gerrit where it waits to get a +1 from our build suite (that runs in 3 minutes) and a +1 from a human reviewer \- last month I said we were hoping to finish our Rails 3.0.11 upgrade soon. I'm happy to announce that not only have we landed on 3.2.3, but we needed some upstream patches to get our site working -- so we're on bleeding edge Rails. We're the largest site I know of on Rails 3.2. Come get your SASS on! \- everyone is encouraged to take one hour from their day to learn about something they wouldn't otherwise \- every story is scoped so that it can be completed in less than a day. We don't branch, we just work on top of master. We've found that the closer we stay to master, the less needless work we create for ourselves Causes is a great place to better yourself and better the world. We're particularly looking for a systems/ops/network engineer to help wrangle our colo. Apply through the site or adam@causes.com if interested! ------ wdaher Cambridge, MA (or REMOTE). Full-time. Do you like low-level systems programming? Does the idea of hacking on an old- school graphics demo that fits into a DOS MBR in your free time appeal to you? Does "Dazed and confused, but trying to continue" mean anything to you? Have you ever told a joke whose punch line was a git command? If you've answered yes to any of the above, I think we'll be fast friends -- and we want to hear from you. We're looking for engineers who are excited to work on technology that most people will tell you is impossible: updating an OS kernel while it is running. Help us bring rebootless kernel updates to Linux, as well as new operating system kernels and other parts of the software stack. You must have prior experience with operating systems, including kernel programming, debugging, porting, memory management, and/or virtualization. Experience with compilers is also relevant. About us: We're a small, tight-knit team of twelve men and women that enjoy working on hard technology problems. We were recently acquired by Oracle, and are eager to take advantage of its vast resources to get Ksplice into the hands of sysadmins everywhere. Feel free to direct questions to me at waseem.daher@oracle.com or to jobs@ksplice.com. If you're interested, send us a resume and we'll be in touch. Oracle is an equal opportunity employer. ~~~ mkopinsky Now I'm curious what jokes have punch lines that are git commands... ~~~ wdaher Not exactly a joke per se, but take a look at "Improving your social life with git": [https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/improving_your_social...](https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/improving_your_social_life_with1) :) ~~~ mkopinsky I'm sure there are jokes to be made about people having commitment issues or being too pushy. ------ mecredis New York City, Rails, Full time I work at Kickstarter we are looking for more Rails engineers that want to write mission critical code that enables thousands of people to realize their creative dreams. Features are developed by small groups of engineers, designers, and product managers. Some of the projects we’re working on right now include: tools for Kickstarter’s project creators, payment processing for millions of dollars in pledges every week, and new ways to discover projects through social recommendations and data analysis. We deploy daily for features big and small, and encourage contribution to open source projects. Everyone in product and design commits code, so expect to work closely with people up and down the stack (right now we're 7 engineers with another 5 or 6 committers). We develop in Rails and JavaScript/jQuery, host on AWS, and manage code in git — but we’re not dogmatic about it. You can checkout some of the projects we've open sourced on our github organization page here: <https://github.com/kickstarter> So if you’re interested in helping us build a platform that is changing how culture gets made, get in touch -- jobs [at] kickstarter.com. We’d love to see your favorite work, whether it’s a side project or your github profile. ------ TimothyFitz New York, NY - Software Engineer - Fulltime Canvas (USV Funded) is looking for engineers #3 and #4 to join a small close team building the rich-media community platform of the future. The job title says "Software Engineer" but really we're looking for "Software Entrepreneur" or a "Startup Engineer". Yes, your day job will be writing code. But that's the only similarity to a big company software job. You'll be challenged to take big ideas and turn them into concrete testable hypotheses. Shipping a great feature is important, but positively changing user behavior is the ultimate success criteria. Built-to-spec takes a backseat to moves-the-metrics. More details and how to apply: <http://canv.as/jobs> ------ crb London, UK — Stoneburn: <http://www.stoneburn.com/> Stoneburn are a Google Apps, Google Enterprise Search and Amazon Web Services consultancy. We're looking for junior administration & deployment staff - our ultimate hires would be a year or two out of university, with a system administrator/scripting background and a hacker mentality. Your primary work to start will be building our support department for business Google Apps customers, but you'd be expected to be competent enough to help out with any Linux/Windows application we might engineer for our customers and host on AWS. (We'll expect you to know enough about e-mail to tell me what an MX record is, but full Google/Amazon training is provided.) As hiring manager I'll be looking out for a cover letter that shows both ambition and the great communication skills you would be expected to display to customers. Depending on your preference for direction, possible career path is into the development or deployment teams. Check the jobs page out at <http://www.stoneburn.com/about-stoneburn/jobs>. Instructions on how to apply are on that page, but please put 'HN' in the subject. ------ zephyrnh San Francisco, CA H1B Welcome Airbnb - <http://www.airbnb.com/> We only have 27 engineers, and we need more! I'm a backend engineer here, and we're hiring backend, frontend, mobile and ops engineers. Check out our (pretty sweet) jobs page: <http://www.airbnb.com/jobs> I've been working at/founding startups for the last few years, and didn't think I would end up somewhere as "big" as Airbnb, but I love it here. Despite the large size of our customer service operations worldwide, the entire product team (PMs + engineers + designers) is still ~40 people, there's still a lot to do, and we need help doing it :) ------ nopassrecover (OFF-TOPIC) - Why are so many jobs downvoted here? Are people downvoting other listings to make their own listings higher ranked? Are there some controversies surrounding the downvoted companies I'm unaware of? (if so please post a link below the job asking for the poster to give feedback on the issue) ~~~ philh Currently there are no downvoted jobs, but there are several that have apparently been killed by the dupe detector. ~~~ nopassrecover Ah that makes a lot of sense. I believe a couple were actually downvoted before (they weren't dead) but looks to be fixed. ------ rhc2104 San Francisco, CA, or REMOTE, full-time or intern Samasource is a distributed work system similar to Mechanical Turk, but aimed at eradicating global poverty by providing work to the people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. See the TEDx talk our founder gave: <http://vimeo.com/9305118>. We're looking for a senior engineer (Ruby knowledge preferred but optional), Operations Engineer, PM, and other positions. <http://samasource.org/careers/> Feel free to email me at rhc2104(at)columbia(dot)edu if you have any questions. ------ sshumaker Los Angeles, CA - elarm.com - Full Time At elarm, we're building the next-generation of home security. The clunky, low-tech alarm systems available today haven't changed in twenty years. We're creating a beautiful device you don't just need, but actually want to own: wireless, android-powered, easy to use, and designed for smartphones and video surveillance. And it's been built from the ground up as a consumer electronics product - so you can buy it, open up the box and set it up yourself in just a few minutes. We spent the last year hard at work and just finished raising a large seed round to help transform our prototype into a real shipping product. Come join us and help us launch! We're hiring for the following positions: \- Rails / Web Developer \- Mobile App Developer (iOS or Android) \- Linux / Embedded Hardware Guru We can offer competitive salary, meaningful equity, and a chance to work on something that will become an intimate part of people's lives. <http://elarm.com/> <http://elarm.theresumator.com/> (jobs) ------ bmcfarland SoHo, New York, New York --- FullTime Engineer __ _About us: Spling is a fun, beautiful way to collect and express the sights and sounds of the internet. Spling transforms the outdated, blue textual representation of a link into interactive media. Users can then express themselves through their links, creating an online digital media identity. Spling is an early stage startup backed by numerous VCs and angels. We are in a unique position where we can offer a competitive salary with generous, meaningful equity. _ __What we're looking for: At Spling, we believe in beauty through self-expression and creative freedom for our users and team members. We are focused on creating a tight knit community where everyone loves the product they are building, as well as the environment they are working in. We are looking for talented individuals to join our family who have the unique ability to combine hustle with the desire to make every pixel perfect. more info: <http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/10916> ------ zg London, UK - <http://www.trialreach.com> _The Role:_ We're looking for for front and back-end developers, but ideally you will be comfortable working on our whole stack (Linux/Python/Django through to HTML/JS/CSS with jQuery) even if you're stronger on one end than the other. Compensation includes base salary + bonus + stock options _About TrialReach:_ We're an early stage VC-backed startup that helps patients find and access new treatments before these are available to the general public. We've signed up a bunch of major pharmaceutical companies as customers and we're trying to solve one of the biggest problems in the industry. We've got a great riverside location and you'll get to work alongside some very smart and experienced people on something that can transform the lives of patients worldwide. _Bonus points if you:_ \- Speak any European languages \- Are familiar with building systems to manage and display multilingual content \- Have experience with recommendation/search algorithms _Interested? Pop me an email:_ zeshan at trialreach.com ------ tg3 Chicago, IL (right now, may be moving to the Bay Area) / Remote / Full-time and Intern Wikify.me is a recently-funded (angel) company looking for our first big engineering hires. We are one engineer and one business guy building the 3rd person perspective in social media using NodeJS, MongoDB, and jQuery. Wikify.me launched in a beta release at our Alma Mater a month ago and have been iterating since to get the product we want. We're looking for Interns and Full-time developers to join the Wikify.me team. Experience with Node/Mongo/jQuery is a bonus, but not required. Our only requirement is that you're smart, passionate, and willing to work outside of a job description. We want you to help us build the company you would want to work for, and change the world with an amazing product at the same time. We offer competitive pay and significant equity, and expect that our first hire(s) will be a critical part of building our company and our culture. Send me an email (trey dot griffith at gmail) telling me about something cool you've done, and attach your resume. ------ trefn San Francisco, CA FULLTIME Mixpanel (YCS09; <http://mixpanel.com>) is a web analytics startup based in San Francisco. Our platform is the most powerful & flexible analytics service available for mobile and the web. Revenue is in the millions, growth is solid, and we're cash-flow positive. It's a good position to be in. We're hiring for a number of positions, but I'd like to highlight a few: 1\. Director of marketing - we're looking for our 1st pure marketing hire (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896058>). 2\. Solutions Architect - hybrid support/sales/marketing/engineering role. Really awesome for developers who want to do more client-facing stuff. 3\. Backend/ops engineer - we have a large amount of infrastructure (~200 servers) for a company our size & need someone to manage it. This role is all about automation. See <http://mixpanel.com/jobs/> to learn more, or you can message me directly - tim@mixpanel.com ------ adammichaelc Full-time front-end developer, San Francisco, CA or Provo, UT. Remote ok. About Us: Raised a $1.7 million seed-round from A-list investors (for details, [http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/scan-gets-1-7m-from- google-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/scan-gets-1-7m-from-google- ventures-and-shervin-pishevar-to-make-qr-codes-actually-useful/) ) Scan, Inc. <http://scan.me> Our mission is to connect the digital and physical world via QR codes, NFC, etc. Right now we're working on fixing the broken user-experience with QR codes, and finding and executing on the use-cases where using a QR code is a net-win for the user. For more, see [http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/scan-gets-1-7m-from- google-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/scan-gets-1-7m-from-google- ventures-and-shervin-pishevar-to-make-qr-codes-actually-useful/) About You: * Lots of experience running a high-traffic site, handling everything on the front end (design, JavaScript & CSS, some scripting language such as PHP to talk to the back end) * Loves getting hands dirty and jumping in to get lots of stuff done * Methodical in doing things right the first time (unit testing, thinking of edge cases, etc) * Loves to geek out learning UX, understands psychology and how to create blissful user experiences 5\. Passionate about focusing on the user and what they want/need Pluses 1\. iOS and Android design experience 2\. Thinks QR codes are broken, and has lots of ideas about how to fix them to bring users delight. Email adam@scan.me to start a conversation. Point me to your work and tell me a little about yourself. Thanks! Adam ------ metartdev MetArt / SexArt - Los Angeles, CA, Vancouver, BC or REMOTE MetArt is one of the oldest and busiest paid adult websites anywhere. For over 12 years, MetArt has been the leader in high-quality softcore pornography. We are often in the Alexa top 1,000, and are rapidly expanding our list of money- making properties MetArt is based in Los Angeles but telecommuting is welcome. \---- MetArt has an opening for a mid to senior level PHP developer and telecommuting is welcome. We are a traditional paid adult site, not one that gives away free content, and we deal with millions of visitors every day. As a senior level developer, you'll be expected to take on the architecture, design, and implemention of complete applications. We work with our own custom content management system that is expanding to meet the needs of our growing network of very profitable sites. [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/19187/nsfw-adult- site-...](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/19187/nsfw-adult-site-php- developer-senior-level-metart) ------ JoshKastelein Boston, MA - <http://www.crimsonhexagon.com> Crimson Hexagon is one of few consumers of the full Twitter firehose, and we're looking for software engineers to help scale our infrastructure and support phenomenal growth. With patented algorithms, we use machine learning to measure public opinion about major brands, politics, etc. using the social web as our datasource. Our clients include many household names. We've collected, indexed, and are constantly mining an archive of over 120 billion web and social media documents, adding another 1+ billion every three days. I found my position here in a "Who is Hiring" thread[0], and the challenges, culture, and people here have been fantastic. We're a lively crew and are well funded. And we have plenty of perks and plenty of fun. Drop me a line at josh@crimsonhexagon.com [0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832316> ~~~ tutufan Software patents. _groan_ ------ emidln Highland Park, Illinois (near Chicago) OpinionLab is hiring. We listen for, process, and analyze the feedback our customers' clients provide. You might have seen our [+] around the web. We're looking for someone with a very good working knowledge of Python who can work autonomously. Ideal candidates would be comfortable digging into the depths of SQLAlchemy or Twisted (via pdb and/or the source) if Google or IRC don't produce quick results. Specific libraries or skillsets aren't required (trust me, I'll be interviewing you), but you need to be able to learn efficiently. You'll be working with a small dev team and asked to learn the full stack. We're building the next generation of OpinionLab products, starting with a new data processing architecture, so you'll have an opportunity to shape the company. Everyone likes lists of buzzwords, so we are some things we use: django, tastypie, sentry, rabbitmq, salt, twisted, pypy, ruby, rails, gunicorn, nginx, sqlalchemy, mysql, postgresql, mongodb, redis, autonomy idol, virtualenv, supervisord, github, campfire, linux Our work environment is very casual. You spec your own working environment (some like OSX, some like Linux, a small minority even do daily work in Windows) so that you are most comfortable (I'm a tmux+vim fanboy). You might find a dog or five in the office on any given day. We provide great benefits (see the linked official job spec[1] for details). If you have any questions, I'm @emidln on twitter, emidln on skype. and badams@opinionlab.com via email. Send resumes (preferrably with a link to bitbucket, github, or something else publicially visible) to careers@opinionlab.com [0] - <http://www.opinionlab.com> [1] - [http://www.opinionlab.com/company/careers/sr-software- engine...](http://www.opinionlab.com/company/careers/sr-software-engineer- python/) ------ mb22 Inflection - Redwood Shores, CA We're the little startup that could and you've probably never heard of. We just sold a small part of our business for $100M to ancestry.com - <http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-04/D9UC8GKO0.htm> We were named one of the hottest big data companies in the valley We have managed to hire a killer leadership team including Peter Merholz - [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/09/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/09/prweb9089270.DTL) We really value design and engineering - check out our beautiful website: <http://inflection.com/careers/> We have a mixed stack that uses .net, python, erlang, solr, mongo, redis, and other goodies. We're starting to build two new exciting products and we'd love to talk to you. shoot me an email mbaird@inflection.com ------ bwwhite Mind Candy - London, UK <http://www.mindcandy.com> Based in Shoreditch, Mind Candy is a major player in London's rapidly expanding Silicon Roundabout community. Our hero brand is Moshi Monsters, one of the world’s fastest-growing online games for kids (60 million sign-ups and counting), and we have several other projects in the pipeline. Some technical roles we're currently hiring for: * IT Support Engineer * Mobile Developer * Payments Product Manager * QA Automation Engineer * Scrum Master/Agile Project Manager * Senior Mobile Developer * Software Engineers * Systems Administrator * UX/Interaction Designer Our office in the Tea Building in Shoreditch is really great, and we have a lot of company social events which are always a blast. See <http://mindcandy.com/recruitment> for more details. Cheers, Bryan ------ niravshah Washington DC, New York City, Austin or remote. Vox Media is a media/technology startup. We run a consumer technology news site (<http://theverge.com/>), a video game news site (<http://polygon.com/>), and a network of over 300 sports news sites & communities (<http://sbnation.com/>). You can read about some of the interesting challenges we run into on our product team blog: <http://product.voxmedia.com/> We're hiring Ruby developers and operations engineers, among other roles: <http://jobs.voxmedia.com/> Our investors include Accel Partners, Allen & Company, Comcast Interactive Capital, and Khosla Ventures. We get around 35 million unique visitors every month. ------ bfung OPOWER <http://opower.com/> <http://opowerjobs.com/> San Francisco, CA or Arlington, VA. Full Time We leverage data and behavioral science to change people's energy consumption habits. Help the environment through energy conservation and help people save money. Java, Rails, Hadoop, and smatterings of many other things - we have a culture where taking initiative and having a good design will result in a system being used by other people. Great perks and a chill yet super productive atmosphere. I can speak about openings about software engineers (associate to lead), and product managers (<http://jobvite.com/m?3n1Njfwe>). Others openings include Office Manager, Sales, and other functions. Take a look and contact me (benson [dot] fung [at] opower [dot] com) if you have questions. ------ BraintreeR Chicago, IL - Braintree - FULL TIME Developers Braintree helps businesses process credit card payments by providing a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing and credit card storage. We're unlike others in the industry; we think and do things differently. Our team is talented, our practices are collaborative (pairing, agile), we work on challenging problems (high availability, quality of service, scaling, security), and our devs have 10% time to work on whatever they want. Developers use and love our product. Although we mostly work with Ruby, we also work with Python, Node.js, PHP, Java, .NET, Perl, and Objective-C More about our people, practices, and software: <http://www.braintreepayments.com/devblog> Apply at <http://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-careers> ------ arseniosantos Circa, San Francisco CA, Full time. Circa is re-imagining the way we'll consume news. We're creating an experience that we feel is missing in today's world of news and building the product that, as users, we would want. We want to create the best news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering the readers. We're looking for engineers to help us build our internal processing, content management, and mobile app products. If you have practical Python experience, have deployed apps to AWS, and are interested in natural language processing, we're looking for you. We've just announced raising $750,000 as part of a seed financing round. Some of our angel investors include Quotidian Ventures, Scott Belsky (Behance), Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting/NYT), and David Karp (Tumblr). More information on us and the position can be found here: <http://jobsco.re/JAn0Om> ------ bkrett Classified Ventures (Chicago, Santa Monica) (no REMOTE) - The parent company of Cars.com, Apartments.com and HomeFinder.com Classified Ventures was founded in 1997. Our websites power the automotive, rental and real estate channels of 150+ online media partners nationwide. Classified Ventures has over 111,000 customers across all product types nationwide The average visitor spends 10.4 minutes on a CV operated website. CV’s employee base has grown by over 350% in the last six years! Classified Ventures is owned by five leading media companies: A.H. Belo Corp., Gannett Co. Inc., Tribune Company, The McClatchy Company and The Washington Post Company. We are looking for people to fill a myriad of different roles, from Admin Assistant to Sales to Engineers! The list of postings can be found here: [https://classifiedventures.silkroad.com/epostings/index.cfm?...](https://classifiedventures.silkroad.com/epostings/index.cfm?version=1&company_id=15937) ------ BMarkmann Counterpoint Consulting - Vienna, VA (Washington DC area) Associate Consultant About us: * Founded in 2006, self-funded and always profitable * Laid-back, collegial workplace * Dedicated to making business applications suck a little less About you: * You have a passion for creating software to solve complex business problems * You have strong communication skills, and are able to work hand-in-hand with business people to translate business requirements into cutting-edge web applications Check out our current listing(s) at: <http://www.c20g.com/site/join> We'd love to get some HN folks on the team! ~~~ eternalban If you don't mind please note the general area(s) of client domains. (Mainly if gov & related or not.) ------ rdoherty Mountain View, CA or remote SmugMug is hiring! We're looking for QA, iOS developers, web developers (frontend and backend) and designers. We created Camera Awesome, a top iTunes Store app, and are the leading photo website for pros who shoot everything from BMX to brides. We're proudly profitable, free and clear of VC investors. Our core technologies are PHP, MySQL, Memcache, Go, EC2, S3 and YUI. We're also doing a lot of new work with iOS on Camera Awesome. We have our own personal chef, awesome (private!) offices with at $500 decoration budget when you start, just about any hardware you desire and yearly company trips (<http://cmac.smugmug.com/Photography/Jackson- Hole/1/18570755_...>). If you're interested send your resumes to jobs@smugmug.com <http://www.smugmug.com/jobs/> ------ brianmwang Fitocracy (<http://fitocracy.com>) - New York, NY (Full Time/Intern, no remote, no H1B) Web Developer (<http://fitocracy.com/jobs/>) _About Us_ Fitocracy is a fitness social network powered by game mechanics to make exercise a more addictive, accessible experience for all. Hundreds of thousands of people use our web and mobile apps to track their progress, compete against their friends, and get real world results. We turn life into the ultimate RPG where you are the hero that levels up, beats quests, and finds the best version of yourself. Our mission is to turn fitness into a more fun, addictive, and accessible experience for everyone. We aim to provide the motivation, information, and community necessary to "re-wire" people's brains so they make sustainable, impactful changes in their lives. We are a small, 5-person team based out of NYC that recently raised money from a variety of VCs and angels, including 500 Startups and Eniac Ventures. The founders, having gone through significant fitness transformations in their own personal lives, originally started Fitocracy in late 2010 as a way to marry their love of fitness with their years growing up playing classic role playing games like Final Fantasy and Everquest. _Our Stack_ Django, Ubuntu Linux, MySQL, nginx, AWS, redis, git, Celery, and Javascript. Expect to use/learn these all. _Who We're Looking For_ \- Experience with Python and Django \- You can traverse across the web development stack and you're quick to pick up new technologies \- You are obsessed with delivering a great user experience \- You work well with small, tight-knit teams and communicate well _Bonus Points_ \- Sysadmin experience a huge plus \- Interest in health & fitness a huge plus _Contact_ Email me at brian@fitocracy.com ------ zds Codecademy (<http://codecademy.com>) - New York, NY Product Designer, Frontend Engineer, Backend Engineer, Recruiting Engineer Codecademy is the easiest way to learn to code. Since August 2011, more than 1 million people have started learning the basics of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS with our interactive online tutorials. We're passionate about extending education opportunities to everyone across the world. We've partnered with The White House to teach kids to code and we're now building solutions for other programming languages and other learning methods. We're a small team but we're well funded (raised $2.5m from Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, etc.) and have been covered extensively in the press (CNN, NYT, WSJ, etc.) Come join us - codecademy.com/jobs or jobs (at) codecademy (dot) com. ------ streeter Educreations (<http://www.educreations.com>) - Full Time or Intern in Palo Alto, CA Educreations is the easiest way for teachers to teach online. We're growing fast, and have a crazy awesome iPad app that hit the #1 spot after 4 days in the app store. We're unabashidly inspired by the Khan Academy but want to enable all teachers to teach like Sal Khan. We were part of the first cohort of Imagine K12 and are looking to grow the team rapidly. We are looking to make our first hires. If you want to change the world and are a strong Python hacker, have experience with Objective C or are an awesome designer, we want to talk to you. Email jobs@educreations.com We are looking for: Lead Software Engineer (Python) Lead Mobile Engineer (Objective C/Cocoa) Lead UX/UI Designer ------ rsingel Contextly - San Francisco - Local, Possibly Remote Contextly is making online news better. We're currently in a closed beta of our related links service, a beta that includes Wired.com and other top tech blogs. We're looking for a technical co-founder to build and architect (in the widest possible conception of that term) a better future for online news. Pardon the generalities, but we actually believe that stealth is underrated for startups. If you are passionate about journalism and big data and want to build something that actually makes a difference, drop us a line, we'd love to talk. There's many decisions yet to be made about our future stack, so being proficient at choosing the right tools in an honest manner is more important than having X years experience in Python/Ruby/MongoDB, etc. E-mail ryan@contextly.com with "HN" in the subject line. ------ jroll Mountain View - drchrono.com (YC W11) [full time and interns, H1B considered] We're looking for more engineers and salespeople to help us revolutionize healthcare through mobile and web interfaces. Our stack includes Python/Django, iOS, and Android, but you don't need to be an expert, just ready and willing to learn fast! Our product supports thousands of doctors who depend on our systems daily to provide quality care to their patients, iPad in hand. The usual startup benefits included: competitive salary, healthcare, whatever hardware you need to be most productive. Learn more at <https://drchrono.com/jobs/> Apply via email: jobs@drchrono.com and/or take our hacker test at <http://bit.ly/qbKAut> ------ jakemcgraw New York, NY - Software Engineer (Various) - Remote possible Refinery29 (Seed $500K, Series A $4.5M, high daily revenue) is looking for a few good engineers to join our rapidly growing technology team. Our company has gone from 8 employees a year ago to just over 75 today, and we're continuing to grow. Our technology team is unique in that tech and product are the same team, developers often drive product design. Our number one priority in technology is hiring smart, driven men and women, giving them the tools to succeed and getting the hell out of the way. If you're sick of building products you don't believe will succeed or having your job dictated to you, come join us! <http://the-rig.refinery29.com/jobs> Ping me on Twitter @jakemcgraw if you have any questions. ------ jsatok Toronto, Canada - AppHero (<http://apphero.com>) AppHero is looking for engineers to join our team. About you: \- Passionate about building disruptive products that solve big problems \- Excited by the opportunity to learn new things and question norms \- Self starter who enjoys thinking outside the box \- Entrepreneurial spirit and are interesting in taking an active role in growing AppHero \- Experience using Java to build applications \- Interested in working on the backend for web and mobile apps About us: \- VC funded by top investors from Toronto and New York \- Building a product to help people discover the best apps by providing personalized recommendations \- Small team with diverse experience \- Work from a bright, modern, open concept office at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto Feel free to reach out if you're interested: jordan (at) apphero (dot) com More info: <http://apphero.com/careers> ~~~ canadiancreed If you're looking for an exciting opportunity and know Java, give Jordan a call. Was speaking with him about this very same job and he's got some great ideas and is a pleasure to speak with. ------ sahillavingia San Francisco, CA (SOMA) - <http://gumroad.com> We are building a simple, beautiful, and useful product that enables new forms of commerce for millions of people around the world. We are a tiny team, and offer each employee meaningful equity in a product and vision they believe in. If you are interested, please check out: <https://gumroad.com/about/jobs> ------ defrex Toronto, Canada (King St. W.) - Django Developer - <http://shopcastr.com> Shopcastr is a social marketplace for independent retailers and local shoppers. We’re backed by Mantella Venture Partners and are seeing great early traction. We have a solid team so far and need someone to help make up the foundation of the company as we grow. We’re looking for a developer with some Python and Django chops who isn’t afraid to pick up new skills when needed (we use CoffeeScript and SASS, for example). We’re looking for someone self-taught, though we won’t hold it against you if you’ve also been to school. Email us at jobs@shopcastr.com with whatever you think we need to see before following up with you. ------ axiom Toronto, Ontario Top Hat Monocle (<http://www.tophatmonocle.com>) is hiring for a few roles: designer, sysadmin/infrastructure developer, general web developer. We also hire interns so please feel free to apply for that as well (paid of course.) We're a profitable education startup that helps make class more engaging. We've got some really cool problems to work on and your work would be impacting a huge number of students daily. Our dev team is in Toronto but we've also got an office in San Francisco so if you're really good we would be open to having someone work from there. Send your resume/github account to mike at tophatmonocle dot com. ------ antgoldbloom Kaggle - San Francisco and REMOTE We're looking for: * Developers (REMOTE) * Data scientists * Business Development Kaggle is a platform for data science competitions, that is changing the way data science is done. We've already solved problems for NASA, Wikipedia, Ford and Allstate (see some of the problems we've solved here: <http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3296837.htm>). We're currently a team of 14, and we're looking for the outstanding developers, data scientists and business folk who will form the core team. More information at <http://www.kaggle.com/careers> ------ jack7890 New York, NY -- Web Engineer -- Fulltime -- SeatGeek SeatGeek is the web's largest search engine for live event tickets. Think "Kayak for sports/music/theater tickets." Our dev team is currently seven people. We're looking to add one or two more. We're specialization-agnostic. Most of our current guys are pretty full stack, so wherever in the web stack you like to spend your time, we can find a place for you. We're using lots of Python these days. A bit of Ruby and PHP too. And always plenty of JS, supported by backbone. Mongo and MySQL for data. More details here: <http://seatgeek.com/jobs/web_engineer/> ------ cetani Cetani - Carmel, IN (near Indianapolis) www.cetani.com/jobs looking for: Ruby on Rails or C# Cetani provides indoor location tracking software for different industries, but mostly in healthcare. We use third-party hardware for Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) and have a software platform to manage and use RTLS information. We're looking for C# (backend/driver) and Ruby on Rails developers. We're a small but growing company, and are established in the location tracking market. We were founded in 2003 by two developers, so we care about development and technology. For more information, look online at: www.cetani.com/jobs, or contact me via email (address in profile). ------ esigler San Francisco, CA - Minted Frontend & backend developers needed! Minted is a social commerce site, crowd-sourcing graphic designs and art from around the world. Behind the scenes, we're running Python and PHP, on MySQL running in EC2 and Rackspace environments. We provide competitive compensation, generous benefits, and a brightly lit office environment that's 5 minutes walking distance from the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco. We're backed by Benchmark Capital & IDG Ventures, among others. See <http://www.minted.com/jobs> for more, or send me an email at eric@minted.com ------ andrewvc Santa Monica, CA Pose.com is a fast growing social network for style and fashion. We're looking for talented Ruby / Rails, Backbone.js, iOS, and Android developers. Our team is fun and small. We're 6 talented hackers and are looking to add a couple more. We're well funded, and emphasize keeping a good work-life balance (read: no crunches, regular hours). Additionally, we're looking to add a front-end developer. We're heavy users of backbone.js and CSS 3, so if these technologies pique your interest, let us know. We're scaling fast, and if you'd like to join us for the ride, send your CV and github acct. (if you have one) to andrew@pose.com ------ dawson How are you? - <http://www.howareyou.com> I'm looking for full-time/contract 6 month + iOS Objective-C developers (iPad), can work remote from anywhere. Would also love to find a full-time UX/UI designer, will put something up on dribbble this afternoon, contact details in profile. ------ volkadav OmniTI (omniti.com) - offices in Manhattan and Columbia, MD (remote ok for the right candidates) We're a consultancy focusing on high scale web app design, ops support and the like, focusing on open source tools. We're growing and are hiring for a wide range of roles right now to try to keep up with client demand: front and back end dev roles, DBAs, PMs, and systems people. Full role descriptions are here: <http://omniti.com/is/hiring> careers@ if you want to submit a resume or you can reach me directly if you have questions at mjackson@ ------ jgilliam Los Angeles, CA NationBuilder is hiring developers and organizers. We build tools for leaders, mostly focused on politics right now. We're backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sean Parker, and many others. Developer jobs: <http://dev.nationbuilder.com/jobs> Organizer jobs: <http://nationbuilder.com/organizer> Our stack is Ruby/Rails/Postgres/Redis/Mongo, details here: <http://dev.nationbuilder.com/about> ------ bendilts Salt Lake City, UT. - <http://www.lucidchart.com> LucidChart is an HTML5 diagramming application that proves web apps don't need to be pale imitations of their full-featured desktop counterparts. Real-time collaboration and full versioning history aren't our only advantages; users tell us they like LucidChart because it's faster, easier, and smoother than Visio and Omnigraffle. We need great engineers who want to work in a Silicon Valley startup, but would rather live 15 minutes from the ski resorts in Utah. We have one of the largest Javascript codebases on the Internet supporting LucidChart's client, and are using Scala, PHP, node.js, MongoDB, and MySQL to power our servers. Experience in one or more of these areas is helpful, but we're most interested in people with inhuman problem solving skills. We currently have 14 full-time employees, including 8 engineers. That ratio reflects the focus of our organization -- we are a software company, and we live or die on the strength of our engineering team. We think we have the strongest engineering team in Utah, and want to add at least 3-5 people this year. All hires are made by unanimous decision of the current team. If you join us, you can know that everyone here wants you here. Send resumes, github profiles, or whatever else might be relevant to jobs at lucidchart dot com. ------ aturnbull Three Ring (New York, NY) We're an early stage education technology startup looking to grow our team of developers. We provide a simple, easy way for teachers to create digital portfolios of student work using their smartphone. Our current backend is Rails/Postgres on Heroku and our frontend is built using HAML/SASS/JS. We use HTML5 + JS + Phonegap (Cordova) for our iOS and Android apps. We're looking for: Rails Developers - you're a knowledgable, fast learner excited to build a meaningful product. We push code daily and develop priorities based on teacher feedback. There's still a lot to do, and you'll have the opportunity to build out and take charge of significant features. Front-end Developers - you're familiar working in a Rails environment and love getting things perfect. You want to build out a product for teachers that's not just well made, but a joy to use. You like standards and graceful degradation for our friends with IE (but not 6!) Javascript Developers - we're starting on a robust, backbone.js based frontend for the website and have built our app out almost entirely in Javascript. Love making quality web apps? Shoot us an email. Interested in education? Email me: alec [at] threering.com <http://www.threering.com/careers> <http://mashable.com/2012/04/24/three- ring/> ------ cperea Austin, TX with RGM Advisors, LLC Full Time Job Opportunity H1B Sponsorship is a possibility Position: Quantitative Researcher Industry: Financial/Proprietary Trading RGM Advisors, LLC is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Austin, Texas that applies scientific methods and computing power to trading in multiple asset classes around the world. Responsibilities: We are currently seeking Quantitative Researchers at various levels who are capable of working within our proprietary computational research and modeling environment to develop automated trading strategies using machine learning, statistical analysis and other quantitative techniques. Successful candidates have the opportunity to solve complex and intellectually challenging problems including research and development into improved modeling techniques; design of improved tools and processes for conducting research and building trading models; and development and implementation of quantitative trading models for financial instruments traded in various markets. Qualifications: Excellent analytical skills Academic background in engineering, computer science, physics, math, statistics or another quantitative discipline Familiarity with machine learning algorithms, statistical analysis and/or quantitative analytical techniques Familiarity with UNIX and C++ To apply for this position and to see a full list of open positions at RGM Advisors, please visit our career portal: [https://jobs- rgmadvisors.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&sear...](https://jobs- rgmadvisors.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchLocation=&searchCategory=) ------ dabent Los Angeles Area (Santa Monica, CA) TrueCar is changing the way people buy and sell cars. We are well funded, earning revenue and growing. Most of our coding is in Python, Java and Javascript. We have several openings right now. I'll change things up from previous posts and keep them brief. If it sounds like it might be a fit, shoot me an email (address is in my profile) * Senior Designer and Designer (Photoshop/UX) * Java Architect (hands-on experienced Java geniuses) * Senior Linux System Engineer (If you are one, you know it) * Senior SQL Database Automation Engineer (Microsoft SQL Server) * Statistician (strong SAS programming skills including PROC SQL are needed) * Data Warehouse Developer (ETL/Data Modeling on MS SQL Server 2005/2008) * Data Analyst (SAS/SQL - Looking for an MS in Statistics, Econometrics, Operations Research, Data Mining, or Math) * BI SQL Analyst (OK, so I had to look up that one: Work with internal stakeholders to understand business objectives and identify useful data sources and analyses in order to reliably and accurately answers to important questions. Provide ad hoc analyses and reports for internal customers, especially C-level and PR requests. 3-5 years of workplace analytics experience.) I started here at TrueCar in the fall developing code primarily in Python and absolutely love it. Come join me by the beach: <http://picplz.com/user/dabent/pic/tpc4v/> ------ bhonohan New York, NY - 3 Developers, IT, Project Mgr - FULLTIME charity: water is a 5 year old non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. 100% of all public donations directly fund water projects. We raise 70% of our donations online, and tie every dollar donated to mycharitywater.org to the project it funds. Example: [http://mycharitywater.org/p/myprojectsview?project_id=ET.GOH...](http://mycharitywater.org/p/myprojectsview?project_id=ET.GOH.Q4.09.048.132) // Front-end Dev \- Looking for someone skilled in HTML5/CSS3/jQuery/Responsive design, to work on our websites, Email Campaigns, data visualizations and admin consoles. // 2 Software Engineers \- Our platforms are built on a mix of PHP, Python, Java; Systems integration is key here. Data analysis and visualization skills are welcomed. // IT SysAdmin \- Mix of Helpdesk, Server Admin, internal IT Systems management; Knowledge of AWS/nginx and monitoring services. // Software Project Manager \- Manage resources, schedules; Should be familiar with Agile methodology; code sprints/scrums Full Descriptions: <http://www.charitywater.org/about/jobs.php> To Apply: <http://www.charitywater.org/forms/hr/job_application/> ~~~ knite Some of the positions on your jobs page sound very interesting, but your application page is a major turn-off, with too many form fields and requesting personal information like a home address and complete salary history. ------ midas Priceonomics (YC W12) - San Francisco Front-End Engineer - Full Time Priceonomics is the price guide for everything. We're a team of three who are passionate about reinventing how people search, discover, and purchase products. We're based in the heart of San Francisco, on the edge of SoMa/Mission. We have great investors like Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway (SV Angel), Crunch Fund and many more. Details (and a fun puzzle!) here: <http://priceonomics.com/jobs/> ------ bartonfink Mapquest Vibe - <http://mqvibe.mapquest.com> Denver, CO - Fulltime. Mapquest is hiring engineers to work on a new product, Mapquest Vibe. Vibe was just released at SxSW and we have a lot of work to do before we can strip the "beta" label off. If Mapquest answers the question "How do I get from A to B", Vibe answers the question "Where do I want to go?" Using Vibe, you can see at a glance where the best businesses are in any neighborhood - our goal is that it will help users feel like a "local" wherever they wind up. You'll have a lot of autonomy in terms of how you implement features as well as input into the product direction itself. Projects I've implemented are a semantic tagging system to help categorize businesses, a dynamic geographic buffer to allow for fuzzy location searching, and I'm currently implementing a new API intended for public consumption. It's a very empowering culture and a great place to work. We're hiring across the board. Front-end folks use backbone.js, jQuery and a few mapping-specific toolkits to do various things. Back-end folks use a mixture of Java (running on Play!) and Groovy talking to a Postgres DB. Right now we're doing mobile development for the iPhone, with an Android app on the horizon. Experience matters less than ability - we'd be just as happy interviewing a grad right out of school as we would be interviewing a grizzled vet with 40 years experience. Skills I would particularly like to see added to the team are knowledge of Hadoop and Lucene, but that's my own personal wish- list. If you're interested, shoot me an e-mail (it's in my profile). ------ kstenerud San Francisco, CA (INTERN, H1B welcome) MindSnacks - <http://www.mindsnacks.com/> We build fun games for brains in San Francisco. We're a small & talented team. We hate boring. Our investors are awesome. If you are nice and want to help us make splendid products, we'd love to hear from you. We're hiring in lots of areas! Here are a few: * Backend engineer: So much data, so little time! If you can manage the chaos and make them thar machines answer questions like "What do they like about our stuff?" and "What don't they like?" and "Is they learnin' themselves good?", we want to hear from you! * Frontend engineer: Our users want to see how they're doing. They want interactivity that goes beyond their mobile devices. You've got the magic touch to make that happen. Let's talk! * Mobile engineer: You build pocket-sized awesomeness on iOS and/or Android. We make games that teach people stuff. The perfect combination! Even if you're not a game dev, there's plenty of app-y stuff to do! * UI designer: Engineers make things go vroom, but without a stunning design it's pointless. If you live to make jaw-dropping UI experiences (web and/or mobile), this is the place to be! Email us at jobs@mindsnacks.com More details: <http://www.mindsnacks.com/careers/> ------ tpimental Care.com - <http://www.care.com/> Waltham, MA Founded in 2006, Care.com is the largest and fastest growing service of its kind in the United States and has been used by hundreds of thousands of American families to find and connect with caregivers. In 2012, Care.com began to expand its service internationally. Several open positions including: \- Product Manager \- Software Engineer \- Web UI Engineer More info here: <http://www.care.com/careers-p1089.html> ------ afletcher Mediatonic - <http://mediatonic.co.uk> London, UK - Fulltime Mediatonic is an award winning independent games developer based in Soho, London. We work across a range of different digital platforms (HTML5, Flash, iPhone, console) building connected experiences for clients such as Disney, Cartoon Network, SEGA, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Pixar and Warner Brothers. We're currently hiring for the following positions: * Artist (2D) * Associate Producer * Game Designer * Games Analyst * Games Writer / Creative Producer * HTML5 Developer * Junior Administrator * PHP Developer * QA Engineer (Embedded) * SmartPhone Developer * UI Designer About us: Mediatonic is focused on becoming one of the best digital game developers in the world. We hire experts in every field related to games and like to take on the biggest technical challenges and projects we can get our hands on. Our working environment and culture is hugely important to us at Mediatonic. Our office is based in Soho London, we have a relaxed, open working environment and run a number of social events and activities during and outside of work time. See <http://mediatonic.co.uk/> for more details. ------ snowmaker San Francisco, CA - Scribd - Looking for creative engineers with various backgrounds Scribd is one of the early YCombinator companies, and we've been growing steadily. We're now a top 100 site and one of the top 3 rails sites on the web by traffic. But we still have a very small, tight-knit team where each person plays a critical role. Scribd alumni have gone on to found four other YCombinator companies, more than from any other startup. We think this says something about the kind of people that we like to hire. Technology-wise, we mostly work with Rails, Javascript, and iOS. We also have a lot of challenges related to machine learning, text mining, and scaling large web infrastructure. We're looking for generalists with an interest in one or more of those areas. See <http://www.scribd.com/jobs> for lots more detail on the stuff we've built, a lot of which we've open sourced. We're in downtown SF but we've hired a team of the best people we could find from around the world. Relocation and H1B / J1 visas are no problem. We've gotten some tremendously talented people from these "Who's hiring posts" before. If you're interested, please get in touch with me directly - jared at scribd.com. ------ Sighduck GGeez - New York, NY - Technical Co-Founder Hi there! GGeez.com is building an awesome project for the video game community based on challenges. I am seeking a knowledgable person who will be able to work with me and create something that people will absolutely love to use. You must LOVE video games and have a passion for creating a community. Please check out <http://www.ggeez.com/hiring.html> for more info ------ jnelson PhotoShelter - New York, NY (Full-time) PhotoShelter provides tools to help photographers display, market, sell, and distribute their photos. We're a small company with a laid-back atmosphere (we love dogs and barbecue) located right on Union Square, in the heart of the city. We are looking for both back-end and front-end engineers to help grow our product. We value folks who are passionate about and take pride in their craft, more than buzzword compliance. Our stack includes css, html5, javascript (with a homegrown MVC framework) on the front-end, and PHP, some C, PostgreSQL, Sphinx and Memcached on the back-end. While specific experience with any of those is a plus, we want engineers who write quality code and design clean solutions. Our diverse staff includes veteran engineers from HotJobs and Yahoo, one of Computerworld's 40 Under 40 tech innovators, and even a well-known concert photographer. We offer competitive salaries, stock options, bonuses, great benefits, and try to grab dinner together (on the company!) every few weeks. If you're interested, shoot an e-mail to devjobs@photoshelter.com. Thanks! <http://www.photoshelter.com/about/index/jobs> ------ Hovertruck Chartbeat is hiring in NYC (Meatpacking District). H1B possible. We're a real-time analytics platform focused on providing data to the people on the front line (people who can take immediate action), rather than the analysts in the back office. Our stack is Python (django/tornado), C, MongoDB, and Google Closure for our JavaScript needs. Hiring engineers and designers of all sorts. :) <http://chartbeat.com/jobs/> ------ pdavison Highlight - San Francisco / Full-time / Engineering + Design / H1B Highlight (<http://highlig.ht>) is looking for extraordinary engineers and designers to join our core team. Our product is a mobile app that helps you see more information about the people around you. It is just now becoming possible thanks to recent advances in mobile technology and the product is incredibly rewarding to work on. Our days are full of interesting challenges around UI/UX, engineering, and machine learning. Our goal is to give you a sixth sense about the world around you, showing you things that you’ve never been able to see before. It’s difficult and ambitious, which is what makes it fun. We launched in January and the response has been very exciting. We recently closed a round of funding from Benchmark Capital, SV Angel, Crunchfund, and a great group of angel investors. We want to make Highlight an amazing place to work, with a creative, open culture that deeply values both engineering and design. If you are excited about what we are doing we would love to hear from you. You can reach us at jobs@highlig.ht. For more details, please see <http://highlig.ht/jobs.html>. ------ davidblondeau Burligame, CA - Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) (<https://www.collaborativedrug.com>) CDD is growing and financially stable. Our software helps scientists manage, analyze and collaborate around their drug discovery data (chemistry and biology). We are are in a great position to support the evolution towards more collaboration, specialization and distribution in a market that has been historically closed and secretive. The model has been successful with academic labs, small biotech startups and very large collaborations (like the Gates foundation TB initiative or MM4TB in Europe). We are now gaining some traction with government agencies and the big pharmaceuticals. I am hiring a full-stack software developer (<https://www.collaborativedrug.com/pages/employment#h-1>). As one of three developers, you need to be comfortable working or interested in building expertise at every level of the stack. Experience or interest in system administration and operations is nice to have though not required. We have many projects involving web development, data visualization, data processing, scaling, security, privacy and other software challenges to make our scientific application collaborative, engaging and rewarding. It is perfectly OK if you do not have experience with any of the languages or technologies we currently use (Rails/Ruby/JS/MySQL/Solr...) as long as you can learn those quickly. CDD is a great place if you want to have a lot of impact and like to take on projects and responsibilities. If you are interested, contact work@collaborativedrug.com, you will get an answer from one of the developers. ------ yesimahuman INTERN (Madison, WI or remote) - <http://codiqa.com> We are building the best development tools for HTML5 mobile apps. 30k users since launch in late Feb, paying customers, active in jQuery Mobile community. We have a complex drag-and-drop tool built with Javascript and backbone.js. Backend built on Python+Django. Interested? Send an email with a link to something you've made to max@codiqa.com ------ jaredrhine Xtranormal, <http://www.xtranormal.com/jobs/> San Francisco near Montgomery BART Xtranormal lets anyone create and share animated and 3D movies using using web, mobile, and desktop apps. We’re growing and have great engineering positions available: * Senior front-end: 4+ years experience, JavaScript apps, HTML5/CSS3/jQuery/LESS/MVC * Operations: 5+ years, Linux, devops, open source, EC2+colo, on-call * Mobile: 2+ years, iOS, HTML5/PhoneGap, JavaScript * Full-stack: 3+ years, Python/Django, REST, SQL, HTML/JavaScript * Front-end: 2+ years, HTML/CSS/JavaScript * QA: 2+ years, web or mobile testing You’ve definitely seen videos made using our technology. Here’s a Python rap video a customer made last year which speaks to the Hacker News crowd (some impolite language is included): <http://youtu.be/FJ7QsEytQq4> Come help us build new ways for people to build awesome animated videos! Competitive compensation and benefits. To apply for any of these positions or for more information, please email jobs@xtranormal.com and you'll get straight to the hiring manager. Postings are available at <http://www.xtranormal.com/jobs/> ------ coolaj86 SpotterRF - Orem, UT (near Salt Lake City) - Intern, Full-time Our core product and primary focus is the world's first Compact Tracking Radar (not the large spinning blip-blip kind), affectionately known as "The Spotter". It's the size of a small lunch box and tracks in real-time, which we primary sell in military / gov't markets. The success of and need for our product has put us in the unique but challenging position to bring government and military customers into the 21st century of technology, design, and usability (and that _is_ a challenge). For example, we use an HTML5 interface for our tracking system and it only works in real browsers (not MSIE). If you love technology, want to work in a friendly environment, and have a budding (or deep) interest in a mix of the areas below, or you just have a good feeling about it, please get in touch with me (ajoneal at spotterrf . com). We're looking for skill but, more importantly, potential. Embedded Developer * Linux, Arduino * Raspberry Pi * C * Soldering Web Designer * Adobe Suite * CSS3 * HTML5 Application Developer * Application language (i.e. NodeJS, Ruby, Python) * Systems language (i.e Golang, D, C) * Problem solving skills Algorithm Developer * Radar, Sonar, etc * Game Design * Artificial Intelligence * Machine learning * R, MatLab Here are some projects that have sprung out of github.com/SpotterRF (both on and off the clock): * Foobar3000 - The worlds most advanced (and convenient) echo server * Dropshare - Simple file-sharing that gets past (government) e-mail filters * Mildoc - Pretty documentation for the rest of us * Tolmey - GPS Geotranslation in JavaScript * Appr - Application Distribution (think App Store) ------ SeoxyS Chartboost - <http://chartboost.com> San Francisco. Relocation. 14 people company. We're a young but growing advertising and cross-promotion network for mobile games. We help game developers utilize their user base to promote new titles, and make money. We're funded and profitable. We're hiring across the entire spectrum of developers and designers. We're looking for smart and motivated people who know how to get shit done, but are also always interested in learning new things. Stack: Objective-C / PHP / Mongo / Redis / Ruby / JS / Clojure / Storm / a little of everything else. (Generalist) Software Engineer -- <http://jobsco.re/ITMWVM> Front End Engineer -- <http://jobsco.re/HOJdo5> Senior Backend Engineer -- <http://jobsco.re/HOJF5v> Interaction Designe / Product Manager -- <http://jobsco.re/ITM7MQ> UI Designer -- <http://jobsco.re/HOJlnj> Dev Ops -- no link yet Summer Intern -- <http://jobsco.re/HOJTJY> ------ puppetrecruiter Puppet Labs (<http://www.puppetlabs.com/jobs>) - Portland, OR We have grown from 20 to over 80 employees in just over a year and continue to add positions, including: Operations Engineer, Support Engineer (Portland) Professional Services Engineer (Portland or NYC) Sr Sales Engineer (anywhere in US) For these roles, we are looking for awesome people with strong nix sysadmin background to join our growing Operations, Support, and Professional Services teams under our Technical Operations umbrella. Puppet Labs creates IT automation software which enables system administrators to deliver the operational agility and efficiency of cloud computing at enterprise-class service levels, scaling from handfuls of nodes on-premise to tens of thousands in the cloud. Puppet powers thousands of companies, including Twitter, Yelp, eBay, Zynga, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Google, Disney, Citrix, Oracle, and Viacom. Interested? Check out the postings online at www.puppetlabs.com/jobs or connect with me on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/aimeefahey. Thanks! Aimee Fahey Talent Acquisition Manager @puppetrecruiter ------ typpo Mountain View, CA - fulltime or intern Room 77 - <https://www.room77.com> We're changing travel search by giving people full transparency in their search for a perfect hotel stay. Using the staggering amount of data we've collected and analyzed, we'll actually find and request the best hotel room for you. Some projects you'll work on: \- computer-generating views from any room in the world \- building the first deep-text hotel search engine (eg. search "eiffel tower views" in Paris or "jetted bathtub" in New York) \- super-fast search across all major providers (we show Expedia results faster than Expedia) \- finding better ways to extract and expose data like hotel freebies and fees ...and many other things that contribute to a fast, easy travel planning experience. If you're interested in information retrieval, machine learning, NLP, or computer visualization, you'll have a great time solving brand new problems and creating a genuinely improved and useful hotel search. Check out our jobs page: <https://www.room77.com/jobs.html?s=HN> ------ kristjan San Francisco, CA - <http://singly.com/jobs>: Security, Infrastructure and QA engineers, Full time, Remote OK Singly is hiring all sorts of engineers (and more) to build a cross-platform, cross-service API that provides merged, normalized and deduplicated data on which apps can be built. We're well on the way to an early-June launch and have had a fantastic response to early signups. A recent $7MM in funding [1] is letting us expand the team and ramp up developer outreach. If you're not quite after a job, we'll still happily pay you at our $10k hackathon [2]. Apply through <https://singly.com/jobs> or kristjan@singly.com, or just come hang with us in #lockerproject on Freenode. [1] [http://allthingsd.com/20120423/personal-data-connector- singl...](http://allthingsd.com/20120423/personal-data-connector-singly- raises-7m/) [2] <http://hacksingly.eventbrite.com/> ------ arupchak Los Gatos, CA - Netflix My team at Netflix is looking for Site Reliability Engineers to come in and help solve our availability and reliability challenges. We have one of the largest AWS footprints out there and are constantly finding out about the limits of AWS technologies. We have a unique problem that we want to figure out how to enable all of our engineering teams to deploy faster and more often, while still increasing the overall availability of the Netflix streaming service. We do this by building tools/services for engineering teams and by helping teams figure out ways to make their software more reliable. Official Job Description: <http://jobs.netflix.com/jobsListing.html?id=oHxbWfw5> To get a sense of what engineering teams at Netflix work on: <http://techblog.netflix.com/> <https://github.com/netflix> If interested, please feel free to email me directly (email in profile) ------ ehinter Mountain View, CA. Full time. <http://patterninsight.com/company/careers/> Pattern Insight is a booming startup making code and log analysis tools for a customer base that includes many titans of the tech industry. The data mining and static analysis technologies present in our product have strong research roots, as we grew out of PhD research done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Relatedly, our core engineering team has a strong academic background and as a whole has published over 100+ articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences. We are looking to expand our engineering team in sunny California. As stated above, we are also looking for a handful of interns. For more specific requirements, please see our career page: <http://patterninsight.com/company/careers/> Come join us, we are still tiny and looking for people ready and willing to make decisions that shape our future. ------ syncopated Los Angeles, CA / Drupal Developers / Full Time - No remote Stauffer New Media Development <http://stauffer.com/about/careers> It takes great people to achieve such accomplishments – and Stauffer New Media is looking for talented individuals to complete our team. We are a group of smart, accomplished development engineers who do more than simply code for our clients. Rather, we use our past experience and passion for innovation to create unique, cutting edge solutions for our business clients. Joining our team will provide you the opportunity to work closely with all members, including the most senior staff. You will learn directly from your peers, while experimenting hands-on with the newest open source technology. You will work directly with our clients, developing and shaping projects from start to finish. You will transcend from being simply an engineer to a full-service business consultant, engaged in creating value generating solutions for our clients. ------ lucasr Mozilla - Remote, or one of our 9 global offices (London, Mountain View, San Francisco, Toronto, Paris, ...) Mozilla has quite a few engineering openings to work on exciting projects like Firefox (front-end and platform), Firefox Mobile (front-end and platform), Boot to Gecko, Web APIs, and more. For more details: <http://careers.mozilla.org> ------ robinwarren Covalent Software - <http://www.covalentsoftware.com/> Taunton (near Bristol) UK, Java Fulltime Covalent is the market leader in UK public sector Performance Management, we're a small company (< 40 total, 15 person development team) but growing consistently. Specifically right now we are moving into new markets and hence need to enhance our product to support that. We are also building out new modules to sell into these and our existing markets. Work would be on our hosted Java (Java 6, soon to be 7) thick client application which talks across the internet to our backend running on SQL Server. Although not following any specific agile methodology we deploy nightly to test and do 4 major releases a year to customers. We use continuous integration (Jenkins) and unit testing as appropriate. My email address is in my profile, or go via <http://www.covalentsoftware.com/company/careers.php> ------ tommccabe New York, NY - DVF is seeking front end web developer. We're a leading fashion brand with a growing e-commerce business and need someone who is great with front end technology. E-commerce experience is a plus. More info here: [http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/12661/front-end-web- develo...](http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/12661/front-end-web-developer) ------ rwgould Toronto, ON - <http://gaggleup.com> GaggleUp is a new start-up at the intersection of local and online commerce. We are on the verge of launching into new verticals in the group-buying space, as well as launching co-branding initiatives with some of Canada's most recognizable companies. Our core web application has been carefully designed and maintained with best practices in mind on the industry-leading web application framework (can you guess which one?). However our cherished web app needs to be extended, scaled, and built out to meet business demand. We are looking for a full time developer or two to help take our web app to the proverbial next level. \-- About Us -- Our core web app is built with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript * It runs on Ubuntu using Amazon Web Services, and deployment is controlled by Chef * We develop iteratively and release regularly * We care about quality - our code is well-designed and tested (~75% code coverage) * We work hard, but smart. We believe less code is better, and a simple UI is key * We're not religious about technology. We believe in using the right tool for the job * We like to give back to the open source community * We have a very experienced management team who have been hugely successful in the past \-- What We're Offering -- * A chance to join a growing startup before everyone knows the name * A chance to work on a new web application using cutting-edge tools * A chance to work with an experienced team of entrepreneurs * A competitive salary with a comprehensive benefits package Sound interesting? More information here: <http://gaggleup.com/jobs> ------ sgrock Portland, OR/San Francisco - <http://newrelic.com/about/jobs> New Relic is growing and has several technical (and non-technical) positions. If you've got skills in Ruby, Java, C, or iOS, and want to work at one of the coolest companies around, give us a shout. We are passionate, possibly even crazy, about application performance management (APM). Our mission is to make web applications run better, to make the internet more productive, and to make life easier for developers and devops. We are turning the APM marketplace upside down by providing SaaS products that deliver high-value functionality previously only available through enterprise software. We are well above 17,000 customers. And with your help we’ll get to 10x that number. [H1B] is fine. Usually no [REMOTE] but we have made exceptions. We're losing our [INTERN] to college so that's also a possibility. ------ jdelic LaterPay in Munich, Germany is hiring. We're a Python-based Saas company, looking for experienced operations/sysadmins and programmers. We love to hire internationally and are good at helping you relocate to Germany, as long as you have a work permit for the EU. We work with Django, Tornado, nginx, Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Redis. We're building a highly-scalable payment platform based on these tools. We're Angel- funded and have already lined up multiple international customers. Find out more here: [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/12430/linux- sysadmin-a...](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/12430/linux-sysadmin-a- super-scalable-performance-laterpay-gmbh) [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/9841/senior-python- dev...](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/9841/senior-python-developer-a- german-start-up-laterpay-gmbh) We'd love to hear from you. ------ jeremyw SimplyHired - Sunnyvale, CA - Full-time - <http://www.simplyhired.com> We're looking for DevOps engineers to round out our operations team. Help automate, scale and make more reliable the largest job search engine. Open source / Nginx / Varnish / HAProxy / MySQL / N+1 / N+N / Configuration management There are no assigned roles. You'll cross-train on everything, getting your hands in site reliability in all its breadth: networks, provisioning, performance & scaling, deployment, big data / Hadoop, monitoring, etc. Both datacenter & cloud. We automate relentlessly in a mix of Python and Ruby. Think like a developer: learn something, code it up, learn some more, refine. Over time, we want this stuff to sing. Email jeremy-at-simplyhired.com or see <http://www.simplyhired.com/a/our- company/careers>. ------ ryen Coffee Meets Bagel - San Francisco, CA. Full time - Experienced Python/Django web developer Coffee Meets Bagel ( <http://coffeemeetsbagel.com> ) is a new innovative online dating startup making waves in New York City and looking to expand to the west coast soon. We've recently been featured in TechCrunch, Glamour, BostInno, and several other major blogs and publications. About the Job: We're looking for an experienced Python/Django web developer to join our early stage team as we scale our website in terms of geography and users, refine our revenue model, and continue to keep our customers happy. You will have an opportunity to work with and learn from a highly experienced technical advisor and a senior python engineer. This is a market with huge opportunity and we will look to you for best practices around architecture, deployment and scaling the service to millions of people. Requirements: \- 2+ Years of Python development experience with some knowledge of Django or similar web frameworks. You will be able to contribute to our Django code base from Day 1. \- A strong knowledge of the fundamentals of networking, operating systems, and security. \- A Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering or related discipline from a 4-year program. \- Agile. Intelligent. Creative. Problem-solver. Startup lover. You like finding and working with outstanding engineers and want to help us build an awesome engineering team. Bonus: \- Experience building back-end systems on a high-traffic, low-latency web site. \- Knowledge in Machine Learning/Graph Theory/Large-scale Data Analysis is a plus \- Experience working with, and contributing to open source software projects is a plus—show us your github account or other online projects if available Also looking for engineering interns, front-end developers, and marketing/PR intern. <http://coffeemeetsbagel.com/jobs/> ------ twp Chambéry, France and Lausanne, Switzerland - Python and Javascript devs - geospatial and business All open source. Geospatial development is primarily Javascript (OpenLayers, Ext.js) and Python (Pylons, SQLAlchemy, etc.). Business development is Python (OpenERP). Full list of positions: <http://www.camptocamp.com/en/careers> ------ sganesh Austin, TX Audingo - (www.audingo.com) Full Time - (Intern, no REMOTE, H1B for right candidate) Audingo is helping radio stations and other verticals connect with their listeners via different messaging mediums and helping them monetize it. Checkout the service through www.mix947.com. Our platform runs on Windows Azure. Asp.NET MVC 3, RESTful WCF services & most of windows azure's capabilities power our backend. UI is done using HTML, CSS, JQuery & a bit of flash (this is currently being stripped out). We also have an IOS app & an Android app. We're looking for (i) UI/UX Designer/Developers (ii) .NET Developers with ASP.NET MVC 3, WCF , (Nice to have - Windows Azure Exposure) (iii) Product Manager and (iv) QA - Selenium & Other Automation Tools Benefits: Competitive salary (we’re funded) * Stock options (in a pre series A company) * Medical Insurance * Nice Private Office * Equipment Of Your Choosing * Well Stocked Pantry * Relaxed, Fun and Passionate Co-Workers * We're on 360 south of Bee Caves Rd Please send a mail to "saig AT audingo.com" with your accomplishments and/or resume. ------ fjordan rewardStyle - Dallas, TX (Uptown) - Fulltime/Part-time rewardStyle is an invitation-only web tool that helps fashion bloggers find and monetize their content. About us: * Soft launched one year ago * Solving hard problems involving complex systems * Currently a small engineering team of three looking for talent What we're looking for: * Designers * Fullstack engineers * Front-end engineers We currently use PHP/C, MySQL, Memcached, and iOS/Android Contact me: forrest at rewardstyle.com if you are interested. ------ steverb Knoxville, TN CellularSales is a fast growing retailer of Verizon Wireless Cellular Service, and we're looking for a few good devs. Our stack is .NET and we're looking for people who love getting stuff done, and are good enough to teach the rest of us something new. If you're in the area and are interested, shoot me an email (address is in my profile). ------ malcolmong New York, NY (SoHo) -- Engineers SKILLSHARE _Our mission is to transform education by democratizing learning and empowering anyone to become a teacher._ There are some people who like a challenge, and then there's someone who joins Skillshare. Think about all the moments in history when people said "it couldn't be done". Being an engineer at Skillshare is for the people who defy these remarks, lead the charge and as a result change the world. As an Engineer, you'll be joining a fast-paced engineering team that identify and solve problems from conception to deployment daily. The product we build supports the fast-growing Skillshare community at large, at scale and you'll be leading its evolution into the world. _Learn more:_ <http://www.skillshare.com/careers> PS - bonus points if you can beat the founders in a game of Settlers of Catan or Dominion! ------ KoryFerbet Seattle, WA Fulltime An already profitable Seattle based Startup is looking for mobile developers, both Android and iOS to join their team permanently. They have a fantastic advisory board and great team. Their leaders all have experience taking startups and turning them either public as well as negotiating acquisitions. We are seeking a self-motivated, creative multi-platform mobile application developer with a passion for pushing the envelope of user experience to create intuitive, useful, and widely-adopted apps. This position is the first of its kind in our organization and as such, you will have an opportunity to make this job your own. Because my client is a startup you will have a chance to leave your thumbprint with a company that is revolutionizing mobile performance. Key Responsibilities Develop rich-UI applications for iPhone and/or Android platforms Work with graphics designers to design and implement a rich and intuitive mobile user experience Work collaboratively in a team environment that includes more senior application developers and/or architects Skills Required Strong familiarity with cutting-edge UI implementations, including underlying threading models Track record of bringing apps to mass market, either solo or in team settings Knowledge of Java on Android and/or Objective-C on iOS Disciplined coding style with an eye toward maintainability Relentlessly high quality standards and extreme attention to detail A history of positive teamwork and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment Experience with integrating multiple aspects of API. B.S. or B.A. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar, or equivalent experience Bonus Points Experience working on the NDK Experience with Amazon EC2 You can apply via [http://www.bullhornreach.com/job/149588_mobile- application-d...](http://www.bullhornreach.com/job/149588_mobile-application- developer-seattle-wa) Or send me an email for more information Kory@imatch.com ------ dgurney Concert Window is bringing on a CTO in New York, NY. We are creating a way for people to watch live concerts online. We've already built an exclusive network of nine top venues around the country and developed proprietary tech for producing the webcasts. We are supported by Mark O'Connor and Wynton Marsalis, and recently closed an angel round of seed funding. We are making revenue already, with thousands of paying customers. Now, we're bringing on a CTO to mastermind the technical infrastructure that will power Concert Window going forward. We don't care what language or stack you use; we're looking mostly for an extremely high quality candidate who wants to take ownership of creating this infrastructure. The company is run by two Harvard grads and musicians. Ideally you are also a musician or music lover. Email dan@concertwindow.com with "HN" in the subject line ------ ipt SamKnows - London, UK PHP Application Developer SamKnows is regarded as the global leader in internet performance measurement, and it's technology is used by governments and companies around the world. We are looking for a smart, well-rounded developer with 3-5 years industry experience, to help us build data-driven web applications. There will also be an opportunity in the coming year to play a role in re-designing our existing system's data storage/backend, to allow us to scale to orders of magnitude more records than currently processed. You have strong PHP, OO design, and SQL; you also speak Javascript, and use version control. Ideally, you will have a grounding in maths (especially statistics). Any of the following are advantageous: PHPUnit, Symfony, MySQL optimisation, jQuery, Linux, HTML/CSS. Please apply by sending a CV / covering note to cvs@samknows.com ------ stochastician Prior Knowledge is hiring in downtown San Francisco! We're a small team in downtown San Francisco pushing the frontiers of probabilistic machine learning to the masses. Our first product is Veritable, a predictive database. We like to think of it as a database for things you don't know. We're passionate about discovering the hidden causes behind data, and are currently split pretty evenly between machine learning experts, scalable systems engineers, and people used to working with horribly messy, complex, and sparse data. <http://priorknowledge.com/join-us/> describes a bit more about what we're looking for, and you can always e-mail me (jonas@priorknowledge.com) for more info! Or come to our Friday office hours and meet the team. ------ adam0101 Hartford, CT - Operations Engineer - Full Time - Travelers You will be a part of a team of Operations Engineers which will be responsible for a growing number of applications and infrastructure in our corporate environment. You know your way around many operating systems, and network devices. You are comfortable working on a Linux Server issue one day, and the next spending it analyzing a network trace. You have a demonstrated history of providing great customer service and root cause analysis. You are comfortable working in a high paced collaborative environment with a small elite team. More details here - [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/19121/it- operations-en...](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/19121/it-operations- engineer-travelers?a=mAEMy52) ------ rdamico Crocodoc.com (YC W10) - San Francisco - {Software Developers, Business Development, Sales/Marketing} We just launched a major new HTML5 document embedding product today (<http://tcrn.ch/JbsoVN>) and announced new customers including Dropbox and LinkedIn. We're growing super fast (haven't had time to finalize formal job descriptions yet!) and are a small, fun, high-intensity team. Our goal at Crocodoc is to free users from antiquated desktop software and empower the world’s top companies to adopt cloud-based document workflows. We've developed the world's most advanced web-based document viewing and collaboration technology for Microsoft Office and PDF files, built on open standards such as HTML5 and CSS3. Drop us a note at jobs@crocodoc.com ------ bjcubsfan Oklahoma City, OK Full Time Engineers with software experience Citizenship Required We are looking for programmers who can work with Python, Django, C, and Matlab. They should have Linux/Unix experience. You will work with a company that contracts with the Federal government. This means a very stable job, 40 hour work weeks (Flex schedule available), and excellent benefits; but unlike many government positions, the specific group has stimulating work to do and is not locked in to ancient technology. The work focuses on developing tools for and performing data analysis on the system. I can get you more information if you are interested: <http://www.twitter.com/bjcubsfan> email: okc-engineer.bjp@xoxy.net ~~~ Jhau I work close to this team. It's a great job! We have allot of freedom of expression in the way we solve problems. ------ steveb St. Louis, Missouri - 2 Software Engineers - Fulltime Major global financial corporation. We are seeking 2 software engineers with strong C++/Java/Python skills to develop grid software and implement visualization of financial data. The roles are as follows: 1) Help develop a multithreaded C++/MPI application to simulate the behaviors of mortgage portfolios. The application runs a cluster of Linux nodes. We're looking to scale to thousands of cores. 2) Develop visualization tools using Paraview or other technologies for financial data. Mine data sets and work with analysts. We are open to big data technologies and techniques. Experience with quantitative finance, HPC or scientific computing is a plus. Our target platforms are both Linux and Windows. email me at steve@borrelli.org if interested. ------ equark Sense - <http://www.senseplatform.com> \- Quantitatively Oriented Developer - Summer Intern \- New York City / Cambridge, MA / San Francisco. We're pre-launch startup building a next-generation platform for data and statistics. We're solving some of the most challenging problems in statistics and big data in a way that will delight both PhD statisticians and business analysts. Position: We're looking for a quantitatively oriented developer to join our small (3) team. We're open to summer interns. Strong knowledge of C/C++ and Javascript required. Masters/PhD in a quantitative field and strong opinions about data analysis software such as R, Stata, SAS, or SPSS is a major plus. Sound interesting, drop me a line: tristan@senseplatform.com ------ uberc New York City. SUMMER INTERNSHIPS in software (including Unity 3D), hardware, and game design at Project Grasshopper. Project Grasshopper: game lounges for grown-ups. Starting in New York City and involving interactive tabletops and innovative physical and digital media in actual locations, with the goal of using games to foster meaningful face-to- face social interaction and in-person community. Founded by former Google PM director. Participants in test events have basically said: we love it, we want it more, and we don't know where else to get it. If this piques your interest, email info@projectgrasshopper.com and I can send you a concept test video that gives a brief overview of the project and includes footage from a recent test event. ------ FreakLegion Sacramento, CA - Full-time - 5 Engineering openings - REMOTE an option if you're awesome We're a former startup recently turned autonomous software development arm of ManTech International. Malware's our game, with a focus on building enterprise security products. We're largely a .NET shop, but under the hood everything runs on C/C++ (both managed and unmanaged) and hand-coded assembly, so there's room for people at all levels. Email's in my profile. Happy hunting! \-- 1\. Software Engineer - C++/Low-level Required skills: C/C++, Windows system internals, Win32 API, ASP.Net, C#/.Net, MSSQL Server Desired skills: In-depth knowledge of CPU architectures and Windows kernels (Windows 2000 forward), x86-64 proficiency, optimizing software for speed and/or memory, Windows device driver development \-- 2\. Software Engineer - C++/Low-level (slightly different priorities than above) Required skills: Windows device driver development, C/C++, Win32 API, Windows system internals, ASP.Net, C#, MSSQL Server Desired skills: Managing projects using SDLC, optimizing software for speed and/or memory, x86-64 proficiency, in-depth knowledge of CPU architectures and Windows kernels (Windows 2000 forward) \-- 3\. QA Software Developer Required skills: Win32 API, C/C++, socket and network layer APIs, automated testing with TestComplete or equivalent Desired skills: C#/.NET, scripting (Perl/Python/Ruby/other) \-- 4\. Software Engineer - Database Specialist Required experience: C# and ASP.Net, MSSQL Server, Service-oriented architecture, HTML and CSS Desired experience: Optimizing software for speed and/or memory, C/C++, WCF \-- 5\. Software Engineer - Windows Networking/WMI Required skills: ASP.Net, C#, MSSQL Server, Windows networking Desired skills: Windows system internals, C/C++, optimizing software for speed and/or memory ------ proletarian We're hiring devs at Adobe to work on social media marketing in San Francisco, Colorado Springs, an Orem, UT. Full-time only. We use Rails, Mongo, Redis, and are doing amazing things with social APIs and big data analytics over social data. <http://www.adobe.com/products/social.html> Position Summary Architect and build new solutions for social marketing within Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite. This position involves working with complex and dynamic social APIs from Facebook and other social platforms. You'll work with large data sets and be involved with scaling a platform that handles millions of users interacting with the world's biggest brands. Our small, distributed team is located in San Francisco, Colorado Springs, and Orem, UT. We constantly get to work with new challenges as the social platforms evolve, and often find ourselves evaluating new technologies. Responsibilities Lead development for large, complex social marketing features. Define APIs for internal and partner consumption. Gain broad knowledge of our platform and fix bugs / refactor code throughout. Make intelligent engineering choices about product architecture and development approaches. Lead conversations about our solutions, both internally with team members and externally with customers. Define, develop, and innovate on our team processes. Work with team members to guide them to better solutions, review code, etc. Requirements BS or advanced degree in Computer Science or similar field. Minimum of 6 years experience working on complex systems, or equivalent. Broad technical knowledge and demonstrated track record of picking up new skills. Experience with, or genuine interest in, social media. Knowledge of at least one web programming language (Ruby/Rails, PHP, Java, etc.). Here is the link: <https://adobe.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl> Adobe believes in hiring the very best. We are known for our vibrant, dynamic and rewarding workplace where personal and professional fulfillment and company success go hand in hand. We take pride in creating exceptional work experiences, encouraging innovation and being involved with our employees, customers and communities. We invite you to discover what makes Adobe a place where exceptional people thrive. Click this link to experience A Day in the Life at Adobe: <http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/careeropp/fma/dayinthelife> ------ triggit Triggit, Inc. San Francisco, CA - Full-Time - NO REMOTE - H-1B friendly <http://triggit.com/careers> Base pay for engineers starts in the six figures, you get to build your own battle station, and every engineer gets an office with a door. We have a really cool office with high ceilings and natural light. We also do daily catered lunches. Available positions: Senior Linux System Administration / Developer Ops Senior Reporting Engineer Senior Engineer: Ad Serving Systems Ruby on Rails Developer (Full Stack) We're hiring aggressively, so check out <http://triggit.com/careers> or hit up engjobs+hn@triggit.com ------ e1ven Waltham, Ma (Near Boston) SavingStar is looking for Ruby experts to help us transition the world away from paper coupons, and enable a digital couponing future. If you can intelligently discuss page vs. fragment caching, if scaling a website to millions of users sounds like fun and if you enjoy a fast paced, flexible environment with challenges to spare, we might be a good fit. We're looking for someone to help improve our websites and services, both internal and external, and to work with partners to integrate SavingStar into their environments. We're looking for someone who's used frameworks (such as Rails or Django) extensively, and is comfortable in Ruby on Rails. Our primary database is MongoDB, so NoSQL/Schema-less experience is great. Shoot me an email ;) ------ Jun8 Chicago, IL. Full time. The Applications & Analytics Architecture Group in Motorola Solutions is looking for an software engineer. The group performs research and development on video, image, audio, and data analysis algorithms, applications, and services, to create next-generation public safety and enterprise solutions. Job Responsibilities: • Collaborate in cross-functional teams to develop system prototypes, integrating video/image analytics algorithms and software. • Contribute to the development of video/image analytics & processing algorithms, develop efficient software implementations of the algorithms, run simulations to evaluate performance and refine the methods. • Generate patent disclosures covering the system solutions and the underlying methods. • Present results and demonstrations at internal meetings and meetings with customers. Basic Qualifications: The position requires an MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering. Specific Knowledge/Skills: • Enthusiasm for solving complex problems. • Extensive C++ and/or Java programming experience and strong object oriented design experience, including working knowledge of core libraries and design patterns. • Significant software development experience, including use of software development tools and version control in Unix/Linux and/or Windows environments. • Application programming experience on Android mobile platforms. • DSP and/or GPU programming experience on embedded platforms is a plus. • Web applications or services development experience, including server- side and client-side web scripting (e.g. JavaScript, Python, and/or Perl) is a plus. • Experience with multimedia frameworks (e.g. GStreamer, WindowMedia) and video codecs (e.g. MPEG-4 AVC) is a plus. • Experience deploying video/image processing applications in live prototype or pilot systems a plus. • Some hand-on skills building circuits is a plus. • Familiarity with one or more of the following areas is desirable: video/image processing, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition. • Strong teamwork and communication skills, creativity, productivity, and learning agility. If interested, send me a message. ------ cperea Full Time Job Opportunity in: Austin, TX with RGM Advisors, LLC Industry: Financial/Proprietary Trading Position: Quantitative Researcher RGM Advisors, LLC is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Austin, Texas that applies scientific methods and computing power to trading in multiple asset classes around the world. This is a unique opportunity to join a successful quantitative trading firm in a geographic location that is consistently recognized as one of the top 10 places to live, work, and play. Responsibilities: We are currently seeking Quantitative Researchers at various levels who are capable of working within our proprietary computational research and modeling environment to develop automated trading strategies using machine learning, statistical analysis and other quantitative techniques. Successful candidates have the opportunity to solve complex and intellectually challenging problems including research and development into improved modeling techniques; design of improved tools and processes for conducting research and building trading models; and development and implementation of quantitative trading models for financial instruments traded in various markets. Qualifications: Include the following Excellent analytical skills Academic background in engineering, computer science, physics, math, statistics or another quantitative discipline Familiarity with machine learning algorithms, statistical analysis and/or quantitative analytical techniques Familiarity with UNIX and C++ RGM Advisors, LLC offers a fast-paced environment where individuals take pride and ownership in their work. Our culture is intelligent, friendly and diverse. Our modern, comfortable office space is located in downtown Austin, Texas with 360-degree views of the city. We offer attractive compensation and benefits packages, hands-on training in trading and financial markets and a casual work environment that fosters innovation and creativity. To apply for this position and to see a full list of open positions at RGM Advisors, please visit our career portal: [https://jobs- rgmadvisors.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&sear...](https://jobs- rgmadvisors.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchLocation=&searchCategory=) ------ cperea Full Time Job Opportunity in: Austin, TX with RGM Advisors, LLC H1B Sponsorship is a possibility Position: Quantitative Researcher Industry: Financial/Proprietary Trading RGM Advisors, LLC is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Austin, Texas that applies scientific methods and computing power to trading in multiple asset classes around the world. This is a unique opportunity to join a successful quantitative trading firm in a geographic location that is consistently recognized as one of the top 10 places to live, work, and play. Responsibilities: We are currently seeking Quantitative Researchers at various levels who are capable of working within our proprietary computational research and modeling environment to develop automated trading strategies using machine learning, statistical analysis and other quantitative techniques. Successful candidates have the opportunity to solve complex and intellectually challenging problems including research and development into improved modeling techniques; design of improved tools and processes for conducting research and building trading models; and development and implementation of quantitative trading models for financial instruments traded in various markets. Qualifications: Include the following Excellent analytical skills Academic background in engineering, computer science, physics, math, statistics or another quantitative discipline Familiarity with machine learning algorithms, statistical analysis and/or quantitative analytical techniques Familiarity with UNIX and C++ RGM Advisors, LLC offers a fast-paced environment where individuals take pride and ownership in their work. Our culture is intelligent, friendly and diverse. Our modern, comfortable office space is located in downtown Austin, Texas with 360-degree views of the city. We offer attractive compensation and benefits packages, hands-on training in trading and financial markets and a casual work environment that fosters innovation and creativity. To apply for this position and to see a full list of open positions at RGM Advisors, please visit our career portal: [https://jobs- rgmadvisors.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&sear...](https://jobs- rgmadvisors.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchLocation=&searchCategory=) ------ mceachen Twitter - San Francisco, California. Full time & interns for Engineering (front-end: javascript, back-end: rails/scala/java, ML: hadoop/scalding/pig), Design & UX, … I've never felt so appreciated/spoiled at a workplace before. You'll be working with great people, getting stuff shipped daily that makes a difference, working on whatever suits your fancy for a whole week every quarter during company-wide hack weeks, contributing to some of the most popular open source projects out there, and getting fed gourmet catered meals every day. <http://twitter.com/jobs> ------ logicalmind Western suburbs of Chicago (Naperville area). No H1B, no remote. We are looking for junior to mid-level person with either a Java background looking to move to C# or a C# background. If coming from a C# background, must be open to open source libraries like Spring.NET. It's a small team and you will work with public-facing web applications in the financial field as well as back-office application for internal stuff. Must understand RDBMS fundamentals. I cannot name the company publicly because this is not an endorsed post. But shoot me an email (email is in my profile) if you're interested or have any questions. ~~~ solutionyogi I am not interested in this particular job but why would you want to use Spring.NET? Is it because you are migrating from a Java application using Spring.NET? Are there any other reasons? If you are moving to C#, I would definitely recommend another framework which is more suited to leverage C#/.NET. The reason I am suggesting is that because it is very difficult to hire good C#/.NET developers these days and the problem becomes 10 times harder if you are going to use Spring.NET. I know that it will be a deal breaker for me and my other friends who use C#/.NET. ~~~ logicalmind When this application was started around 2008 or so we had a number of frameworks to choose from. At the time we chose spring.net. Looking back on it, that was a good choice considering most of our alternatives at the time (and since) have come and gone. Particularly Microsoft technologies that seem to come and go all the time. We're pretty happy that we chose a reliable, stable and well-maintained library such as spring.net. I am curious what alternative you'd recommend, particularly if it's something that is production ready and has a certain future. We're well aware of how hard it is to hire good C# developers. But in my opinion, a good C# developer isn't going to be put off by the choice of Spring.NET. ~~~ solutionyogi I think Spring.NET is too verbose and too big. I would rather use few well tested and idiomatic C# frameworks as an alternative to Spring.NET E.g. IOC - You can use MEF which is part of the framework. OR my personal favorite Ninject. Web Applications - Without a doubt ASP.NET MVC. Aspect Oriented Programming - Postsharp DataAccess - I do not think ORM technology is mature enough to use it for any complicated work. For simpler things, Dapper does the trick. I believe in using best tool for a given problem instead of using one monolithic framework. I especially don't like Spring framework because it needs too much configuration in terms of XML files. I prefer configuration through code approach. Email me if you want to discuss more. ------ kabir_h Cambridge, MA - Shareaholic makes tools for publishers and users to help them find and share the best content on the web. We're a small, funded startup (with killer investors: Dave McClure, Dharmesh Shah, General Catalyst) that reaches 300 million unique users via 200K publishers. We've got an awesome team culture that avoids bureaucracy and gives everyone a meaningful chance to contribute. Everyone codes, even our marketing person. We're hiring a Front End Developer and a Product Designer: <http://www.shareaholic.com/careers> ------ kloncks Kout.me - Full-time (San Francisco) - Back-end Developers, Designers. Sorry no remote. No H1B. Well-funded early stage startup focusing on simplifying online selling, especially selling across multiple platforms. Looking for designers to make our product beautiful and useable. Looking for engineers to work on some really hard problems in payments, fraud, and creating a multi-platform network. Small team, great culture, flat organization, meaningful equity, strong compensation, and a huge vision we can all rally behind. A perfect way to learn about building a startup from the ground up before building your own. Email hany@kout.me and mention you're from HN. ------ hullo SparkNotes is hiring a full time web developer in New York, NY. We work mainly with PHP/symfony but are open to candidates with strong ruby/python/perl experience as long as you've worked with (or at least are open to) MVC web frameworks. Full LAMP stack, opportunity to make a big impact (5 person technical team) on a high profile site (well over 10 million uniques/month), backed by the resources of bn.com. Work out of our Chelsea office and cadge lunches off your friends at Google. [http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=2924074](http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=2924074) ------ musman San Francisco, CA - User Experience Designer @ BillFloat.com BillFloat is seeking a passionate and creative UI/UX Designer to join our product team. We have an innovative solution which offers consumers ‘more time to pay’ over 2,500 bills such as utility, cable, mobile and insurance payments through a range of affordable small-dollar credit offerings. You will work closely with our sales, product and engineering teams to define and evolve the brand and experience across multiple channels. Your main task will be to embrace our users' needs and develop simple, accessible and easy to use design solutions. * Role and Responsibilities * You are self-directed, and comfortable running with a feature from inception to release in an Agile environment. Partner with product managers, fellow designers, and engineers to drive to the heart of a complex problem space and articulate clear user-centered design solutions. You know how to use data and analytics to inform your designs. Bring ideas to life with compelling visual assets, writing and verbal communication. Produce highly usable designs for web and mobile environments. While you don't need to be a strong visual designer for this position, you understand intimately the role and influence the visual design process brings to the finished product. * Experience and Skills * 2-5 years experience working on consumer web products. Ability to translate user goals and behaviors into design ideas. Ability to create workflow diagrams, wireframes, and mock-ups rapidly and at an appropriate level of fidelity. (Hand-waving, white-boarding, paper, balsamiq, Adobe, etc) Ability to assess technology constraints and opportunities, and adjust design approaches accordingly. You know which small stuff to sweat - careful attention to detail while being able to adhere to project deadlines. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills. * Extra Credit * Experience in consumer financial or ecommerce products and checkout flows Working knowledge of front-end markup: HTML, CSS, JQuery or Ruby. <http://jobvite.com/m?3RHMjfwn> ------ carbon8 San Francisco, CA. Byliner Inc. is a publishing company and social network built around great stories. We are an online archive of long form journalism and fiction, as well as a publisher of original stories for iPad, Kindle, and other mobile devices. We use Ruby, MySQL, Redis, Sass and are making the shift to using Backbone and CoffeeScript on the front-end. We also produce ebooks. Looking for both UI and back-end developers. Full Time and/or contract. Also starting to look for a designer for help with static HTML/CSS and graphics on a contract basis. More info: <http://byliner.com/jobs> ------ ahuibers Mountain View, CA, Full-time, onsite Hiring in Machine Learning / Applied Artificial Intelligence. Work on the new new thing at Bump Technologies (we can't say exactly what it is yet...) <http://bu.mp/openings> ------ asuth Quizlet, SF [Full-time, Interns] This is a picture of two kids using our unreleased learning game: <http://qdaq.com/4j1.jpg> We took this photo in a classroom last week where we were beta-testing our educational game. We want to hire engineers who are excited by helping kids learn, and creating similar reactions to the one above on a scale of millions of kids. We're building web and mobile software that makes a significant difference in the lives of its users. More info: <http://quizlet.com/jobs/> ------ kaib Tinkercad (<http://tinkercad.com>) INTERN - Mountain View and Helsinki The first cloud based solid CAD in the world, we are changing the world as part of the digital manufacturing revolution. Super easy interface, usable by people aged 8 and older. We are looking for engineers in Helsinki. Algorithmic backend, frontend and between. Javascript, Go and low level C for the optimized bits. Senior marketing and customer acquisition folks welcome in Mountain View, specifically if you have strong B2C and SAAS experience. If you are interested mail me at kai@tinkercad.com ------ nhance Reenhanced - <http://www.reenhanced.com/> Quakertown, PA - Full time Ruby on rails We build software that just works using Ruby on Rails. We're looking for another team member who enjoys a real work life balance to come work on Rails apps and become a better programmer with us. We utilize a really great development process that ensures all of our code is internally reviewed and fully tested before it ever makes it to a production server. This helps us sleep well at night and we rarely have to deal with emergencies. Send me an email at nhance@reenhanced.com ------ kdehne Charleston, SC When was a last time that a day at the office was accompanied by the satisfaction of knowing that you did something to change the world? For us at Blackbaud, that’s an average day. We’re developing the solutions that help non-profits focus on what they do best; whether that’s saving the environment, educating children or solving the world’s major health concerns. We are hiring User Experience Designers, Software Engineers, QA Engineers, and Product Managers. <http://blackbaud.submit4jobs.com/> ------ blo San Francisco, CA (SOMA) - Mobile / Front-end engineers, Full-stack (node.js) engineers - Full time / intern Stealth - consumer web and mobile \-- We are a unlaunched, funded startup focused on improving how people fundamentally browse and interact with online services. Our new web-based experience combines UI/UX innovation with data algorithms to allow users to accomplish tasks in a more usable, efficient, and social manner. We work mainly with JS (jquery and node.js) and HTML5. Mobile developers should be familiar with iOS/Android. Curious? Contact [my username] at alum.mit.edu. Including your portfolio is preferable! ------ hswolff GetGlue - <http://getglue.com/> New York, NY - Fulltime GetGlue is the leading social network for entertainment. Users check-in and share what they are watching, listening to and reading with friends; get fresh recommendations, exclusive stickers, discounts and other rewards from their favorite shows and movies. Looking for: Python Engineer <http://getglue.com/jobs/python_engineer> Mobile Engineer <http://getglue.com/jobs/mobile_engineer> ------ baudehlo Hubdoc is hiring in Toronto, ON. We are looking for a great Javascript developer, with good front end experience, will train in Node.js. We are pre-launch, and looking for a top guy to join the team at the ground floor. The team consists of a two founders with great previous startup experience, and myself - a long time open source hacker (I created Haraka, the mail server now used by Craigslist, was one of the original hackers on SpamAssassin, and have done many projects in between those). No hoops to jump through, just email me directly and attach your CV/Résumé: matt@hubdoc.com ------ avar Amsterdam, The Netherlands. H1B[1] Booking.com is always on the lookout for good developers, DBA's and sysadmins on-site in the center of Amsterdam. I'm a developer there currently working on search and relocated over there about a year and a half ago, and have been very happy with it. We have people from all over the world relocating to work with us and are very well set up to handle relocation and visa issues, most of the people working in IT are expats so we've got a lot of experience with bringing people in. It's a rapidly growing company that represents the biggest chunk of the Priceline (PCLN) group of companies where problems that look relatively mundane on paper become much more interesting due to the scale and growth levels we're operating at. We use Perl for almost everything with a MySQL backend and Git for development. We get our changes out really fast, it's rare for your code not to be on our live systems within hours of you pushing it. We're also very open to open sourcing code that doesn't contain any business logic, I've personally been involved in open sourcing a few of our internal tools, including <https://github.com/git-deploy> and a few CPAN modules. We have a relatively flat hierarchy with minimum levels of bureaucracy since we're very data driven and have a clear goal: helping our customers. Everything we do is aimed at solving problems for our customers, if it doesn't help our customers we're not interested in doing it. You don't have to know Perl in advance to be a developer there. We've hired people who've done C, Java etc. before. The sort of people we'd like to hire are good technically, excellent at communication, and can acquire a good sense of how they fit into the big picture. I'd be happy to answer any questions at avarab@gmail.com and/or forward your resume, I've posted in a similar thread here a couple of times before and have already helped get one person hired, many others have had or are having interviews, and I've fielded a bunch of questions from would-be applicants. <http://booking.com/jobs> also has some good information. 1\. Well, not H1B, but we'll take care of the Dutch equivalent. ------ j_bear Stitch Fix is in San Francisco at 3rd and Market. Full-time candidates only, local preferred strongly over remote, relocation possible for the right candidate. Stitch Fix is a totally new way to shop -- check out our video (<http://bit.ly/GSelpp>) for a quick introduction to our service. Here's how we do it: Our clients provide us with details about their size and personal style. Once a month they are offered a Fix: for a $20 styling fee we hand select 5 items using a combination of our proprietary styling algorithm professional stylists and send it to their home. If a customer chooses to buy one or more pieces, the $20 styling fee is a credit toward their purchase. Lots of additional detail is available in our faq (<http://bit.ly/JaVIM6>). Our clients love the service and the business is exploding. We have thousands of paying clients, business doubled from November to April, will double again by September, and we will grow faster in 2013. We just raised our Series A from top-tier VC firm to invest in scaling engineering, operations, and merchandising -- which is where you might come in. We are building the team that is going to take us to 10x by the end of next year. We are looking for folks that get super excited about jumping in the deep end, building outstanding products, and delighting clients. In Engineering we're big fans of Continuous Deployment, Specializing Generalists, and people that know the difference between hacking together technology and consistently delivering world-class products. We like people that take their work seriously but aren't serious at work. We believe the best products are delivered when engineers are empowered to solve problems, involved in how the business works and have a clear connection to their customer. The engineering team is currently a data and analytics engineer, a front end engineer/designer, and a generalist engineer. We are in the process of moving from a Linode/Django/jQuery architecture to AWS/Rails/(ember\|backbone\|similar) and beyond that we have _lots_ of new products to build and will need to incorporate a bunch of new technology to get there. We are looking for 2 more great generalist engineers, ideally with Rails experience but it's not a requirement. If you're interested please send an email to jobs@stitchfix.com. ------ roobeast San Francisco, CA (Downtown) - Trulia Like working with data? Forming it into useful visualizations or making it searchable? We're hiring on the front end and the back end. Have experience with Solr? Hadoop? Jquery? IOS? Want to work on interesting problems, leverage open source, launch features and have ownership? We are a great size, not so big you'll go unnoticed, not so small you wonder about the business model. <http://www.trulia.com/about/careers/Engineering> ------ mattsears Littlelines (<http://littlelines.com>) is looking for front-end and Ruby/Rails developers to work with us in our spanking new headquarters in Ohio. You'll have the opportunity to learn, hone your skills, and contribute valuable work to real projects. We work exclusively on Rails web applications, so some familiarity with Rails views and how a Rails project is set up is a plus. Ideal candidates will be able to work with us at our headquarters. If you're interested please send an email to jobs@littlelines.com ------ alexpoon06 NYC, NY (midtown) - Visual Revenue We use predictive analytics to help media companies like Forbes, InStyle, and Comcast optimize their content arrangement. We built a decision support system to help the editorial team figure out what content to promote, when, and where. Here are what the press has to say about us. [http://www.fastcompany.com/1787107/visual-revenue-dennis- r-m...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1787107/visual-revenue-dennis-r-mortensen) [http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/01/27/data-dollars-the- deat...](http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/01/27/data-dollars-the-death-of-the- printing-press-doesnt-mean-the-death-of-the-press/) [http://www.betabeat.com/2012/01/26/is-it-possible-to- predict...](http://www.betabeat.com/2012/01/26/is-it-possible-to-predict- pageviews-15-minutes-into-the-future-1-7-m-for-visual-revenue-says-yes/) We are primarily a python and JS house. We are a team of 15 with 8 of us part of engineering. We are looking to add a few more front end engineers and an UI/UX designer to the team. Perks include free-gym membership <http://visualrevenue.com/aboutus/jobs/free-gym-membership> and stunning office view of downtown Manhattan. <http://visualrevenue.com/aboutus/jobs> ------ zinxq Refresh.io - Palo Alto - Full Time Developers You're a crack-shot software engineer. Not necessarily because of where you went to school, but because simply put - you love this stuff. You know at least one mobile/web-related computer language cold. Whether it's Objective-C, Ruby, Java Javascript, or others - we're not too concerned about which one because no matter which one (or ones) we end up using, you'll not only be able to pick it up fast, you'll be excited about doing so. You understand the latest technology. From NoSQL to Backbone to Node. You aren't technically religious and gain as much satisfaction in picking the right tool for the job as you do implementing it. You've built stuff. Web sites. Mobile apps. Whatever. You can show us. You can't wait to show us. You're not only excited of the what users can do with it, you're proud about how it's implemented and to a technical audience, you can't wait to talk about it. As part of the first engineering team, you're excited by the prospect of working with smart people. Because you're smart and you know it - and you know that working with other smart people simply makes you better (all the while making them better too). As a bonus, being part of this initial team gives you the opportunity to strongly affect future engineering hires - insuring the caliber of the team. You live within commuting distance to Palo Alto, CA or are willing to relocate (paid). <http://www.refresh.io/jobs> ------ factortree Factor Tree - New York, NY We're an e-Learning startup that targets a very specific problem and demographic: teaching math to kids preK - 6th grade. There's a huge problem with the way kids in the US learn math: lack of basic arithmetic fundamentals. We want to fix this problem using an alternative East meets West adaptive curriculum, and we could use your help. We're a NYC startup, a bit different from the Silicon Valley boys, more results oriented, less fluff and you can bet that everyone on your team is as talented and driven as you. We have awesome proprietary technology and architecture that's going to make a huge impact on math e-Learning and are already working with several schools, organizations, and private consumers. They agree what we have works. This is your chance to "do good by doing good"-- get competitive compensation, cash + equity, and make a real difference in the world. Like everyone and their grandmothers, we're looking for talented engineers, Javascript/PHP/AJAX/MySQL. Bonus points if you're UX oriented and have a keen eye for cool design or hopped on the iOS SDK early and are a guru at objective C. You gotta be laid back, we're all going to be spending long hours together and don't want to work with anyone too high strung. After all, most of the times you'll need to see problems from a child's perspective. If this sounds like something you're interested in, tell us why and send your resume/portfolio to recruiting@thefactortree.com with HN in the subject title. www.thefactortree.com ------ LauraSeeker Seeker Solutions - Victoria, BC and Vancouver, BC - Canada At Seeker Solutions, we build solutions to real-world business issues using natural language processing and machine learning. Our development teams support existing solutions, build new projects and enhancements, and research cutting-edge natural language processing techniques. As we expand our client base into several new industries, we're undergoing a major growth stage. We're currently hiring the following positions: * Director of Software Development [Victoria] * Software Development Team Lead [Victoria] * Software Architect [Victoria] * Software QA Analyst [Victoria] * Senior Software Developer [Vancouver] * Intermediate Software Developer [Vancouver] * System Operations Engineer [Vancouver] We are primarily Java-based, with heavy use of Hadoop/HBase, although our research team mostly works in Python, and our processes are fairly agile. Our offices are full of happy people who enjoy awesome perks (Nerf gun fights, bringing dogs to work, gym memberships, a well-stocked kitchen, plus more) and are passionate about what they do. If you're not in our area and are open to moving, Victoria and Vancouver are beautiful cities, boasting vibrant cultural scenes and nearby locations for skiing and surfing. If you're ready to help shape the future of our company and bring new NLP solutions to market, please check the full job postings and apply online via <http://seekersolutions.com/careers> \-- feel free to contact me (laura.bowles@seekersolutions.com) if you have any questions. ------ sbisker Cambridge, MA / San Francisco, CA - Full Time or Intern Web Developer at Locu (<http://www.locu.com>) # Exceptional software engineering talent # Exceptional cross-browser JavaScript/jQuery, HTML and CSS skills, or the ability to learn quickly # Experience with Python / Django is a plus # Previous experience building rich, interactive websites # Basic design skills (Photoshop), ability to work with designers # Experience in designing dashboards and user interfaces is a plus # Previous start-up experience is a plus Front-enders, "desingineers" and full-stack all welcome for this position - as long as you enjoy hacking on cool new products and features. :D (We're not explicitly recruiting for pure backend or pure design positions right now, but we're open to resumes there as well - see <http://locu.com/#jobs> for details. If you're a perfect fit, we'll find a way to make it work.) Locu is developing technologies to change local search ($35bn advertising market by 2014) by creating the world's largest semantically-annotated repository of real-time small-business data. We are about to launch MenuPlatform <[http://www.menuplatform.com>](http://www.menuplatform.com>), our first product, which helps restaurants better manage their online presence. Interested? Drop us a line at jobs@locu.com. Please specify which position you're applying for, as well as "HN", in the subject of your letter. Learn more about our open positions at <http://www.locu.com/#Jobs> \------------------------------------- Founded less than a year ago by MIT graduates and researchers, Locu <[http://www.locu.com>](http://www.locu.com>); has the backing and support of some of the best angel investors in the country. We are looking for more exceptional talent to join our team and help us achieve our vision. We are committed to building a cutting-edge technology giant with a fun and challenging work environment. We have a culture optimized for learning and continuous improvement. We are 10 people with very diverse backgrounds, and growing. ------ pmjoyce Geckoboard -- London, UK -- FULLTIME Several positions including: Software engineers x 3 Interface Designer More details at <http://jobs.geckoboard.com/> or ping me a mail at paul@geckoboard.com ------ vduquette Toronto, Canada Rails developer <http://sprouter.com> We are working on a big launch this summer involving live video. Looking for a rails dev looking to take on a big role. We only have two developers right now and are looking to add a third. You will have a big say in product design and will play with the newest tech out there. Rails 3, HAML, jquery, websockets, redis - all the good stuff. Hit me up: vince@sprouter.com for more info. ------ urlwolf Fluidshopping - Berlin - Fulltime - CTO We are a Berlin-based startup working on next-generation testing and user experience. At Fluidshopping, we want to make split testing easy for web shop owners. This includes test that change the business rules, not the GUI. For example, you may want to test if sending a $10 voucher to those who buy >$50 will have an effect on chance of repeated buy. Or you want to test the effect of free shipping when they bought >$100. As far as we know, these tests are not easy without tinkering with the current shopping cart software setup. We want to make this as easy as testing the GUI and UX elements (design, copy). We use lean startup methods, and can systematically test hypotheses on any market. Our approach is the ‘startup of startups’, that is, iterate fast and discard what doesn’t work, even if the new product looks like a completely new application (and startup!). We have runway for a year. We are two people, and have been funded for only two months. We have offices in Berlin, but we often work from home. We are looking for a technical cofounder (CTO) to disrupt the ecommerce analytics market with us and to receive a forthcoming EXIST schoolarship (2000-2500€/person/month) for one year. We are two people, one of us is technical, with a PhD in machine learning. Responsibilities: Your responsibilities will be to work on new key features, help us scale, contribute to the product and optimize performance. You’ll be the CTO in an agile development environment. The job offers lots of challenges because we build a real-time collaborative tool in a large market that is ripe for disruption. As the CTO, you set the technology. Our current MVP is Django. We need to interface with shopping carts, and when the API is not enough, that means some PHP may be unavoidable. What we like: \- node.js \- Mongo or similar NoSQL db \- jQuery \- JavaScript \- python/django \- Backbone.js \- Familiarity with HTML5 (websockets) Perks: \- Work from home as much as you want \- … but have a nice office, with terrace and BBQ \- Stock options in two-digit range \- Dog \- In the center of the Berlin startup ecosystem (we organize events such as demodinner) For more see <http://fluidshopping.com/blog/about-fluidshopping/> ------ proximiant Proximiant - Mountain View, CA [Relocation, H1B welcome] <http://www.proximiant.com> NFC Digital Receipts service that allows shoppers to get a picture perfect receipt beamed directly to their phone without sharing their email. We use AWS, Django, C#, C++, Android, and iPhone. We're seeking bright engineers. During an interview, you will do coding -- actual coding sitting at a machine and writing and testing your code. Come help us build a great company! Email jobs@proximiant.com ------ jzoidberg Sunnyvale and San Diego CA Front-end UI Developer GridX - we are a well funded startup developing a unique new application to operate the next generation smart electricity grid. Help us solve some of the most complex and rewarding energy and environmental problems of our time using Big Data and Cloud Computing. We use Scala based web frameworks like Liftweb and Play! - experience with or interest in those would be a plus. Our UI's use highly interactive HTML5 with WebSockets and Server Side Events. Rendering in SVG and Canvas. Please contact johan at gridx dot com ------ martian Software Engineer - San Francisco, CA - Thumbtack We're looking for full time software engineers, mobile engineers, and interaction designers. Our delicious company food culture has been featured on Inc.com and inspires many Bay-area startups. We eat family style meals everyday cooked in-house by our gourmet chef. We recently raised a Series A and are growing rapidly. Over 250,000 small businesses have already signed up. We can offer visas if you live abroad and are willing to relocate. thumbtack.com/jobs or email chris at thumbtack. ------ m3talacorn Amazon - Seattle, Silicon Valley - Full-time Software Development Engineer - Cyber Analytics Desired Skills & Experience \- Invention is in your DNA \- Desire to solve problems that have no textbook solution \- Strong proven ability in building high-performance, highly-available and scalable distributed systems. \- Design and coding skills in some language on some OS platform. \- Experience with object oriented design and development. \- Data exploration and data modeling skills. \- A thought leader Cyber Security is a great domain to work in. It is also challenging. Adversaries only have to be lucky once to be successful. You, should you join, have to be smart/creative/insightful all the time. Cyber Analytic Software Engineers love to build and live to explore data. Our engineers are constantly leveraging AWS technologies trying to get more insights to protect our most critical assets in our rapidly changing environment. Our systems and algorithms operate on one of the world's largest cyber data sources and it is quite routine for our systems to operate on [TOP SECRET] scale datasets using distributed frameworks such as Apache Hadoop(Map/Reduce) and other open source technologies such as Lucene. We consistently strive to ensure the security and integrity of our customers data. ------ amykhar Philadelphia area, Full Time Junior Web Application Developer, No remote. No recruiters. Are you an energetic, smart, hard working developer looking to make a difference? We are the place for you. Our company is at the forefront of the emerging sleep industry. We are the leading Sleep EMR company and have a backlog of projects and ideas being asked for by our customers and employees. We currently need a junior web application developer. We use PHP, JQuery and MySQL, but if you are a whiz at some other web programming language, we are willing to teach the right person to use our languages of choice. Here are some awesome things about our company: We are an employee and customer focused business with benefits like - we offer flex time, Christmas week off and, every other Friday, our developers get to spend time working on things that motivate and interest them. If you are an A player looking for an A company you have found your spot. We are offering a package that could pay as much as $70k for the right person. This is not a remote position, and we are not offering a relocation package at this time. Actual candidates only please. No recruiters. SleepEx is the leading provider of software for the Sleep Lab Industry. We are a small team, about 13 people. We dress casually, and work very hard. ~~~ canadiancreed An interesting role and a location that is of intrest, but I wonder if you'd consider folks applying from outside the US or not? ~~~ amykhar No. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to sponsor visas at this time. ------ vtrac Austin, TX / NYC, NY / London, UK Bazaarvoice is hiring for a bunch of positions - big data software engineers, front-end engineers, DevOps, etc. Ping me for more info. Here's the DevOps spec: _Who We Want_ : Bazaarvoice serves traffic on some of the biggest websites on the internet. Every day our content is served to tens of millions of people making tens of thousands of requests per second, resulting in tens of thousands of gigabytes of traffic. Our request logs alone add up to almost 1TB daily. If the thought of doubling these numbers excites you, we'd love to hear from you. _Responsibilities_ : * Develop internal tools and processes to maintain stability and performance of our infrastructure * Work with Development teams to build applications in an Operationally sustainable way * Design cross- datacenter, world-wide systems with a high availability mindset * Research, analyze and propose new technology solutions for Bazaarvoice's infrastructure * Make things go faster _Skills and Experience Necessary for the Role_ : * Bachelor's degree in CS, EE or MIS; or equivalent experience * 5+ years experience with LAMP development/administration * Hands-on scripting with shell & Python/Ruby/Perl * Thorough understanding of TCP/IP networking & DNS * Excellent project management, communication, prioritization and analytical skills * Strong customer service mindset _Technologies_ : * Linux * Tomcat * Solr/Lucene * MySQL * Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, VPC) _Bonus experience_ : * Puppet/Chef * Hadoop/BI/Big Data * Cassandra * OpenStack/Eucalyptus * Open source contributions ------ mpakes CoffeeTable - San Francisco - Full time, local. At CoffeeTable (<http://www.coffeetable.com>), we’re combining the best parts of commerce, catalog shopping, and tablet devices to create truly inspiring shopping experiences. Whereas the ecommerce giants like Amazon and EBay are all about searching and comparing technical specs, we’re putting the fun back into shopping. Discover products, shop with friends, and get that same special feeling when you walk into a store and they know your name, your size, and exactly what you’d like but didn’t know it. Referral Bonus: Refer a candidate that we hire, and win a new, top-of-the-line iPad 3! (64GB, Wi-Fi + 4G) Looking For: * Senior iOS developers * Server-side developers (CT is a Rails shop, but love Python/Django devs too) * Front-end web developers CoffeeTable is a small team (2 developers) looking to grow in a big way. New hires will have a huge opportunity to make a big impact across the board, from product direction, to design, to architecture. Well funded ($2.5MM Series A from Strategic Partners in the catalog industry) and located right across from AT&T Park in San Francisco. See <http://www.coffeetable.com/jobs> for more info. ------ 5vforest GovHub (<http://www.govhub.org>) is looking for a full-stack Rails developer to lead our team in Berkeley, CA. GovHub is an online platform that aims to revolutionize the way we consume political information and how we use that information to impact policy development, without the interference of big organized interests. We launched our initial product in late February, and now we’re preparing to embark on a new project, one that will help citizens to get their voice heard by the government officials who matter most. We’re looking for an experienced Ruby on Rails developer to spearhead this newest iteration of our site, which will include rewriting some of our current functionality as well. (We’re currently built on Symfony 1.4.) What we’re trying to build isn’t simple, but we’re confident that with the experience of having built most of it before, and with a venerable and well- rounded developer to take the reins on the project, we’ll be able to do it well, do it quickly, and make a real impact on the space. About us: we’re young, inexperienced, and extremely committed to this company. Currently we’re just one CTO/developer and one CEO/bizdev guy, with a few other folks helping out peripherally. Ideally, you’d be as passionate about the product as we are, and would want to join us in a full-time role. For the right person, we can offer a competitive salary, equity, and a chance to make this project as much of yours as it is ours. Get in touch: abecker AT govhub DOT org. [http://blog.govhub.org/post/22396376388/govhub-is-looking- fo...](http://blog.govhub.org/post/22396376388/govhub-is-looking-for-a-full- stack-rails-developer-to) ------ jefflcap Captricity - Berkeley, CA - Full-time (relocation assistance avail.) Captricity is seeking a Chief of Technical Staff. Captricity allows anyone to turn paper-based data into structured electronic data. Our vision is to bridge the physical and electronic worlds of data. The genesis of the company comes from research on how technology can improve the efficiency of low-resource organizations around the world. We’re an early stage startup comprised of industry veterans and UC Berkeley Phd grads, combining cutting-edge research with proven skills in product design. We’re backed by some of Silicon Valley’s best investors and firms, tackling a huge problem with tremendous social and economic potential impact. We’re looking for a proven technical leader who can lead a team of engineers to success; someone who can sling code with the best of them but wants broader scope and wants to make an impact — a really big impact. We combine machine learning, computer vision and crowdsourcing to provide a seamless bridge between the offline and online worlds. You’ll help lead us in building and scaling out our technology, product, and business. You: ambitious, technical leader, adept at managing both the technology and the people behind it. You’ll work with the company leadership on a regular basis; actually, you are part of the company leadership . You’ll play a big part in creating and executing the company’s engineering and product roadmaps. Just as important, you’ll help define the engineering culture of the company and help us change the world. How often do you get to do that? More details: <http://captricity.com/jobs/#CTS> ------ nscharhon Seattle, WA - Pariveda Solutions (full-time) At Pariveda Solutions we focus on The Business of IT®, helping our clients improve their bottom line through information technology strategy and solutions. Our goal is to be the #1 privately held IT consulting firm in the world, striving to build long-term relationships with clients where partnership is a centerpiece. Our mission is to incubate, develop and deploy world-class talent in service to our clients. The Pariveda Opportunity: As a Pariveda Associate, you will work on small project teams to deliver solutions to our customers: • On most of your projects you will work directly with our clients: o To understand and document their business and technology requirements. o To design, code and test technology solutions. • On IT strategy or process projects, you will be a member of a team with more senior Pariveda consultants. You will work with many technologies and work as an IT visionary for the client. • On some projects, you may be a team lead for one or more consultants. • You will be involved in building Pariveda by participating in intellectual capital development, training, recruiting, and business development. • You will work mostly with local clients as a part of our geographic model, minimizing travel requirements. • You will work alongside some of the sharpest developers to improve your technical and consulting skills. This is an exciting opportunity to help build our fast growing national consulting company, your career, as well as the careers of others. Candidates must meet the following requirements: • Three to seven years of consulting or related experience • Experience as a team lead or senior developer • Experience in one or more technologies: o Java / J2EE o Microsoft.NET o Business Intelligence Technologies o ASP.net o SQL o AJAX o JavaScript o HTML o CSS • Experience working with clients or customers • Experience with multiple phases of the SDLC • Ability to read and understand technical documents written in English, with good communication skills on email and phone conferences • Ability to share knowledge and expertise with other Pariveda software developers • Strong analytical thinking and problem solving skills • Strong written and oral communication skills • Bachelor’s Degree in MIS, Computer Science or Comparable major • Legally authorized to work for any company in the United States without sponsorship ------ aviflax NYC, remote friendly Arc90 is hiring an experienced Web application developer. We need a developer with a deep understanding and appreciation of the Web, with experience designing and building server-side solutions. The ideal candidate would be proficient with both Java and C# and open to learning and mastering a new language. <http://arc90.com/jobs/web-application-developer/> ------ jnelson5 Mountain View CA, Full-Time, Web Application Engineer Luminate.com is seeking an engineer with a strong background in web application development and implementation. As a member of the web applications group you will get to work on our core front end product as well as help design and implement our next generation products. We are changing the way people interact with images online and here is your chance to help push that vision to the next level. Come work at one of the hottest silicon valley startups along side veteran engineers and architects from Netscape, TellMe, LiveOps, and Digg and backed by top tier VC's and Google. Required experience and knowledge: * Experience in professional software web apps development (start-up environment preferred) * Open source contributor is a big plus. * Expert knowledge with HTML, Python (or Ruby), Javascript, JQuery, CSS * Strong sense of design and end user experience * Highly creative individual * Proven experience in development of cross browser compatible web applications * Excellent communication skills * Ability to work in a fast paced, collaborative and iterative programming environment Contact: john@luminate.com -or- [http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=ogXMVfwE&s=HackerNews](http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=ogXMVfwE&s=HackerNews) ------ nixme San Francisco, CA - Do (<http://do.com/jobs>) Do is on a mission to build the best tools for small teams and businesses across the world. We're hiring developers and designers for backend + frontend web, and mobile (iOS and Android). Tech: Ruby. Lots of Javascript/Coffeescript. Backbone. PostgreSQL, Redis, Solr. iOS. Android. And we're a Salesforce company. Solid funding, great benefits, competitive comp. I'd love to chat if you're interested - gopal@do.com ------ rory_k Priory Solutions - London, UK - Junior Developer We're expanding and need a talented and keen Junior Developer with Javascript and C# skills to join our team. You'll implement features, solve issues, fix bugs, write tests, and become expert in our products. If you \- Have 0-3 years dev experience with strong Javascript & C# \- Enjoy writing solid code, solving problems, fixing bugs, writing tests, delivering value \- Want to work at a small innovative software company \- Are awesome then drop me an email rory.kingan@priorysolutions.com ------ steilpass Agile Software Developers in Cologne, Germany. Although we have been bought we still feel and work like a startup. We are looking for great developers with a web background. We believe in modern engineering practices, agile environment, the right tools for the right job and fun at work. If you want to work with lots of data in a self organizing way give me a call. More information at <http://adkla.us> ------ GavinB New York City / NYC Assistant Project Manager - help us design "subversively educational" games for kids. One part game designer, one part project coordinator, one part community manager. Can be entry level, but any experience in games, web, or mobile spaces a plus. [http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Jobs/JobDetails.aspx?...](http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Jobs/JobDetails.aspx?job_did=J3G2WR72G5KL4P511HX) ------ fishpi Santa Clara, CA, USA - London, UK - Bangalore, India Arista Networks is looking for software engineers, hardware engineers and software interns (as well as a bunch of other positions I probably don't know about). We are a fast-growing pre-IPO company that produces high-performance datacenter ethernet switches. More information at <http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/careers> ~~~ rms25 hey fishpi, I think there might be a problem with your website. When I click software engineer I got the hardware engineer description, and when I clicked hardware engineer I got the Technical Solutions Engineer description. I tried this with IE9 and Opera Version 11.62 on Windows 7 and both yielded same result ------ mikeinterviewst InterviewStreet (<http://interviewstreet.com>) - Mountain View and Bangalore Programmers for frontend, backend, and project management roles. Our hacker team is 5 strong, so you'll be tackling a huge variety of projects. Help fix a horribly broken hiring world by creating the best platform for addictive programming problems and tutorials. team+mv or team+blr at interviewstreet dot com ------ app New York, NY / San Francisco, CA (mobile devs only) VIMEO -- vimeo.com/jobs Looking for: PHP App Engineers Backend Engineers (<http://bit.ly/JLMR3C>) Designers (<http://bit.ly/InBF0T>) QA Engineers (<http://bit.ly/KsY3BA>) Mobile Engineers (to be posted soon) Mobile Designers (to be posted soon) Stuff we use: PHP, Python, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, AWS, Solr, Hadoop, nginx, node. And pretty much any mobile platform. ------ sameersegal Bangalore, India - Artoo: www.artoo.in We are using Android & Cloud for low literate, first technology users at the base of the pyramid to help businesses become more effective in alleviating poverty! We work on Play! framework, Nginx, AWS, Android, WebSockets and more ... We are looking for Android, Cloud engineers, data scientists, artists. We are also open to creating a role if you can convince us! Drop me a line at sameer[at]artoo[dot]in ------ kittkat Boston, MA- Jana's hiring: Full-Stack Web Developers, Web Development Interns, Head of Engineering Jana.com is disrupting the advertising and research industry in the developing world. With our mobile platform we enable big players, like the World Bank, The Economist, or Microsoft, to get crucial customer feedback in days instead of months and have consumers test innovative products with the push of a button. We're engaging 2.1 billion people in emerging markets, earning revenue in 50 countries and have raised almost $10M from premier VC investors. Our team bursts with talent from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Google but we're pretty relaxed, except during weekly Settlers of Catan battles in the office, ice-cream runs on Wednesdays or beer runs every Friday. In short, we're having fun disrupting century old industries through cutting edge mobile technology. Right now we're looking for full-stack web-developers. So, if you think you could have the same kind of fun come talk to us! You can view all our open positions and apply at: <http://jana.com/about- us/careers/> ------ minhajuddin Cosmicvent Software (Hyderabad, India <http://cosmicvent.com/contact-us>): <http://cosmicvent.com> We are hiring freshers who like problem solving. We can even train you for a month on the technologies which we use(ruby, rails, mongodb, javascript, backbone) ------ soham San Francisco Bay Area (Specifically Palo Alto area) Eng-services team at Box.com is hiring (<https://github.com/box>). Fulltime. Relocation/INTERN/H1B ok. Our small team has an outsized impact on the entire engineering team (100+), technical architecture and Enterprise deployments in general. Looking for people specifically interested in this area. ------ topperge UberEther - Northern Virginia - Full Time Developers We build identity and access management solutions while melding in big data for analytics and real time risk assessment. We're looking for some young, talented developers (0-2 years out of college) who want to change the way applications and data is secured. We're bringing in 5 junior resources to pair with our current team to build some awesome new solutions for our customers. Due to the nature of our client base you must be a US Citizen and have the ability to obtain a top secret security clearance. Full benefits all paid for by us, no need to worry. Great salaries and $10,000 bonus once your clearance comes through. A great opportunity to get into one of the most challenging environments to protect huge amounts of data. We started the company because we were tired of the corporate BS found in most organizations. We're tryingt o do things differently. (<http://uberether.com/about/>) If you're interested email me at: matt@uberether.com ------ leeny TrialPay - Mountain View, CA (F/T, will cover relo) TrialPay is hiring back-end generalists. Small eng team. No bureaucracy. Really smart people. Actually making money. aline@trialpay.com Read more about us here: [http://allthingsd.com/20120131/visa-places-bet-on- new-approa...](http://allthingsd.com/20120131/visa-places-bet-on-new-approach- to-payments-with-rare-investment-in-trialpay/) ------ gsteph22 Drawn to Scale - San Francisco, Distributed Databases www.drawntoscale.com Just drop a line to spire@drawntoscale.com We're building Spire, a database for real-time big data. We're building a SQL engine, fulltext search, and more on top of HBase. It's incredibly fun because we get to build a database _from scratch_ , and we get to do some really cool stuff with distributed systems. We’re obsessed with building pragmatic things that work in “the real world” and joining them with the most cutting-edge distributed systems research. We’ve built and run some of the largest companies and infrastructures: Sun, Amazon, Google, Intel, and more. Even the CEO codes almost every day. Engineer: Database Core / Distributed Systems: San Francisco Help our core team build a database from the ground up. Finally, you can do things “the way they should be”. Instead of a db from the 1980′s, we’re creating a platform for modern, real-time applications. Here are some things you may enjoy doing or learning about: -Building query planners and optimizers -Compiler design -Functional programming (Scala, Clojure, etc.) -Distributed systems architecture: failover, replication -JVM tuning and performance hacks -Turning academic research into reality -Resilient systems for the real world -Engineer: Operations and Automation: San Francisco Yes, this is a “DevOps” role. If you like coding _and_ systems work, you’re going to enjoy this. You’ll be the one responsible for building clusters that heal themselves and deploy seamlessly in the cloud or customer sites. -Cluster automation -Deployment frameworks like Chef, Puppet, CFEngine -Building monitoring tools that you enjoy using -Upgrading and recovering from failure with no downtime -How to make Linux behave -Hadoop/HBase/BigTable/other distributed systems -And perhaps a bit of UX hackin’ ------ schelle San Francisco, CA - <http://www.indiegogo.com>: Rails, DevOps and Scalability engineers - Full Time and Internship Indiegogo is hiring all sorts of engineers (and more) to scale out our global crowdfunding platform. With the signing of the JOBS Act, things are only heating up more and it's a great time to join (for more info: <http://www.indiegogo.com/contact/press>). We're closing additional funding in order to keep paces with the customer and technical demands of the new frontier of crowdfunding. In doing so, we're expanding the team and our data- driven approach to empowering anyone, anywhere, to raise money for anything - spanning creative, cause and entrepreneurial projects. Apply by sending an email to: hn-jobs@indiegogo.com (full list of openings: <http://www.indiegogo.com/about/careers>) ------ nealmydataorg Tool to manage (add. search, modify) Jobs data regarding who is hiring (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913997>) can be accessed at <http://mydataorganizer.com/ycombJobsMay2012.html> Please provide feedback. Thanks, Neal ------ amduser29 Life360 - San Francisco Love geolocation? We are processing over 200 million points / day Want to work on something that matters? Over 15 million people are trusting us with their family safety needs. Want to be respected? Work on interesting projects that you have a material impact on and get paid well doing it. <http://life360.jobscore.com/list> alex@life360.com ------ donohoe New York, Backend and Frontend Developers, PM, & Design. Full-time. UPDATE: Only job enquires please. I'm not interested in your consulting company services or recruitment agency at this time. Thanks. I'm hiring for a number of positions for a new global business site from Atlantic Media. We're based in NYC with an office in Soho. Each role is a hands-on position and you will be working closely with other developers on your team and editorial. There is the opportunity to work on a large number of fun and challenging problems as the site and team grow. _Backend Developer_ \- Expert level Django/Python or WordPress/PHP experience. You will work with other developers to build a solid backend and devise solutions for our unique set of editorial and application needs. Expertise optimizing code for high traffic sites a must (scalability, caching etc). _Frontend Developer_ \- We're not beholden to any JS framework (yet) but lets assume jQuery as a start point. Emphasis on building solid user experiences and web applications. Focus on new and emerging "HTML5" technologies and APIs (localStorage, geo, offline) and a view to mobile first. _Design_ \- Looking for a strong design lead to work with product and dev (we're all on the same team, literally). You'll be given wide creative voice and actively encouraged to push in new directions as opposed to traditional methods. You’ll be working with other great minds from Atlantic Media, WSJ, NiemanLab, Gawker and many others. The cast is assembling. Interested? You should be. I’m not leaving the West Coast just for the bagels. Take a look at the postings linked below from Atlantic Media’s site. Use those as a guide and feel free to contact me directly: michael@donohoe.io Project Manager http://bit.ly/HT6BGB Web Designer http://bit.ly/IyjuA7 LAMP/Python Developer (refers to Django, Wordpress also good) http://bit.ly/IyjX5r Senior Developer http://bit.ly/IyjBvC Get in touch. Traditional resume is fine but bonus points: \- Links to your work on GitHub or other public repos \- StackOverflow profile \- Links to websites or services where you've had a primary development role. For Design, any work on Dribbble or other portfolio platform is great. Please draw attention to any mobile work or UI ideas you've explored. ------ Nebula_Inc Nebula - Palo Alto and Seattle - Dev/Ops Automation Engineer - full time devs Nebula is dedicated to enabling all businesses to easily, securely and inexpensively deploy large private cloud computing infrastructures. We are seeking a versatile, well rounded automation engineer to play an integral role in shipping the V1 of our groundbreaking product: The Nebula Cloud Controller. This person will have direct ownership of mission-criticial projects, direct visibility to company executives, and own test engineering for the company. Responsibilities Determine and implement automated testing strategy Design, build and automate test cases in Python Participate in bi-weekly scrum sessions. Drive Nebula's continuous integration environment Help Nebula ship our product releases on time. Environment: Python, Jenkins, Linux, OpenStack Apply here: <http://www.nebula.com/careers/devops-automation-engineer> ------ functionx Function(x) Inc. / Viggle - New York City / San Francisco Full-time - Software / Platform Engineers Function(x) is a start-up "mode," technology driven media company that recently launched the award-wining iOS app (coming soon to the Android market) dubbed Viggle - the first of its kind loyalty and rewards program for watching television (bit.ly/GHC4t2). You can check into your favorite TV shows with Viggle and get great, real, tangible rewards such as movie tickets, music, gift cards and much, much more. All just for watching the TV shows you love. The main conduit through which people interact with Viggle is through the mobile platform, so your work will directly reach the millions of users across the country (and beyond) that we plan on reaching. As a member of our product engineering team, you’ll build real products for the real world. You’ll be responsible for developing server-side infrastructure that powers our mobile and web based product offerings. Responsibilities will include everything from product specification to system design to implementation to operational deployment. Function(x) systems operate at large scale under highly variable load, so experience with or interest in designing systems for high-availability and scalability is a must. We’re building a great infrastructure to support Viggle – we’re not afraid to choose the best technology for the job, from Java to Node.js to RubyOnRails to Riak to PHP and Python We use open source and want our engineers to contribute back to the projects we use. Our development processes are agile and transparent. Interested? See more: San Francisco - [http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oiwdWfwH&s=hackernews](http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oiwdWfwH&s=hackernews) New York - [http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=of1PVfwK&s=hackernews](http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=of1PVfwK&s=hackernews) ------ matrix Salt Lake City, Utah Black Diamond is hiring for entry level web developers and for an enterprise systems role. This is a rare opportunity to combine a passion for outdoor sports (climbing, skiing, mountaineering, and more) while working as part of a smart, motivated software team. For more details, see the careers section at blackdiamondequipment.com ------ jreposa Brooklyn, NY - AD60, MyBankTracker.com Web Developer - <http://www.ad60.com/jobs/> ------ lorinavalny Clifton, NJ Onsite Web Developer Needed "designer fluent in html/css/js" This is a new position, we are looking for an individual who can craft the visual and interactive experience that clients and prospects have with our brands. You will need a high level of creativity with an emphasis on collaboration! You will be challenged to create a visual message that is consistent with our existing brands while exploring new ideas and ways to communicate our message. If you have what it takes - email your resume to lori@fortressitx.com along with your portfolio. <http://www.fortressitx.com> <http://www.dedicatednow.com> <http://www.solarvps.com> ------ kevingessner New York NY -- Full-time, on-site Fog Creek Software -- We're looking for top-notch software developers and sysadmins/devops magicians, as well as designers and front-end developers. Great salary, kick-ass benefits, paid relocation. Learn more at <http://www.fogcreek.com/careers.html> ------ karaanne AxialMarket - NYC - Sr. Software Engineer (FT, no remote, no H1B) AxialMarket is an internet-based 2-sided marketplace for buyers and sellers of private companies, combining social interaction and networking tools with real-time workflow, data and analytics. We write Python and JavaScript We use modern tools like EC2, Redis, Memcached, Real-time analytics and RabbitMQ We care A LOT about design We have a ton of data detailing the behavior of participants in our marketplace We are the largest online marketplace of private company transaction participants We work out of our own beautiful, open, bright office near Union Square/Flatiron We pay market We offer meaningful equity <https://www.axialmarket.com/about/careers/> ------ windust OptionsCity - Chicago, IL - Developer OptionsCity creates professional Options trading software that interacts with the Chicago / NY Exchanges (CME, CBOE, LIFFE, NYSE). We need a Developer to help us get things done (we have a long to-do list and a bunch of features in the queue, and not enough people :). The position is entry level (Junior Developer / Graduate), so as requirements we don't expect you to know a lot (Our stack for the curious is J2SE, SVN, Hibernate, MySql). The only two real big requirements are to be smart, and work with constraints. These two requirements are much better defined at our site <http://www.optionscity.com/jobs/developer.htm> (and yes, we decided to go with the maritime themed job posting!) Thanks! Freddy ------ jasonchen913 New York, NY - Full Time \- J.Crew - Java Web Application Developer / Front End Engineers Are you looking to work on something new? Want to be part of an exciting project that is currently underway? Than the opportunity at J.Crew might be the one for you. Please feel free to reach out to me at Jason.Chen@jcrew.com if you are interested.. Front End Engineer - [http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/result/10118702/3663/DiceId...](http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/result/10118702/3663/DiceId_10118702/J.%2BCrew/front- end-engineer) Java Web Application Developer - [http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/result/10118702/617414/Dice...](http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/result/10118702/617414/DiceId_10118702/J.%2BCrew/java- web-application-developer) ------ ShaneSullivan Burnaby, BC autoTRADER.ca is Canada's leading automotive marketplace and our Burnaby dev team is hiring multiple positions, including: \- Web Solutions Architect \- Senior QA Manager \- QA Engineers We develop autoTRADER.ca using Microsoft.Net C#, SQL Server, and related technologies. We also develop for iPhone (#5 in category) and iPad (#1 in category) plus have just started with Android. We develop and support high volume back-end services using WCF, REST, SOAP, etc. We have a great benefits package which includes paid home internet/mobile phone, $1000 tuition reimbursement, paid conferences (we're sending devs to both WWDC and Google IO this year), a bonus system and flexible medical benefits. To apply, please visit <http://www.jobsattrader.com> ------ jasonshen Ridejoy (YC S11). San Francisco, CA. Full time. Engineer number one. Interested in getting in on the ground floor of fundamentally changing the way people travel or, as one of our users said, "restoring people's faith in humanity"? See more at: <http://ridejoy.com/jobs> ------ zukhan FULLTIME or INTERN. Offices in San Francisco, Boston, and Menlo Park. Delphix (www.delphix.com) is a data virtualization company that does for databases what VMware did for servers - this is a massive market, and we are on track for similar success. The product is unique and provides huge value to our users - in our first year of selling, we have already added 30 large corporate customers, including many of the Fortune 500 (Proctor & Gamble, Staples, Qualcomm, etc.). The engineering team is top notch, which includes inventors and architects of the VMware platform, Oracle RAC, Sun ZFS file system, and DTrace. We believe database virtualization is the next frontier for achieving 100x payback in IT, and Delphix is leading the way. Delphix engineering sits at the nexus of three core technologies: databases, operating systems, and the cloud. We've taken the best and brightest across the industry and built an engineering culture where anyone with a good idea has a voice and can drive unique projects with the backing of a wealth of knowledge and experience. Whether its developing new abstractions in the filesystem, designing an architecture to inter-operate with a novel database, or developing a new cloud paradigm for structured data, there is no lack of hard problems and opportunities at Delphix. WANTED (intelligent/creative/passionate problem solvers) Do you want to work with brilliant people in a culture where creativity and clarity of thinking is encouraged and rewarded? Are you interested in working on the Data, the next big problem in Data Center? Do you thrive on solving difficult technical challenges? Do you take pride in writing beautiful code with a strong attention to detail? Then we are looking for you! Engineers who strive to master their craft; generalists who want to contribute at all levels of the application, from the database to the client and all things in-between. Delphix offers awesome tough technical challenges in the Systems Management, File Systems, Distributed / Cloud Computing, Clustering, Databases, and software excellence. Email jobs@delphix.com for more information and include Hacker News in the subject line. ------ joshTheGoods Ensighten - Cupertino (will relo) - (full-time and intern, designers, developers, leaders) We help some of the biggest brands in the world (MS, Sony, AMEX, Purina, etc) manage the flows of data for their various digital footholds (web, mobile, etc). We've braved the early startup landscape and are looking to scale into a world class organization on the scale of most of our clients. We do JavaScript everywhere, and deal with massively scalable and highly available infrastructure composed of multiple commercial clouds (EC2, Azure, RackSpace, Terremark, etc). We're looking for brilliant and energetic people. employment@ensighten.com <http://ensighten.com/company/careers> ------ psota Cambridge, MA Panjiva (<http://panjiva.com>) Hiring engineers--UI/UX, frontend, backend data mining/algorithms. See <http://panjiva.com/jobs> ------ ajh980 Detroit (Downtown), MI - Glocal - Full-time (will cover relocation) Glocal (www.glocal.com) is looking for developers to join our growing team and help develop the next major destination for watching video online. We are funded (series A), located in Downtown Detroit (Campus Martius), and backed/partnered with a major technology firm. We will cover relocation expenses. Candidates must have a wide range of development skills and be willing to take on major responsibility right away. Our technology is mostly Rails, Javascript, Python, Ruby, MySQL, and much more all hosted on Engineyard and S3. Want to change the world, and the city of Detroit? Please send resumes to jobs@glocal.com. ------ uwe_dushan San Francisco, CA. Full time. <http://www.unknownworlds.com/jobs> Looking for talented engineers to work on Natural Selection 2. Would consider remote work for the right candidate. The tech is some of the best I've seen in the 11 odd years I've worked in the games industry. Team is small (8 in the office, few more remote) and most excellent. We are a creatively independent, well funded, rather ambitious, anti-crunch, post-hierarchy, release often, 'real' games company. Email us here: jobs@unknownworlds.com or drop me a line directly (dushan@unknownworlds.com) - I'm one of the core engineers. ------ whymsicalburito Redular - Orange County, CA We have recently secured funding for our next ambitious project and are building a team of 3 engineers to help us bring the project to life! Requirements: \- Formal Computer Science training \- Have code you wrote running on a live web server, and working properly. \- Proficient in OOP (PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc) \- Basic understanding of MVC Frameworks \- Love tackling hard problems. Bonuses: \- Previous Start-Up experience \- Data Visualization experience \- Machine Learning experience Compensation and Perks: \- $6k + Equity \- Monthly beach day! (during the summer) <http://redular.com/jobs> ------ Dwatson783 Havas Digital - Boston - Full Time - BI Developer & ETL/API Developer (no remote, relo welcome to discuss) Havas Digital is a global marketing agency focused on utilizing data to help drive marketing initiatives for our clients. To help drive the greatest results for our clients we use Artemis- a Havas developed analytics platform that drives decisions using big data. If you're interested in learning about digital marketing, analytics and enjoy playing with data from ad servers, twitter, facebook, site analytics, offline campaigns, CRMs and more then we're what you're looking for. The two roles we are hiring for are based in Boston as part of our solutions team. These candidates will work as part of a small team to build new capabilities for clients, increase the sources of data we use to build insights and lead new ideas to expand the platform development. What we're looking for: \- A person that lives to tell a story through data. That understands design and presentation and is willing to go past the traditional to bring better insights. They should also have an understanding of the data and it's structure, how it should be molded and prepared to optimize it's use. An interest in online marketing is helpful, experience with big data is preferred and the desire to learn more technically and in the business is welcomed with open arms. If you've worked with Tableau, Microstrategy, Excelcius and the other handful of BI tools out there- we want to hear from you. -A person who loves working with data, is interested in pushing the cutting edges of data and what we can do with it and has an interest in social media and online marketing. You should have experience with pulling data from APIs such as those from Facebook, Twitter, GA. You've worked with manipulating those data sets, automating the processes to feed systems with what you've built and tied it out nicely by inserting QA and controls to monitor your work. You have no fear of diving in and figuring things out and can learn the tools you need to in order to service the platform the best you can. For more on Havas Digital and Artemis: <http://www.havasdigital.com/artemis/> Interested? Email me at Doug.Watson[at]HavasDigital.com ------ zinxq Refresh.io - Palo Alto - Full Time Designer & Front-End Developer You will have 4+ years of experience using your design skills to build front- end interfaces across platforms (web and mobile). With strong project management and communication skills you're comfortable working in a fast-paced iterative environment. You have command of UX and UI and have a good sense of typography and color. From time-to-time your friends call you a "ninja" as it relates to your JavaScript, HTML and CSS skills. You have built apps Objective-C. <http://www.refresh.io/jobs> ------ rjsjr San Francisco, CA. Full time. Social Finance <http://sofi.org/> is fixing Student Loans with better rates, alumni investment, and great social integration. We're looking for a range of Software Developers and Product Managers to come work with an experienced startup engineering team and build great products. Backed by Eric Schmidt and Steve Anderson, we're located in the beautiful Presidio and have a free shuttle from downtown. Apply online at <https://sofi.resumetracker.com/public> ------ cchilton San Francisco, CA - IOS and Android Engineers - No remote Mindjet has long been known as the global standard for visual mapping of ideas and information, and now provides collaborative work management solutions that dramatically improve how people can work better together. Mindjet’s incredible market opportunity is driving its rapid expansion. It must ensure that it creates products in the most integrated, agile and effective way. Therefore, we have the need for Mobile Software Engineers. <http://www.mindjet.com/about/careers/> ------ adam1010 RentStuff.com -- Chicago, IL -- Full Time PHP Developer for a venture-backed start-up working out of 1871 in Chicago (in the Merchandise Mart) <http://www.rentstuff.com/jobs/php_dev> We are a marketplace for renting out stuff you own to other people (bikes, camera equipment, tents and outdoor gear, etc) and we also aggregate listings from local rental shops (think Kayak.com). Intimate, small team environment with lots of authority and great perks! Mysql, jQuery, Bootstrap, LAMP, EC2, AWS, Javascript, FT, Full-Time ------ melissatrahan San Francisco, CA. Full time or intern. Massive Health is hiring. We're a start-up based in San Francisco, and combined our team has previously shipped products to over half a billion people. We're using this consumer product expertise to improve healthcare by creating beautiful tools that deliver useful insights for getting and staying healthy. We've already launched an app called The Eatery, and there's lots more to come. learn more here: <http://massivehealth.com/jobs> ------ Uchikoma Berlin, Germany DevOps and Senior/Excellent Java developers You can reach me at stephan.schmidt@brands4friends.de I'll do the interviewing (+ some developers ;-) Vice CTO ------ sbrekken Unfold - Oslo, Norway - Full time. We are currently looking for an ambitious and talented front-end developer with significant hands-on experience to join our team in Oslo, Norway. You have extensive HTML, CSS and JavaScript knowledge. You’re eager to explore new technologies and techniques as our field is rapidly changing. While we are very focused around front-end development, server-side experience is also valued. <http://unfold.no/vacancies> ------ pariveda1 Pariveda Solutions - Houston, TX - FT We are looking for application developers with excellent problem solving skills and a passion for technology to join our IT consulting team in Houston. If you or someone you know may be interested, please visit our website at [http://parivedasolutions.com/TalentDevelopment/Pages/BrowseB...](http://parivedasolutions.com/TalentDevelopment/Pages/BrowseBy.aspx). We want to hear from you! ------ asmosoinio Turku (Finland), Espoo (Finland), Manila (Philippines), remote work in also a genuine option. Gecko Landmarks' brings location based services to everyone in emerging markets, because not everyone can (>60% of global population) read maps. We are hiring a Software Developer (and Beyond) for mobile (Android, J2ME) and server-side (Python, Google App Engine) work. More information: <http://geckolandmarks.com/jobs.html> ------ RichardPrice San Francisco, CA. Full time. Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research. Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves. It's widely held that science is too slow, and too closed. We are working on changing that, and re-inventing the way that scientists communicate. The stakes are high. If the inefficiencies in science can be removed, we may be able to accelerate science by a factor of 2, leading to a huge impact for humanity. For more on the problem Academia.edu is solving, see the guest post on TechCrunch last Sunday on 'The Future of Science' by Academia.edu's founder, Richard Price <http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/29/the-future-of-science/> Academia.edu has over 1.2 million registered users, and over 3.5 million monthly unique visitors. Both of these metrics tripled in 2011. Over 4,500 papers are added to the platform each day, and over 3,500 academics join each day. We just raised $4.5 million from Spark Capital and True Ventures <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297812>. Some of our angel investors include Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu) and Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman of The Economist). We need talented engineers to come and help us with the mission. We have a strong engineering culture. We're an 11 person team based in downtown San Francisco. The site is in Rails, and other technologies we use include PostgreSQL, Redis, Varnish, Solr, Memcached, Mongodb, Beanstalkd. Familiarity with our technologies is a plus, but it's not essential. It's far more important that you are a quick learner who can pick up new technologies quickly. There is more information about the company on our hiring page, at <http://academia.edu/hiring>. The kinds of things you would be working on include: ★ tools for scientists to share their work faster and more openly ★ algorithms to mine our data, and to find out what research is trending in real time ★ back-end infrastructure to scale the site on AWS What we're looking for are: ☀ 2+ years of web development experience ☀ Experience with the full engineering stack ☀ Passion for engineering All the strategic decisions in the startup are made collaboratively, whether they are about hiring, new feature development, user growth, user retention, funding, or revenue. You can participate in those general startup decisions as much or as little as you want. We have found that our decisions are much better as a result of everyone contributing to them. If you like having an impact, you will enjoy the Academia.edu culture. There is more information here <http://academia.edu/hiring>. H1B candidates are very welcome. We will take care of the visa process. If you are interested to learn more, please email Ryan Jordan at ryanj [at] academia.edu ~~~ heretohelp I had a conversation with your CEO once that made my stomach sink pretty badly. Your emphasis on academic credentials rather than projects, portfolio, or experience at the time for potential hires really put me off. ~~~ crasshopper My first thought: isn't Mendeley already the academic (paper-sharing) social network? ------ pariveda1 Pariveda Solutions is hiring in Houston! We are looking for application developers with excellent problem solving skills and a passion for technology to join our IT consulting team. If you or someone you know may be interested, please visit our website at [http://parivedasolutions.com/TalentDevelopment/Pages/BrowseB...](http://parivedasolutions.com/TalentDevelopment/Pages/BrowseBy.aspx). ------ willf Wordnik.com (San Mateo, California) We have lots of positions at Wordnik (wordnik.com) as we build out our new recommendation and discovery engine. Check out the jobs page at <http://www.wordnik.com/jobs> or write me directly (will@wordnik.com) Machine Learning Expert: At Wordnik, we work with text — lots of text. Wordnik uses empirical methods to build recommendation systems and to extend and improve our Word Graph. We employ statistical, machine-learning, and deep- learning methods to exploit that prior knowledge for the modeling of text. We are a coding shop; developers in addition to researchers. Computational Linguist: At Wordnik, we work with text — lots of text. Wordnik uses empirical methods to extend and improve our Word Graph, and we employ statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning methods to exploit that prior knowledge for the modeling of text. We are a coding shop; developers in addition to researchers. Full-Time Web and Mobile Designer: You are a talented designer that knows the web and mobile ecosystems inside and out. You're passionate about mobile and the web. You have ideas spilling out of your head for design simplifications, improvements, and additions to the user experiences affecting millions of people. Your design work is clean, focused, and inspiring to others. Mobile Developer: You are an eager iOS developer who is a quick learner, with a passion for creating delightful and intuitive software. You want to help push the platform to its limits, with implementation approaches transcending even Apple’s first-party apps. Frontend Hacker: We're looking for a Ruby/JS hacker with aesthetic sensibilities who can help us improve our existing ruby applications and build cool new things like our mobile site, games, browser extensions, etc. Server Engineer: Wordnik is looking for a senior level engineer to help develop our public and private API system. You will help build our out Application cluster, which requires nuts-and-bolts knowledge of high- performance application stacks. Cloud IT Architect: We're looking for a senior, hands-on developer capable of interfacing with the Amazon EC2 API and others, who would be responsible for building internal tools to manage our software infrastructure. This would include both back-end workflow as well as user-interface components. ------ Carter2BT Portland, OR \| Seeking Entrepreneurial Lead Engineer/CTO Help us disrupt a $100 Billion Dollar industry. Looking for passionate entrepreneurial developers (iOS and/or Android and HTML) to be a part of building something from the ground up. Ideal candidate is in Boulder CO or Portland OR - maybe open to remote. E-Mail Carter@Tabrific.com to start conversation ------ mikek Kiwi Crate is hiring in Mountain View, California. <http://www.kiwicrate.com/jobs> ------ lou718 Jawbone, San Francisco, CA. Full-time. Makers of Jambox, Big Jambox, Era and Icon bluetooth headsets, and the UP wristband. We're hiring iOS, web front end, python backend, database (mongo+mysql) engineers, and more: <http://jawbone.com/careers> Email lou [at] jawbone.com if interested. ------ blckswn49 Hi! We are in Taipei and looking for a remote drupal 7 developer and designer. Must have experience. Please email us your portfolio, resume, and some current drupal based websites that you have designed/ developed to: blck.swn.99@gmail.com. ------ nwjlyons Oxford, UK - Django Developer - Torchbox.com - <http://twitter.com/#!/torchbox/status/196998627883892737> ------ johnmmurray Louisville, KY - iOS Developer, Android Developer, 2 Back-end Engineers <http://www.mavizon.com/careers/> ------ grourk Everyone. Everyone is hiring Software Engineers. ~~~ seanp2k2 But not enough need a dedicated sysadmin / ops engineer yet :\ seanp2k (at) gmail.com if you're looking for someone to wrench on your _nix boxes all day. I love automation, monitoring, and hacking. I have 5 years professional_ nix experience, including most recently being part of a team manging ~1,600 servers across 7 datacenters in a 24x7 environment, including on-call duty and stuff like PCI-DSS compliance. I'll also develop some ruby / php / python / perl / awk / bash where required :) ------ cybernytrix Stealth startup working on "TV meets Facebook". Looking for web backend engineers and video engineers. ------ takecarex3 San Francisco, CA- Venture backed stealth healthcare technology company seeks self-motivated Ruby on Rails Developer (RoR). We have just relocated to San Francisco and have already solidified partnerships with the biggest names in healthcare technology. We recently closed funding with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund (Facebook, Yammer, Spotify, SpaceX, Practice Fusion, Path, RapLeaf). If you are looking for a ground-level opportunity with high growth potential this is it. You will be one of our founding engineers and work directly with our Product Manager. You will be directly responsible for coordinating, designing, building, and implementing features and workflows into our full product stack. We’d eventually like you to grow into managing our engineering team. Together, we can grow an exciting product that will undoubtedly become an integral part of the future of medical care, but we need your help. Responsibilities: -Work directly with offshore engineering team and report to product manager -Implement product features via Ruby on Rails (RoR) -Build and maintain existing infrastructure and systems -Willingness to take on greater role as company grows and expands, including managing engineering team Requirements: -1-2 years of Ruby on Rails (RoR) development and willingness to vastly improve ability and learn -Strong communication skills with CEO & Product Manager to help design, spec, and build new features -Strong work-ethic, self-motivated, work well in teams Bonus: -Experience with Test Driven Environemnt (TDD) -Experience with agile development -Startup experience -Interest in healthcare -VoIP (SIP/RTP) (OpenSIPS/Asterisk) -iPhone Development -Android Development -Flash RTMP More about the project: The project relies heavily on VoiP Technologies for communication (both voice and video). We have an existing product written with endpoints in Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android. Experience with VoiP Technologies is strongly preferred, although not essential. Experience with Ruby on Rails projects and agile development is required. This is a big opportunity to join a great team of individuals in a leadership role and be on the ground floor of changing healthcare. If you think you’re a good fit, please email sfhealthstartup [at] gmail.com with any relevant information (github, LinkedIn, Twitter, resume, etc.) Competitive compensation, benefits, and equity participation ------ takecarex3 San Francisco, CA - Venture backed stealth healthcare technology company seeks self-motivated Ruby on Rails Developer (RoR). We have just relocated to San Francisco and have already solidified partnerships with the biggest names in healthcare technology. We recently closed funding with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund (Facebook, Yammer, Spotify, SpaceX, Practice Fusion, Path, RapLeaf). If you are looking for a ground-level opportunity with high growth potential this is it. You will be one of our founding engineers and work directly with our Product Manager. You will be directly responsible for coordinating, designing, building, and implementing features and workflows into our full product stack. We’d eventually like you to grow into managing our engineering team. Together, we can grow an exciting product that will undoubtedly become an integral part of the future of medical care, but we need your help. Responsibilities: -Work directly with offshore engineering team and report to product manager -Implement product features via Ruby on Rails (RoR) -Build and maintain existing infrastructure and systems -Willingness to take on greater role as company grows and expands, including managing engineering team Requirements: -1-2 years of Ruby on Rails (RoR) development and willingness to vastly improve ability and learn -Strong communication skills with CEO & Product Manager to help design, spec, and build new features -Strong work-ethic, self-motivated, work well in teams Bonus: -Experience with Test Driven Environemnt (TDD) -Experience with agile development -Startup experience -Interest in healthcare -VoIP (SIP/RTP) (OpenSIPS/Asterisk) -iPhone Development -Android Development -Flash RTMP More about the project: The project relies heavily on VoiP Technologies for communication (both voice and video). We have an existing product written with endpoints in Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android. Experience with VoiP Technologies is strongly preferred, although not essential. Experience with Ruby on Rails projects and agile development is required. This is a big opportunity to join a great team of individuals in a leadership role and be on the ground floor of changing healthcare. If you think you’re a good fit, please email sfhealthstartup [at] gmail.com with any relevant information (github, LinkedIn, Twitter, resume, etc.) Competitive compensation, benefits, and equity participation ------ Peek Peek (www.peek.ly) - Manhattan, NY (interns, part-time, full-time, H1B welcome) Peek wants to make the Internet and data available globally via mobile devices. We want people in the most remote regions of the world to obtain $50 or even $25 devices to communicate and collect the data they need. This means that we need to make software that is affordable and uses as little data as possible. But is still incredibly powerful! It's a big challenge. At Peek we are looking for software engineers who have a passion for the startup environment, and who want to develop skills on new and emerging technology while learn more about what it takes to start a successful company. What we're looking for? 1\. You love to create. You will code and build mobile apps on the hottest mobile platform in the world (and it's not iOS or Android... hmmm), it's an SDK used in 40% of the phones in the global market (and growing 50% year over year). You'll also work on our cloud systems, hosted in Amazon AWS and learn all about mobile to cloud applications, and handling scale on the order of millions of clients. We use C/C++, Java, .NET, Ruby, Javascript (including node.js), and many others. 2\. You are eager to do it all and make an impact: product and feature planning, development, project management and of course, testing (we all do it!) 3\. You are "smart and gets things done" (and can name the guy who coined that phrase) 4\. You want to be part of a startup - this means a very small organization with a flat hierarchy where you can communicate freely and openly. What's in it for you? 1\. A very competitive salary, great health care (incl. vision and dental), stock options, group events (like ping pong nights) and a great working environment in Manhattan, New York. 2\. The opportunity to work on every aspect of a mobile operation, including embedded (C/C++), back-end (Java, node.js), cloud systems (EC2), and more. You'll get a chance to work on all of these systems, not just one or two. 3\. Our founders, who have raised over $100m in capital in their careers, will show you the start-up ropes, do sessions with you, and introduce you to folks in the startup community - entrepreneurs, VCs, etc. And when you want to start your next big startup, we'll be there to help you out. Peek launched nation-wide in the US, in late 2008. Since then we’ve launched successfully across Europe and in India, and picked up many awards along the way including Time's Gadget of the Year, Wired Product of the Year, and GSMA nomination for Best Cloud Technology. Peek is backed by top-tier venture capital firms RRE Ventures and L Capital, and led by the founder of Virgin Mobile USA (IPO 2007; acquired by Sprint). Send us an email to jobs@peek.ly ------ mikenyc New York, NY - Craft Coffee - Lead Rails Engineer Full-time <http://craftcoffee.com/jobs> We're looking for a kickass full-stack Rails developer. TECHNICAL CHALLENGE It's not a shopping cart. We want to build a best-in-class integration of marketing and technology. This is the new golden skill set. You'll master it at Craft Coffee, and engage in very hard problems on the leading edge of online commerce. See, for example: [http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth- hack...](http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an- airbnbcraigslist-case-study/) ABOUT CRAFT COFFEE We're seriously passionate about what we do. Every team member receives tons of great coffee equipment on day 1. We live what we do, and we'd never sell anything to our customers that we didn't personally love. We ship coffee to paying customers in 48 states and 9 countries. Our subscribers LOVE us. Coffee is an everyday ritual and we elevate that moment for people. PEOPLE YOU RESPECT LOVE US Technologists, entrepreneurs, food writers, chefs, designers, filmakers. Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit. He subscribed, fell in love, then invested because of our product execution: "Continuing to be impressed by Craft Coffee. Is it wrong that I'm starting to tell NY tech startups by their attention to design?" Dave McClure, pirate at 500 Startups: "For all you aspiring lawyer- entrepreneurs out there, I just want you to know that we invest in lawyers only if they know how to code like [Craft Coffee founder] Mike Horn!" Amanda Hesser, author of The Essential NYTimes Cookbook & founder of Food52: "New weekend ritual -- grinding @craftcoffee beans in manual grinder & making coffee in a French press.""They do an excellent job all around -- interesting sources, thoughtfully assembled -- and I really enjoy the element of surprise every month." Ondi Timoner, filmmaker (Dig! and We Live in Public), winner of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize (twice!): "Thought I'd never tweet about food & drink but this is really a public service announcement - go get @craftcoffee now!" Zach Klein, co-founder of Vimeo, CEO of DIY: "My favorite of-the-month-club is @craftcoffee -- three packages of coffee beans delivered from different roasters each month." PRESS LOVE US Wall Street Journal: "An artisanal greatest hits package." Tasting Table: "Your morning just found more glory" Sprudge (a leading coffee industry blog): Best New Product of 2012: "The very act of opening your Craft Coffee box is a joy, the packaging artful, delicate and neat. The coffees selected therein are consistently surprising, unexpected, and splendid. There's some magic in the air at Craft Coffee." Serious Eats: "a chance to really compare and think differently about what's being done out there in coffee" Saveur: "perfect gift for the coffee connoisseur in your life." Martha Stewart Everyday Food: "Barista in a box." APPLY See our full job post here: <http://craftcoffee.com/jobs> After you check us out and see what we're all about, email us at dev@craftcoffee.com. It's a direct line to the CEO. ------ bherrup Sterling, VA - Washington, DC - ZipList, Inc. (no H1B, no REMOTE) ZipList, Inc, newly acquired by Condé Nast, seeks a Mobile Developer for a full-time staff position in Sterling, VA. ZipList, Inc. is the technology leader in universal online and mobile shopping lists and recipe boxes. The robust technology ZipList provides is simple: digital and mobile users can populate their universal recipe box and shopping list with recipes from anywhere on the web, including food sites, e-cookbooks, and blogs. They can also save recipes to their universal recipe box using texts and QR codes, or via their mobile device. Combining this robust functionality with the high-quality content available on Epicurious and other Condé Nast food brands, enables consumers to have a one-stop digital recipe and shopping list network offering tremendous ease and flexibility. Condé Nast is home to some of the world’s most celebrated media brands. In the United States, Condé Nast publishes 18 consumer magazines, four business-to- business publications, 27 websites, and more than 40 apps for mobile and tablet devices, all of which define excellence in their categories. The company also owns Fairchild Fashion Media (FFM), whose portfolio of brands serves as the leading source of news and analysis for the global fashion community. Condé Nast has won more National Magazine Awards over the past ten years than all of its competitors combined. Follow us on Twitter @CondeNastCorp and @CondeNastCareer. We are looking for self-starting, entrepreneurial-minded software engineers to work on meaningful components of ZipList's mobile offerings. We work in a highly Agile, scrum-based development environment and we release early and often. The ideal candidate will be able to easily switch from mobile platform to mobile platform. They will keep themselves abreast of the new APIs and technologies that are available on these platforms. Also, the candidate will be able to participate in the discussions and make recommendations about what are the best solutions for the many varied scenarios we may face. Skills/Requirements : • A minimum of a B.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer/Software Engineering or similar degree, and two years of professional software development experience. • A minimum of one year of Mobile Development experience (modern smartphone platforms a plus, iPhone, Android). • Minimum two years experience with Java and/or Objective-C and their respective User Interface layers. • Minimum two years experience with JavaScript, HTML and CSS. • Experience with Client Application Development and Deployment Processes, a plus. • Experience with AJAX, JSON, and REST a plus. • Experience with Windows Phone 7 (.NET) , a plus. • Familiarity with Ruby, Ruby on Rails (or experience with other dynamic languages like PHP or Python) If this sounds like you, please apply at <http://bit.ly/HSPVPu> ------ nandemo Not a single company hiring in Tokyo? ~~~ ahuibers Bump has one engineer in Tokyo and we may expand, probably on front-end mobile (iOS or Android). Our lead product the Bump app is the 5th most popular app of all time in Japan. ------ osmeta osmeta - Mountain View, CA - Full Time or Intern <http://osmeta.com> ------ technology VaynerMedia - 373 Park Avenue South, Floor 9, New York, NY 10016 Community & Content Coordinator Location: New York, NY Location: New York, NY Type: Full Time Min. Experience: Mid Level The Community & Content Coordinator works hand-in-hand with the Account Executive and serves as their more analytics and community oriented counterpart. Who are you? Creative, comforted by the numbers, and centered in an unwillingness to maintain the status quo. We look for folks that are “good at the internet”. The task at hand: You will be assessing and solving complex brand challenges through a community and content lens relying on a sixth sense (and data) to encourage maximum engagement As an ardent protector of our methodology and ethos, you will constantly be called upon to give your ideas on what works, what doesn’t and why We’ll expect you to think like the brand, eat like the brand, and speak like the brand with a level of respect and dedication that is typically only found within a client organization Invest in popular culture and digital spaces to bring seemingly unrelated content ideas and concepts to bear (walking the walk is incredibly important to us) Translating an understanding of, and respect for, good user experience into innovative content from ideation to creation to assessment Act as a mentor, teacher and/or sounding board for the community managers and multi disciplinary team surrounding you The Ideal Candidate has: A Bachelor’s degree and 2-4 years of interactive experience working on digital / social strategies + campaigns, including some client-facing experience A deep love and respect for communities and the power that can be housed within them supplemented by a commitment to listen and adapt as they change An even temperament that will allow you to think clearly and communicate clearly in times when swift action (or the diffusing of potential issues) is imperative An innate curiosity and desire to determine how something works and then be driven to improve upon the original concept The ability to effectively collaborate with multidisciplinary project teams to enable all participants to feel equally invested in strategies and executions and keep everyone in the know and in a position to succeed A sparkling personality that will mesh well with the existing VaynerMedia family (we love smart people with a dash of quirkiness and humor) An insatiable curiosity and knowledge about all things social, web, and mobile The ability to write concisely and with a strong voice, without typo or delay with general editorial sensibilities An interest and comfort level in standing in front of a client or a room full of peers and giving their opinion or a presentation The uncanny ability to see opportunities and solutions in the face of a challenge An interest in math, data and analytics (if you were the one asleep in math class, we have other roles that might be of more interest to you) [http://careers.vaynermedia.com/apply/8WIzAX/Community- Conten...](http://careers.vaynermedia.com/apply/8WIzAX/Community-Content- Coordinator.html) =========================================================== Junior Designer Location: New York, NY Department: Creative Type: Full Time Min. Experience: Entry Level VaynerMedia is looking for a junior designer to join our in-house team full- time. We’re looking for someone who is passionate about design and social media and is comfortable working in a fast paced environment. You'll be working exclusively within the digital realm (no print work) and the portfolio you submit should reflect this. Requirements: \- Formal design schooling OR equivalent experience working professionally. \- Strong typography skills and a ridiculous attention to detail. Also helpful to have experience with information and icon design. \- Must know the ins-and-outs of Photoshop and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite. \- You'll be working with our clients and must be comfortable designing within the aesthetic and voice of their brands. You need to be good at taking in feedback and adapting accordingly. \- Must have a startup mentality. We work hard and love every minute of it. You should also be comfortable working within an agency structure. \- Must live in or near NYC or be willing to relocate. Bonus points: \- An understanding of UI/UX. \- An understanding of the big social media platforms and their abilities/limitations (design-wise). \- Experience working with developers and a basic understanding of the abilities/limitations of the major code languages. \- Mild to major illustration skills. \- An obsession with sports, music, or food. Please include in your cover letter a link to your portfolio (if you do not have a link please attach with the cover letter). Please also include a few sentences on what you think is the best designed website or app out there, and why. [http://careers.vaynermedia.com/apply/kWHDVB/Junior- Designer....](http://careers.vaynermedia.com/apply/kWHDVB/Junior- Designer.html) ------ pabloest San Francisco, CA Meraki - <http://meraki.com> Meraki is the leader in cloud networking and we have over 20,000 customer networks around the world. You can see a sample of customers who rely on Meraki at: <http://www.meraki.com/customers>. We were funded by Sequoia and Google, and are based in the Mission district of San Francisco - yes, it's sunny here! Our cloud infrastructure has been developed from the ground up, and we pride ourselves in its reliability, resilience, and performance (we have a 99.99% uptime SLA). Our wireless access points and routers make network management simple, and our relentless focus on user experience delights our customers. // Engineering On the front-end, distributed web application lets network administrators quickly sift through historical data, perform diagnostics, and navigate a huge space of possible network configurations through an intuitive interface. Our multi-site, hosted backend system provides services thousands of networks and millions of client devices. Your work will be widely deployed and used by millions of people, and you’ll be able to collect an incredible amount of data about how your code is performing. Our team is small enough that you will work on problems core to our business. * Front-end: sharp and creative UI engineers who love to work with Javascript, CSS, and Ruby on Rails. <http://www.meraki.com/company/jobs#frontendengineer> * Back-End Systems: familiarity with C++, Ruby or Python, an understanding of databases, and especially experience running a live service or building production systems. <http://www.meraki.com/company/jobs#backendsystemsengineer> * Firmware: fluent in C, some device driver experience, with a love for building new products and things like bringing up new platforms. <http://www.meraki.com/company/jobs#firmwareengineer> // Marketing * Technical Marketing Manager: excellent analytical and communication skills, a solid technical background, and the skill to tackle a wide variety of activities, such as launching new products, providing technical education to customers and partners, building collateral and competitive positioning to assist Meraki's rapidly growing sales team, and more. <http://www.meraki.com/company/jobs#technicalmarketingmanager> * Front-end Developer: expert level command of HTML and CSS with strong Javascript skills, knowledge of a scripting language, familiarity with back-end application concepts and a strong design aesthetic. (B.S. degree in computer science or equivalent) <http://www.meraki.com/company/jobs#frontenddeveloper> // Support * Technical Support Engineer: sharp, energetic, technical support engineer who can work closely with many groups within the company, including engineering, to diagnose and resolve critical escalated issues, identify, reproduce, and document bugs. <http://www.meraki.com/company/jobs#technicalsupportengineer> // Sales We have many openings for sales positions, including inside sales, regional sales, sales engineers, and strategic sales. Interested? Feel free to get in touch with me: pablo@meraki.com ------ dlmiler2 Washington, DC GS-11 ------ benihana Durham, NC \| Northern VA - Bronto software is hiring. <http://bronto.com/company/careers> I left this great company a few weeks ago to pursue an opportunity at Etsy, but I'll be the first to say that it's an awesome place to work and would recommend it to anyone who wants to work with good developers. It's an email marketing company currently building out a platform that includes email, social (facebook, twitter) and SMS marketing as well. ------ benihana Etsy is hiring in New York City - <http://www.etsy.com/careers> I've been here for three weeks and I love it so far. I pushed code to production on my first day, and since then I've pushed probably 10 times. I have never been more surrounded with competent, smart, fun people. ------ klbarry New York, NY - Two internships: General programming or electrical engineer intern. $12/hr, ~20 hours week. www.tractechsystems.com www.colormerchants.com Job Description: Join our team if you're looking to learn a lot and make a difference in a very fast growing start-up. We're the industry leader in jewelry RFID, and believe we've only just begun to crack this market. We need bright technical people to handle a variety of programming tasks, work with our RFID technology, and support our business customers. Qualifications: We're looking for an ambitious intern with programming knowledge. We feel that if you're pretty comfortable with one language, it's not too hard to work around the others. Knowledge and enthusiasm for RFID is a huge bonus! Application Instructions: Send your resume and cover letter to kevin.barry@tractechsystems.com. ------ zugo Zugo Services are looking for an experienced Python engineer for a role focused on our tracking & analytics platform. The salary offer for this position is in the range of £40k/£50k per annum and includes a discretionary bonus of up to 10% depending on individual and/or company performance. Required: Interest in MR and distributed data analytics Preferred: * Non-trivial experience with DISCO, Tornado, SQLAlchemy, nosetests * Experience of optimising TCP/IP kernel and Nginx configurations for managing high load for more info. contact recruitment@zugoservices.com	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What lies in your Node_Modules directory - learnaholic https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next-b89f63d21558#.8up4jxl2g ====== greenyoda Recent submissions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12235789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12235789) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12251162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12251162) Plus a few others.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Moral Bankruptcy of Manipulating Human Psychology to Turn Users into Addicts - kiyanwang https://hackernoon.com/the-complete-moral-bankruptcy-of-manipulating-human-psychology-to-turn-users-into-addicts-d09b98281ef ====== steanne [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15717649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15717649) ~~~ DrScump (280+ points, 96+ comments) ------ ACow_Adonis I do not usually do this, given that this conversation has already been posted on hacker news, but i felt compelled. At the top of the page is an icon, i'm presuming of the author, and a description: "I created a story-driven strategy framework to help transformational companies achieve planetary scale. Learn what I do at [http://exponents.co"](http://exponents.co") Since I couldn't actually parse that sentence, i went to [http://exponents.co](http://exponents.co) I've only got one question hacker news might be able to answer for me...is this a parody? Am i part of a joke i don't get? ~~~ alex_hitchins I thought the same. It makes no sense to me what-so-ever. Can only assume that it's either parody or for a very, very select audience!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nextdoor, a local social network, has launched in the UK - askafriend https://blog.nextdoor.com/2016/09/13/bringing-nextdoor-to-the-uk/ ====== just_observing This is deceptive. I entered my details and it said that neighbours were already using it and gave examples. Examples that are very like those on the local (closed) fb group for the area. So I signed up. And now it says there is no-one using it, I'm the first and I need to recruit 9 more people to make the area 'live'. This is one certain way for me to avoid your product forever because if I can't trust you now I can't trust you at all.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Death in China Stirs Anger Over Urban Rule Enforcers - danso http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/world/asia/death-in-china-stirs-anger-over-urban-rule-enforcers.html?hp&_r=0 ====== ferdo > “This is in fact a metaphor for today’s China, where the state is seizing > property everywhere through a variety of means,” Mr. Li wrote. “Businessmen > lose their enterprises and are thrown into prison; an anonymous vendor loses > his watermelons. Sometimes it’s the urban management officers that seize the > property. Sometimes it’s the court, or the bank, or the unpredictable > policies.” Not much different from the US, iow. ~~~ kiba Fairly sure that the US have fairly low level of low level corruption and high level of political corruptions. If you offer a bribe to a police officer in the US, I am sure that 90% of the time, they would just haul you to jail. The fact that insane prosecutions against people is occuring is probably a result of our democratic institution's perverse incentives("TOUGH ON CRIME", "3 STRIKES LAW", "THINK OF THE CHILDREN") and lack of forethought and rationality on the part of the electorate. ------ danso In the recent HN discussion about whether the Department of Homeland Security should be abolished...some commenters wondered why that would be any improvement compared to moving its components into other existing Departments...bureaucratic details aside, I think one thing that DHS has going _against_ it is its paramilitary nature that is not quite military, not quite FBI, and sometimes literally, just some guy with a badge feeling you up at the airport...and that is why some people think it's more reasonable to just do away with the DHS, even if its components are preserved (and keep the same authority and deadly force to enforce laws and security) It's that lack of "real" authority that makes DHS seem less desirable than its parts being moved into "real" departments. In other words...think of your reaction when a police officer has a gun in your face telling you to place your hands slowly where he can see them...and a mall cop who is bellowing at you to put your hands in the air "or else". The former situation is _materially_ less pleasant, but you may psychologically be OK with it because "the cop is doing his job and cops put their lives on the line, and also, he has the power of the Law behind him, and, Law & Order is a great show"...whereas with the mall cop, your life is never in danger and yet you have contempt with someone trying to assert authority in his small pathetic world. With DHS (in some people's opinion), and seemingly, these Chinese rule enforcers, you could have the worst of both worlds...a poorly trained government official who oversteps his very limited authority _and_ yet has the ability to ruin your life, legally.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OS X Yosemite Security and Privacy Guide - epsylon https://github.com/drduh/OS-X-Yosemite-Security-and-Privacy-Guide/blob/master/README.md ====== therealmarv great guide!! Did not know everything there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dissecting Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo Compensation - mhb https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/technology/yahoo-marissa-mayer-compensation.html ====== kyleschiller There are a lot of good points here, but it feels like most of her compensation is explained right here To lure Ms. Mayer from Google and compensate her for options she forfeited there, Yahoo’s board offered her a lucrative employment agreement. She initially received restricted stock worth $35 million and stock options worth $21 million, based on 2012 stock prices for Yahoo, along with a cash salary and bonus. It sounds like Mayer was initially making way more than the 900k/week figure quoted in the title, so it almost doesn't make sense to talk about her performance the rest of the time if we're interested in explaining here salary. There were a couple of significant missteps that the article explains resulted in meaningful pay cuts, but it sounds like the bulk of her compensation was determined from the beginning. ~~~ ebbv That doesn't mean it's not worth discussing. I could get hired to be the CEO of Ford and get a contract for a ton of money. But I'd do a poor job probably. It would be worth discussing afterward; how did this happen? Why are executive salaries so incredibly disproportionate to their impact and benefit to the company? What can be done? What should be done? ~~~ edanm It isn't clear that the salaries are in fact disproportionate. The article makes the case that there were many mistakes, but that it's hard to say if anyone else could've done better. And the shareholders did end up making a lot of money. I'm not sure anything should be done here. The shareholders chose to pay a lot to get her as CEO. Even if they lost out, it's not a reason to intervene. People make bad bets all the time. ~~~ pooper Something must be done to rein in executive pay though. I am not talking about MM in particular. She is probably a fine executive. However, my point is that unchecked executive pay is not good for anyone. We don't live in a free market. There ought to be some way to cap pay. A progressive income tax that caps out at 90% of income above $3M a year? So if you make $3,000,001, you pay 90 cents in taxes on the last dollar you earned sounds fair to me. ~~~ edanm "However, my point is that unchecked executive pay is not good for anyone. We don't live in a free market. There ought to be some way to cap pay." Why? To all those questions. I mean, in some specific cases you might be right, but in the case of shareholders, who own a company, deciding how much to pay to the executive that they choose to run that company, why would someone else need to be involved in that decision? Who is supposedly losing out here? The shareholders themselves? They (vicariously) own the money in the company, and choose how much of it to pay to the executive, because they believe that's the best way to make more money in the long run. Why do you think you know better than them, when they're actually betting money on it? Or is someone else being hurt here? Also, as far as I understand it, you're mixing two different things by proposing to "fix" this with an income tax. You said in the paragraph above that executive pay is not good for anyone, which I presumed to be about (or at least to include) the shareholders of the company. But by introducing taxing, you are quite literally talking about taking money from the shareholders and giving it to the government. So at least in this way of doing it, you're quite literally not protecting the shareholders but rather "harming" them. (This doesn't make income taxes bad or anything, I'm just pointing out that one thing they're _not_ good for is to protect shareholdres, IMO). ~~~ ebbv The idea that shareholders own the company and are therefore good, objective arbiters of CEO pay sounds good on paper but even the simplest of examinations of how this functions in reality should tell you what the problems are. First, the board who decides the CEO pay are not objective. They are friends with the CEO. They are not objective. The social circles of boards of large companies and the CEOs they hire is not that big, and they do not think objectively about each other. Second, there's no real motive for them to be strict with the CEO; there's every motive to be overly generous. If they give the CEO ultra generous pay and bonuses, they then expect (and receive) to be treated in the same way when the shoe is on the other foot. When the CEO is on a board for a company they are an executive at. Executve pay has been on an insane runaway explosion for years. You can say "That's because the companies are so successful!" But Yahoo is evidence success has nothing to do with it. And I would argue even if it were due to success; the workers should be benefit at least as much as executives, and they don't. ~~~ edanm "First, the board who decides the CEO pay are not objective. They are friends with the CEO. They are not objective." Well you might be right, but aren't hostile takeovers, activist shareholders, etc. disproof of that? In fact, the article mentions that it was activist investors who had Marissa Mayer instated, though I don't really know the history of Yahoo that well. "Executve pay has been on an insane runaway explosion for years. You can say "That's because the companies are so successful!" But Yahoo is evidence success has nothing to do with it." It's pretty weak evidence, considering that Yahoo was very succesful for its shareholders. I mean it's one thing to make the argument when the company fails, which I still don't buy. But to make the argument when a company succeeds, by claiming it didn't succeed enough, or that the CEO wasn't enough responsible for the success?! (Defining success as what shareholders care about in this case, which is making money). We can see examples of CEOs who do much worse and destroy lots of value. And I'm not even talking about the fact that they had to pay Marissa Mayer enough to take the risk, or that you can't judge investments solely on whether they succeed or not, since all investments are risks. But I'm still left with one thing I simply don't understand here - who are you trying to protect that is getting hurt? The shareholders? How are you protecting them by limiting the ways in which they can use their money? If you really think that shareholders aren't well represented and therefore make bad decisions, then maybe you're right, but wouldn't the solution be to fix _that_ problem, instead of attacking a symptom? "And I would argue even if it were due to success; the workers should be benefit at least as much as executives, and they don't." Not sure what you mean by "at least as much", but workers _do_ benefit. They tend to hold shares of the company, which have increased in value just as much as the CEO's shares. Salaries in e.g. tech companies are much higher, which is another way in which workers benefit. ~~~ ebbv Workers in general do not hold shares of companies. It is a small minority of workers in the US who have shares of their company. The workers are who I'm concerned about, not the board members. The workers suffer from the current trend of executives and boards looking out only for themselves and their fellow large shareholders. Even when workers do have some shares of their company; I'm sure most Yahoo employees who were laid off would rather still have their jobs than get a final small dividend when Yahoo was sold off. ~~~ edanm "Workers in general do not hold shares of companies. It is a small minority of workers in the US who have shares of their company." Fair enough, I was talking more about tech than about other industries, with which I'm less familiar. Still, a companies success, as you allude to later, is important for employees to keep their jobs. "The workers suffer from the current trend of executives and boards looking out only for themselves and their fellow large shareholders." In what way? And why do you specify "large" shareholders? "I'm sure most Yahoo employees who were laid off would rather still have their jobs than get a final small dividend when Yahoo was sold off." But you're changing the point of the debate! This option _wasn 't on the table_. Yahoo was failing one way or another. The whole articles' point was that Marissa Mayer tried what she could to turn Yahoo around, but ended up not entirely succeeding on that front. That said, Yahoo overall was a good stock to buy because of other investments. As other people in the article and in the thread tend to agree with, it's not clear if someone else could've done better. The big question that people have talked about in this thread is whether Marissa Mayer should've received so much money for a growth in Yahoo that purportedly happened without her having anything to do with it. Btw, I'm just as sure that the shareholders of Yahoo would've been as happy as the employees for Marissa Mayer to have succeeded and breathed new life into Yahoo. Why wouldn't they? Trying to cast this as shareholders vs. employees strikes me as completely wrong. ~~~ pooper Sorry, I should have been clearer. I don't want to make this about about MM v Yahoo!. MM is at worst a symptom. My argument is that the disease is systemic. > In what way? And why do you specify "large" shareholders? I don't want to go too far into conspiracy theories but I think it is logical that under certain circumstances, a "large" individual shareholder may not have the best interest of ALL the shareholders in mind. Of course, I don't think what I propose will ever exactly happen. This is merely a thought experiment to guide us. A guiding principle I remember learning in elementary school was that our rights are not absolute. Our right to freedom of speech is not absolute and neither is the right to bear arms. These rights, even though enshrined in our constitution, are arbitrary lines drawn in sand. I think the right of a corporation to pay and the right of an individual to make a living are also such rights. Now, I don't expect anyone to pick this idea up. It is too toxic. The idea that we should put caps on how much an individual is allowed to earn is unthinkable for most people. People are talking about repealing the estate tax permanently which is a huge blow to my idea. I hope some day we can push for an aggressive progressive income tax and estate tax. There are a lot of things that need to fall in place for it to happen though. For instance, it should become impossible to transfer large sums of wealth without it showing up on a public ledger of some sort. If someone has not earned $3M+ sum total (including inheritance) over their life and they buy something that costs $3M, that should automatically trip some alarm about back taxes. The more I think about it the more absurd it begins to sound though. Maybe I was wrong to suggest progressive taxes as a way to enforce caps. If not taxes, what are some ways we can try to rein (is this the proper spelling?) in executive pay? ------ perryh2 Something that is often left out from these articles is the $230 million acquisition of Polyvore in 2015 [0]. I still don't know the reasoning behind this decision other than the existence of prior relationships with people that worked at Polyvore. From casually browsing the Yahoo Style vertical, I don't see any connection to Polyvore's site and vice-versa. [0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-jackson-slams-yahoo- for-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-jackson-slams-yahoo-for-polyvore- acquisition-2015-12) ------ yourapostasy IMHO the activist shareholders were the key decision makers in this story. The key I believe was the following. "The surging value of those investments [Alibaba and Yahoo Japan] — not any brilliant business moves by Ms. Mayer — is why Yahoo’s shares went up....managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms. Mayer...Ms. Mayer delegated the Alibaba issue, hiring an experienced dealmaker, Jacqueline Reses, to be the company’s principal liaison to Alibaba and its leaders, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai. Ms. Reses helped the Chinese company navigate its initial public offering. She also renegotiated an agreement, struck just before Ms. Mayer arrived, that would have forced Yahoo to sell an additional 122 million shares in the offering. Those extra shares are now worth $15 billion." Those two acts---knowing how to find Reses, and knowing how to delegate to Reses---combined with finding a buyer, were what made Mayer's compensation palatable to those activist shareholders. Those shareholders considered Mayer an enablement platform like a smartphone app store, and for the value "unlocked" enabling the shareholders to cash out, they were willing to pay the enablement fee. For a fee far lower than 30% of what they unlocked, they probably considered it well worth paying. That unlocking the value meant effectively dismantling Yahoo was incidental for the decision makers. I think the moral of the story for me personally is if I ever find myself within a company where activist shareholders successfully get on the BOD to "increase shareholder value" in any manner that smells of selling off all or the most profitable/highly-valued parts of the company, then I will send out my resume (always maintained and updated) and update my availability status. I'd like to hear contrary viewpoints, though. ------ smoyer "Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable. The company’s DNA and technology were built around its original identity as a web portal" I have a theory that there's always at least one big web portal - AOL started as a dial-up ISP and turned into a portal. Yahoo started as a search engine and turned into a portal. Facebook started as a social network and turned into a portal. ~~~ mattmanser As far as I remember, Yahoo was a portal first and foremost, it didn't start with a search engine. The quick googling I just did seems to confirm that, it started as a human curated directory and didn't start crawling till 2002 (and almost bought Google at that point). ~~~ mcherm It makes me feel old when people talk about doing historical research on events that I lived through. When yahoo first started out (and at that time I was using it) the role it played was equivalent to that which search engines play today. At that point in time there were no search engines, the only way to know about a website was to already have the address, or two read someplace that referenced or linked to it. Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today: the site you start out on, and the place you go if you want to find something on the Internet. They eventually lost that role to search engines like Alta Vista, and later incarnations of Yahoo became a"Portal": a site you go to because it has decent implementations of many different features such as news, movie listings, stock quotes, and everything else that Yahoo offers. ~~~ mgkimsal "Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today" More specifically - you went there and could "search" the directory. You put in a word or phrase and it searched the directory listings to find matches. It was just only searching its own very limited set of info, vs a crawled index of all the content of the sites. IIRC, they'd also started charging ($250 IIRC?) for adding a listing to their directory sometime in the late 90s or so. ~~~ jaredsohn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory) says $299 per year; also this page says that it just went away in 2014. ------ revelation What is going on here? She was given a salary that made her preposterously rich no matter what she does, an unlimited checkbook to buy and do whatever she feels right, control over a huge enterprise with plenty of talent and capabilities in place.. and the best of all, two magic money making boxes that take no effort whatsoever but basically guarantee there is zero short term pressure from shareholders. And here we are joining a mad apologist chorus of "oh, but nobody could have done differently". That is crazy. If you believe that, you might as well stay in bed for the next month because apparently whatever happens has been predetermined a long long time ago. ~~~ gcb0 Thank you! ------ abalashov I think one thing that's important to keep in mind is that some part of that compensation is for effectively jettisoning her career. Proportional/justifiable? I don't know. But now she's the woman that drove Yahoo! into the ground - that'll forever be her "thing", regardless of what role she played vs. unavoidable reality of sinking ship. That can have the effect of depressing compensation elsewhere, even if it certainly doesn't stop her getting another executive role (as we all know). If you're going to pay someone to be the captain of a cruise liner that has an 80% chance of sinking on its next voyage (even if it's not like the Titanic where everyone dies), that's going to take some money, too. He won't be piloting cruise ships for a while. ~~~ gaius _compensation is for effectively jettisoning her career_ It doesn't work like that. Take Carly Fiorina for example. Measured either by jobs or by shareholder value destroyed, she has a fair shot at the title of "worst CEO in history, ever". And yet people still thought that that experience qualified her for a shot at the Presidency. Indeed she even claimed that her business experience was what made her the best candidate! MM will probably be Uber's next CEO without missing a beat. ~~~ abalashov Yeah, I know, and I was mindful of that in trotting out the hypothesis. But I suspect there is a taxonomy within the upper strata of the CxO world where the optics of "running Yahoo into the ground" may disqualify her from the crème de la crème CEO jobs or pay packages, forcing her to settle for merely $ungodly_sum with not so hefty a multiplier. They're also rules that most likely apply only when making lateral moves within the field, subject to the highly idiosyncratic rules of the Fortune 100 exec recruitment game. The headers get stripped when you move into something like the Presidency, since there is an alchemy by which you can parlay a previous stint as a Fortune 100 executive into the vague catch-all digest of "business experience". I mean, look at our current President. ------ gaius _" Yet most of Ms. Mayer’s paycheck ultimately came from the gains in Yahoo’s Alibaba and Yahoo Japan investments, over which she had little control. Thanks to an investment made in 2005, Yahoo had a 24 percent stake in Alibaba, which today is China’s leading e-commerce company."_ Quite literally money for nothing, and people wonder why CEO pay is such an issue. ~~~ JabavuAdams Ah, but look at her pedigree and previous accomplishments! Like some kind of orbit-injection-burn. She had to be at just the right place, at just the right time, with the correct velocity. Some days I'm jealous of these execs. Other times I realize that I was playing computer games or reading esoteric subjects instead of excelling at jumping through every hoop placed in front of me. ------ mks40 From reading this (and following this vaguely), I took the following assertions: i) MM had virtually nothing to do with tripling of stock value, that was due to ownership in Alibaba/Yahoo Japan ii) She did not turn Yahoo around as a business and made failed acquisitions. Yet, the article wants me to believe iii) Nobody could have done any better in this position. She achieved the best possible outcome If her net contribution to Yahoo as a business was 0, it seems pretty unreasonable to assert that NOBODY could have made any better acquisitions (e.g. buy Instagram, not tumble), or strategic initiatives (why focus on search?). ~~~ danieltillett I actually agree with the article that nobody could have done better, but they certainly could have done the same as MM for a whole lot less salary. ~~~ curiousgal You didn't address OP's point: > _If her net contribution to Yahoo as a business was 0, it seems pretty > unreasonably to assert that NOBODY could have made any better acquisitions > (e.g. buy Instagram, not tumbler), or strategic initiatives (why focus on > search?)._ ~~~ pooper I can't answer for anyone else but I can say with pretty good confidence that Yahoo! would not exist today if they put me in charge. I would fling poop left and right the moment I discovered the back door. I wouldn't have gave two poops about shareholder value. I am sure "they" would have found something sketchy about my past life that is worthy of at least ten life sentences and I would be sent away for good. I was already a little skeptical by the time Y! bought tumblr but I think the effort was there. I saw bringing in Katie Couric and David Pogue as a way to ease older people to watching "live TV" on Y!. I still don't think there was any fault with the vision. It might just be that the execution was a few years too early or bit too ambitious? I mean getting younger audiences to watch the news is not easy and getting majority of the "old" people to go from lean back to lean forward isn't easy either. It feels like a gamble and I still believe it succeeded in a parallel universe. ~~~ rhaps0dy >I would fling poop left and right Username checks out :) ------ kome "Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable." I really don't think so. Their product would have succeeded with a more humble and focused approach. A generalist company like IAC/InterActiveCorp is doing fine: Yahoo too had all the assets to keep a position of relevance on the global internet. Yahoo management was bad. That's all. ~~~ tomhoward IAC's market cap is about $8B. Yahoo's cap is 6x that at $48B. It's hard to imagine Yahoo just transforming itself into the same kind of company as IAC, only 6 times bigger. But it could be said that it is making that kind of transformation, only more suited to its circumstances, by selling off its consumer brands to Verizon and retaining just the more valuable Asian investments in its current entity. The whole problem for Mayer was that its key products had started losing relevance long before she joined, and its brand/reputation was already a joke among the types of people it needed to appeal to - i.e. early adopter consumers and top engineering/design talent - if it was going to make a turnaround. Unlike Apple in 1996, it didn't still have loyal, true-believer devotees ready to enthusiastically embrace it once it started producing good products again. The people still using Yahoo products have mostly been people too indifferent about tech to switch their email platform or their browser's default page - i.e., people at the opposite end of the spectrum to Apple's true believers. So all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that is most lucrative, which is precisely what she's done. ~~~ mgkimsal > all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that > is most lucrative That doesn't explain the dozens of acquisitions under her leadership. ~~~ tomhoward Sure it does: it may have been the only way to attract and retain enough top engineering and design talent to keep the consumer brands valuable enough to sell at a good price. Xobni, in particular, would fit that justification, given how key email has been to Yahoo's user retention. Tumblr on the other hand was more of a product/brand/audience acquisition than an acquihire, but it could well have made the suite of consumer brands more attractive to buyers. ~~~ pbhjpbhj So she got paid preposterous amounts of money to ruin other businesses so she could use their workforce to fool investors in to propping up Yahoo when it was noticed Yahoo was no longer useful and was falling in it's goals? Capitalism: 'optimising' markets by giving all the value created to individuals who destroy the means of value creation. It's like some sort of economic terrorism, destroy any hope of economy and flee with the money. ~~~ marcosdumay Now that you've named it, this looks way too common. ------ kostyk After five years of leadership the bottom line is value of investment to shareholders has tripled. Mission accomplished. Who cared about Yahoo web business even then anyway. ~~~ jpatokal The article's point is that virtually all of this tripling was due to Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, not anything she did. ~~~ kyleschiller I don't know, it mentions that she had "little control" over the investments, but then goes on to explain that: managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms. Mayer. Mr. Loeb had accused Yahoo’s previous leaders of mishandling both their core business and the Alibaba relationship.... Ms. Mayer delegated the Alibaba issue, hiring an experienced dealmaker, Jacqueline Reses, to be the company’s principal liaison to Alibaba and its leaders, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai. Ms. Reses helped the Chinese company navigate its initial public offering. She also renegotiated an agreement, struck just before Ms. Mayer arrived, that would have forced Yahoo to sell an additional 122 million shares in the offering. Those extra shares are now worth $15 billion. ------ valuearb Any article that claims to be "dissecting" her compensation and then doesn't detail her prices for her option grants and how much she made from each specifically and how much she made from her restricted stock, isn't "dissecting" squat. In reality she got options for a bunch of shares. The stock tripled, making her hundreds of millions of dollars. If the stock had gone down or just not gone up, she would have made far far less (basically just salary plus value of the restricted stock grant). Whether she deserves credit for that, or whether option grants are even a good mechanism for rewarding CEOs, is an entirely different conversation (answers are she deserves some credit and no). But she was never paid $900K a week. As of today she can make $900K a week if she sold all her shares right now. But until she cashes out her shares that amount changes daily. Next week her estimated earnings could easily be down to $700K a week, a year from now they could be nearly wiped out. "Dissecting" option grant valuations in detail would also have been interesting. For example her original option grant was valued at $21M. That means that based over the length of the grant, with a reasonable expected stock price increase (say 8% per year), compensation consultants estimated that she'd profit $21M. So how many shares, at what price, add up to that valuation? Why was that reasonable? I understand she walked away from a huge amount of compensation she was owed at Google to take the Yahoo job, and the board had to compensate her for that. But how much of that was reasonable? "Dissection" of it by a journalist should include details of that compensation, how the amount was determined, and quotes from those who had opposing viewpoints at the time. ------ pmlnr 900k/week? That is 46M$ for a year. That is 500 times more than a salary considered pretty decent in the UK tech world. No matter who you are, what you do, that is just plain too much money to receive as a paycheck. ~~~ na85 That's not even the highest, either. Pichai makes more than double. ~~~ pmlnr Out of curiosity, what is the known highest salary for a tech-type employee? (dev, sysadmin sre, whatever) You know, those whom without tech companies tend to sink. ~~~ jacquesm ~350K / year afaihdp. Consultants can and do make (much) more on a weekly or monthly basis but they rarely have their dance cards fully booked, so then you have to discount the weekly rate by how much down time there is. ~~~ icebraining What about Anthony Levandowski? He worked for Google for about 10 years, and got $120M. How many tech people are getting hefty "incentive payments" which we don't even know about, since they don't end up getting sued? ~~~ jacquesm Those are the exceptions, not the rule. ~~~ icebraining There's only one CEO per company. ~~~ nojvek If you read carefully she got a lot of compensation as stock. It's the stock price that shot up due to alibaba and yahoo Japan that netted her money. Initial compensation was only 30 mil or so. Same with picchai. Google is doing very well under him. Stock rises and his gains rises. He is very incentivized to make that happen as the CEO ------ throw2016 I don't think focusing on Mayer is helpful. It is one of the more egregious cases but it shows just how badly c-level compensation, accountability and agency is broken. It also shows how some economic theories that sound good don't remotely work in the real world. And sometimes economic theories are designed to sound good. There are real world consequences of skyrocketing executive pay disconnected from performance and accountability. Bad or short term strategies can result in losses of thousands of qualified and experienced people, plummeting productivity and revenue, mid and long term setbacks and serious harm to future prospects. Golden parachutes usually mean no consequence to the implementing c-level teams. They usually end up easily soft landing at a consultancy or another gig. Carly Fiorina and Stephen Elop come to mind. Robert Nardelli and Home Depot also come to mind. You can't be hand waving around this for 2 decades counting. ------ turbinerneiter They could have payed roughly 500 people for 5 years with that money. Maybe one of them would have caught the bugs that led to their data breaches. They also could have bankrolled 10 or more start-ups with that cash. Hell, they could have spent it on blow for their workforce. At least that would have made for interesting stories. ~~~ exodust I know right, I can't understand how we _still_ place so much importance on the character sitting in the CEO's chair and not the people actually working on the products. I suppose not all companies do that. It's sad about Yahoo, my first email address was Yahoo, signed up around 1998. I still have it and use it. ------ k__ Sounds like she and her friends she hired were some kind of locust who got lucky in the end. ~~~ na85 Sounds more like she joined a sinking ship and it sank. ~~~ k__ They sold it for a fortune before it sank. ~~~ na85 I guess so. I'd expect no different from any other CEO. ------ james1071 Normal rules don't seem to apply in Silicon Valley. ------ 2_listerine_pls Yahoo is dying, let's put Marissa at Yahoo to avoid being seen as a monopoly. ------ timwaagh why does it need to be even a question whether she was overpaid. these ceos always are. in this case even more, because they paid for a big name. names dont produce results, but they cost a lot of money all the same. ------ ensiferum I know this is going to sound bitter but I could have trained a monkey to do her job. And I would have asked for only 50% of her salary. I'm sure she thinks she did a great job and earned her position etc. By realistically I think her best assets are like any other professional CEO' s. Good at bullshitting and at golf and knowing the right ppl. What really frustrates me is how nothing ever sticks to these guys. Lose or fail it's never their fault and they always earn their money's and bonuses. ~~~ babyrainbow >I know this is going to sound bitter but I could have trained a monkey to do her job.. You could have. But you could never have made the monkey make it to the interview... ~~~ mcherm > you could never have made the monkey make it to the interview You phrased that correctly. The hard part wasn't to do a good job in the interview, the hard part was getting invited to the interview in the first place. And to be fair, Melissa Myers' resume justified her being considered for the position. ------ blunte Summary: Mayer earned $240 million for pushing Yahoo further into decline, while a Yahoo investment that predated her skyrocketed, tripling Yahoo's stock price during her tenure (despite her destructive impact). ~~~ pbhjpbhj earned =/= was paid, IMO this is an important distinction. ------ jackmott the salary is absurd for any outcome. anyone getting paid that much is irresponsible, as is anyone paying then. ~~~ TheGrassyKnoll Sure its absurd, but at least the Feds & state of California are going to get a rather large chunk of it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Meshbird – distributed private networking - antonkozlov https://github.com/meshbird/meshbird ====== joshstrange How does this compare to something like zerotier? And how does this "All traffic transmit directly to recipient peer without passing any gateways." without hitting some server to negotiate the first connect? Does the "MESHBIRD_KEY" contain the IP?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Topsoil, a gardening puzzle game - kneeko https://topsoilgame.com ====== celticninja over quota error message appearing for me. ~~~ kneeko fixed! thanks for letting me know.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Would you pay for freelance marketing and user research? - schutte I'm thinking about going independent as a freelance marketing and user research contractor for startups. Think of me as one person method, ideo, or other marketing and usability / user research shop without the overhead, but all of the experience.<p>I can help you package and pitch your product, learn more about what users want from your work, build a marketing plan, and teach you how to do those things yourself.<p>I'm doing a bit of exploration. - Would you hire someone like me? - What would you want me to do for your project or company? - What would you want to pay hourly or weekly?<p>p.s., A few of my developer friends suggested that I post this here. Apologies if this feels like spam. ====== knes FWIW Being a marketing guy myself I found it hard to sale my skills ( how ironic ) as a freelancer. The main reason is that many young entrepreneur think that marketing is simple and they will just "do it themselves" ( And fail ). They don't understand marketing is a skill on its own, like writing code for example. So the first thing you should do is educate them on that and then sale your service to them :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Coronavirus high risk countries visualization according to German RKI - yeldiR https://geolic.net/covid19-risk-areas ====== Dahoon Or "A visualization of the modern health systems in the world".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
World’s Largest Video Commercial P2P Deployment - shacharz http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3079128 ====== billyp123 Hey everybody! If you want to learn more about Peer5's Serverless CDN email us at info@peer5.com	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
I've taught quite a few friends how to code. Here are my thoughts: - rotemtam https://medium.com/@rotemtam/the-law-of-bruised-foreheads-1e86cfc40eb5 ====== bl4ckdu5t Don't give me money, teach me how to make money. That's like a common saying. In this case, if I ever have a friend that needs to learn to code I think I'd rather point them in directions in which they can become self-taught programmers like myself. Although I am 100% in agreement that they should have bruises before asking questions ~~~ rotemtam I think the moment you give someone clarity after they have been wrangling with a tough problem is very magical. Because they can see the complexity which never comes through in a simple tutorial or demonstration.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to find a high paying software developer position - brogrammer2019 I have been programming since age 9 nearly every day (now 31 years of age)<p>I have made various web and mobile apps (all failed in terms of profitability), have experience in various database engines (Oracle Database, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL) pretty good at UX and UI, also I believe I am pretty good at coding. Also have some knowledge of building and training Neural Networks. Yet I still still cannot find a job today that pays over 100k<p>All the consulting agencies I have interviewed this year offered around 55k USD<p>I hear about other people on HN making more than 100k, and more than 1k per day programming.<p>Not sure what I am doing wrong? ====== bradwood It's not only about skills, but supply-and-demand economics, perception, et al. Try to think about a sector, vertical market, tech or industry domain, or similar that is in high demand and build specialist, demonstrable skills in that area. Also, make sure your soft skills are top notch - you are confident, articulate, present well. Talk at meet-ups, make youtube videos, write a blog -- do a little bit of self-marketing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
400 vs. 422 response to POST of data - rahulroy9202 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16133923/400-vs-422-response-to-post-of-data ====== rahulroy9202 I was overwhelm by the answer and had to share it. Sometimes the depth of discussions/answers on stackoverflow baffles me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Back to the Futu-Rr-e: Deterministic Debugging with Rr - mnemonik http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/64/ ====== kragen Michael Elizabeth Chastain became the maintainer of the Linux ioctl list in the early days because he wanted his mec-replay tool to be able to work, and ioctls were a fly in the ointment — each ioctl has its own idea of how to interpret the arguments, and may end up accessing user memory in some complicated way. Record-and-replay tools like mec-replay, rr, [https://github.com/moyix/panda](https://github.com/moyix/panda), and [http://velvetpulse.com/2012/11/27/scribe-the- deterministic-t...](http://velvetpulse.com/2012/11/27/scribe-the- deterministic-transparent-record-replay-engine/) need to be able to intercept that access in order to record the relevant data. Edit: of course, I should have mentioned that doesn't apply to PANDA — by recording events at a non-system-call interface, PANDA avoids the problems of system-call emulation and instead has the problems of hardware emulation. I imagine PANDA will be a heck of a lot more useful for debugging new bare-metal operating systems. The publisher regrets the error. Time-travel debugging and deterministic replay is such a fundamentally important feature, and it can expand our capabilities in many different ways that we're only starting to explore. Debugging is just one possible application; consider also exhaustive testing of error conditions, re- execution of optimistic transactions that hit a write conflict, temporal backtracking search over executions, data prevalence (though it doesn't solve the schema upgrade problem), and deterministic building. And remember that the hardest problem for reverse-mode automatic differentiation is figuring out how to "run the program backwards" in order to find the gradient of the output; deterministic replay strategies are directly applicable to this problem and therefore to generalized gradient descent. It's a shame that mec-replay fell by the wayside 20 years ago. Surely we won't let that happen this time. [http://www.boutell.com/lsm/lsmbyid.cgi/001191](http://www.boutell.com/lsm/lsmbyid.cgi/001191) [https://static.lwn.net/1999/0121/a/mec.html](https://static.lwn.net/1999/0121/a/mec.html) Much to my surprise, you can still download mec-replay 0.3 from 1995, although you'd probably need to build a Linux 1.3 kernel to run it with: ftp://ftp.shout.net/pub/users/mec/misc/mec-0.3.tar.gz ~~~ moyix Just wanted to point out that PANDA actually doesn't need to know anything about the semantics of system calls, including ioctl. It builds on a whole- system emulator, and the things it records are hardware events (interrupts, memory mapped I/O, DMA, etc.). This is why you can record/replay Windows or any version of Linux without having to explicitly add support for those OSes. Unfortunately we haven't implemented the gdb reverse debugging commands yet, so it's not as useful for debugging as it could be. Hopefully soon. ------ Ygg2 Are there any non-Java IDEs that implement Deterministic debugging? ~~~ kragen What do you mean by "deterministic debugging"? Rr and GDB aren't in Java, and neither are the most common IDEs for GDB. ~~~ Ygg2 I meant like an IDE, like Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA for C/C++ that implements stepping back/forward in code, like rr. ~~~ kragen I think the ones that use GDB will be able to take advantage of rr: Emacs, vim, maybe old versions of XCode. I don't think there are any Java IDEs that implement stepping backwards. ------ chris_wot I'm wondering: if people run something like an unstable Fedora or Ubuntu distribution, could they have an option to automatically run rr for certain software? ------ baldfat Thank you Mozilla!!! As someone that programs in R. By making a it called rr R is now the second hardest to find stuff on Google. They really are going to hate looking for help when all the R searches come up. ~~~ jzd They might call the tool something like rrdb - rr debugger Just like searching google for go is pointless; instead one should search for golang	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Vector - A High-Level Programming Language for GPU Computing - zhemao http://zhehaomao.com/project/2013/12/20/vector.html ====== sitkack Please think about renaming it. This is the most generic, hard to find thing possible. Consider `vecmao` has only 13.5k hits on google. ~~~ theophrastus hear-hear! some of my least favorite things to search and research about are matters related to "R", "C", "dock", "boost", "Go"... i never had any such problems with "erlang", "numpy", or "gromacs". Please do not underestimate the critical nature and endless annoyance associated with naming things after common concepts (or worse yet, single characters) ~~~ yeukhon There seems to be trend of namning things with language as suffix. Like xx.js and xx.py or xx.go ~~~ theophrastus there's a language named "js" or "py"? i'm only aware of languages named "javascript" or "python" ;) ~~~ gcr You knew what OP meant. ;) The suffix is just meant to be unambiguous. Those familiar with the target language will understand what language the library is written for. ------ lelf High-level??? _This_ is high level — [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate) ~~~ asmman1 I don't get you. Is not C high-level? ~~~ stass No, C is as low level as you can get. It directly maps into the instructions of a register machine in runs on. ~~~ sillysaurus2 I invite anyone who thinks C is low level to try their hand at CUDA or OpenCL. You think C is bad? Those are far worse. This is at least a great step in the right direction. It's not "low level" as you describe just because it's C. ~~~ rbonvall You know what's worse than CUDA or OpenCL? General purpose algorithms implemented in a graphics API. I read a lot of GPGPU papers at the university, and I could never understand the older ones, that described algorithms by mapping everything to graphics elements, and computed the solutions as a side-effect of rendering something. Next to that, undestanding an algorithm implemented in CUDA is a breeze. ------ pavanky While it makes CUDA more readable, I feel like the amount of time taken to write the code in this language will be very close to writing actual CUDA code for someone who is experienced with it. ~~~ zhemao Maybe not faster to write, but it'd be less repetitive. I've written a bit of CUDA code, and having to put in a bunch of cudaMemcpy calls everywhere got pretty old. Also, reduce is pretty annoying to implement properly, and I'd rather not have to do it again for every possible reducing function. ~~~ pavanky That is what libraries are for. ------ 14113 Very interesting! I'm also implementing a programming language for my undergrad dissertation (but specifically for agent based simulations). The thing that struck me most about vector was the radically different for loops (compared to C). I'm assuming you're purposefully crippling them to make parallelisation easier? Or is there another reason? EDIT: One other thing - the website fails to scroll nicely on a mac (in chrome). I had to manually use the scroll bars instead of being able to 2 finger swipe... ~~~ zhemao Yes, the special for loop syntax is to make it consistent with the "pfor" syntax. The "pfor" syntax is that way so that it can be parallelized. Also, I can't believe I forgot to mention this in the post, but both for and pfor can sweep multiple iterators, so for (i in 0:10, j in 0:5) { } Is equivalent to for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { for (j = 0; j < 5; j++) { } } ~~~ melonakos Hey, @zhemao, wasn't kidding about wanting to talk about bringing you on board here. Seriously takes a lot of talent to do what you've done :) ~~~ melonakos Ah, OK. Well, it's never too late to say no to the BigCo and join a startup :) * [http://notonlyluck.com/2013/07/23/reasons-to-join-a-startup-...](http://notonlyluck.com/2013/07/23/reasons-to-join-a-startup-over-a-bigco/) * [http://notonlyluck.com/2013/07/24/more-thoughts-on-reasons-t...](http://notonlyluck.com/2013/07/24/more-thoughts-on-reasons-to-join-a-startup-over-a-bigco/) ~~~ goldenkey Startup culture is a cancer. Quite trying to sway him from true greatness. All hail Emperor Bozos. ------ pflanze I'm wondering about the timings on page 36 in the vector.pdf; those can't be seconds or it would be way too slow. (I've written a program[1] to calculate the mandelbrot set on the CPU with SIMD optimizations, and SMT support, on my ageing laptop with a Core 2 duo it calculates the start set in about 0.07 seconds.) It would be interesting if you provided the pure C program that was used for the timings as then I could get a real grasp of the performance of the GPU variant. [1] [https://github.com/pflanze/mandelbrot.git](https://github.com/pflanze/mandelbrot.git) (BTW, also in the PDF, page 35, you write "computes the number of iterations til convergence for that point", that should be "divergence", right?) PS. I'm quite impressed by what you achieved in the given time frame. ~~~ zhemao You can find the benchmarks in the "bench" directory of the git repo. The CPU code we generate for the benchmark is not particularly optimized and is completely single-threaded (so not really a fair comparison). ~~~ pflanze I'm getting the following when running "vagrant up"; this is on Debian. $ vagrant up /home/chrishaskell/src/vector/Vagrantfile:7:in `<top (required)>': undefined method `configure' for Vagrant:Module (NoMethodError) from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:115:in `load' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:115:in `block in procs_for_source' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config.rb:41:in `block in capture_configures' from <internal:prelude>:10:in `synchronize' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config.rb:36:in `capture_configures' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:114:in `procs_for_source' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:51:in `block in set' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:45:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/config/loader.rb:45:in `set' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:377:in `block in load_config!' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:392:in `call' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:392:in `load_config!' from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/vagrant/environment.rb:327:in `load!' from /usr/bin/vagrant:40:in `<main>' If you post the generated C code then I'll give the timings and try to compare what it's doing differently. The CPU I'm using (Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz) was released in July 2006 [1]. The GPU you're using was released on 15 June 2007 [2]. My CPU code calculates the 1246x998 pixel image of the zoomed out view (real=-2..2, imag=-1.6..1.6, maxdepth=200) in 0.07 seconds, if your GPU code does about the same in 0.61 sec, then that's about 8 times slower than the slightly older CPU can do with hand optimized C code. That wouldn't be such a pretty result yet :) [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_Series](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_Series) ------ elwell Nothing against this particular language, but... I feel like there is a new language at least every day. It would seem that this does more harm than good to the developer community's progress. Of course, languages need to be iterated on in addition to the programs they compose. But, there is now such a large spread of similar languages that it necessarily slows the development of the most productive ones by blurring/resetting the focus constantly. Many technical problems can be solved with existing languages, rather than eliciting the distraction of a brand new language. Though, in this case, there is perhaps a clear purpose for the specialization of the language. There is certainly a benefit to new languages that offer _truly_ new concepts or optimizations. ~~~ zhemao I agree. This was just a class project, and I don't plan on continuing development. These features would be a lot more useful rolled into existing programming languages. ~~~ kylelutz Would you be interested in trying to adapt some of your approaches into a C++ GPGPU library ([https://github.com/kylelutz/compute](https://github.com/kylelutz/compute))? ~~~ zhemao Hey that's pretty cool, and would probably make OpenCL usable by mere mortals. One improvement that I see you could borrow from vector is getting rid of this explicit copying business. Take a look at the array implementation in our runtime library. [https://github.com/vectorlang/vector/blob/master/rtlib/vecto...](https://github.com/vectorlang/vector/blob/master/rtlib/vector_array.hpp) Basically, the VectorArray class contains both the host array pointer and the device array pointer. There are also two boolean flags, h_dirty and d_dirty. When you modify array elements on the host, h_dirty is set to one. Then, when you run a kernel, the data is copied to the device if h_dirty is set, h_dirty is cleared, and d_dirty is set. When you try to read an array element again on the CPU, the data is copied from device to host if d_dirty is set, and d_dirty is then cleared. ------ melonakos Copycatting is the sincerest form of flattery :p [http://arrayfire.com](http://arrayfire.com) ~~~ muyuu How similar is it? ~~~ melonakos Reminds me of an early version of ArrayFire from 2009 or so. The project highlights 3 aspects: * Automatic memory management - Been in ArrayFire since 2008 * Their pfor statement - See ArrayFire's GFOR, [http://www.accelereyes.com/arrayfire/c/page_gfor.htm](http://www.accelereyes.com/arrayfire/c/page_gfor.htm) * High-order functions - Been in ArrayFire since 2009 It's always interesting to watch other people reinvent the wheel. It takes a lot of talent though. If the people behind this want an awesome opportunity to join with our team (where we live this stuff every day and have developed a great culture and customer focus), give me a holler. Find me at [http://notonlyluck.com](http://notonlyluck.com) ~~~ goldenkey It's interesting how much startups tend to talk about how great the culture is. Can you elaborate on this 'developed culture.' I am really curious and hoping for a real response, not fluff. ~~~ melonakos I've written dozens of posts about it. Maybe peruse some of the posts here: [http://notonlyluck.com/category/culture/](http://notonlyluck.com/category/culture/) ~~~ goldenkey I see, thanks. ------ Chromozon This was an undergraduate project? Props.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills - guildwriter https://www.wsj.com/articles/exclusive-test-data-many-colleges-fail-to-improve-critical-thinking-skills-1496686662 ====== jseliger I've taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I've written about this in various places (e.g. [https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for- the-party-eliz...](https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party- elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/)), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them. In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, but mostly I'm opposed to the way no one explicitly tells this to students. A lot of the brighter or better prepared ones figure it out, but many, it seems, never do. ~~~ Animats "Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers. I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs for both sides. Seeing both sides discussing the same facts and coming to different conclusions gives a sense of how to decide something. Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying. This is apparently unusual, although it didn't used to be. Left-wing radicals used to read the Wall Street Journal, to see what the other side was up to. This seems to have stopped; the problem with the Occupy movement is that while they were against Wall Street, they never developed an agenda that could be implemented to do something about it. [1] [http://www.soe.vt.edu/highered/files/Perspectives_PolicyNews...](http://www.soe.vt.edu/highered/files/Perspectives_PolicyNews/09-03/marketingalcohol.pdf) ~~~ thebspatrol I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric. I easily spend far more time listening to and reading right-leaning rhetoric, despite being left leaning. I already know "my side". Why would I want to live in an echo chamber? ~~~ davidf18 I have to read NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Economist, The Guardian, Breitbart, TimesofIsrael to get full information. NYT does a lot of censoring/under emphasizing of critical information. Of course there is also general reading that is important. ~~~ Bakary Interestingly, this is still a significantly limited echo chamber because these sources are all Anglo-centric, perhaps even the Times of Israel despite its location. Of course, this number of publications is already a large investment of time so I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to do more. ~~~ eeZah7Ux > because these sources are all Anglo-centric They are also mainstream media. They provide a very narrow set of viewpoints. One example? No newspaper publish material as significant as wikileaks. ------ danielford I teach community college biology, and I agree that we're really bad at teaching critical thinking. But the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) cited by this article was graded by a computer last time I checked. Here's a direct quote from one of their papers a few years ago: "Beginning in fall 2010, we moved to automated scoring exclusively, using Pearson’s Intelligent Essay Assess or (IEA). IEA is the automated scoring engine developed by Pearson Knowledge Technologies to evaluate the meaning of text, not just writing mechanics. Pearson has trained IEA for the CLA using real CLA responses and scores to ensure its consistency with scores generated by human raters." Link below: [https://www.pdf- archive.com/2017/06/06/cla/cla.pdf](https://www.pdf- archive.com/2017/06/06/cla/cla.pdf) Most of you are more knowledgeable about technology than I am. So I'll leave it to you to decide if using an algorithm to grade an essay-based exam of critical thinking is a valid approach to this problem. ~~~ Xeoncross So as long as you think critically the same way as everyone else does you'll be fine. ~~~ TallGuyShort Or perhaps worse: think critically the same way the test writer does: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests- are-s...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i- cant-answer-these_us_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341) ~~~ jdmichal I've often thought that a lot of the high-brow analysis put into art was junk. Just people taking dots and connecting them with shreds of evidence existent in the art. Confirmation bias masquerading as analysis. It's nice to see an artist agreeing with that viewpoint. I should clarify that I don't mind when the _context_ of a piece is explained. I like knowing about where the artist was when a work was created; what was happening around them that might have influenced the work. It's when that jumps to "and this small detail is about this particular thing that was happening" \-- and always spoken with confidence -- that I feel like the train jumps the rails. ~~~ brightball Ha! I don't know if you've ever seen Ocean's 13, but there's a line in that movie that cracks me up along the same "high brow" analysis lines. > Matt Damon - "Do you have any wine back there? > Lady - "Château d'Yquem?" > Matt Damon - "As long as it's not '73..." Just makes me chuckle every time because he's a con artist in such a broad field almost nobody can actually identify all of the good and bad varieties from any given year. By just giving an obscure reference you somehow sound like you know what you're talking about...knowing that nobody else actually knows enough about what they are talking about to call you on it. Just struck me as a great bit of "high brow crowd" humor. ~~~ colomon Haven't seen the movie, so it's hard to directly comment, but for what it's worth, Château d'Yquem is a very famous wine. Exactly the (rare) sort where the popular wine magazines will routinely every few years have an article reviewing how the different historic vintages are holding up -- should you drink that 1975 d'Yquem now or hold it a few more years? It also would be a very dangerous wine to BS about if you didn't know anything about it. 1973 apparently was a lesser year. (Still, it would run you something like $500 a bottle today.) 1975 and 1976 were classic years, name those as something to skip and people will be questioning your taste. And they didn't release a wine at all for the 1972 and 1974 vintages, because they didn't think the grapes were up to snuff. I had to look those details up because I haven't paid much attention to wine in 20 years. (Wife doesn't like it, so it's hard to justify buying even $20 bottle. Not that I ever could have afforded a Château d'Yquem.) But I still remembered the mid-70s produced a couple of really good vintages. Someone who was actively into wine could probably have given you all those details without any research. ------ davidf18 Why wait for college to teach critical thinking skills? My father is a prof at a major university and we grew up discussing ideas, but high schools can teach critical thinking skills and problem solving. My high school was owned by the university and we did a lot of critical thinking. Jewish religious schools (Yeshivas) teach critical thinking skills by studying the Talmud [1]. A number of Yeshiva students take the LSATs and skip college altogether to go directly to law school so powerful is the process of learning Talmud. Basically Talmud is full of (often) legal arguments and stories and a lot of time is spent on thinking through/arguing edge conditions (e.g., a piece of property is found overlapping public space and private space). The point is that college is absolutely not necessary to teach critical thinking skills and in my opinion this should be started at a much younger age. Incidentally, I have found even graduates of Ivy League schools seem to not understand basic fundamentals. For example, in Economics, they don't seem to understand why housing is so expensive in certain cities and don't seem to have the analytical skills to understand why prices are high. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud) ~~~ sametmax I agree that critical thinking should be taugth sooner. A 12 years old can perfectly handle it. I got the most jewish name ever, however, I can't agree with you on the Talmud. Just like the Bible and the Coran, it's full of things that goes exactly in the opposite direction of critical thinking. And religion, while helping with a lot of things like holding communities and sharing values, is definitly using a huge number of arguments that are totally in opposition with critical thinking. Starting by the fact that all of it is based on the assumption you believe in Yahweh. However, since the Jewish community itself is pretty well educated, it's easy to be biased. ~~~ davidf18 I have learned Talmud without being religious and it is very, very educational in my opinion and very interesting. If you study it you will see that it is full of critical thinking and different ways of looking at the same issue. It has been translated into Korean and a number of Koreans study it to help them to be better at thinking [1]. Check out an Artscroll Talmud which has a good English translation. There might even be something on-line. Also, much of critical thinking in my opinion is cultural. In some cultures, children "are to be seen and not heard." In the Passover Seder (The Last Supper was a Passover Seder) the youngest child at the Seder asks "The 4 questions" (memorized ahead of the ceremony of course). [1] [http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud- be...](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud-became-a- best-seller-in-south-korea) ~~~ rickdale Well, speaking from a secular point of view, studying the Talmud in and of itself makes you religious regardless of the education you are getting from it. You are funny. You are basically orthodox for whats considered Jewish around me and yet you don't even think of yourself as ,"very religious". ~~~ davidf18 Well, I'm glad you find me amusing. Using your logic, studying Physics makes me a Physicist. Studying Mathematics makes me a Mathematician. Also, I think that the Koreans who study Talmud might not think that they are religious. Honestly, anyone with intellectual curiosity I feel would find the Talmud interesting, regardless of being non-religious or of an ethnicity other than Judaism. ~~~ rickdale _Physics makes me a Physicist_ Thats not what I said. Thats comparing apples and oranges. I would bet my bank account your are Jewish, and you are religious in the eyes of this Jew, regardless if you are as religious as your father. I dont doubt the talmud is intellectually interesting, but the reality is those that are studying it ARE religious. Even the koreans you keep referencing; even if they aren't religious at all, they are in the minority for those studying the Talmud that way. ~~~ ambicapter > the reality is those that are studying it ARE religious. Even the koreans > you keep referencing; even if they aren't religious at all, they are in the > minority for those studying the Talmud that way. "All those who study it are religious, except those that aren't, but they don't count anyways" ------ Nickersf Every time a college sucks article gets published I think the same things: Look at the college enrollment rates since the 1960's. Look at the tuition rates since the 1960's Look at the distribution of majors since the 1960's Then precede to look at the labor market. It all becomes very clear. There's millions of great young people roaming the halls of colleges who are not engaged in higher learning. Great young people who would develop critical thinking skills from work, family and good on the job training. Many of these young people are told from an early age that college is a must in order to get anywhere. Whether that's true, I can't answer with confidence. I waited to go to college. After high school I decided to work, pay bills and taxes. In my late 20's I went back for a CS degree and am productive and happy now. Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money. Is there even a solution to this issue outside of the family? Is the focus and quality of k-12 in the wrong place? Is it a mixture? Who knows? ~~~ Hydraulix989 > Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and > money. Why is that, if I may ask? For me personally, my goal was to graduate with a CS degree as soon as possible right after high school so I could start my much higher paying full time engineering job as quickly as possible. I noticed you also majored in CS, so I wonder what I might have overlooked? ~~~ Nickersf I was totally disengaged from school socially and academically. I went and worked in a kitchen so I could buy a van, guitar and amp at 17. I spent my 20's touring around North America and Europe within the underground crust/punk community. I worked at record stores and DIY labels. All of it has been a great learning opportunity and helped me develop on the fly critical thinking and problem solving skills. It helped me appreciate the value of the dollar and what not having a place to live is like. It also taught me how the private sector works, networking and selling products in a limited market. I learned vast alcohol consumption causes problems when trying to do all those things, and not having your shit together is costly. However, the big thing is I learned all of that without being crippled with student loans, in fact I came out of it with savings, and capital. ~~~ Hydraulix989 Wow, that's a great story! College definitely isn't for everyone, and I'm hearing more and more of other people with stories just like yours. ------ Fricken The problem isn't critical thinking skills. You can get together any 5 jokers and ask them 'what's the best way to build a backyard patio?', and they'll all start stroking their chins. But when thinking critically interferes with some sort of strong emotion, or pre-conceived belief system, then forget it. It doesn't matter how much education you have, if entertaining a particular problem causes your amygdala to start firing then your ability to think critically is out the window. ~~~ cirgue > It doesn't matter how much education you have, if entertaining a particular > problem causes your amygdala to start firing then your ability to think > critically is out the window. Thinking critically is, by definition, the ability to not hold beliefs and opinions too deeply or too personally. This is a learnable skill, and is one facet of intellectual maturity. ~~~ BearGoesChirp In which case there are levels of it because there are issues that I can discuss to get an emotional response from almost anyone, especially if they think I'm arguing the issue for some reason other than to measure their emotional reaction. ------ ThomPete Critical thinking is an important skill but I'd like to caution against this fixation on critical thinking thought in collage as some sort of beacon for society. Critical thinking is something people develop over the years and it starts early IMO. It's not just a 4 year course. It's a whole approach to the world around you. There are many critical thinkers in my experience outside of collage. And I don't see it a problem as such. Also it doesn't matter how good a critical thinker you are we all have blind spots and biases that makes it impossible to be critical thinkers in all contexts. Will need to look at the study to see how it's actually measuring the critical thinking skills. Many of those who do learn critical thinking first when they get to college end up getting such a aha moment that they think critical thinking is the same as constructive thinking and should be applied to everything. You often meet them in the big companies or management. Many of them like to play the devils advocate poking holes in everything around them but aren't able to come up with solutions themselves. In my view critical thinking is best learned by reading philosophy and seeing how philosophers historically either improved or created new theories. Because here critical thinking and constructive thinking goes hand in hand. If you read the right progression of philosophers through time you end up understanding how they didn't just critique but put forward their theories which could then be critiqued. In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking. ~~~ xaa > In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a > problem as no critical thinking. I disagree. I see critical thinking as a prerequisite for constructive thinking. Without the ability to identify problems, you can't offer solutions. I and many fellow students in grad school went through exactly this evolution. First, you are taught to be critical and skeptical of everything. But at some point, you realize you can't get anything done in your own research if you are constantly skeptical of everything, so you learn how to find "good enough" solutions to tough problems. So WRT society, I think it could use a healthy dose of critical thinking, because it suffers from the same problem. People can't identify good arguments, so they don't know they even need better ones. ~~~ ThomPete Well by definition it can't be a prerequisite. Constructive thinking must have come first otherwise there was nothing to think critically about :) Joke aside: Critical Thinking isn't going to save the world. It's a fallacy in the same line of; if only people were more rational or more logical. It has it's uses but it also has it's mis-uses. ~~~ cryoshon >Critical Thinking isn't going to save the world true, but why is >if only people were more rational or more logical. a fallacy? we can see pretty clean data that show more education = better societal outcomes... ~~~ ThomPete Rationality and logic is used for bad things too. ------ aphextron The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually _learning_ the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and developing new skills. ~~~ ChuckMcM I have attended several different colleges, and my kids have all attended different colleges (than the ones that I've attended) and from that sample we discovered great variation in both the quality of the teaching and the focus of the teaching. From our limited data set (3 private liberal arts, 1 private "top ten", 3 different community colleges) the small private liberal arts colleges all had some classes that were taught by professors who cared that the students really understood the material, the community college classes were mostly taught to the exam, and my experience at USC was the big 'survey' classes (like EE101, CS203, etc) were generally taught to the exam (specific learning skills were 'taught' in the lab sessions) but the more specialized classes (like EE450 engineering calculus) were more focused on developing skills at using the material in your future life. Bottom line is that it is really hard to generalize about colleges because colleges can be so different. ~~~ lowpro Can confirm that your experience at the top ten school applies to Purdue Engineering and Technology majors. First year starts out slow with mostly 100+ people classes (accounting had 1,100! 550 in the room at a time), but after that they get specialized and you normally find the more personable professors in the higher numbers since there are normal size classes of maybe 10-50. ~~~ majewsky Same here in Germany. Our CS faculty admits some 300-400 students who are sitting together in one lecture hall in the basic courses (math, algorithms, logic, information theory, electronics), with tutorial sessions for about 30-40 students per room. The specialized lectures in later semesters have 10-30 students and only one tutorial session. I've found the smaller lectures to be much nicer since it allows engaged students to discuss the subject with the lecturer more freely. (Of course, it depends on the lecturer, i.e. if he/she allows questions and counterpoints from the audience, but most lecturers do.) ------ ergothus I remember the moment I unlocked the critical thinking I do have. It was 7th grade, and I was in a home-ec-like class. The day before we had learned how to order from mail order catalogues (showing my age there). This day the teacher passed out magazines, told us to pick an ad, and then find 5 ways it was misleading. Easy, right? Sex, money, Fame, these associations are in a bunch of ads, and everyone knows about them. But it turns out that 5 is a pretty high number for some ads. You had to really look. And even that didn't change anything for me. Then we presented to others. And one girl showed an ad for Bayer, and said "4 out of 5 doctors recommend. Who picked the 5 doctors?". My mind was blown. I think it was the moment where I considered myself a good judge and then was shown a point I had never even considered. I had thought all about having careful wording on the survey, not mentioning any negative results, but I had never considered that the very basis of it could be manipulated to the point of meaninglessness. I think that moment of fundamental distrust, in both what I'm being told, as well as in my own certainty, did the trick. Perhaps too well - I'm hypersensitive to being manipulated. I rejected any career that involved deliberate group manipulation, such as military, law enforcement, and legal. I recognize that EVERYTHING is manipulative to some degree and can't be avoided, but I try to avoid anything that does it very explicitly, so I can't for example, watch most documentaries. The moment the vocal pacing and background music starts something in my brains starts shouting "YOU ARE BEING MANIPULATED!" and I try to fight that manipulation, which is largely impossible so I generally end up turning it off. Ditto political speeches (I'll skim the transcripts, thanks), most anything out of marketing, etc. I don't really think we can "teach" critical thinking, but we can provide opportunity for it again and again. I think our school system in the US (no experience elsewhere) is very poorly set up to do that, be it college or pre- college. ~~~ MaxGabriel Side story about the 4/5 recommendation, this one for toothpaste: apparently Colgate would just ask dentists to list every type of toothpaste they recommended, and 80% of those doctors wrote down Colgate as an option, thus the "four out of five dentists recommend Colgate" ads. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate- gets-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-the- brush-off-for-misleading-ads.html) ~~~ dhimes Now I'm very interested why 20% _wouldn 't_ write down Colgate. Did they know something the others didn't? ~~~ antisthenes They probably just forgot about it. If someone asked you to write all the brands of X that you've ever used, can you remember all of them, especially if they were nearly equivalent in quality and use case? ~~~ dhimes I might forget about Aquafresh or Close-up or something, but I'm pretty sure that I would remember Crest and Colgate- especially if I was a dentist. It's like leaving Honda off a list of reliable cars. Hard to believe it's an accident for any reasonable sample size. ------ camelNotation > Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students > fail to improve... The irony of this sentence is painful. The entire reason most colleges fail to improve reasoning - something everyone has known for a while now - is because of standardization and industry-oriented training. They've transformed into advanced trade schools, caring more about selling products (graduates) than producing well-rounded, capable leaders. The entire idea of a standardized test is to produce the very metrics they use to sell those products. And you know what the worst part about it all is? They are using the old college model (4-year baccalaureate programs) to do what could be done just as effectively in about two years. So they aren't even good at what they are TRYING to do. ~~~ eastWestMath I used to make fun of the idea of coding bootcamps. Then I started a PhD in computer science and realized only 30% of CS students actually engage with the theory courses that would differentiate them from boot camp grads. At this point I'd be more inclined to hire a philosophy grad from a small liberal arts school who went to a boot camp than a CS major from a big school, at least I know there will be a capacity for abstraction and decent writing skills. ------ unabst I went to MIT, and I'm pretty sure everyone already had critical thinking skills. In fact, I just assumed that's part of what the admissions office was looking for. > at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess > the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table Is this what defines critical thinking? Because if these are the skills they want to teach, they should just explicitly teach them. Philosophy taught me a bit about arguments, but it wasn't writing class. In writing class we wrote, but they didn't teach structured arguments. Personally, I loved solving logic puzzles as a kid, and I'd read. Also my mother raised me to think carefully and objectively. I don't ever remember being taught "critical thinking" at school though - not in college or anywhere else. I'm not aware of any workplace that teaches it either. Maybe that's why we're screwed!? ~~~ austenallred It seems that no one is really sure what job college _should_ be doing. It's this massive bundle of so much everything that no one knows what's going on but we all keep attending almost no matter what the cost. ~~~ askafriend I really think you hit the nail on the head. The critics of college _and_ the proponents of college _are both_ right - to a certain extent. But therein lies the true problem - no one is really sure about what college truly is, at least we can't agree on it anymore at any level from the student level all the way to the business level. The system has evolved _and_ devolved to a point where it has strayed far beyond it's original intents. However even despite this uncertainty, we continue participation in the system blindly without asking questions and taking into account modern context. I think systematic educational progress is closer to the pace of social progress than the pace of technological progress. It's incredibly complicated with tons of actors that keep the current system rolling and not enough inertia yet to push it in a different direction. ------ ReinholdNiebuhr I've always wondered if going to college immediately at 18 is the wisest of choices. Personally I worked numerous jobs until 30 and earned my bachelors in history and political economy. I always appreciated each class and all that was offered while everyone else around me being way younger were recovering from the night of partying before. I know how I was at 18, I was tired of high school and ready to just explore the world. I did and when I went to college it was on my own dime and when it felt right. Granted what was learned would be considered soft, nothing that could really show in the coding world.. and I get it.. you go to get technical skills to get a good job. To me though if this is what college is about then perhaps we should aim for more of an apprenticeship type set up like Germany. Liberal arts colleges can exist still, but it'll be to teach for a more mature crowd able to pay out of pocket and not being something made almost as a requirement. That's not to say you need a college degree to succeed.. I was already set up in my career at the time without any college experience. Considering now I'm trying to start an aquaculture company I probably should of majored in marine biology... then again.. I really didn't become passionate about over-fishing until I took a political course on it. Shrug. ------ xchip Critical thinking skills are not taught because they teach you how to question authority, and that means criticizing parents, teachers and the system. Socrates already tried doing that and was accused of corrupting youth (and got him condemned to death) ~~~ cryoshon critical thinking also incentivizes discontent, generally speaking. better not to ask the difficult questions ~~~ xchip Epictetus (134 BC) explained very well how to deal with that: [http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html) It's a short but amazing read. On can't believe it was written 2151 years ago :) Let me know if you liked it, I'm curious! ------ raleighm Many comments here are about the value of higher ed generally and are fascinating to read, but I'm interested in critical reasoning particularly, and this study doesn't surprise me. (1) Critical reasoning is rarely taught directly, especially to students who don't major in or take a philosophy course. (2) Even when critical reasoning is taught directly, it's poorly taught. Compare an introductory text on critical reasoning from fifty years ago with one today. You will find that the former feels like it's written for a user of reasoning (which is as it should be written) and the latter is written for explainers of reasoning (colleagues or future academics, I guess?). Jargony, technical, prolix, etc. (3) Too many professors in the humanities are influenced by a conception of argumentation-as-narrative rather than argumentation-as-truthseeking, or deny there's a distinction or that the latter is possible. Quality of indirect/incidental critical reasoning education is not what it used to be. (4) STEM education overemphasizes formal logic. Most of our daily reasoning that's worthy of being called "logic" is informal logic. Outside of university is more important, but things don't look great there either, for reasons everyone here is already familiar with. Echo chambers. Loss of nuance as deliberation is framed in terms that can easily be liked/hearted/shared/retweeted. Curious what, if anything, folks here think could be done to turn things around. [Edited for clarity.] ~~~ lemming Can you recommend a text on critical reasoning? It's something I often feel I'm quite bad at. ~~~ raleighm These are good: The Art of Reasoning: An Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking (Fourth Edition) 4th Edition [https://www.amazon.com/Art-Reasoning-Introduction- Critical-T...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Reasoning-Introduction-Critical- Thinking/dp/0393930785) Reflections on Reasoning 1st Edition [https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Reasoning-Raymond-S- Nicke...](https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Reasoning-Raymond-S-Nickerson- ebook/dp/B00G6TC2AK/) ~~~ lemming Thank you! ------ WheelsAtLarge The article is about college but what about the previous 12 years of school. Why don't students learn critical thinking during those years. 12 years of school and students lack learning skills, critical thinking skills and what burns me most high school graduates don't have a marketable skill they can use to get a job if they have to start working. Last year's election focus on some very irrelevant subjects yet our graduates aren't ready for the world they have to face. School reform should be a hot subject yet it's not at the top of the list. Start up jockeys take note the US school system is ready for disruption. I hope it happens soon. ~~~ thesagan Yeah, I think this one of the great oversights of the higher ed discussion: the near collapse of much of the public school system "outcome profile". Sounds like we're trying to bandaid that with a declining uni system, too. ------ Radim The mandatory Jordan Peterson link: "Why You Go To College" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANtPUg37f04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANtPUg37f04) ~~~ bumblebeard I mostly agreed with what he was saying until he made that non-sequitur about "postmodern neo-Marxism." Universities are just giving the students what they want: a piece of paper that allows access to the job market. Most modern university students do not appear to want an education and neo-Marxism has nothing to do with that shift. ~~~ programmarchy This is a cynical view of what students want. I think you're underestimating the influence that professors have over young developing minds. There is an intellectual war being waged on university campuses, and students are being used as cannon fodder. Postmodern Marxists have virtually taken over humanities, and have been extending their reach outward through the soft sciences for some time now. I would argue that this is directly related to the lack of critical thinking skills developed in universities. Postmodernists view logic and rational thought as tools of oppression used by white males to subjugate women and minority groups in Western cultures. This became a convenient philosophy for Marxists who could no longer rationally defend communism after its repeated failures in the early 20th century. And this is the philosophy being pumped into the minds of students. Hence, you see students of these far left academics violently shutting down free speech across university campuses. They have nothing to gain from rational debate. Their feelings and subjective interpretations trump any form of reason or critical thinking. Jordan Peterson would argue that what young people really want (and what would be good for them) is responsibility. Because responsibility gives an individual a sense of purpose and moral agency. And currently, these values are mainly being cultivated by the right side of the political spectrum, which is why I think you see younger generations shifting towards conservatism. ------ shirro If people had critical thinking skills they wouldn't be taking out outrageous loans to pay for often worthless degrees. ~~~ rockinghigh Good luck finding a job without a college degree. ~~~ shahbaby This guy should not be down voted. For better or worse, College is the new high-school. Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside. The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with? Retail/Sales, Warehouse work, Construction, Odd-jobs, Uber That's the reality. ~~~ icelancer >The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with? Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall? People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there). More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst. ~~~ rockinghigh I also hire engineers and don't care about education. However, what you call networking is often bootstrapped by education and previous work experience. Very few people have "an impressive Github" out of high school that will actually impress good tech companies. However, if you have a bachelor from an average university, you will at least get some phone interviews. ------ seibelj I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!? ~~~ learc83 Most students aren't paying that much. Sticker prices are often much higher than what students actually pay. The sticker price at Harvard is around $60k, but 70% of students receive financial aid from the University and of those students the average paid is actually only about $12k per year. Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k per year. What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else. ~~~ joatmon-snoo > What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k > a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else. To be fair, this is what the system _strives_ to. More and more schools are achieving an equitable balance (this is also why top unis are shifting towards need-based policies, as opposed to merit-based ones: your merit threshold for FA should be the threshold at which you accept students), but there are still kinks (IIRC students from farms are one notable demographic - their families tend to have high cashflow, because of the sheer value of the equipment and crops that they work with, even though their net income is incredibly low). On the other hand you have schools like NYU that pretty much exist to strip their students of financial assets: they combine administrators who don't care for furthering their institutions as ones of education, but rather moneymaking tools, with financial aid offices so miserably incompetent that they presumably only exist so that they can claim to have such on marketing materials. (Apologies for the vitriol, but as a New Yorker I've always been ashamed of the school, and it embodies all too well so many of the things wrong with our higher education system.) ------ jstewartmobile Not the biggest fan of higher ed, but why put this on the colleges? Why not the high schools? Eighteen was practically middle-aged in the 19th century. We just keep dropping that bar and infantilizing people so much that WSJ will be writing this about PhD programs in a few more years. ~~~ mowenz >Eighteen was middle-aged That is possibly misleading. By year 1500 the life expectancy of a nobleman in England who had reached age 20 was about 70--about the world average in 2017. Infant Mortality rates were high back then, skewing averages, and during the Middle Ages they had the Bubonic Plague, skewing it even more... ~~~ jshmrsn Perhaps he was referring more to amount of responsibility at age 18 rather than % of lifespan? ~~~ mowenz Sure. It's possibly a misleading statement and that's all I said. ------ happy-go-lucky [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education) > Thomas Jefferson proposed "establishing free schools to teach reading, > writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual > ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a > college education paid for by the state." > In the United States, the first free public institution of higher education, > the Free Academy of the City of New York (today the City College of New > York), was founded in 1847 with the aim of providing free education to the > urban poor, immigrants and their children. Its graduates went on to receive > 10 Nobel Prizes, more than at any other public university. [https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/about/history](https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/about/history) > City's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it > the titles "Harvard of the Proletariat," "the poor man's Harvard," and > "Harvard-on-the-Hudson." Ten CCNY graduates went on to win Nobel Prizes. ~~~ lr4444lr All true, but left unmentioned is that a significant part of that was due to the open discrimination against immigrant groups by the prestigious ivy league that viewed them as inferior. CCNY benefited from that pool of excluded talent. ------ jakob223 Link to get past paywall: [https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784](https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784) ~~~ eddyg Thanks to AMP (pretty much the only good thing about it!) this works: curl -s https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/exclusive-test-data-many-colleges-fail-to-improve-critical-thinking-skills-1496686662 \| sed -n '/./{/<title/,/<\/title/p;/<p>/,/<\/p>/p;}' > wsj.html; open wsj.html ------ pieterk Why should we believe that their critical thinking evaluation is accurate? ~~~ omegaworks The first critical comment! A lot of anti-college head-nodding in the commentary here. It's not really that unexpected from a community that goes ga-ga over stunts like this[0]. The headline wreaks of Rupert Murdochian anti-intellectual pandering. A great claim requires great proof, and when it's below the fold... what can ya do? 0\. [https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel- fellowship/](https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel-fellowship/) ~~~ linksnapzz Of course, we all agree that criticizing the efficacy of the Higher Ed. academic-bureaucratic axis is de facto anti-intellectual. Where else but Higher Ed. would we find intellectuals?! I am also unclear that the headline "wreaks" anything. ------ suneilp It took me a long time to really develop critical thinking skills. I'm still behind where I think I want to be. One thing I've noticed is spending more time on the right sites, like HN, has helped tremendously. Even if they aren't perfect. Another thing that has really helped is spending more time with critical thinking friends. So what really makes the top colleges so great. Is it really just the professors and curriculum or is the real value in that more bright minds are all grouped together. ~~~ wccrawford I'm curious about what you've done to "develop critical thinking skills". I learned that kind of thing really young and I've always enjoyed puzzles and thinking, so it's not something I've had to work on. And when I've seen others have problems with it, I've never seen them improve. I've watched them learn facts and processes, but never seen them actually learn how to think about new things that weren't given to them in a book or tutorial. So... What's worked for you? ~~~ gagege My wife, for one, did not grow up in an environment that encouraged critical thinking. In school she did the work and got 'A's, but admits that she never really questioned anything. And apparently her parents never tried to get her to ask deeper questions about the world. She wasn't really interested in science, literature, math, or history. She wasn't really interested in anything having to do with education. It was just what she was "supposed to do". She remained in this state throughout most of her 20s. In the last few years though, she has started homeschooling our daughters and has completely immersed herself in the liberal arts, as well as math and some science (she never had a good basis for understanding science and still struggles with it). It's almost like talking to a different person now. She has read more books in the last year than she had in her entire life previous. She argues, what I would consider, well. She doesn't fall for the unreasoned ideas of bloggers and mainstream news anymore. It's pretty awesome. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what it is that any one person could do to develop these skills other than immersing themselves in whatever subject they're into and exposing themselves to all sides of an argument. Also, I've realized that it helps to get out of your own head sometimes and just let all the information wash over you. Don't try to scrutinize every little thing immediately. Your subconscious will remember bits and pieces that you will use later. ~~~ wccrawford "just let all the information wash over you" is one of the things that I think is required of someone that thinks well. I find that too many people either accept or (worse) reject information immediately without considering it. In that state, you either can't think critically about new information, or your old information, depending. I think the inability to look at "facts" and consider them unreliable is one thing that keeps people from being able to think well. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone learned something 20 years ago and absolutely refuses to accept that it might be wrong, simply because someone in authority taught it to them. Authority means nothing in the end, and memories fail. ------ almonj It isn't just that people aren't taught thinking skills, it's that people are actively attacked and coerced into suppressing that kind of thinking style. Going through normal public schooling systems most people are taught during key developmental phases that questioning the world around you causes punishment. If it isn't your parents, it's your teachers or the government constantly shoving stupid thought-suppressing ideas in your head. During these phases your immune system learns to associate free thinking with abuse and pain. When you are an adult it becomes very difficult to undo this. An adult who gets very emotional when their beliefs are questioned likely got abuse and punishment when they questioned the beliefs of those around them in youth. ------ 6stringmerc If I'd used my critical thinking skills to go to an HVAC vocational track, following years of hourly / labor Summer jobs as a teenager, and took out a business loan half of what I've spent on University studies, I'd probably have a small empire by now. Universities are great for a liberal arts study track, but that's kind of it. I'm not even sure most require Students to study Retirement Planning or "How to Understand a Car Loan" in practical terms. ~~~ smileysteve No Universities require students to do anything. On mandatory attendance, a good professor will tell you, "you're paying for it, I could care less if you show up." But on retirement planning and car loans; these are failures of being aware of the world around you. On understanding a car loan, plenty of people that are not college educated need to and do "understand" these concepts. Anecdotally, I bought two cars (though I didn't finance) before I turned 18; Enrolled in my first 401k by the time I was 18, and understood my work's entirely employee paid healthcare options at 16. To the autodidact admission though; I learned about programming on my own on a TI-80; about finance from picking up a "Money" magazine - and posters on a teacher's wall from a different class doing an investment challenge, and cars from walking around the neighbor's garage. ------ _pmf_ For a lot of people, college is a phase where you have to suspend critical thinking and go with the flow. ~~~ ygaf Apparently you can be so correct that it overflows, resulting in downvotes. ------ harry8 Not having read TFA due to paywall I've noticed that a hell of a lot of people deriding critical thinking really mean something like: "So many people disagree with me about the environment/healthcare/religion/liberty/whatever and I just _know_ they're wrong so they must be unable to think critically." They, them, over there. There are whole courses run on "Why other people are so unfathomably wrong." [1] Maybe the TFA says so, but maybe we should actually look at our own thinking. What facts we'd actually not bet on yet find it ok to use as opinion foundations. How many ways could we be wrong in what we think. It doesn't seem to be popular (or I'm missing the point, am not up to date with the zeitgeist, or thinking is totally overrated anyway or ...) [1] one example. Maybe it's excellent, for all I know. [https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science- deni...](https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science-denial-uqx- denial101x-4#)! ------ Xeoncross I'm working on critical thinking with my 2 year old. If he can't think critically by college then I've failed. I spend time each day practicing discussing things with him and he has already come to assume if he wants anything in life he will need to talk about it as throwing a fit or whining ensures he does not get anything. People assume because kids haven't been trained, they can't be trained. So they wait until they are older (or even at college level) to begin training. Really bad idea. ~~~ akud I have a 1&1/2 year old, and I'm curious about your approach. What kind of things do you discuss with your son? Is it on the level of "if you want a cookie, you have to ask" or more like "why do you think so-and-so did that?" ~~~ Xeoncross > if you want a cookie, you have to ask Is a good start - then I build from there. We're working on the 'understanding' part of critical thinking right now since he is still trying to make sense of the world. A) Whining isn't a nice way to ask. [start conversation about manners...] B) No. We just ate lunch. [start conversation about eating when we all eat..] C) No. Do you know why we don't eat cookies all the time? [etc...] D. Yes. Can you talk one to ____ also? Do you think they want one? Each of these is a series of short explanations along with a question for him to answer and speak his mind. If he doesn't understand I say something similar I know he can respond too. For a 2 year old, people have remarked how well he talks/communicates. ------ agentgt Is it possible a large portion of the observed behavior of critical thinking personality based (ie Jung Theory)? That is to say could it be certain personalities are more likely to analyze. They may not be smarter or even more educated but are more drawn to problem solving and analysis than others. So even if the individuals were taught to perhaps be more logical, detail oriented, not reactive, etc it maybe incredibly unnatural such that a normal psych test may not elicit the behavior.... just a theory... I'm probably wrong. While it seems critical thinking is a good thing it might be in some cases detrimental particularly if it requires more time. That is reactive individuals who prefer not to rely on critical thinking might be able to make critical decisions quicker (albeit possibly incorrect). ~~~ cryoshon I'd put it on some sort of bio-psycho-social-economic-educational axis. not everyone has the spark... some can develop it, and some clearly have it from early in their life, before the other factors could have an impact. i'd say the biggest division is introversion vs extroversion. extroverts are the majority of people and are more likely to engage with the world via their senses rather than their analytical capacity by definition. ------ JuliaMel The problem is that most students now go to school just to get a degree, a certification of sorts. They don't want to think and they're very resistant to any teaching that not "on the test." What's more, college students have come to view their college enrollment as a commercial exchange where they expect to get "what they paid for." Unfortunately, for them, that's not critical thinking skills, but a "good" piece of paper that can get them a job. Critical thinking can't be quantified or measured on a multiple-choice test, and is therefore becoming highly unpopular with students in even the best universities ------ cyberjunkie Critical thinking topples popular, mainstream, insecure systems and that's not good. You want obedience and the lazy, traditional education systems ensure they put out order-following, capable workforce, not adaptive, ever-changing ones. ------ mowenz Higher ed needs competition. In the interest of human progress, justice, and fairness, top-tier education needs to become open-access and in the form of competitive study. Instead of the greatest academic achievement having anything to do with money, connections or committees, make degrees open access: anyone can study for them and test for them. If any person, no matter how disadvantaged, or from what community they come from, wants to study pre-med, then they should be able to self study and test for a bio, chem or other pre-med degree. There's no technological or economic reason this can't happen. ~~~ chii I dunno if i can trust a doctor who hasnt been through a rigorous course of several years, but self studied to pass the certification. May be if the certification process is very stringent, and take into account many practical skills, and the evaluation and have little false positives... ~~~ mowenz I was actually talking about a pre-med degree to apply to med school. I also would prefer a doctor who has been through med school and residency. ~~~ greglindahl Even pre-med has a lot of lab courses, which are a bit more difficult to do with self-study than straight textbook-based instruction. ~~~ mowenz Every approach has pros and cons. And wouldn't "straight textbook-based instruction also omit lab work?" I'm a little bit confused by this language. Anyways it doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle: If it's deemed necessary one physically demonstrate certain skills before med school admittance then perhaps admissions could be contingent on passing a summer course in lab skills could be ------ rotexo I don't think I was forced to develop critical thinking in a systematic way until my PhD, where I actually had to produce ideas that would withstand scrutiny by both professional scientists and experiments. I went to a magnet high school and then a liberal arts college and the emphasis seemed largely on preparing for tests at both places. It is probably true that I could have developed my thinking more at an earlier stage if I had been more self- motivated. Needless to say, the PhD was a painful experience. ------ Banthum Lots of reasons for this. Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it'd be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don't think most faculty come close to being solid critical thinkers. Whereas most beliefs are life-long emotional self-indulgence parties (my tribe good! their tribe bad!) critical thinking is a life-long struggle against your own lazy and thoughtless mind. It's very low-entropy so it takes intense, endless, focused effort to maintain, especially in a group. \-- Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors' big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that's the biggest moral command for an educator. Higher education is now a political orthodoxy. Free-thinking, questioning of accepted ideas, and consideration of "dangerous" ideas are now often considered not just factually incorrect but morally incorrect. e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now. Students who speak or write against the orthodoxy become the victim of outgroup psychology and are punished socially, academically, and professionally. People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point. The quiet damage of self-censorship is constant and massive, and destroys critical thinking education not just by ignoring critical thinking, but by actively teaching students wrong critical thinking and tricking them into believing it is critical thinking. They'd be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum. There is some pushback from organizations like Heterodox Academy [1] but it remains scattered and ineffectual. Until the academy re-embraces freedom of speech, diversity of viewpoints, it'll continue to be a moralizing seminary school and thus will continue to teach to moral conclusions instead of teaching thinking methods. \-- And the final reason that seems obvious is that most of the people in university these days just shouldn't be there. They're not mentally prepared for higher education; they don't have the IQ. It's like sending a blind person to a school of visual arts. But they're sent there because it sounds good in politics, provides false hope that everyone can become high status (the Lake Woebegone dream), and provides for the endless expansion of a very lucrative government-money-milking educational establishment through subsidized tuition. Education is in a sad state and a growing number of people think the model has to collapse and be replaced by a more decentralized model aided by technology (e.g. YouTube lectures, etc). [1] heterodoxacademy.org ~~~ jstewartmobile I always like to look at the items at the bottom since that's where best and the worst clump together. Thanks for sacrificing some HN points on this. You nailed it! ------ monksy Side note: Should we allow WSJ articles as that they prevent the reader from reading the entire article for free? At this moment it seems like it's an avenue to advertise for WSJ. ~~~ giarc The issue with WSJ articles has come up many times before. There used to be work arounds (googling the url, going through a FB link etc) but most seemed to be closed now. I agree, WSJ articles should be discouraged, however, it's an open submission process. The problem is that people upvote the submission based upon the headline (and comments/discussion) and don't access the article. This is fine, however we then end up in situations like this. ------ andrewflnr I'm not sure this is a reasonable expectation of college. Critical thinking is hard to teach. I don't know if it's possible to scale it beyond the few teachers who are good at it. Measuring critical thinking is hard, too. The universities who criticized the test used here are probably not wrong, even if their motive is only to save face. It's only 90 minutes, which is a time limit more suited for quick sophistry than looking at some new evidence and coming up with a solid argument from it. ~~~ TallGuyShort I went to a very religious school that has a bad reputation for being closed- minded. I found many of the graduates and students to live up to that reputation, but I learned to question a lot from the professors. My biology professor there taught evolution in the most convincing way I've ever seen. Presented the history, the evidence, the thinking behind the theory, common fallacies, etc. Across the board, I heard some of the most convincing arguments for political, religious and scientific thinking that contradicted the stereotype from the very professors who were teaching everyone. So they exemplified it well, and I feel like they taught it to me well, but I look at the result and it just didn't happen a lot. Could be hard to teach, could be hard to make someone learn (I feel like it's the latter), but it certainly is not just a problem caused by professors who can't think critically themselves. ~~~ andrewflnr Could be hard to teach, could be hard to make someone learn (I feel like it's the latter) I don't really see the difference between these, at least from a practical perspective. I guess my point is that you can't make someone learn critical thinking. I definitely wasn't trying to say that the problem is professors being bad at critical thinking; that hardly enters the equation. :) ------ eeZah7Ux Sadly, nobody is pointing out how critical thinking is under constant attack in some western societies. In a society based on entertainment and consumerism, emotions, desires and impulsive behaviors are [made] king. Nobody will try to sell you a car or some shoes by appealing to your rational side. Analytical and level-headed people, e.g. academics, mathematicians, engineers are frequently depicted as uninteresting and boring in movies. ------ xname2 90% of college "critical thinking" will result in same conclusion. 9% will change their conclusions to match with the majority. 1% will be shamed. ------ jordanjustice Interesting, and not entirely surprising. I just finished Godin's altMBA two weeks ago, and it's all about critical thinking. This was a struggle for a lot of the students as they were either use to or expecting a typical college style instructional design. The whole program was incredible and my mind is still spinning. [https://altmba.com/](https://altmba.com/) ------ notadoc It's almost as if relentless standardized test taking doesn't generate critical thinking skills? Wow who woulda thunk! If only we could critically think, maybe we could think critically about this. ------ MichaelMoser123 i have several questions here: \- how does one measure critical thinking in a survey? The article doesn't say so. \- The humanities/liberal arts are supposed to encourage critical thinking, how do the Humanities compare vs exact sciences/engineering in terms of critical thinking? \- Do employers really value critical thinking, or does too much critical thinking inhibit your career prospects in an organisation? ~~~ pas This is the test: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_Learning_Assessment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_Learning_Assessment) There are a lot of studies about what is critical thinking, how to test and teach it: eg. [http://windsor.scholarsportal.info/ojs/leddy/index.php/infor...](http://windsor.scholarsportal.info/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/2254) Here's a PDF about the CLA itself: [https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUSE/SEAL/Reports_Papers/highe...](https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUSE/SEAL/Reports_Papers/higher_ed_papers/The%20Collegiate%20Learning%20Assessment_Ford%20Policy%20Forum%20Monograph%202008.pdf) > liberal arts ... Yes, good insight, it'd be good to have access to the data. > employers I think there are very different types of employers. Some need broad rationalist critical thinkers, some need focused specialized experts, and so on. ~~~ MichaelMoser123 Thanks, I wonder about the nature of the jobs that have a requirement for critical thinking: these might be analysts, or managerial posts, how prevalent is this requirement? ~~~ pas I think it's more dependent on the type of organization and sector. So if you are in a fast moving sector, you need agile self-aware people. They will think critically about the problems, uncover their basic assumptions, try to challenge them, and so on. It helps if you have open-ended, think outside the box, oh wait, we don't even have a box ... problems. But it doesn't help if you want to cook your books and your accountant start to ask inconvenient questions. I'd say product designers/managers are an interesting case, because coming up with a new product (or just new/different/fresh/interesting features for an existing product - for a new version) requires a lot of thinking, yet it requires a certain focus after the spec has been finalized, otherwise the product guy/gal will find itself in constant anxiety worrying about how the basic assumptions are shifting, how things need to be tweaked, and so on. And of course, the aforementioned is just a very narrow aspect of thinking, and a lot of non-strictly-cognitive psychology. But as our current state of society shows, critical thinking doesn't really have a super-duper-extra high and obvious utility reward. Otherwise it'd be more prevalent. Aaaand of course you'll get into a loop, trying to questions yourselves, your thoughts, trying to eliminate your biases, correct for others', estimate, forecast, predict, post-process. (And some people do it [http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/31/2016-predictions- calibr...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/31/2016-predictions-calibration- results/) , some don't.) ~~~ MichaelMoser123 Thank you for the answer. ------ known Asking WHY is a taboo in modern education system :( ------ Paul-ish How do we know this test is not just a proxy test for motivation? Why would anyone try to do well on the test? ------ nether Well, I'm a product of this system, so I'm not sure what I'm missing out on. ~~~ pas Critical thinking is basically a built-in bullshit detector. And if you use it on yourself it helps you to come up with good explanations [models] for things in the world, hence it helps you understand the world. ------ ekm2 Long thread and no one talks about just teaching Logic like French schools do. ------ umroh-murah critical thinking is very importen thing, student must have the ability ([http://www.aidatour.co.id](http://www.aidatour.co.id)) ------ umroh-murah critical skill is importen, student must have the ability ([http://www.aidatour.co.id](http://www.aidatour.co.id)) ------ bipr0 However this article is revealing, it is not surprising at all. ------ whatnotests Do what you're sold^H^H^H^Htold. ------ csmark I graduated college back when there were still a few summer jobs that earned enough to pay for the following 2 semesters of college. I was in the biological and chemistry sciences. The CLA+ is the test discussed in the article which measures critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing. (thanks to jakob223 for the link) A sample "spreadsheets and news articles" example asked students to decide and backup your recommendation for a product campaign given numerous sources. Looking back the biggest change in college was how fast I could absorb information and mentally outline a document's contents to come back to it. Critical thinking and analytical reasoning came from my background in computers and an amazing high school instructor. Is being faster the same as improving a skill? The example mentioned above focused on the ability to interpret charts, tables, and graphs and write a plan of action based on and backed up by the information. Being able to work with numbers and charts usually ties into one's chosen area of study. Those who are not comfortable with numbers are not going to learn it in college because they're going to avoid exposure to it as much as possible. Certain majors put an emphasis on critical thinking skills. If the school or the selection of seniors to sit for this exam represented this group it would definitely skew the results. Things (I think) I did right: Always take the majors intro course versus the general. It's better taught, not everyone is clueless, and you'll probably hate the subject less. Physics 213 E&M test Average: 43% Range - 23%-63% & an 84% "outlier" by me. Won't ever forget that one! I took a 300 level History of the Civil War rather than Western Civ. Criminal Justice and Differential equations even though I didn't need either. There were a few others but it's been too long. This was before prices exploded so taking a course out of curiosity wasn't a major financial burden. I thought my Criminal Justice instructor in insufferable liberal at the time. Four years later in a completely different environment what he said was happening all around me day and night. Without it I would have no context and completely missed what was a prelude to current day Baltimore. I continuously learn more about the Civil War. One course and I've given tours to friends of Gettysburg, Antidem, Harper's Ferry, and the Bloody Angle. Seeing why things were done a certain way after reading about it in a book is a treat. Seeing the bend in the Missouri River at Vicksburg was amazing! Look up Grant landing south of Vicksburg. What would I suggest taking? Never stop asking "Why?" Philosophy involves questions and critical thought and discussion to a rational argument to an answer or at least something close to it. In a society of systems for stamps of certification or education asking why is increasingly infrequent. TBTAW "Too Big to Ask(or Answer) Why?" There's an art to doing it so as to not offend or insult. Putting down the brush for a mallet does have a time and place. But it's not just asking the question, it's having a system to deduce an answer. When it comes to identifying stressors asking and then answering questions is part of the process. It's part of a process. ------ adjkant Just yesterday there was a thread [1] on the rising costs of college and if it is worth it. The general consensus on that link seemed to be that most can no longer afford learning for the sake of learning. Contrast that with this thread, where many appear to be taking the stance that college education, particularly one of breadth, is a crucial part of their education. Some posters have discussed the benefits of small liberal arts colleges. As far as I can see, the anecdotes from many here about education is a big part of why the cost has been able to rise so much - it can give a life- changing value for some. HN is a community of programmers, mostly. Ask many about a CS degree, and they won't tell you that the programming languages they learned in college are what makes them successful, but the way they learned to teach themselves as needed on topics in CS. Give a man a fish, yada yada yada. The same really goes for critical thinking and education in general. It's the reason a few in the thread yesterday talked about their loans being worth it. The hard part is getting a student to focus on learning to think/learn, to borrow from a post by @closure in this thread. There seems to be a lot of support behind pushing for critical thinking and this type of learning in high school, which I strongly agree with. I was lucky enough to get it in high school, and early at that. It made an absolutely huge difference in my approach to education. The question then arises: is it the responsibility of a college to teach a high-level of critical thinking, or should you enter with it? I don't have the answer, but I'm curious as to what people think. I go to (chose) a college that is very much pre-professional at the core, but it offers all of the resources I need for a full and fulfilling education. I have always seen college as a resource, but you have to know how to use it to get the most out of it. The problem is that most college freshman, and many college seniors, don't know how to do this, and critical thinking is probably a big piece of that. It's a bit of a circular problem - you need critical thinking skills to get the most out of college, but may need to also learn critical thinking at college. If we ever actually get to a point where we can do a proper overhaul of the education system as a whole, I think properly defining and executing these roles should be a key focus. \-------------------------------------------------------------------------- PS: This is just a collection of thoughts/insights, not really a stance or an argument. Not sure what to make of all of this yet as a full picture. [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14483409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14483409) ------ libeclipse I can't bypass the paywall with Google. Any help? ~~~ eBombzor [https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784](https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784) This twitter link worked for me. ------ pmarreck See: the last election cycle Also: As someone who does have critical-thinking skills (perhaps taught by my Cornell Psych major), it's extremely disheartening to see bad thinking pretty much everywhere ~~~ monksy The last election cycle and the conservative party is not reflective on intelligence. (Granted the party has had and currently has vocal people who are 1. aren't well educated and 2. are incredibly intolerant 3. a mixture of both) Politics relies on playing on people's confirmation biases and it works. Trump is not the only one who did that. Politicians won't debate fact because they can be wrong, and also they can be proven wrong. (From there their opponiate can harp on that and use people's confirmation bias to discredit) ~~~ TallGuyShort >> the party has had and currently has vocal people who are 1. aren't well educated and 2. are incredibly intolerant 3. a mixture of both Hmm... once again the conservative and liberal parties sound identical to me. OP didn't say anything about conservatives.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: direnv shell extension - zimbatm http://direnv.net/ ====== zimbatm I'm interested in positive and negative feedback on the project. This is something that I use every day and I suppose it can be useful to other people. Does it seem useful to you ? Is the project explained well enough or is it confusing ?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Instagram for Android landing page - lleims http://instagr.am/android/ ====== trafnar What a nice page. I can't wait to see what their new designers come up with in the future. They recently hired Tim Van Damme (<http://timvandamme.com/>) and Maykel Loomans (<http://miekd.com/>) ------ hellokhoaphan For while you're waiting: <http://mashable.com/2012/03/23/instagram- alternatives/> ------ dprice1 This formats very strangely on my portrait-oriented display (1200x1920, firefox 11). The top of the page is a big black rectangle, and the subsequent content is bottom-aligned. It sure is pretty though. ------ mladenkovacevic I remember that the maker of Instagram was offering 50% of Android sales to anyone willing to do the work of porting Instagram to Android and providing the support. Is this what finally happened? ~~~ rasmusrygaard Wasn't that Instapaper? <http://www.marco.org/2011/12/07/standing-up-for- android> ~~~ mladenkovacevic Ah I think that's it yeah. Thanks for the correction. ~~~ notatoad that did finally happen though. there's an instapaper for android now. <http://papermill.me/> edit: or not. my bad. ~~~ spindritf Is it an official app? I don't see any links, any endorsement, or even a mention of an Android client on Instapaper.com. ~~~ notatoad i thought it was, but now that i look again i don't think it is. there was a story about papermill on theverge [1] the other day that heavily referenced marco's post, and i assumed that the point of all the marco references was that it was the endorsed app, but reading the article again they don't actually make that claim. [1] [http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/23/2897938/papermill-is- the-f...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/23/2897938/papermill-is-the-first- beautiful-simple-instapaper-client-for-android) ------ Wazowski Cool. However, having used both, Pixlr-o-matic is quite a bit better. ------ einarlove 840 lines of css. A bit more then i expected. ------ gabamnml I hope it comes soon. It's expected long	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
This is actually what America would look like without gerrymandering - csense https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-is-actually-what-america-would-look-like-without-gerrymandering/ ====== grayje The same story from 2014: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this- computer-programmer-solved-gerrymandering-in-his-spare-time/) Not that it isn't still very, very relevant... ~~~ DerekL Also, the president mentioned redistricting reform in his State of the Union address. [http://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10758738/obama-state-of-the- uni...](http://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10758738/obama-state-of-the- union-2016-gerrymandering) ------ DerekL In the algorithm's redistricting of Maryland, two of the districts have parts on either side of the Chesapeake Bay. The algorithm should consider the actual travel time between two points, and not the straight-line distance.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The 'Busy' Trap - suprgeek http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/ ====== keithpeter "I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. " Summary: reflective thought helps creative work. Modern communications can interfere with time for reflection. Many of us are secretly anxious about the value of our work and need to convince ourselves of the worth of what we do through having a lot of tasks to tick off. ------ carsongross "I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter." This man is treading dangerously close to some deep truths about late-stage, debt-ravaged, finance-dominated western economies (and societies.) ------ olegious This is why every time I return to the USA from Western Europe, I'm depressed for a few weeks. It seems that Western Europeans (UK excluded) have figured it out- they as a society have realized that an extra .05% GDP won't make that much of a difference at the end of the day. That's why at 4pm on a Thursday cafes are full, lunches aren't eaten in front of the computer and people actually go on vacation for more than a week!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tesla to triple supercharger network by the end of June - jcdavis http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-dramatically-expands-supercharger-network-delivering-convenient-free-long ====== mrmaddog If I were in the hospitality industry, I'd be buying adjacent shops next to every Tesla charging station. Having a captive, wealthy audience for ~30 minutes seems like a ripe opportunity, whether it is restaurants, masseuses, or cafes. I'd also offer free valet+ services so patrons would stay in my establishment longer: I'll look over your car, start the charging process (in case there is a queue), and make sure to move it when it is done charging. ~~~ zacharypinter I misread that as "hospital" instead of "hospitality" on my first read, which actually brings up an interesting tangent. If the Tesla stations make use of and store solar power, would they be a viable backup power source for hospitals? Or are the power requirements for a hospital on backup energy way too large for that sort of thing? ~~~ MiguelHudnandez The amount of solar panels you'd need to charge a Tesla at supercharger rates would be ridiculous. They may have solar panels, but that is just something cute that might make a small dent in the installation's grid power consumption. However, you are on to something [1], though it's more for cars that are parked for long periods during the day. The point of a supercharging station is contrary to donating your vehicle's power to the grid. 1: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to- sell...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-sell-power- from-electric-cars-back-to-the-grid) ~~~ pbreit Are you sure? "plans are to install on-site grid storage to make them self-reliant with their own energy supply" ~~~ icegreentea Well... let's do the math! Incident solar radiation is about 1 kW per meter squared. Assume 10% end to end efficiency (including solar -> electric, storage, and actual charging efficiency... this is optimistic, but doable... certainly not the cheapest though). You now need 10 square meters of panel to supply 1 kW. Assume sun is out for 12 hours a day, and for the full 12 hours you get all 1 kW/m^2 incident radiation (this is very very generous). The car has a 60kWh battery. So if we want to find out how much panel it takes for one station to charge one car a day... 60kWh to charge, but 12 hours to charge it up, so you basically need 5kW, which is 50 m^2 of panel. Which honestly isn't -THAT- big. Its a 7 meter square. Now... from my random snooping around, and my own impressions, I would say that a 'large' gas station typically covers something like... 500-600 meters squares (thats 5300 to 6500 square feet). That would be enough to super optimistically charge 10-12 cars a day. I saw optimistic, because incident solar radiation is not that kind. Can take a looksey here: [http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook...](http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/) If you pick average, annual, and single axis east-west tracking (which I believe is the best bang for the buck), you see on the solar map, the BEST places in the US gets 5-6 kWh/m^2/day, compared to our assumption of 12 kWh/m^2/day. The feasibility of superchargers being even 90% off the grid is of course completely dependent on the ratio of size of supercharger panel array and rate of cars charging. But given the above, I'm inclined to believe that it is highly impractical for the majority of super charger stations to become actually self reliant, especially in high traffic areas. ~~~ btilly A supercharger network is going to have a lot of stations on lonely stretches of highway. Given how few Teslas there are being taken on those trips, you're going to want charging stations in places where there will be very, very little usage. I can easily see a random station on I-10 near the CA/AZ border being entirely self-reliant... ------ jack-r-abbit I think this is brilliant on the part of Tesla. If they can get their charging network big enough & fast enough, new comers to the electric vehicle market would be wise to just use (license?) some of the tech needed to also charge their cars on these stations. Depending on how this is structured, Tesla _could_ come out of this getting a piece of every electric vehicle that gets sold using their chargers. Unless the tech here is nothing special. ~~~ secabeen Elon was asked about that in the call. Tesla is open to working with other manufacturers, but the superchargers are pretty finely tuned to the battery that Tesla is using. Other manufacturers would have to make their batteries to Tesla's specs for it to work. ~~~ chris_mahan I understand the manner in which the battery is put together is a company secret. ~~~ NickM I've read that as well, but it's hard to imagine that it can really be that much of a secret. If a competitor wanted to find out how it's put together, all they'd have to do is buy one and take it apart, no? ------ jcdavis Another interesting bit at the end is the improved supercharging tech: "The new technology, which is in beta test mode now and will be fully rolled out to customers this summer, will allow Model S to be charged at 120 kW, replenishing three hours of driving in just over 20 minutes." ~~~ nickpinkston BTW: 120kW = 160 horsepower, so it's providing the power of your Honda Civic at full throttle for 20 minutes. That's nuts! ~~~ fchief That sure is a big power boost. Welcome to the future. ~~~ 205guy No, no. The future is 1.21 jigawatts, IIRC. ------ simba-hiiipower > _In addition to the expansion of the Tesla Supercharger network itself, > Tesla is improving the technology behind the Tesla Supercharger to > dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to charge Model S, cutting > charging time in half relative to early trials of the system. The new > technology, which is in beta test mode now and will be fully rolled out to > customers this summer, will allow Model S to be charged at 120 kW, > replenishing three hours of driving in just over 20 minutes._ i find this the most interesting part of the release. it sounds like existing model s' currently on the road will be able to take advantage of these upgraded superchargers.. i always assumed advances in charging tech would require upgrades to both the chargers and the cars themselves. anyone know how this is supposed to work? ..i know its wishful thinking, but this gives me hope that my lowly focus electric may someday see its charging capabilities upgraded as well. ~~~ andrewtbham when musk unveiled the super chargers he said they were designed for 120kW but that they were testing them out at 90kW first. ------ protomyth "Without spending a cent!" At some point states are going to start taxing for electricity going into electric vehicles to make up for lost revenue for their road and highway funds. I wonder if Tesla will pay for that or start charging? On another note, I do hope we don't end up with every manufacture building their own recharging network. ~~~ MartinCron _At some point states are going to start taxing for electricity going into electric vehicles to make up for lost revenue for their road and highway funds._ Or they'll increase gas taxes to make up for the lost difference until everyone is driving electric cars. Mission accomplished! ~~~ pkulak That'll get the votes for sure! ~~~ MartinCron There is some logic to it. In my State (Washington) the legislature is currently looking at raising the gas tax rate to adjust for the fact that average fuel economy has gone up a whole bunch in the years since we set the tax rate. [http://www.nwnewsnetwork.org/post/backers-washington-gas- tax...](http://www.nwnewsnetwork.org/post/backers-washington-gas-tax-package- rally-capitol) As we _literally_ have parts of the interstate freeway falling into rivers at the moment, I think I'm OK with some more infrastructure spending. ------ jusben1369 Today I read an article that said Honda is now offering the fully EV Fit for $259 per month as a lease over 36 months. That is unlimited mileage, includes car insurance and a home charger (!) Tesla's whole model was to eventually create a mass mileage car for $25,000 to $30,000. I'm now convinced that by the time they get there the market will be hyper competitive and they'll be squeezed out or marginalized. They may become the Apple of the car market - high margin, great brand, small marketshare %'s - which is nothing to sneeze at. But I'm worried now they've missed their opportunity to really make it as a stand alone brand. Perhaps they'll become a service supplier to the overall industry with charger stations and batteries etc. ~~~ jack-r-abbit Just like with gas cars, not everyone wants the same thing from an electric car. I wouldn't buy a gas Fit, what makes you think I'd buy an EV one? ~~~ jusben1369 It's not really much of a rebuttal to my point though is it? ~~~ jack-r-abbit I think it is. For any product you are going have a range of prices. $15k cars exist... but people still buy $150k cars. So just because Honda gets an EV Fit onto market doesn't mean Tesla missed any mark. If they become the Apple of the EV market, then there is no missed mark. ------ jtbigwoo There's more than a bit of hype in this press release. Tripling the number of superchargers only gets them to 27 with almost half of the stations in California. ------ jtbigwoo Can someone smarter than me comment on the danger of having one of these next door to an apartment or office building? I assume that we're talking about lots of volts and amps here. Are these stations any more or less dangerous than a gas station? ~~~ bloaf I'm going to guess that they are orders of magnitude safer than gas stations. Firstly: no ground pollution. Gas stations are terrible for the land they are built on as they leak lots of organic compounds into the soil. Secondarily: no large reservoirs of combustible materials. I don't know the details of the supercharging stations, but I'd guess that they are at least as safe as the electric transformers we see on telephone poles everywhere. ------ stephenhuey Without spending a cent! I know there was speculation about using solar to power the superchargers eventually, but until then, are they hoping to forever give free fuel to Tesla owners with the hope of recouping supercharger energy costs by selling access to other brands of cars? Any idea how much it will cost Tesla on every free Tesla fill-up? ~~~ NickM Typical US electricity rates are around $0.10/kWh, and a baseline Model S having a 60kWh battery, so if I totally guess at a charging efficiency of 50% then a full charge should cost somewhere in the vicinity of $12. On the 60kWh model, it costs $2000 to enable the supercharger hardware, so I can't imagine they'd lose too much money off these. Keep in mind that these aren't really intended for frequent use: they generally have been placing them on highways in between large cities, with the intent to enable the occasional long-distance road trip that would otherwise be outside the car's battery range. Even if Tesla loses a bit of money per car on average, it's probably worth it just for the value it adds to the cars in peoples' minds. ~~~ nightski Except they are feeding the electricity back into the grid, so I don't think it will cost them more than the installation and maintenance of the charger itself. ------ jdoliner Is there ever going to come a point where rather than hooking my Tesla up and charging it I just drive up to the station and swap out the battery for a new charged one? This seems to help mitigate one of the biggest problems which is how long charging takes and could, I imagine, be made to be a pretty speedy process if need be. ~~~ fancyketchup Probably not anytime soon. You can charge 240 miles of honest, comfortable, real-world, freeway-speed range while you sleep at night, and the same while you're at the office. Cross-country road trips are just about the only time the vast majority of people will ever need to charge at a location other than the origin or destination. Waiting for a supercharge doesn't add much time to the trip unless you normally tend to drive 10 hours straight without answering the call of nature. The superchargers are intended to be at locations and intervals where you would ordinarily stop anyway (to eat, use the facilities, stretch your legs, etc.). There are, of course, cases where a battery swap would be handy, but that's on the wrong side of the 80/20 problem. ------ narrator The charging stations should be able to accommodate a lot more cars than a gas station. You don't have to have a lot of machinery to pump fluids around as electrons get around on their own. The physical size and expense of equipment per charging station should also be a lot smaller when compared with a gas station. ~~~ netrus But keep in mind that I will occupy some space at the supercharger 4-5 times longer than with a regular gas station. ------ viame Yesterday I was driving from Waterloo to Toronto and saw two Tesla S models within 30 min from each other. What a nice car! Does anyone know if there are charging stations along 401? Maybe that's why I can't find anything online ... ~~~ jvm See map here: <http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger> They're located between major cities so you can make a road trip, not in them because the idea is when you're home you just plug them into your wall at night. ------ cinquemb I wonder if they are using all the data they collect from drivers to help them with planning how the distribute they stations? ~~~ cscheid I hope not. Supercharger stations don't exist everywhere, so people don't drive their Teslas freely right now. Choosing where to put them based on where drivers drive their Teslas right now would make the supercharger network have good coverage of where Teslas are today, not where they want Teslas to reach in the future! ------ maeon3 Devil's advocate here: You can't charge up your car when your power goes out for a few days. Wheras gas stations have generators and gas rolls in on time, supercharger networks and home power drink from the same power grid. There's a word for all this: stranded and on-the-grid more than ever before. When power goes out, the city of electric cars also grinds to a halt. And heaven forbid all the people have their cars plugged in ready to charge when the grid comes back on. Does this mean I need to have a hefty 2 stroke generator with 8 gallons of gas ready to go to charge up the car when the power is out for a few days? You'd probably need a $1000 generator to provide the watts and amps. ~~~ dak1 What's stopping you from keeping your own generator? I suppose you'd be effectively limited to the max range of your vehicle from the generator, but if there's no power for 200-300 miles then there's probably bigger problems. ~~~ andrewtbham or better yet... lots of people are getting solar panels from elon's other company Solar City.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kent Pitman on Equal Rights -- and Wrongs -- in Lisp (1993) - gnosis http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html ====== ScottBurson The problem with equality in Common Lisp is that the fundamental data structures don't come with enough semantics that one can tell, just by looking at one, what it is being used for. For instance, a list structure can represent a sequence, an unordered set, an s-expression (a tree of sequences), a binary tree of conses, an alist representing a map, etc. etc. Using higher-level data structures, each with a clear semantics, clarifies the meaning of both equality and copying. For example, my FSet functional collections library for CL has separate types for sets, sequences, maps, bags, and tuples, along with a generic function EQUAL? that has methods for all these different types. Thus one can construct nested types -- sets of sequences, maps whose domains are sets, etc. etc. -- and compare them by just calling EQUAL?. In bare CL one would pretty much have to write a separate equality function for each such type. A critical distinction, in order to make this work, is that between object types and value types. Objects have identity and state; value types do not. When used with user-defined types, FSet requires this distinction to be made explicit: you have to say whether your type is an object or a value, and you have to be consistent about it. This way, it's always clear when equality should be "shallow" or "deep": equality comparison of object types is always by identity ("shallow"), while comparison of value types is always by content ("deep"). ~~~ swannodette This is one of Clojure's finer design choices, emphasis on values. Thus, = alway means deep equality, identical? for testing whether two values are actually the same object. ~~~ lurker19 You mean "whether two values are actually the same 'value'", right? (So, "(cons A (cons B C)) = (cons A (cons B C))" even though allocated separately as two distinct instances and not cleverly optimized to the same storage in memory) Otherwise, I do not understand your comment, whih is lauding Clojure's preference for values over objects. ~~~ swannodette By "object" I mean same storage in memory. Clojure does optimize literal data and identical? test does come first when using =. ------ technomancy Any discussion of equality semantics would be incomplete without mentioning Baker's "Equal Rights for Functional Objects": <http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ObjectIdentity.html> tl;dr: meaningful equality predicates can only be defined on immutable values. ------ krzysz00 Ah! _Now_ I am enlightened.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Science ponders 'zombie attack' - ca98am79 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8206280.stm ====== ca98am79 I like how Professor Robert Smith? actually has a question mark in his surname.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Smugg.com (Rottentomatoes.com for Tech Gadgets) - fernandose http://www.smugg.com Smugg.com.<p>Critic review aggregator for consumer electronics. I admit the progress of this project has been very slow, mostly due to me learning how to code properly this time while also developing this site. However in this time, gdgt.com shifted their focus to same area of critic reviews aggregation. They have done an excellent job with the team and money they have and I now wonder if it leaves any space for me to keep going.<p>So please do let me know what you think. ====== fernandose Extra details: \- I admit the progress of this project has been very slow, mostly due to me learning how to code properly this time while also developing this site. However in this time, gdgt.com shifted their focus to same area of critic reviews aggregation. They have done an excellent job with the team and money they have and I now wonder if it leaves any space for me to keep going. So please do let me know what you think. \- As I am new to programming and still very much learning, I have used wordpress as the foundation for the MVP and customised it by programming new plugins. \- At the moment aggregating is completely manual, so I am still establishing a formal process which allows an uninterrupted flow of publishing products. \- The scoring follows a very similar method to metacritics. However at the moment the only adjustment made during scoring is ‘weighting’, which allows publishers who consistently produce well written and in-depth reviews to have a more prominent part in the final score calculation ------ mikeknoop I think the reason Rotten Tomatoes is successful in because by in large, most reviews are negative. The true good movies actually stand-out. For Smugg, when the homepage consists of all reviews in the 80-95 range, you can't tell things apart. It's just another generic review site that says everything is "okay", when in reality, the baked-in, out of the box experience of a device usually sucks in day-to-day use. I don't know how you're getting reviews, but you could honestly seed this yourself by critically analyzing Engadget reviews and really focus on the flaws of the product, instead of the "features" for generating your scores.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Does Codementor Work? - pankyj I am a software developer and would like to provide my services on Codementor. Does anyone who is listed as a mentor share some insights on how this would work? For e.g. how do I get myself listed as a mentor, how would they determine my expertize, rates, availability, etc. I saw some examples and it seemed to came out as a place where people seek emergency help - if this is so how do I manage my availability. ====== praveenscience You have everything from the requests to process here: [https://www.codementor.io/howitworks/mentorship](https://www.codementor.io/howitworks/mentorship). Did you see that already? If yes, in simple terms, you set your budget and you try to bid yourself for the work. Then the customer chooses you, if you are convincing enough for them to take you. You gotta start a timer and let the customer know that you are charging. Once you have done with your work, and the customer is happy, you may stop the timer and the timer works in steps of 15 minutes. Then the customer leaves you a feedback and you will be credited with the amount agreed. I guess the payout duration will be about three to five days later in order to curb fraudulent accounts and you can request your pay once you reach a certain threshold. ~~~ pankyj Thanks for the link, it mainly outlines details for people seeking mentors. The way you described it, it does sound similar to Upwork? Out of curiosity - are you a mentor on the platform or have past experience with this? ------ rboyd Some emergency help. Some people just wanting tutorship. Some entrepreneurs. A _lot_ of CS students that procrastinated too long and just want you to do their homework assignment. Set your rates higher than you would think you need to. You need to offset the amount of calls where you waste your time up front and the job goes nowhere (usually the first 15 minutes or so are unbilled while you explore the problem description). It can be pretty good. You do need to build the skill of discovering which jobs aren't worth taking though.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Non-uniform memory access meets the OOM killer - r4um http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/03/30/oom/ ====== adrianmonk The OOM uses a heuristic to figure out what to kill. If the primary purpose of your system is to run some process that hangs on to a lot of RAM, that heuristic is exactly the opposite of what you need, so it would a good idea to disable it or exempt that process. Also, while I'm talking prophylactics, if you have (which you should) monitoring and alerting in your production environment, it seems like there should be an alert for whenever the OOM killer activates. Assuming you are allocating resources carefully enough that you expect everything to fit, if it fires, it's almost always a sign that things are not going according to plan and need to be investigated sooner rather than later. ~~~ greenleafjacob Yes, the OOM killer activation is on its face evidence of an incident; comments on other threads saying “If your process ran out of RAM, you get to quit. Why offload it on some other random process? This is how your database process runs out of memory, and your web workers get killed (or vice versa).” The scenario depicts a capacity shortage regardless of what the system decides to do in response. ------ saagarjha A lot of time seems to go into tricking the watchdogs on single purpose machines. I heard a story once of a guy who wanted to get some computation done, but the process was being deproritized by the scheduler because it seemed like it was a hung process that kept asking for CPU time. The solution he came up with was voluntarily relinquishing compute accesd right before anyone would would check up on it, making it appear as if the process was great at sharing time with others. By doing this, he could get that one process’s instructions running something like 99% of the time. ~~~ the8472 That's a pretty odd workaround considering that you can reserve cores to the point where not even kernel tasks run on them and then pin a single userspace thread to that core so it can run without ever being preemptively descheduled ~~~ dward This wouldn't even work with the completely fair scheduler, which is the Linux default scheduler. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completely_Fair_Scheduler](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completely_Fair_Scheduler) ~~~ the8472 CFS obeys core isolation and task sets, so it would work ~~~ dward I was speaking of the "odd workaround", not about using cpu isolation. ------ cthalupa >This new version also had this wacky little "feature" where it tried to bind itself to a single NUMA node. This is 100% a feature. If you care at all about memory access latency, you want to remain local to the NUMA node. Foreign memory access is significantly slower. If you have NUMA enabled and your applications are not NUMA aware, and there are shared pages being access by applications running on both nodes, the NUMA rebalancing can actually cause even worse performance as it constantly moves the pages from one node to the other. Any application that cares about memory access latency should 100% be written to be NUMA aware, and if it is not, you should be using numactl to bind the application to the proper node. This also goes for PCI-E devices (including nvme drives!) as they are going to be bound to a NUMA node as well. If you have an application that is accessing an nvme volume, or using a GPU, you should 100% make sure that it is running on the same node as the pci-e bus for that device. ------ smarks Time to re-up this classic from Andries Brouwer: [https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/](https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/) ------ speedplane It's not commonplace for even medium size companies to run dozens of servers. Memory resources (as well as disk and CPU) are always being stretched. The OOM may have been sufficient for single server environments, where you could always provision an extra 40%, but it's far too blunt of a tool. Most environments I've worked with have to define an instance size (in memory and CPU), and determine how many parallel threads/processes will run on it. Plus you need to determine when and how to scale up to more instances. To reduce costs, the goal is to 100% utilization, but also with the capability deal with spikes in traffic an workload, and all with an acceptable error rate. Unfortunately, doing this type sizing/scaling analysis is incredibly difficult. The opaque effects of the OOM make it even more difficult. I'm sure the OOM uses a deterministic algorithm, but it's complex enough that most don't know it, or handle for it. In a server environment, if the OOM kills a service, your app and all other services are likely hosed. It would be far more preferable if the OOM had a straightforward, consistent, and deterministic method to dealing with low memory. This way programmers would know to look out for it, and could handle it more consistently. ------ ParrotyError The OOM killer was a misfeature when it was designed. Why is it still in the kernel? Solaris solved this problem 20 years ago. ~~~ aristidb Pardon my ignorance: How did Solaris solve this? ~~~ ParrotyError I can't remember but I did sit in on a presentation about 15 years ago where they explained it. I lent the notes to a senior developer and never got them back. ~~~ RantyDave It doesn't have an OOM killer. Even more remarkably a call to allocate memory can't fail, but it may not return either. When Solaris (well, SmartOS in my case) runs completely out of memory, all hell breaks loose. ------ n_t That's why one needs to be aware of memory and other load characteristics of system, particularly if it is an enterprise system. Various process should be put in different cgroups with defined resources. cgroups also provides memory pressure notification and other goodies too. If it is an embedded system, probably it is best to turn off overcommit. Finally, for critical processes, use oom.priority so that process can be excluded from being killed. ------ StreamBright This is the reason i am big fan of running any software with separate users and setting ulimit to a low value so that something stupid like this cannot impact the production service. I would be super keen to try to replicate this scenario on my test cluster and see if my settings catching it. Does anybody know if the software in question is an opensource tool? ~~~ ams6110 This is the approach I take also. I'm also looking at totally disabling the OOM killer because it seems to be pretty useless. Anytime I see stuff killed by OOM the culprit is usually and obviously some runaway Java process, but OOM inevitably picks the SSH daemon to kill, which doesn't help anything, and the box continues to swap so badly that it just seems unrecoverable. I'd rather just have the box panic and reboot if it's truly out of memory. ~~~ yjftsjthsd-h I have not looked into it at all, but can you not exempt sshd from the OOM killer? ~~~ ams6110 I looked into it a little bit. There are ways to tune it but I didn't see a way to exempt processes by name. It may be possible. The scenario I described above is HPC clusters in a university environment. The problem is students running programs that are poorly written. I'd rather reboot the node and tell them to fix their code than deal with trying to accommodate their careless / naive programming. ------ jschwartzi At my last job I wrote a build system that build maybe 30 or 40 executables from several hundred source files. Sometimes when I'd run make -j with no constraint my desktop environment would crash. It turned out that the OOM killer was triggering because I was filling up memory with compiler invocations. I was really proud of that bug. ~~~ bmurphy1976 I seem to end up building a lot of stuff on memory constrained devices for some reason. The OOM killer is always a problem, but it's easily avoided by provisioning an excessive amount of swap. It's slow, but slow is faster than never. Did you have any swap at the time? ~~~ jschwartzi Yeah, probably. It was just a desktop Ubuntu system. ------ amelius Reminds me of: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of- leaky-a...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky- abstractions/) ------ ben_bai What happened to good old returning NULL when no memory is available? No let's do overcommit (malloc always works) and OOM-kill some random process when under memory pressure! ~~~ JeremyBanks We collectively decided that this is less annoying that introducing thousands of difficult error cases to handle in every application. ~~~ concrete-faucet Well, what about adding a new signal (SIGXMEM) with a default action of ignore? If the system is running low on memory it can send this to some or all processes and wait for a little bit to see if things get better. This is how iOS has handled things since version 2.0: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicationdelegate/1623063-applicationdidreceivememorywarni) > It is strongly recommended that you implement this method. If your app does not release enough memory during low-memory conditions, the system may terminate it outright. ~~~ geofft See section 11 "Memory Pressure" of [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/memory.tx...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/memory.txt) \- there's a way to get notified via eventfd() if your current cgroup's memory gets low. I believe you can just do this on the root memory cgroup (/sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.pressure_level) if you're not setting up actual cgroups for your application. (Signals for asynchronous conditions are an awkward interface because they can interrupt you between any two assembly instructions. You're not able to release memory in the handler itself; you have to set a flag that gets handled by the main loop. So eventfd makes sense here. I'm assuming iOS is doing something similar by queueing an Objective-C method call. Signals make a lot more sense for segfaults and the like, where you're being interrupted at the exact instruction that isn't working and you need to handle it before executing any more instructions.) ------ dis-sys Being able to write NUMA aware applications like the one described in the article is a luxury for ALL Go users. The current Go runtime doesn't have any NUMA awareness. As of today, you can get a two NUMA nodes processor (AMD threadripper 1900X) for as little as $449. ------ BrainInAJar Memory overcommit is the most hostile, idiotic misfeature to ever ship in any mainstream operating system. It's such a great example of why one should pay absolutely no concern to Linus	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
You Drink, Uber Drives – For Free - pfusiarz http://www.startuppanel.co/you-drink-uber-drives-for-free/ ====== jawns This publicity stunt by Uber actually creates a perverse incentive for drinkers to _increase_ their blood alcohol level. If cab fare home is more expensive than the cost of the drinks needed to get you over the limit, then it makes (financial) sense to drink up. Which sounds harmless, since Uber's agreeing to drive you home. But if your blood alcohol level is high enough to impair your ability to drive safely, who's to say what other abilities it might impair? And does Uber really want to assume moral liability, if not legal liability, if something goes wrong? ~~~ genericuser Most college campuses already do something similar with safe ride programs. Such programs are usually seen as a good thing, in my experience. The amount of alcohol needed to be over the legal limit is actually remarkably small and Toronto and other major cities they might possibly do this promotion in aren't exactly known for cheap drinks. Based on that and the high probability that a person who goes out drinking in a major city will not venture too far from their residence, I expect that two drinks would usually be more expensive than a ride home. Uber fucks up plenty of things that are worth taking issue with, it is my opinion that this is not one of those things. I think most people should see this as a morally positive promotion. ~~~ kedean Every campus safe-ride I've heard of is free for all students no matter what. The issue here is the breathalyzer, not that they provide free rides for the drunk ones. At the college I went to, for example, you could use saferide as long as you had a campus id (now you can even use it without as long as you are with a group of <5 with an id among you, or if you pay $2). There's no incentive to get drunk there, because the ride will be there regardless. Since Uber is breathalyzing the clients, it's actually in your favor to be over the limit, hence the extra liability. ~~~ genericuser The saferide at schools I went to(large state schools) was limited to students who they deemed 'needed' it so if you stated you didn't feel safe, or that you were drunk they would provide a ride. If you were sober, felt safe, and were honest though they would not provide you with a ride. I know I tried at both schools I attended. Some of us would take more moral issue with lying to abuse a resource in way other than its intended purpose, than with getting drunk so we could use it honestly. You can easily 'lie' to the breathalyzer to make yourself read as over the limit without drinking more also, so for me it is the same issue. ------ rememberlenny Site is down - Content pasted below:: Video: [https://youtu.be/VECIOprmHMg](https://youtu.be/VECIOprmHMg) We’ve all been there. You go out with friends and by then end of the night find yourself drunk in the back of a taxi, searching for $10 to pay the driver. For those who stumble home, singing Sweet Caroline, we applaud you. This is where Uber took initiative. The popular ride sharing app is often at the center of global debate as it attempts to disrupt traditional taxis while battling employee wage suits and suppressing customer safety concerns. However, recently the service has introduced free rides for anyone who passes a breathalyzer test. The concept is called Uber Safe, their attempt to suppress drunk driving. it consists of a massive breathalyzer machine on on a sidewalk. All you have to do is take a straw, from the machine, and see if you blow over the legal limit. If you do pass, you’re too drunk to drive. Uber will hail you a car for a free ride home. A site has appeared in Toronto as a marketing stunt, so don’t get excited. However, with the massive turnout Uber has told users to “stay tuned” for more kiosks in more areas. Our only concern will be the lines at any NYC kiosk when at that point, drunks will have to decide between waiting for a possible free ride or taking their chances. ------ selter01 What? I ONLY use Uber when I'm drinking, otherwise I'd drive myself. I would go from spending $100/mo to $0 ------ copsarebastards Commenters on this thread have their heads so far up their asses that they are choking on their noses. Only on HN is a harm-reduction promo to decrease drunk driving a PR disaster because it _might_ cause some people to drink _one_ more drink to get a free ride. Did you ever think that overthinking things might give people a perverse incentive to drink so they can forget your post? ~~~ CodeWriter23 Seriously, a huge uproar over a marketing 101 textbook promotion. Attempt to alter consumer behavior in a manner that favors your brand by giving away a free sample. Does anyone seriously think Uber will continue this promo indefinitely? Of course not. I'm guessing the culture in Toronto is most people drive drunk because cabs cost too much, so this kind of promo is intended to help gain traction in the most lucrative market segment for Uber, the bar/club closers. ------ molyss I might be sounding as taking Uber for overly cynical, but it really sounds like yet another way to kill all competitors. And if it is, I am wondering what will happen when all competition is indeed killed. Will they keep burning money on it (as they do today on uberpool), or stop the whole program, andmake people chose between paying an uber or driving home wasted ? I'd bet on the second case, in which case the reduction of DYI will only be temporary, followed to a potential increase compared to current rates (due to people drinking more becaus of this stunt). Am I paranoid ? ~~~ genericuser I thought something similar. In that I read this and immediately thought 'wow Uber came up with a way to cut into one of the Taxi systems cash cows even more' Now if they come up with something like cheaper rates when one end point of your trip is an airport they can take a cut of the other big one. It seems remarkably clever as an idea to hurt their competition, just enough evil to seem charming to me in this light. ~~~ slayed0 They already do that by providing flat rates to/from many major airports to their corresponding downtown zones. ~~~ genericuser Ahhh well I never claimed to be clever or original. Unfortunately for me in Boston they have an 8.75 airport surcharge, and no sign of flat rates from my experience. ------ niravshah I wasn't getting the page itself to load - here is a cached version of the page [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jj45GHq...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jj45GHqI1IwJ:www.startuppanel.co/you- drink-uber-drives-for-free/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) ------ BrianEatWorld I don't know if its the same in all cities, but in Austin I have actually had taxi services refuse to pick me up if I give an address that is a bar, regardless of my level of inebriation. Uber may not be a model corporate citizen, but I have trouble as seeing this as anything but a good move. Particularly, given that my current city has a pretty big issue with drunk drivers. ------ cwkoss If you want get a free ride and you're sober, just swish some hard liquor around your mouth before you blow. A little single serving bottle could probably get you 3-4 trips! ------ philip1209 This sounds like the exact opposite PR image that Uber wants to create. "We make it easier for you to get drunk." This would be like OpenDoor advertising "Sell your house more quickly during a divorce." Technically, yes, but that's not a sustainable image for your company. ------ arprocter This could get ugly if the kiosk tells someone they're below the limit, they drive off in their car and then the cop who pulls them over thinks otherwise. ------ gkop Cab companies have been running this promotion on New Year's Eve since as long as I can remember, it's not a new idea. ~~~ milesokeefe Those haven't been automated with a breathalyzer kiosk though. ------ robgibbons Why should Uber drivers be forced to deal with shitfaced passengers? Unless the drivers have the choice of taking this category of passengers, this seems like a real shoddy deal for drivers, and a bad incentive for alcoholics. ~~~ joshstrange So right now the #1 reason I use Uber/Lyft is because I am drunk or plan on drinking and don't want to: A. Leave my car downtown and have to get it in the morning B. Give drunk Josh the option to drive. I'd rather take a Lyft, not drink and take a Lyft back then take the chance that I will made a very stupid decision while drunk and drive home. I'm rarely "shitfaced" but most of my friends use Uber/Lyft that same way I do so I'm always drunk or planning or being drunk when I take a Lyft. For everything else I just drive myself. What I'm trying to say is Uber/Lyft drivers already deal with this so if this initiative helps to keep drunks off the road (both driving and walking, which I've heard can be even more dangerous than driving) then I'm all for it. ------ herbig Yeah, this is a terrible idea, for all the reasons people have already listed. Perverse incentives, easily gamed. You have to wonder how these kind of things even get past the initial brainstorming sessions. It only takes a couple reasonably intelligent people a bit of discussion to come up with why this is not a good idea. But maybe Uber knows what they are doing, or how to handle the downsides. I'm skeptical. ~~~ schoen You could probably increase your Breathalyzer reading sharply by gargling with a few mL of hard liquor seconds before taking the test. (I understood this as an unmanned device.) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer#Mouth_alcohol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer#Mouth_alcohol) "[C]ertified breath-test operators are trained to observe a test subject carefully for at least 15–20 minutes before administering the test [... A] very tiny amount of alcohol from the mouth, throat or stomach can have a significant impact on the breath-alcohol reading." If so, people who haven't been drinking at all but are willing to carry around a flask of liquor might be able to get free rides home at any time. ~~~ copsarebastards So what? It's a promotion, if Uber wants to give away money that's their call. ~~~ schoen I didn't mean to join all of the other criticisms of the program; I was just interested in the reliability of the Breathalyzer as a way of achieving the apparent goal, which I think is low. I'm not particularly bothered or concerned that Uber is doing this. ------ cmdrfred The real issue is why are bars legal in the first place? Not being a user of alcohol but living next to a bar I constantly ask that question. If they really wanted to catch drunk drivers just sit in front of my house and you would pick up a couple an hour. Also how can you call yourself a adult and then go out get completely shitfaced then go "Oh no, I don't have a way to get home." like it was a unavoidable consequence of existence. People who downvote (but have no correction, objection, or answer to) this may have to reevaluate the role bacteria feces plays in their lives. ~~~ icebraining Why wouldn't bars be legal? ~~~ cmdrfred If drinking and driving isn't legal and said bar is not within walking distance of any public transport then how can they legally serve more than a beer or two when you arrive alone or when the entire party is drinking? Either change the limit or bust them. The drunks near me even park their cars toward the street because they know when they leave they will be to drunk to back out. ~~~ cheetos [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab) * [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver) ~~~ cmdrfred Please see above comment where I say neither are being used.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA - DanielRibeiro http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/ ====== patio11 I live in central Japan's manufacturing hub. If you ever come visit me, and _really_ want to return depressed, I'll arrange for us to take a tour of the company which produces most of the world's cell phone camera gaskets. (A little ring of rubber around the cell phone lens.) You very well might have one in the Japanese cellphone which came in the Chinese paper box and got stamped "Made in China" that you have in your pocket. Every day, a couple hundred workers report to the factory. The most labor- intensive step in the process is taking a sheet of approximately 1,000 gaskets, manually removing them with a tweezer, inspecting them under a jeweler's loupe, and depositing the passes into the waiting outgoing package. When you fill it, it gets wheeled away for shipping. Your quota is 1,000 passed gaskets per hour, for which you are paid approximately 1,000 yen (at least, that was the pre-crash wage), or about $13 at today's prices. When you say "We want our manufacturing jobs back", this is the kind of job you really want. It is _easily_ the worst legal job I've heard of in a first- world nation. There's also practically a clock on the wall saying Time Until Robotic Arms Are Sensitive Enough To Do This Without Damaging An Unacceptable Portion Of Gaskets. One reason that (pre-crash, anyhow) this neighborhood had a lot of immigrants is that the typical worker at this sort of factory 30~50 years ago was a Japanese woman in her twenties and that these days the job is a job Japanese women mostly won't do. ~~~ Klinky _"When you say "We want our manufacturing jobs back", this is the kind of job you really want. It is easily the worst legal job I've heard of in a first- world nation."_ How about cleaning up after old people when they mess themselves? How about any of the DVD sorting facilities at Netflix, which is practically the exact job you described? How about the massive amount of call centers we have in the US? How about almost any low level job in agriculture? I don't think your imagination is deep enough to fathom how bad a job can really be, even in a first world nation. There are plenty of people who are willing to work or already work a monotonous or difficult job for low pay here in the US. More investment should go into automation, but given that the world labor market makes humans so cheap(mainly due to not having the care about the workers health or safety), human labor usually wins out. Once all these jobs go to automation, what do you do with the workers? That is then societies problem really, we'll need to figure out if there should be a social net that guides people into higher education so we have people building/repairing robots instead of doing what the robots are actually doing. Given the vested interests in the status quo, this is probably not too likely to happen in the near future. ~~~ sp4rki All the jobs you mention make substantially more money and I can assure you have better work conditions than a gasket manufacturing plant located in Japan's manufacturing hub. I'd rather be earning a living by means of a nursing job that pays at least 5 times (more like 10 times in the US) what a Japanese gasket plucker makes. And I get the bonus that I can feel great because even though I have to clean shit, I make someone's life more bearable and get to take care of human beings that appreciate that I'm contributing to humanity instead of rotting away any chance of developing my intellect by spending 12 hours plucking gaskets. Also, the solution to the automation problem is not higher education, the solution is the return of the skilled laborer. You can't automate a robot to drive to a customer's house, cut open some drywall, fix a plumbing leak, restructure some electric piping to a new section of the wall, install a socket, make a report and get it signed by the customer, get payed, drive back to the company hub, and finally give you the money. Hell you can't automate a robot to make custom dragon blood forged steel swords, which we'll probably need for the zombie apocalypse. Bachelor and masters degrees are currently too easy to get to the point even a monkey could get a bachelors these days, specially if it's a wealthy monkey. The result is that GOOD plumbers, electricians, or dragon blood forged steel sword making blacksmiths are so hard to get this days because all the offspring of skilled laborers want to go to a fancy school to be doctors, lawyers, or architects, because it's all the rage to get a university degree this days. ~~~ stevenbedrick > I'd rather be earning a living by means of a nursing job that pays at least > 5 times (more like 10 times in the US) what a Japanese gasket plucker makes. For what it's worth, most people actually doing the "cleaning up after the elderly" job are certified nursing assistants, who often earn basically a notch or two above minimum wage. ~~~ 0x0x0x And coming from a medical family, I don't think most CNAs are thinking of the greater good when they're wiping those asses. ------ civilian I hate this "America is losing greatness from losing manufacturing" argument. Our citizens don't want to work in manufacturing, and the Chinese (and other foreign citizens) are willing to do it for less. Sure, why not, they deserve it! The world would improve if we stopped thinking in a "us-vs-them" nationalist way. Think in a global way!: * We're helping Chinese farmers get out of abject poverty into a slightly better situation. * We're improving their economy * We're making cheaper goods for Americans & other developed countries, which means that it will be accessible to poorer people (which is a good thing!) * The company will gain more profit and be able to make more innovative toys for us! If we want to go down the nationalist root, then why don't we just outlaw imports all together? Or at least pass some protectionist tariffs? If we did that, with the foolish misconception that it would help _our_ economy, we would goad other countries into passing tariffs, and the whole world economy would hurt. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act> The Smoot- Hawley Tariff provoked that kind of response and was a key factor in creating the Great Depression. ~~~ larsberg > Our citizens don't want to work in manufacturing Not true among those to whom college is not attractive. There is a group of Americans that would like a semi-skilled labor job that affords them a middle class lifestyle. I grew up in an area primarily populated with people like that, and while all of my friends are now of the BS/MS/PhD crowd, there is a huge set of people who now go on to college not because they want to but because they don't know what else they can do. Unless they are lucky enough to know somebody who can get them in as an apprentice at a union. ~~~ tptacek Those people don't want the lifestyle afforded to Chinese factory workers, but the fact is that this lifestyle is an improvement for the vast rural Chinese underclass; this argument comes dangerously close to suggesting that we should further impoverish millions of people to improve the lot of tens of thousands of Americans. It seems to be a simple fact that the US is structurally disadvantaged in electronics manufacturing. ~~~ coliveira > Those people don't want the lifestyle afforded to Chinese factory workers > but the fact is that this lifestyle is an improvement for the vast rural > Chinese underclass Why do you think this might be true? The only reason Chinese workers are poor is that they government let companies treat them as slaves. I don't think we should even consider that taking part on this is fair to Chinese people. On the opposite, agreeing with the practices of the Chinese government is exporting poverty to other parts of the world. If you think that the advantage is that Western countries get cheaper products, this is wrong again: we could get cheap products anyway, but just using more machines instead of semi-slave labor. ~~~ tptacek No, you've misread me. I'm comparing Chinese factory workers to (more numerous) Chinese rural poor, who make _four to five times less_ than the factory workers, and whose poverty cannot be attributed to greedy factory owners. In objective terms, however exploited you think technology manufacturing "slave laborers" are by companies in the west, the west has done those workers a favor. The status quo ante was a poverty so grinding as to make the comparison to unemployed US auto workers laughable. ------ cjy I think it is important to keep in mind that manufacturing output has actually been increasing over the last 50 years. It is just manufacturing employment that has fallen. That is a natural consequence of becoming more productive. See: <http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-j> The Forbes author is arguing that it is hard to innovate when all the manufacturing expertise leaves. To support this he argues that some Kindle parts are made in China, others Taiwan, others South Korea. To me this is evidence that innovation occurs at a decentralized level. Innovation occurs when companies specialize and focus on a better battery, or screen, or lens instead of a better device. Most people on HN seem to believe that small decentralized start-ups are more innovative than bigger companies. Why is decentralization good for software innovation, but bad for hardware innovation? ~~~ coliveira The problem is not decentralization, but that all manufacturing is outside the US. The part of the process left here is the design. But what if the design is done by somebody else tomorrow? Then companies in this country will have no role to play. ~~~ derobert When you say "all manufacturing is outside the US", you have a very interesting definition of _all_. You may want to check UNIDO's industrial statistics, for then you'd find that the largest manufacturer country is not China, Japan, Taiwan, etc… it's the US. ~~~ bzbarsky The US does different sorts of manufacturing from China/Japan/Taiwan. There is not that much electronics manufacturing in the US. But yes, by value of output, the US is a major manufacturer; we especially specialize in manufacturing large expensive stuff. ------ tokenadult I just used CTRL-F to search this whole thread for keywords. I can't believe that no one has mentioned comparative advantage yet. <http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm> [http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...](http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadvantage.html) <http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html> [http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Economicae/Essays/AB...](http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Economicae/Essays/ABS_Comp_Adv.htm) [http://www.commonsenseeconomics.com/Readings/Comparative%20A...](http://www.commonsenseeconomics.com/Readings/Comparative%20Advantage.CSE.pdf) David Ricardo made an underappreciated contribution to the prosperity of all humankind when he developed the explanation of the law of comparative advantage not quite 200 years ago. As long as manufacturers want to have large markets, they will sell to people who desire manufactured goods. And as long as we (whoever "we" are) have something to trade with the manufacturers, we will not lack for any manufactured good that has been invented. The United States of America is full of affordable Kindles, and people with all kinds of occupations can afford to buy Kindles if they like Kindles. ------ rbanffy I loved the doublethink involved in "There’s no stupidity in the story. The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do". When you play chess, you shouldn't optimize your strategy for short-term capture of your opponent's pieces. ~~~ dmethvin But the analogy to chess is another sign of short-term thinking. There is no end of the game if the _company_ is to survive. Company execs are optimizing for their own good. They won't be around forever, so they need an exit strategy (end game) that works out for them. If it takes the company down, well so be it. Was it a good idea for Groupon investors to take a bunch of money out of the pool in the last round of financing? You can bet they see an end to the game. ~~~ rbanffy The end of the game is beating your competition to the next disruption. Then, you start another match. ~~~ troutwine Forgive me, but that seems vague. The ending of chess is easily decidable, but how do you quantify 'disruption'? ~~~ rbanffy The first example that comes to my mind is Apple. When audio compression and bandwidth allowed music to be transfered trough internet connections and P2P networks threatened to disrupt the music market, they had iTunes ready and quickly cut deals with record labels. Now they pretty much own the legal music market. The second one is the HP pocket calculator. Before it existed, nobody knew how bad slide-rules were. HP disrupted their own market for desktop calculators (but did it before someone disrupted it for them) Apple is also playing this post-PC game with their mobile platforms. They are fighting against Android for a better position on the next round. It looks like the next match won't take long to start. ~~~ nitrogen _they had iTunes ready and quickly cut deals with record labels_ For the record, Apple didn't have iTunes "ready," and the deals with record labels didn't come quickly. Napster was released in 1999. iTunes started life as SoundJam, and wasn't released until 2001. The iTunes store didn't come until 2003. Apple dominated the legal music market because of the marketing and UX superiority of the iPod over its MP3-playing predecessors, not because they were first at anything. ~~~ rbanffy You are rigtht. I mixed the events up. The iPod was launched shortly after Napster became mainstream, but, still, Jobs played his cards skillfully and cornered the market before others realized what was happening. ------ cppsnob "An exception is Apple [AAPL], which “has been able to preserve a first-rate design capability in the States so far by remaining deeply involved in the selection of components, in industrial design, in software development, and in the articulation of the concept of its products and how they address users’ needs.”" This guy is very confused. Other US-based companies selling hardware operate in this same way. To boot, he never shows that anything listed here for Apple WASN'T done in the US for the Kindle. The same laundry list of components he describes for the Kindle goes for every Apple product, every Motorola product, every Xbox 360, etc. Yet the design and software is usually done in the same way Apple does. ------ tptacek A tangent: when ASUSTEK first demonstrated their manufacturing prowess to Dell, long before they offered to take over Dell's supply chain, could Dell have acquired them? ~~~ marshray I can't think of many examples of corporations in Asia being successfully purchased and operated by non-Asians. Maybe it happens, but it seems like you'd hear about it more if it were practical. ------ ansy Technically, Amazon could make the Kindle in the USA out of parts shipped in from various Asian countries even though it could not make each of those components in the USA as well. But then, what really could be made entirely in one country? Especially when you consider each component, the raw materials, the machinery used, and so on down the line for each of those. I don't necessarily disagree with the author that there is value to keeping a process "in house" which needs to be including in any cost savings calculations and that American companies are prone to discounting that value when making decisions. But at some point some components or steps in the manufacturing process might be necessary or optimal to leave in the hands of others whether foreign or domestic. ------ pnathan For the record, out of the public (consumer) eye, there are still electronic device manufacturers in the USA. I work for one. ------ mckoss If you remove the nationalistic bias, this story sounds like exactly the "right thing" happened to Dell and Amazon. Work migrated to where it can be performed most efficiently. This is exactly what we want an economy to do. It's true that Dell did not increase it's ability to design and manufacture circuit boards. But that was never their core strength. I think a firm's managers should be thoughtful about what skills they want to develop internally, and freely outsource as much as they can of the rest. This article would have managers adopt a destructive NIH attitude, greatly reducing their firm's efficiency and competitiveness. ------ aspir The Dell anecdote at the beginning was particularly surprising. Hindsight is always clearer, and the author is intentionally summarizing to strengthen a point, but I was blown away at how calculating ASUS's actions were. The whole time I read that section I was thinking to myself, "Wow, so this is how empires fall: one ill-formed relationship at a time." ~~~ v21 it's worth noticing that ASUS didn't have to be scheming for the end result for that to happen - each stage involved them acquiring a bit more business, and making a bit more money. Their actions needn't have been the result of long-term thinking. ~~~ rbanffy Which is even more perverse. The system self-destructs unless we consciously intervene. ~~~ v21 But who says the system self-destructs? The market has worked in this case - computers are yet cheaper, without a loss in quality. What outcome would be preferable? ~~~ aspir In this instance, I assumed that "system" referred to Dell's business model, which did in fact suffer. From a consumer perspective, as you're referring to, it was preferable. ~~~ v21 Ah yeah, that perspective makes sense. But on the other hand - what business model doesn't degrade over time? What magic that would be! ~~~ meric Monopoly backed by government regulations. ~~~ v21 Even the East India Company fell eventually. ------ minikomi As an aside, I found it interesting reading through te comments here how little bio-industries are mentioned as a possible way out. I got my degree in biotechnology and I must admit, there are far fewer "jobs" it leads to than being handy with, say, Photoshop or Ruby.. I wonder I it's something which will change.. ------ fredBuddemeyer if it is the zero sum game that is suggested (itself unlikely) why is this outcome bad? is it something to do with race, geography? i dont understand why anyone should be rooting for a team here instead of appreciating the synthesis that this represents. ------ logjam "In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.” Yeah, _lack of infrastructure_. In my opinion that's true of every facet of the worthwhile goals of our national (U.S.) life, from good healthcare to cutting edge science to excellence in education. Somewhere along the way that same short-sightedness the author discusses of mis-emphasizing short-term profit (e.g. "tax cuts") started bankrupting our future. Now we're reaping what we sowed. Practically every revolutionary advantage we gained over the last _century_ at least (e.g., public health initiatives and sanitation, public education in the early 20th century; establishment of publicly funded research; the space program, the internet) were all _collectively_ funded programs by government - by _us_ \- the collective will of a people not held hostage by short-sighted "anti- government" rhetoric. ~~~ anamax > Somewhere along the way that same short-sightedness the author discusses of > mis-emphasizing short-term profit (e.g. "tax cuts") started bankrupting our > future. Now we're reaping what we sowed. Practically every revolutionary > advantage we gained over the last century at least (e.g., public health > initiatives and sanitation, public education in the early 20th century; > establishment of publicly funded research; the space program, the internet) > were all collectively funded programs by government - by us - the collective > will of a people not held hostage by short-sighted "anti-government" > rhetoric. The existence of good govt spending does not imply that govt spending is good. Right now, the potential good spending is being crowded out by a lot of dumb spending. (That's nothing new - we blew hundreds of billions on Carter's synfuels project.) That's why public employee pension reform in San Francisco is being driven by folks who like govt. They realize that you can't do good govt spending when 20% of your budget goes to pensions. The same is true of SS (which is bigger) and ordinary healthcare. ~~~ joe_the_user _The existence of good govt spending does not imply that govt spending is good._ Of course, government spending is neither inherently good nor bad. But the thing to watch is how same cable of rent-seeking corporations that suck-up a good portion of what you aptly-label bad government spending also whips-up the "anti-government" mob when threatened (or simply greedy). Why is it that an honest-to-God investor in productive enterprises like Warren Buffet can call for higher taxes on the super-rich but the criminal Koch brothers bend all their effort to oppose this? Well, lower taxes for these new American oligarchs is just one piece of their entire campaign of _state capture_. ~~~ nitrogen _Why is it that an honest-to-God investor in productive enterprises like Warren Buffet can call for higher taxes on the super-rich..._ I believe it is unfair to assume that all wealthy people must share the same philosophy as Warren Buffet, just as it's unfair to assume that all members of any other economic class should or do think alike. ~~~ chopsueyar No, but they should be in a higher tax bracket than you and me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: My weekend project - Hacker News inside Sublime Text 2 - kaolinite https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin ====== kaolinite Weekend project - my first Sublime Text 2 plugin. If you have package control installed, no need to go to the Github page, just search "Hacker News" and you should be able to find it. ------ numbnuts Sublime Text 2 isn't too far off from being able to read mail, is it? How is ST2 plugin development? Is the API stable? Well-documented? ~~~ kaolinite Maybe an email client could be my next plugin ;-) It's not the best documented API I've worked with but it's also nowhere near the worst. There's also a very active IRC channel on Freenode (#sublimetext) which I found helpful. The API docs are here: <http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/api_reference.html> I borrowed quite a bit by reading the source of other plugins too (especially PlainTasks, a very good To Do list tool for Sublime). I think this is pretty much essential to creating a plugin as there are parts that just aren't documented very well, or at least I couldn't find it. Finally, Sublime borrows quite a bit from Textmate. The theme syntax, for example, is taken from Textmate - so you can always read the documentation for Textmate's API, which is somewhat better documented.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bitcoin won't last in world of finance, warns Nobel-winning economist - Cbasedlifeform https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/bitcoin-wont-last-in-world-of-finance-warns-nobel-winning-economist ====== airbreather Economists rarely agree, so by definition are rarely correct. As economics is the study of human behaviour primarily, it is very hard to predict what will and will not happen. You have to think that any economist that actually knew with any certainty what was going to happen would be rich and sunning on the beach with a cocktail. ~~~ zawerf Historically scientists rarely agree either but you can't say that by definition they are rarely correct. Most economists probably agree on more core concepts than they disagree on. I have no horse in this race, just thought it's a funny reason to dismiss an entire field. ~~~ slededit I think you can say they are rarely correct. Scientific Papers that truly advance our understanding are rare indeed. The rest are either failed hypothesis or of little predictive value. Note that this is not at all a value judgement. Incorrect hypothesis are important steps in the way of learning new things, and papers of little predictive value can in volume lead us to new solutions. ------ skepticmoron The explanations they give as to why it won’t succeed are like 12 years old reading anything about bitcoin for the first time. Duh!! ------ mythrwy He might be right, but if he said anything different would he be allowed in Davos at the table with the lords of the world?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How 4chan hacked ReCAPTCHA to win the TIME 100 Poll - mariorz http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-loses/ ====== albertsun While I don't doubt that TIME's poll security team (if it existed) was more than overmatched, how could a website defend the integrity of their online poll against such an attack? Or is running an effective online poll truly hopeless? ~~~ palish Why not only allow one vote per IP? It would be possible to spoof your IP, but still, could all of the manual 4chan voters spoof their IPs for every vote? ~~~ hachiya They could use a proxy to "spoof" their IP. But there is no known way they could use IP spoofing to use any old IP address, as the voting app runs via HTTP, which runs over TCP, which requires a full connection, and the known spoofing attacks on TCP are blind, e.g. you can send but not receive data. So HTTP would not work over blind TCP spoofing. I think that if one vote, or any small number of votes were allowed per IP, the attack would have been much more difficult, as there simply are not tens of thousands of readily available proxies, unless these people have access to a big botnet. A downside to one vote per IP is that AOL and some organizations place their outgoing web traffic behind one or a small pool of IP addresses. So these users wouldn't have been able to vote. ~~~ eru > A downside to one vote per IP is that AOL and some organizations place their > outgoing web traffic behind one or a small pool of IP addresses. So these > users wouldn't have been able to vote. That would not have been such a big problem. But be sure to play 'dead man' and maintain the illusion that every vote counts. Eg here on Hacker News after you click on the vote-arrows Javascript manipulates the counts accordingly, but did you ever check whether your vote has had any effect on the "true" counts in the server? (Of course at Hackers News it has, because PG is not evil.) Even more devious would be accepting the unwelcome votes, but also reversing each one of them after a random time has passed. This way the attackers get the see illusion, that their attacks succeed, but are fought back (or drown out in counter-votes from real people) only a few hours later. ~~~ lacker Sometimes your vote does not have an effect on the "true" count on the server. For example, try voting every comment on a page down, and then reload to see the real counts. This isn't "evil" per se. ------ huhtenberg Hmm .. something's not right. Why didn't Time blacklist the "devoters" by their IPs (or respective small subnets) ? They couldn't be _that_ incompetent. So it's reasonable to assume that the blacklisting wasn't working, which means the hack must've been mounted in a distributed fashion, which in turn implies it was ran over a botnet of some kind. Hmm .. ~~~ andrewf Web proxy farms mean you can't just say "100+ votes from a single IP address = blacklist". You'd probably need manual intervention to distinguish proxies and individual abusers. Once you're manually intervening, you may as well just wait until the poll closes and drop the results you don't want. ~~~ dagobart ...which in turn might make oone wonder whether or not that's happening already all the time and on just any poll around. Haven't it be the respected TIME one could suspect they kept the poll as it turned out just because the Anonymous group knew the exact number of votes for every rank. ------ peregrine A simple forced login with email verification would have ended all of this nonsense. Throw recaptcha for good measure. ~~~ potatolicious TIME's purpose with the poll was to drive traffic and interest - the integrity of the poll is a very distant second concern. Throw up barriers around voting and you remove the participation and thus traffic from the equation. ~~~ CalmQuiet If their purpose(s) include _only_ "to drive traffic and interest" -- then they can forget about pretending that "journalism" (i.e., valuable, reliable content) is no longer their business. ------ timothychung I feel that it is more a crack than a hack. :-) ~~~ timothychung I just think a hack is an improvement to anything while the action in the post is just ruining the online voting system. A hack would be to let the TIME web team to know the details of the crack and the solution to fix it. Cheers. :-) ~~~ jcl Classically, a subset of "hacks" are pranks, which are relatively-but-not- totally harmless ( _someone_ had to take down that car): <http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/best_of.html> In the grand scheme of things, the ranking of TIME's list is relatively unimportant. I believe this is only the second time they've done a ranking poll, and it was effectively gamed last time as well (by a much larger group of people, though: Stephen Colbert fans and Rain fans).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ang Lee Is Embracing a Faster Film Format. Can Theaters Keep Up? - dnetesn http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/movies/ang-lee-billy-lynns-long-halftime-walk-new-york-film-festival.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 ====== rootbear I think they are making a big mistake tying high frame rate to 3D. The only way to see the Hobbit films in HFR was the 3D versions. But HFR all by itself gives an almost 3D realism to film, something I noticed when I saw Douglas Trumbull' Showscan demo at 60fps in the 1980s. I have friends who would enjoy the HFR clarity but who don't have stereo vision and won't pay extra for uncomfortable glasses that do nothing for them, just to see a film in HFR. It looks like some theaters will have Lee's film in 2D HFR, due to technical limitations, so maybe that will give them some audience feedback on whether HFR can stand alone. I'm also suspicious of the gain in quality going from 60fps to 120fps. I saw a demo of HFR at Siggraph a few years back and the change from 24fps to 48fps was very clear. Going to 60fps was less of an improvement, but for fast action scenes it was noticeable. I'm not sure that 120fps will be worth the extra expense, but I'm interested in seeing it. ~~~ moogleii A 120fps master will be useful for 3d at home where the technology relies on rapid alternation between left and right eyes, so the effective fps per eye will be 60. Although, now that I think about it, it might be useful for theaters, too, since they're using two polarized source frames per projected frame. It depends if they're counting the combined, projected frame as one frame or as two source frames to reach their 120 fps claim. Actually, out of curiosity, I read up on how Real 3D does it, and they use alternating, polarized frames out of one projector, which would be 60fps per eye. ~~~ vernie Isn't the home 3D TV market pretty much dead at this point? ~~~ seanp2k2 Yes, Samsung is not making any 3D TVs for their 2016 models (which are out now) [http://www.cnet.com/news/3d-tv-is-now-more-dead-than- ever/](http://www.cnet.com/news/3d-tv-is-now-more-dead-than-ever/) ------ was_boring > The film is considered a risk partly because the hyper-reality lent by the > cinematography technology [viewing at 3d, 4k and 120fps] could be unsettling > to viewers. “Test subjects that have seen some footage have commented that > 40 minutes after seeing battle footage, they’re still shaking,” Ben Gervais, > a production systems supervisor on the film, told Variety in April. This sounds like pure marketing drivel. Just take a look at video games and the disparity of consoles being (largely) locked around 30 fps and PC that can reach 100+ fps. While a higher framerate can give the appearance of smoother gameplay -- which is disputed beyond a certain threshold -- it never makes it "unsettling" or more realistic. ~~~ TylerE Video game framerate and movie framerate are not at all comparable. Movies have true natural motion blur. ~~~ erichocean > _Movies have true natural motion blur._ In addition, researchers have performed tests and there's something about films being as slow (motion blurry) as they are that contributes to them seeming like fiction. 24fps is the slowest you can run a film with lip sync—any slower and your brain has trouble associating the sound with the imagery. 18fps is the slowest you can run a silent film and still distinguish continuous motion. 30fps and you start to lose the "dreamlike" effect, and at 60 fields per second (television), it's lost completely. ~~~ agumonkey Last point made me cringe so hard a few years ago when all TVs were to have their (100\|200)Hz mode so every movie now looks like straight out of Pixar. Hyper smooth, hyper real and hyper fake all at the same time. ~~~ voltagex_ That's interpolated though - I wonder what it'd look like if you had an actual 200fps source (and the ability to play it) ~~~ agumonkey True, I forgot that. I think I've seen one 48fps (maybe first Peter Jackson effort to push this) film and the results wasn't different from interpolated 100Hz TVs, the "movie" looked like a professional documentary. Crisp and dead. ~~~ gambiting I saw the first Hobbit in 48fps and that was the first time I ever wanted to walk out of the cinema - was literally unpleasant to watch, my brain was telling me that everything is playing too fast and that audio _should_ be desyncing from video, but it never did. Maybe I would get used to it if all films were made in 48fps, but I certainly can't recommend it after that one experience. ~~~ agumonkey Some people say we reject non 24 fps out of ingrained habits, I don't subscribe to this point of view. Nobody ever complained that a movie failed its purpose because it was filmed at 24fps. Tangent: so many movie are lacking in terms of set, direction, pacing, scenario.. why do people believe tech is the variable to improve... ------ sowbug 120 is the least common multiple of 24 and 30 (NTSC rounded to nearest integer). Perhaps this is a method to capture enough source material to generate all popular framerates. ~~~ tgpc TV in Europe is 50hz Things get sped up, slowed down or played back with jitter. It's not great. Older devices (DVD/BD players) used to change framerate automatically. Newer devices (streaming) seem to default to 60hz with an obscure Settings menu to manually change it. Nearly everyone ends up watching the content in the wrong frame rate :-( ~~~ MichaelGG So do LCD monitors have a setting for 50Hz refresh? Or how does that work? I've only seen 59/60Hz (and sometimes higher). ~~~ Accacin TVs, not monitors. ~~~ MichaelGG They seem sort of interchangeable? If I stream a EU show is it gonna suck on my laptop? ------ bitwize So cold and lifeless! Film should be 24fps, flickery screen, celluloid only. It helps if the celluloid is of such poor quality that it's grainy as all get- out and the light melts it and it snaps halfway through the picture. Now that's REAL cinema. ------ wazoox In fact, plain HD at 120 fps looks way better IMO than 4K at 30 fps. Motion blur in ultra high resolution is _not_ compelling... ------ kristianp After the hobbit's special effects were shown up at 48fps, reviewers blamed the high framerate for the unreal effect. Few screens were assigned to the HFR versions of the sequels. Hopefully this movie will make higher framerate movies more popular. ~~~ spc476 What I read about the 48fps Hobbit movie was that the indoor scenes looked very fake, but the outdoor scenes of New Zealand looked _fantastic._ The same article made some comments about mixing fps in a movie, one approach like the Wizard of Oz (real world B&W, magical world in color). Another approach might be one aspect of the move (like a character) appearing at 48fps while the rest is in 24fps. Lots of room for experimentation in the next few decades. ~~~ WorldMaker It's funny that British television for a long time (up until the HD era in fact) did this on historic, technical accident: indoor/in-studio cameras they used filmed at a much higher fps than outdoor/on-location cameras for cost and technical reasons. I remember noticing it the most in shows like Keeping Up Appearances and Fawlty Towers. Fawlty Towers especially tended to use outdoor shots for more of its slapstick, playing into the lower framerate for comedic effect. ------ helthanatos I wish everyone would start 120 FPS/4K(downscaled to 4K). That would be great. ------ dimman If they could just focus on producing good movies than focusing on technical details. Just take the Dumb & Dumber movies for instance. IMO, one of the reasons the new movie isn't as good as the old is due to the image quality. I don't need dull colors in FullHD quality, it kind of ruins the feel of the movie...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Phoenix Channels vs. Rails ActionCable - bcardarella https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/08/09/phoenix-channels-vs-rails-action-cable?updated ====== chrismccord We put these tests together after clients with existing Rails stacks wanted our input on choosing Phoenix or Rails for their specific real-time push features. The benchmark apps are simple – no database, no sessions, but we wanted to set the PubSub patterns up in a way that would give us insights into a wide range of applications. The blog repo contains everything to setup an instance and run the benchmarks yourself: [https://github.com/chrismccord/channelsac](https://github.com/chrismccord/channelsac) ------ joshmn This won't be a popular comment, but I'm posting it anyway. I'm annoyed by all these comparison posts that only harp on speed and benchmarks. The biggest benefit to using Rails is its ecosystem and maturity. When speed and benchmarks matter, you won't use Rails unless you're ready to throw money at hardware. In the second sentence, "Phoenix is Not Rails" yet it goes on to compare ActionCable to Phoenix Channels. All these posts on Phoenix vs Rails really confuse me. How does Phoenix, apart from MVC (and perhaps the folder structure?) compare to Rails? Speed, benchmarks, and scaling aside, how does it really compare? Rails scales just fine if you throw money at it (a great thing!); Rails also has the Ruby ecosystem — I can guarantee is vastly superior than Elixir's ecosystem. I digress. ~~~ tidbittt > I'm annoyed by all these comparison posts that only harp on speed and > benchmarks. You know they are not mutually exclusive right? If you want to learn more about Phoenix and potentially how it compares to Rails: * A series of articles on the matter: http://cloudless.studio/articles * Phoenix guides: http://www.phoenixframework.org/docs/overview * Phoenix book: https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming-phoenix * Plenty of talks by the Phoenix team, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD3P7Qan3pw and https://vimeo.com/131633172 * Phoenix v1.2 (latest) features: https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/03/25/what-makes-phoenix-presence-special-sneak-peek There is plenty of material that answers a good part of your questions. If you don't have performance or scalability needs, good for you, but that doesn't invalidate the cases of people who need those. > Rails scales just fine if you throw money at it (a great thing!); If you treat development time and money as infinite resources, then I agree it is "just fine". But in practice, the bigger your infrastructure, the more you will have to spend on servers and on your deployment team. Your development team will also have to squeeze the maximum it can from the codebase, often by adding layers of cache, so it doesn't hurt availability and usability when you have spikes in traffic. This seems to have been the main point of the blog post as well: given how those tools behave, how will it impact your development and deployment?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Microwave Mortuary - chaosmachine http://www.microwaves101.com/content/microwavemortuary.cfm ====== RevRal Once as a kid I attempted to make an "electro-magnet." It made perfect sense to take my huge speaker magnet, trim an AC cord, then tape each exposed wire to a side of the speaker magnet. Before plugging my awesome whatever-the-hell-I-was-trying-to-make in, for added coolness I placed a large ball bearing on the side of the magnet to see if it would spin around. I plugged it in and BOOM. I learned a lot that day. None of my later mishaps involved loud noises or explosions. A lot of melting, though. ~~~ chaosmachine Ah, the joys of childhood. I once bought a string of battery-powered Christmas lights, cut off the battery connector, and attached it to 120 volts of AC wall outlet. Boom, indeed.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Incremental Search in Vim - pmihaylov https://pmihaylov.com/incremental-search-vim/ ====== johncoltrane This is silly. Incremental search has been built-in for more than fifteen years: :help 'incsearch'	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TweetDeck launches web client alternative to Twitter.com - rradu http://blog.tweetdeck.com/testing-the-future-introducing-tweetdeck-web ====== mckoss Isn't this exactly what Twitter said they DON'T want to see (replacement clients using the Twitter API). Is TweetDeck just "grandfathered in"? ~~~ olivercameron They "recommend" people don't build businesses like TweetDeck, because they believe there isn't enough room. However, it seems to me that TweetDeck has done pretty well for itself. ~~~ mckoss FTI - here's the Twitter developer group post: [http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development- talk/brow...](http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development- talk/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a?pli=1) It seems stronger than merely a "recommendation" to me. They flatly state that new apps may not replicate the mainstream Twitter experience. Existing developers are allowed to continue to "serve their customers" - but I think developing new product lines as TweetDeck is doing, is going to run afoul of the new API terms of service. Unless they have a side agreement, I expect some sort of battle to arise from this. ------ jeremymcanally We've been working on something like this but better for a while: <http://meeep.com> A totally customizable Twitter web client (e.g., you can upload your own userscripts, HTML templates, etc.). ------ gyardley Completely quixotic. Twitter wants to own the client experience and as owner of the platform, they have the power to do so. Twitter's now-infamous developer group post also listed a number of areas Twitter doesn't want to own. Reading between the lines, they're giving client companies the opportunity to transition to another line of business. If the client companies don't take the hint, Twitter's going to eventually play hardball. ~~~ chris_j Why doesn't Twitter buy TweetDeck? TweetDeck appears to be a better user experience than anything that Twitter have come up with themselves so far. If Twitter does want to own the client experience on their platform then what better way of doing so? ~~~ rradu Because UberMedia already bought it. [http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/02/12/ubermedia- acquires...](http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/02/12/ubermedia-acquires- tweetdeck/) Don't think they'll give it up that easily ~~~ ig1 Apparently they haven't, one of the panelist (from Tweetdeck) at Geeknrolla said he couldn't talk about any takeover speculation, which implies that it might not have gone through. ------ kaerast This is based on the core of the Google Chrome app. Does this mean it is expected to replace the Chrome app? And does it have any new features? I've been missing the ability to filter certain apps from the Chrome app yet still find it the best Twitter desktop app. ------ bradhe How interesting! This could put Twitter in a very interesting place -- perhaps, one day, they won't need to maintain a _client_ for their service! ------ invertd I guess next in the pipeline is TweetDeck Web Desktop App :) ------ OoTheNigerian I called it a while ago. [http://oonwoye.com/2011/03/13/dont-hate-twitter-we- just-need...](http://oonwoye.com/2011/03/13/dont-hate-twitter-we-just-need-an- alternative-part-1/) ~~~ chc You called _what_ a while ago? I don't see anything in there about TweetDeck making a Web version. ------ zackattack tweetdeck needs an api, bad.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Quaternions: The Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra - guerrilla https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-strange-numbers-that-birthed-modern-algebra-20180906/ ====== avmich We don't discuss Cayley-Dickson construction often enough. Why all systems starting with sedenions are power-associative and have non-zero divisors - where are the properties which are different among them?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Fastest and best way to learn iOS programming? - eibrahim I am an experienced programmer with experience across the board, node, .net, rails, js, python, etc... but for some reason i find iphone programming so freaking difficult and un-intuitive and i don't know where to start... I am currently doing the http://www.codeschool.com/ course.<p>Any other recommendations? ====== sdoowpilihp If you are an experienced programmer, I would recommend just diving in and building something. You will get a lot of hands on experience dealing with the platform, and at the end of the process, you will have what should be a shippable app that you can point to as a sign of your competence as an iOS developer. This is what I have always done when wanting to learn a new language/framework/etc and it has worked well for me thus far. ------ steffex I think you are on the right track. I'm also a experienced programmer. After doing the courses on codeschool.com, I finally understood the concept of objective-c and now I'm capable of creating decent code with it. ------ alexgaribay [http://www.appcoda.com/](http://www.appcoda.com/) They have a lot of good tutorials around practical features you'd expect to be in an iOS app. ------ gspyrou You could try to leverage your experience in c#/.net by using Xamarin for iOS [http://xamarin.com/monotouch](http://xamarin.com/monotouch) . ------ runjake If you can afford it, the Big Nerd Ranch iOS courses will send you on your way quickly, but at ~$4,000 USD they're pretty spendy. ------ ratsimihah Buy a book, follow its tutorials, and make your own app. ~~~ eibrahim any book recommendations? ~~~ ratsimihah The big nerd ranch series, and "pushing the limits." Bonus points if you read blogs about iOS dev. ~~~ ratsimihah Also, read code on open source repositories on github and such.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods - jbegley https://onezero.medium.com/the-privileged-have-entered-their-escape-pods-4706b4893af7 ====== metalliqaz This article was loaded with nonsense.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why all the rejects? - invisible_dev Hello HN. Long time lurker, first time poster.<p>I'm will be graduating this year with a Masters degree, and so I've been applying to a few places (big and small). And so far, all I've gotten are the polite "we don't have a position for your skills" replies or silence. Even for new grad positions.<p>Now, I consider myself a fairly competent developer and this is what I'd be doing even if I wasn't getting paid for it. I have professional .Net experience and multiple personal projects in sufficiently different languages. I would imagine that this would be sufficient to at least warrant a phone screen. But so far, I've got nothing. And I'm perplexed as to why.<p>Is this because I'm not from MIT or CMU? Is my resume not reaching the right people? Is there a stigma against .net developers (in startups, non MS shops)? If so, how do I convince people that I'm platform/language agnostic? ====== nzmsv When I was applying for jobs about a year ago, the only times I got anything other than silence for a response was when I had a contact "on the inside". It has been said that the success rate for just sending in a resume is under 5%; of course, people do get jobs by sending in resumes (or so I hear) - this just wasn't my experience. On the other hand, I learned that the contact does not have to be a friend - reaching out to an engineer working at a company shows you care, and makes the process more human. Note that I'm not advocating spamming busy people with your resume - I think this only works if the interest is genuine. Doing interviews made me realize just how much theoretical CS knowledge I was missing, algorithms especially (I did Computer Engineering for my undergrad). So that was the final push that made me decide to do a Masters (though I did get an offer). I hope that was the right decision :) But more to the point, make sure you brush up on your theory and practice solving problems on a whiteboard. ------ bartonfink Very few people in HR respect the education they "require" in their job postings. With an M.S. you should almost certainly be able to pick up any toolkit or language quickly enough that, while you won't hit the ground running on day 1, by day 5 you should be full speed. You've almost certainly done harder things than learning LINQ, for example - that's what a degree is supposed to signal. I suspect that you're just getting caught by a moron somewhere in the pipeline, so you should not take this as a meaningful appraisal of your skills. That said, not getting a job does suck. From the limited picture I see above, your technical chops aren't what's missing. I wouldn't spend a tremendous amount of time doing more coding work. Some folks like resume consultants, but I have never used one and can't speak to their effectiveness. Best advice I can give you is to send out as many applications as you can get out. A few is not enough. In times of my life when I was in full-on application mode, I'd send out 5 relatively targeted applications a day, where targeted meant I wrote a specific cover letter and tailored my resume to highlight what they were looking for. Most places won't send anything back. Most places - startups and BigCo's alike - are staffed by assholes. Just keep plugging through whatever avenues you can find and something should turn up. ------ dstein _If so, how do I convince people that I'm platform/language agnostic?_ Simple, code some personal projects in another platform/language. The sooner the better, because .Net along with most Microsoft technologies are a dead- end. Most startups already know this. No matter which buzzwords are used, basically everything is going mobile/cloud, and it absolutely won't be WindowsPhone/Azure that wins. ~~~ maresca _The sooner the better, because .Net along with most Microsoft technologies are a dead-end._ As opposed to Java, which has a bright future with Oracle? ~~~ dstein I'm no fan of Oracle and Java either, my bet is on mobile-web (JS/HTML5). Microsoft technologies are a dead-end in the context of mobile/cloud technologies. It would be impossible to argue that Microsoft is going to win iOS and Amazon AWS converts to the Windows phone and Azure platforms. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but there are no situations where I can envision any of Microsoft's mobile/cloud technologies are going to succeed in the future. ------ robryan Are you able to show them your personal projects? It's possible that the stuff your applying for has a load of applicants, in which case you may find plenty of applicants with more targeted experience that may cause those hiring not to look much further. My experience watching friends apply is that grad positions are quiet hard to get into. Maybe you could look for a job that has .NET plus the opportunity to move into other languages down the track, from your post though it sounds like you don't really want to do that. Maybe in the interim you could roll your own project that does show off your skills in another area, best case it might take off in it's own right, worst case you have something pretty good for the resume. ------ pdenya I don't have much experience with applying to startups (I work for an agency) but 99% of the .NET devs I know are .NET only. Explicitly stating that you are platform/language agnostic might help. I've had good experiences with emailing the tech director or head of HR (as opposed to responding to hr@companyname.com addresses posted on job boards) at a place I'd like to work, saying something like "I saw the amazing work you did for __ and I'd love the chance to work with you on great projects like this in the future, do you have any positions open?" I'd be happy to give some feedback on your resume if you want to post it. ------ flignats I'm not sure where you are applying too, but whenever there is an economic downturn one of the first cost cutters is through the IT departments. As for startups, its a tight crowd and hard to jump onto a team or put together one with enough resources and time to pull it through. What type of job were you looking for? Send over a PM if you'd like, we are currently looking for a CTO. ------ aDemoUzer Do projects in the languages/platform you are applying for. There is no better way to concinve someone than to have actual proof. ------ khanm Maybe its not your skills but how you display your skills in your resume/cv. Be sure your resume is up to par with what your competitors are handing out.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Just started consulting and got a better offer - Bombthecat Hello,<p>I just started in consulting with axway and websphere so I'm still just a junior consultant. ( 6 months into job) now i got another offer from another firm. They offer around 10 thousand more (in euro) in VMware and nsx consulting.<p>I'm tempted to switch. 10k is a lot. But i guess i won't be a junior any more and might still be inexperienced.<p>Maybe even VMware and nsx isn't a good odea anymore?<p>What are your thoughts? ====== scawf Where are you living ? 10k is not the same if your current salary is 20k or 50k.. Is your first job below market ? Or is this new opportunity above market ? ------ JSeymourATL > I'm tempted to switch. Beyond the money-- how would this role help you grow & stretch professionally? Where might this lead you in 24-36 months?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter said to be testing two-step security in wake of AP hack - greyman http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/twitter-said-to-be-testing-two-step-security-in-wake-of-ap-hack-50011027/ ====== citricsquid A few years ago there was a strange byline on a few tweets from @spam, it said "by {username}" indicating that there was some sort of system allowing specific users to send tweets from a different account, here is a screenshot from January 2010: <http://i.imgur.com/o0iVS.png> Does anyone have any insight on why Twitter haven't implemented that sort of system (nominated accounts able to tweet from a corporate account) and seemingly abandoned the idea in 2010? One of our Twitter accounts has ~30,000 followers and we have to share the password amongst the company in a spreadsheet, that sort of poor security is encouraged by a single login model, with all the previous high profile account compromises it seems strange Twitter hasn't addressed this before. Maybe someone knows why, or can speculate why? ~~~ smackfu Depends... Which is a worse attack vector: a single account with a shared password, or a shared account where each person has their own personal account password? Twitter really needs shared accounts + required two-factor for the personal accounts. ~~~ benmccann At the very least it's better for auditing. If one of your employee's accounts is hacked to send a fake tweet you immediately know which one instead of potentially having no way to know. ------ tedchs Two factor authentication is a funny thing in 2013. All computer users understand passwords (and the basics of password complexity/secrecy) at this point. That covers the "something you know" factor. Many users conceptually understand a "something you have/are" factor in the form of biometric scans or smartcards. Unfortunately, those approaches are not practical to deploy outside a controlled enterprise setting. On the Web, the only approach that isn't a non-starter today is TOTP, what Google Authenticator uses. Unfortunately, basically zero users understand this, creating a large education issue, and frankly it's a pain in the neck for users ("why do I need to go find my phone to log in??"). The upside is it's easy for Web app developers to integrate TOTP, and it adds significantly to account security if used correctly. Facebook and Google have offered this as an option for quite some time, and with Twitter's current prominence as part of corporate advertising, I am surprised they are this late to the party. ~~~ apaprocki > Unfortunately, those approaches are not practical to deploy outside a > controlled enterprise setting. In what way? Bloomberg uses custom hardware developed in-house (the "B-unit") for four-factor authentication (password, biometric, visual sync, token). These devices are sent to customers all over the world where there is no control over them. All of the device and biometric enrollment is done through the software remotely when the device is received by the end user. So in my experience it is definitely possible to do this outside of the typical employee/enterprise scenario. ~~~ EvanAnderson Background on the B-Unit: <http://www.bloomberg.com/bunit/Overview_Features.pdf> Definitely an interesting device. ------ marcuspovey Any service that acts as an oauth provider but which doesn't use 2 factor is being grossly negligent, and should be avoided. ------ chops Two-step authentication, especially for something as prominent as twitter, is always a good thing. So, kudos to them. ~~~ jug6ernaut > kudos to them. Kudos for being horribly late and reactive instead of proactive? This should have been implemented long long ago imo. Though i do give them more slack than with all of our banking institutions that still don't offer two-factor. But these recent events show how importing two-factor(or security in general) for even things like social media are. ------ herge I am surprised that Twitter has not used features for bigger customers like this as a monitizing strategy. When they used to have a user cap, they could have just charged companies or people to go over that cap. Same thing here, charge for two factor authentication. Maybe even charge for verified accounts. ------ awold Imagine logging in to services only using Google Glass. When prompted to log in, a temporary passcode pops up on Glass. I think it would make two-factor authentication much more streamlined and unobtrusive compared to having your phone beside you and opening an app just to log in. ------ InclinedPlane Good news! Your service is now so popular, well liked, and extensively used that important organizations use it and trust it. Bad news: Now you have to go the extra mile to make sure it isn't misused. I think this still falls into the category of problems that it's good to have, barely. ------ shaydoc I had thought that they would most definitely be thinking of 2 factor authentication. Couldn't they even achieve this quickly using Twilio to send SMS token codes to users who opt to have 2 factor auth? ------ fnordfnordfnord Maybe accounts for clients like the AP need not a two-factor system, but perhaps messages should only originate from a whitelisted set of IP addresses. ~~~ justin This isn't really a good solution for mobile phones which change IP address frequently. ~~~ fnordfnordfnord Of course it isn't. But I can't imagine why the AP would want anyone to send tweets on their behalf from a mobile phone. Maybe there isn't a single solution that meets the needs of every user. ~~~ xxpor >But I can't imagine why the AP would want anyone to send tweets on their behalf from a mobile phone. Reporters in the field? Especially in a breaking news situation where they want to be first. ~~~ fnordfnordfnord Are you suggesting that there may be many AP reporters who are authorized to tweet on AP's behalf from the field, implying a total lack of editorial control (and probably a total lack of coordination as well)? I think that is very unlikely. I'd find it very hard to believe that there isn't a very well defined system in place to control all official correspondence. They have a news desk that is staffed 24hrs per day. Surely a person there could monitor tweets or communications from reporters in the field. I'd even expect there to be a different individual with the keys to the Twittermachine. ------ uses Make it a publicly visible badge so we know how serious account holders are about their security. ------ zokier I just hope they will use the same _standard_ mechanism that Google and now MS use.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight - barry-cotter http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html ====== barry-cotter If you don't read the post Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer. Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men. From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore. From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler. From the point of view of Jeff Bezos' bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. ------ Lazlo_Nibble I disagree that pricing is irrelevant to this battle. Pricing is the only reason they're _having_ this battle. Amazon is trying to drive the prices down to $10 or less because they believe that the eBook market will stagnate if titles are priced much higher than that. They're gambling that lower prices for eBooks will lead to higher sales, and that the increased volume will make up the difference for everybody. Macmillan is trying to drive the prices up so they can still recoup their fixed costs _given current sales numbers for eBooks_. They're not gambling at all -- they're trying to structure prices so if the eBook market stagnates they still break even, which has the very pleasing side effect that if eBook sales increase even slightly (something the iPad is threatening to help happen), all the revenue from those additional sales will be pure profit. I can see points on both sides here. I agree with Amazon that the eBook market is dead in the water unless eBooks cost significantly less than physical copies, but publishers like Macmillan would be _insane_ to give Amazon any control over the actual "list" price that drives all the percentages. (Pricing rant: In order to succeed, eBooks have to be priced competitively with the actual _street prices_ of the print versions, not the list prices. Bestseller prices need to be competitive with Amazon and Costco, and backlist prices need to be at least _nominally_ competitive with used. Particularly for titles have have been in print for decades -- I think you're recouped your costs on the _Foundation_ trilogy by now, guys; it's not my fault you keep re- typesetting it so you can bump up the page count to make the ever-increasing cover price look "reasonable".) ------ po So in this article he states: Traditional chain: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer Then he says that Amazon is acting as wholesaler to the publishers and bookstore to consumers. That would give us this: Amazon's chain: author -> publisher -> Amazon -> consumer What I don't really get is what's so different between that and what apple is proposing: Apple's proposal: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader The only difference I see is that apple hasn't started going after the publisher's profits (yet). What am I missing here? ~~~ asdflkj According to the article, Amazon wants the power to set the price for ebook edition. Amazon has other priorities besides selling your book for as much as possible, such as pushing the adoption of Kindle. So if Amazon decides that your book is gonna be a loss leader, you're stuck. ------ raganwald It can't possibly be good for consumers that any one middleman is so powerful that they can lay a major hurting on MacMillan like this. I really dislike the arbitrage model where the middleman tries to capture all the profit at the expense of the supplier and the consumer. I like the fixed margin model (like Apple's). I think it's good for everybody. ~~~ patio11 _It can't possibly be good for consumers_ Amazon wants to sell me a book delivered on day 1 for $10. Macmillan wants me to choose a book delivered on day 8 for $30 or a book delivered on day 180 for $15. Remind me why I'm suppose to back Macmillan again? ~~~ raganwald If Amazon is writing the book, fine. But if Amazon is saying that somehow magically they will sell you a book for $10 when MacMillan needs $12-$15 to make money, then MacMillan or the author are going to starve while Amazon makes all the money. That is not a win for anyone except Amazon. ~~~ patio11 It isn't magic: Amazon takes a loss on certain Kindle books with the goal of changing customer behavior, in much the same way that WalMart loses money on most new titles it sells to bring customers in the door. MacMillan would rather they dictate prices to Amazon so that they can avoid channel conflict. To enforce this, they told Amazon that if Amazon doesn't play ball with their dictated prices, MacMillan will use their strict legal monopoly on sale of MacMillan books to make it impossible for Amazon to sell them in the crucial post-release window. Amazon said "Two can play at that." (MacMillan doesn't "need" $12 to $15 to make money, but if they demanded it, Amazon would pay $2 a book during the new release window to make boku bucks on the hardware, midlist/backlist titles, and non-book services.) ~~~ cstross _MacMillan doesn't "need" $12 to $15 to make money_ Actually, you'd be surprised. The author's cut is a royalty based on the suggested retail price, which for a hardback offering would be 10-15% of $24, or for a first ebook at $15 would be 25-30% of $15. The production cost of an ebook is non-zero; there's a lot of editing, copy- editing, proofreading, typesetting that goes into it, not to mention commissioning cover art (arguably obsolescent) and other marketing activities. Rule of thumb is $7000-$20,000 for a book, which must be recouped somehow. Typical book sales are _much_ lower than most folks imagine -- midlist hardcover SF novels sell 3000-8000 copies at $24 discounted to $16, paperbacks sell 15-30,000 copies at $8 discounted to $6 (but with a hideous level of wastage such that typically 20-50% of the print run will be pulped due to not selling within 90 days). Suppose the $15 ebook somehow sells as many copies as the $16 (after discont) hardcover. The iBook cut is 30%, leaving $10. The author's cut is another 30% of $15, leaving $5 for the publisher. They then have to defray $7-20K of production costs before they're into profit; an expensively produced book that sells for $15 but only moves 4K copies is thus a _loss_. You want to know the grisly truth? Right now, ebook sales are lucky to make it into three digits. Even Baen, who are Doing It Right, are happy to shift 4000 ebooks at $6 each. And Amazon isn't taking only 30% of the cover price: they're wanting 30% _with a cap of $10, and they get to set the retail price_ , or _70% of retail price_ (current books). Let me say it again: in publishing, about 70% of the revenue stream is soaked up by rent-seeking intermediaries between author/publisher and reader. ~~~ patio11 Charles Stross! I flew to America to buy a copy of Merchant Princes. Well, OK, not really: I tried to buy it in Japan from my Kindle with the intention of reading it on my annual trip back, and I was denied because of some licensing agreement your publisher had. I eventually bought it while passing through Detroit Airport. Despite the fact that this is ridiculously convenient for argument I am about to make, I am actually telling the truth: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002315> When you say"rent-seeking intermediaries" I think of a different player than you do. See, Amazon makes my reading experience awesome. Your publisher? They have not made my experience awesome. I know they spend a lot of money on, e.g., typesetting and wood pulp. That must suck. I am having a hard time mustering up sufficient sympathy to back your publisher's attempt to charge me more so that I can subsidize the continued practices which result in 50% of print runs getting pulped. Is Amazon's contribution to total awesomeness worth 70%? Eh, I don't know. I'm a software vendor. Google takes fifty cents out of the last dollar of sales for me (for advertising), despite the fact that I do all the "actual work". I use the scare quotes because if the last couple of years have taught me anything it has taught me that making the sale -- which is what Amazon does for you -- is a non-trivial bit of the business equation. I don't see my profit split with Google as a moral issue -- I see it as a fairly simple business decision. To whit, I sure like getting that last fifty cents. I think I managed to get about $20 of your books on my trip to America. Now, I don't know whether you see $1 or $3 of that at the end of the day, but either is a darn sight better than $0, which is what your publisher is pushing hard for you to get from me. ~~~ cstross The publisher's contribution is invisible, but awesome. Trust me, the books wouldn't be the same without them. Amazon's visible contribution is ... well, there's something rather nasty happening behind the stage curtain. Agreed, the mass market channel for paperback distribution must die -- everyone in publishing agrees on this (the 50% wastage is grotesque) ... just not until there's a replacement way for injecting cheap books into readers' eyeballs. ~~~ Poiesis What am I missing here? Ebooks aren't fitting the bill? Because of low adoption? ------ nhebb The writer states: _book publishing is notoriously, uniquely unprofitable, within the media world_ Is he kidding? Macmillan occupies the famous Flatiron Building on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan. (It's the narrow triangular building shown in a lot of movies and TV shows.) If they can run their operations out prime real estate like that, then they are either profitable or mismanaged. ~~~ cstross Ahem: _Tor_ (who are my publisher -- I've visited them there) occupy _one_ of the 22 floors of the Flatiron, along with their fifty staff (total) who publish 300 books a year. They rent, the building's been bought, and they've been served an eviction notice of sorts -- the lease almost certainly won't be renewed; they can't compete with the hotel chain who want to turn the Flatiron into a des. res. The Flatiron may be famous as the first steel-framed skyscraper (and the view from Tom Doherty's office at sunset is awesome -- the Empire State Building, backlit!), but it's an elderly and rather badly maintained building. ------ lionhearted > Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, > it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down. Wait. This guy is claiming that publishers are trying to push book prices down, and Amazon is trying to keep them up. This doesn't jive - Amazon has cut the prices of books so incredibly heavily since they came along, and had a very good shopping experience with reviews, excellent customer service, shipping, and so on. I think people are afraid of any company getting too powerful because of the abstract concept - but myself, I'm starting to get comfortable with companies like Google and Amazon taking large share by being the best. If they get corrosive later, they'll have a few year window where they're still on top, but then someone will come and take them out. But I think the current leadership of companies like Amazon and Google is good enough that they won't make shortsighted bonehead decisions against their customers. ~~~ cstross No, what I'm saying is that, of the $16 net price you pay for a hardback, you might _think_ that the lion's share goes to the publisher and the author gets 10%, but the _reality_ is that 70% goes to the distributors and booksellers while the author and publisher split 30%. What Amazon have done is to sneak up on the distributor/bookseller pipes and merge them into one lucrative hose, and now they're playing both ends for their own benefit. Amazon squeeze their suppliers, just like Wal-Mart. Amazon is _already_ corrosive -- if you're a small supplier. ~~~ Lazlo_Nibble That hardcover which I paid $16 for likely has a list price of between $25 and $30. If the publisher was only paid 30% of that $16 sale ($4.80), that means they sold it to the distributor at a wholesale discount of _over 80% off list_. Are any publishers _really_ offering those kinds of terms, even to Amazon? ~~~ cstross Hardcover list prices are pretty much pegged at $24 in the USA, ever since word went out within Borders (or was it B&N?) about eight years ago to stop buying hardcovers with SRP over $24. Yes, Tesco (in the UK) and WalMart can and do demand discounts up to 70%. I have heard hearsay reports (I can't cite sources, due to confidentiality) of Amazon demanding 80% discounts off ebooks from British publishers -- which is why they only launched Kindle in the UK about three months ago: nobody would take them up on it. ~~~ Lazlo_Nibble But even if some resellers _are_ getting titles for 70% off list price, that doesn't translate to them retaining 70% of the revenue from the sale unless they're selling the title at list price. No reseller with the market muscle to demand a 70% wholesale discount is selling those titles at list price! Personally I think your figures ($24 list price, 70% wholesale discount) are edge cases, and don't represent a typical sale. But even if we take them at face value, in your example the publisher/author get $7.20 of my $16 and the distributor/reseller get $8.80. That's a 55/45 revenue split, not a 70/30 split. This also assumes I'm buying at 1/3 off list, which is on the low side. Amazon is discounting bestsellers by at least 45%, with a select few going for 60% off or more. Example: _Going Rogue_ , list price $28.99, sale price $13.50 (53% off). If Amazon's getting a 70% wholesale discount, HarperCollins gets $8.70 and Amazon keeps $4.80. That's a revenue split of 65/45 in the _publisher's_ favor. So: when I buy a hardcover that's been discounted down to $16, the actual _reality_ is that the distributor/reseller is _not_ making twice as much on the sale as the publisher/author -- it's more like a 50/50 split. None of which is to say I support Amazon OR Macmillan's position in this particular battle (they're both wildly overreaching, IMO). I just think your example inappropriately conflates two different things.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Rise (& Fall?) of NoSQL - buffyoda http://degoes.net/articles/rise-of-nosql/ ====== CmonDev "MongoDB, the most widely-adopted NoSQL database, recently raised $150 million dollars on a $1,200,000,000 dollar valuation. Yes, that’s more than a billion dollars for a “boring” database company built around pure open source software!" How do they make a profit (if they do)?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask YC: Get paid to read your email? Your attention is worth something right? - amichail The idea is not to get rid of traditional spam (spam filters already work well), but rather, to have an auction for your attention from email senders just as there is an auction for your attention from advertisers. ====== xirium A variation of this has been proposed before. However, it wasn't an auction. The idea was that people could include a micro-payment with their message. If their payment is below your threshold then the message would be bounced. If the payment is above your threshold then it is delivered to you. If you like the message then you refund the payment. If the message is spam then you keep the payment. This system makes most spam uneconomic and financially compensates users for the remainder. It can be combined with whitelisting and it doesn't preclude legacy inputs. It is certainly better than Microsoft's digital stamp which earns you nothing and Microsoft one cent for each of your messages - legitimate or not. ------ chandrab BoxBe is a startup you should look at...they started with this idea, but according to a few friends of mine that use it no one has ever bothered to pay them for their attention. As a revenue generating business model, it seems thats spammers don't pay! btw - Goodmail has signed up ISP customers to get mailers to pay a couple of cents per message to "guarantee" the delivery of the message. To me seems like a protection racket of corp. customers by the ISP and Goodmail.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Potato knish recipe? - tjr I know a lot of people here are seriously into food and cooking, so I figured, why not ask?<p>Any ideas for a good potato knish recipe? Aiming for the round, baked knishes a la Yonah Schimmel's in New York (or what they used to sell at Mort's Deli in Minneapolis, or at Billy Sherman's Deli in St. Louis). Definitely NOT aiming for the square, fried knishes out of too many food carts or vending machines.<p>I've tried several recipes, but the dough part especially has never turned out right. If anyone knows the kind of knish I am talking about, and has succeeded in making something similar, I would much appreciate knowing how it's done! ====== tjr I did end up stumbling upon a recipe that worked out well: [http://www.readthespirit.com/feed-the-spirit/tag/mrs- stahls/](http://www.readthespirit.com/feed-the-spirit/tag/mrs-stahls/) Would definitely recommend, as suggested in the comment on the page, caramelizing the onions rather than putting them in raw. Also might suggest skipping the "jelly roll" assembly approach, and just wrap a thin layer of dough around a heap of potato filling -- but assemble as you see fit. The taste should be the same either way, and this recipe turns out very good.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The final step for huge-page swapping - bitcharmer https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/758677/0d004feb1bbc862b/ ====== mmt > The advent of nonvolatile memory is changing the equation, though, and > swapping is starting to look interesting again It's not clear to me why the _nonvolatile_ part makes any difference to swap. I'd expect it would make more sense to attach a volatile, RAM-based SSD [1], maybe via PCIe or even once removed via storage fabric. Perhaps it's just incidental, and it's merely price and/or capacity that's important, considering that it's attached via the memory bus. [1] Not that I've ever seen such a product with a high enough capacity for a low enough price. It seems like it could be a way to recycle old and/or slow RAM, maybe a startup idea, but I'm no hardware guy. ~~~ shawn In the game and simulation industry, texture resolution is a problem. If you run the math on how big textures need to be to match pixel resolution 1:1 in 3D space, it quickly becomes infeasable for large scenes. One solution is to stream the mip levels, and to create virtualized mipmaps. This basically lets you create a 128k by 128k texture, which works fine because only small blocks are loaded. It’s literally the same thing as virtual memory, but for texture memory. One downside is that when you shut down the game / simulation, all of that data no longer exists. It was virtual. It either streamed from the sever or you packed it to disk somewhere. Either way you have to set it up again the next time the program starts. I don’t know whether the present topic would let you bypass this limitation, but if there was some way to start a program with a huge amount of memory allocations preloaded, that would be very attractive. And if you can _reboot_ without losing that, then suddenly you can start crafting persistent worlds that load instantly with ~infinite resolution. This is the dream that voxel tech was supposed to make into reality, and it will only become more of a concern over time as mixed reality tech matures. ~~~ sterlind the feature you're looking for is called opening a memory mapped file. I've seen tremendous performance improvements, but it's a really underused feature for some reason. Memory map Performance is incredible. ~~~ wtallis Does Windows have any analog to madvise()? It seems like that's probably necessary to making things work well when you're mapping huge data sets, unless you're sure they reside on _really_ fast storage. ~~~ PeCaN Windows 8 and later has PrefetchVirtualMemory[1]. Before that your best bet is to get a little hacky and try reading the file asynchronously to get it in the cache (Windows caches files pretty aggressively, so this more or less works). [1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/hh7...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/hh780543$v=vs.85$.aspx) ~~~ senozhatsky Seems that VirtualAlloc() [1] is a little bit closer to madvise(), but still is pretty far. madvise() is quite powerful. For instance, take a look at MADV_FREE. [1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa366887$v=vs.85$.aspx) -ss ~~~ PeCaN I figured the use-case here was MADV_WILLNEED, which is what PrefetchVirtualMemory is for. VirtualAlloc flags would be for things like reserving virtual pages without committing them. There's no single API on Windows that does the myriad of things that madvise does. ------ deckiedan All those quoted performance improvements sound great - but what kind of Real World workload or environment would one need to be in to see this in action? Anywhere when swapping? Or does it need to be with special hardware? Would a SSD backed low-memory VM be improved? ~~~ saas_co_de All sorts of cloud hosting things would benefit from this. The ability to swap in and out very fast allows you to run more containers or vms on the same machine in cases where only a percentage of those instances are utilized at any given time but even if one is swapped out it must be able to swap in and respond with reasonable latency. Any kind of "serverless" hosting or any architecture where you have a container per user would benefit from this kind of development. ~~~ Baech8ei If nvme swap gets faster too with huge pages then testing a whole microservice swarm on a local dev machine might benefit from it when the currently idle services can be swapped more swiftly while something chews on data. ------ snvzz By using swap, determinism is bye-bye as disk access, unlike RAM, is not deterministic. I'm afraid of latency peaks caused by this, too. ~~~ lmm > By using swap, determinism is bye-bye as disk access, unlike RAM, is not > deterministic. No, because what's driving this change is the rise of NVMe rather than disk, which has consistent access times. ~~~ snvzz Consistent doesn't imply deterministic. ~~~ gravypod Most consumer DRAM is non-deterministic. A small fraction of users use tools to provide high/stronger deterministic guarantees but issues like bit flips and variable access latency still apply to DRAM although these issues are far smaller in timescale and scope. None the less I'm assuming this set of optimizations is targeted not only at nvme storage but also 3D XPoint. Intel and Micron have done a lot of work in this space and promise to provide non-volatile, low latency, and high density in a single package. Micron has seemingly abandoned QuantX (their 3D XPoint) but Intel has recently made some huge strides in this area which, if adopted, will definitely push them to compete in this space. Soon Intel Optane will be available in a DDR4-like package. It will still be closer to disk-like than RAM like and that is why I think this effort to push for large page swapping will be interesting. It being non-volatile also provides some cool possibilities for the future if this tech becomes more mainstream. Imagine being able to provision a portion of your swap that always contains the state of certain programs you care about or certain always-used libraries. Maybe even caching the entire OS in DRAM-like storage so that all boots read directly from your non-volatile swap. Also, as a very important aside, this is from the patches mentioned in this article. From: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com> ------ sumanthvepa When the article mentions faster non-volatile memory, are they referring to NVMe SSDs or Intel's Optane? Are SSDs that much faster to merit a new memory management strategy? ~~~ sp332 Optane is fast enough to be qualitatively more similar to RAM than to disk. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwy4ujt0qHM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwy4ujt0qHM) The video shows that performance varies with workload differently from RAM though, so I think having a separate class for it is appropriate. ~~~ imtringued The blender benchmark is impressive. CPU utilisation increased from 30-50% to 60%-100% by using optane as swap vs a regular SSD. Optane is still a very early product and it's beating conventional SSDs already. ------ PixyMisa You seem to have put your subscriber link into the URL. Probably best to remove it. ~~~ mkj They're meant to be shared, good advertising for LWN. [https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks](https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Chatroulette Spy - RoyceFullerton I have just launched a project that has been sitting on my hard drive 80% finished for the better part of a year. http://www.chatroulettespy.com<p>It detects your 'anonymous' chat partner's IP address and performs a geolocation lookup on it to show the user the partner's approximate location on a map.<p>I know the Chatroulette fad has peaked a long time ago (when I started this project), but there are still many people using it and its many clones. It was important for me to follow through on this one and not let it die on my hard drive like many projects before.<p>I would appreciate any feedback you have so I can improve it as I suspect it may be buggy. Also, any marketing advice to get the ball rolling would be helpful as well. ====== RoyceFullerton Clickable: <http://www.chatroulettespy.com> ------ aarlo Cool. You said something about adobe cirrus on the FAQ. Can you explain more how it works? ~~~ RoyceFullerton Adobe Cirrus (formerly Status) is the technology that Chatroulette and most clones are built on. Chatroulette was not much more than a slightly modified example program provided by Adobe for Status. Cirrus sets up the connection between the two clients and then the clients talk directly to each other. Since there is a direct connection to your 'anonymous' client you can get the IP and then geolocate. Bing. Bang. Boom. ------ webzone Hi, I'm the creator of calltunnel.com . Will it work with my website too? Thanks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do I come up with a name for programming language? - philonoist Thank you for the technicalities and legal methods, but I am here for some creative musing. I am currently thinking of 'Anarchy'. The language is heavily mathematical( to put it at best, while at the same time I want to be purposefully vague). ====== enkiv2 The typical way to pick a name for a language is to choose a dead mathematician who is obscure enough that only mathematicians are familiar with his name (so, no Aristophanes, Euler, or Godel) & who hasn't already had a language named after him. (This worked for Erlang, Church, Haskell, Ada, and a whole host of others.) Another popular way is to take a term from mathematics & misspell it. (See: Clojure, Clozure.) Languages that are derived from other languages often have themed names -- for instance, the various javascript preprocessors have mostly coffee-flavored names, brainfuck derivatives usually include either "brain" or "fuck" in their names, and befunge derivatives usually end with "funge". Sometimes, languages are named after imperative verbs (such as the approximately 3 languages called 'go') or arbitrary physical objects (Rust, Elm). Language-themed language names are popular, too (LISP, SmallTalk, Guile). Languages I've made have been named after fictional characters (MYCROFT, named after the computer from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, himself named after Mycroft Holmes), authors (WILSON, named after Robert Anton Wilson), and descriptive acronyms (GG, the language compiled by GGC, is for generative grammars). Anarchy is a pretty loaded term (and I say that as an anarchist); chances are you'll turn off a lot of people with that name. ~~~ qualsiasi I'd go with the matematician, Cardano. > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano) ~~~ solveit I wouldn't go with the one with a cryptocurrency named after him. ------ dman Pick a boring name. Do not make your adopters fight an uphill battle trying to sell it to non technical decision makers. ------ iDemonix It depends what your end goal is. To me, Anarchy reminds me of something like Brainfuck - a hobby project that'll never see serious use. If that's your end goal, call it what you want as there'll never be that many users anyway. ------ lsiebert I'd use afl or a word mutation engine and the google api, starting with a list of mathematical terms, and mutate them until you got something with zero results that you like. for example z combined with kmeanset as one word in quotes finds no results. ------ atrocious Try smashing bits of related words together. Heavy math: Heath. ------ slipwalker i would go for obscure planet names from star trek universe, and append a "-lang" suffix ( like Brekka-lang ). ------ Lordarminius Why not Philonist or Philon ? ------ LarryMade2 Mathematical + Purposefully Vague ... Infinity ~~~ LarryMade2 X Y or Z ------ sloaken try this name: Sloaken, or the short version Sloak ------ hood_syntax Typic ------ DoreenMichele Arman.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask YC: How to avoid front-end clutter? - robertgaal I suppose most front-end developers/designers heard of this problem before: too much CSS and Javascript files and too much declarations in 'em. After a while it gets hard to find your way around all the classes in there and add or fix things. Next to that you might scratch certain server-side code and forget to update the client-side bits. We tried to fix this by creating a lot of different CSS/JS files but sometimes certain declarations span across different site sections and you end up looking for them in the wrong place anyway.<p>How do you guys combat the mess you automatically make in the front-end? Do you use frameworks like Blueprint or perhaps SASS? I still haven't found any structure or convention that kind of forces me to do it DRY and neat, like for instance RoR has done for me. Maybe it's time to create a standard for this, or just to create some naming pattern to map front-end code to server-side? Or maybe that already exists?<p>Any thoughts?<p>(I hope I didn't explain this too vague, I'm trying hard not to) ====== bjclark First, if you're having the problem of way to many styles, it's probably because of 2 reasons. You're not using the Cascading part of Cascading Style Sheets, and you don't have a good style guide (which is useful no matter how small the site). As for organization of files, I use something called "alltemplates" that I have no idea where I found. It's basically just an organized file similar to what STHayden describes. Email me at bjclark =at= inigral dotter com and I'll send a zip with the blank templates I start with. Third, I use BlueprintCSS. Forth, I use a form framework, for RoR I'm using [http://github.com/jlindley/accessible_form_builder/tree/mast...](http://github.com/jlindley/accessible_form_builder/tree/master) which has blueprint support and for static pages/sites I use Khoi Vihn's "GoodForm" which is old, stagnant, and all I've ever needed (with my own modifications). ------ Xichekolas I have found that Sass makes managing large amounts of CSS really easy. It's honestly probably more useful to me than Haml itself. But both of those were the 'killer app' of rails for me personally. I can write html and css, but haml and sass are just so much more succinct and DRY. ~~~ ndaiger Ditto for me. I've never enjoyed implementing a design (I much prefer programming), but it's usually cheaper/easier to have someone mock something up in photoshop for me to implement than have have the designer implement a template as well. Haml & Sass make the process so much less painful. ------ STHayden As a designer at <a href="<http://www.flugpo.com>">Flugpo</a> I deal with this problem all the time. With CSS I really think the best answer is one monolithic CSS file. Add a index at the top and keep it organized by global, section and page: <http://www.flugpo.com/FlugPo/styles/style.css> With JS I find breaking it down by section files alone with one global file to be the best way to approach it. ------ mattjung May design patterns may help you somehow: <http://cssdesignpatterns.com> ------ Dylanfm I've used Blueprint for a few projects and I don't have anything bad to say about it. Although, I'm not going to be using it anymore because I tend to make use of about 50% of what it offers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is it time to take SOPA protests to the streets? - sathishmanohar We have collectively written thousands of articles educating about effects of SOPA. We have made phone calls and created special websites etc.<p>But, we are still on the same stream of funny cats and Lady Gaga. We may know the magnitude of effects of SOPA, but general public cannot gauge it, because they may very well misunderstand as, yet another "save whales", "drunk driving" campaign.<p>I think we can do better, when freedom is on the line. ====== swiecki Occupy Wall St. arguably didn't do much to affect Washington, or the regulations that affect the firms that protesters were blaming. I'm not experienced in these matters, but it seems to me like a wiser alternative would be to found some kind of Tech Lobby that advocates for policies that benefit the internet in Congress and educates members of Congress about the internet. ~~~ kls You will have to forgive my cynicism on this one, but industry lobby groups usually take on a life of their own much like a Union. The problem being that the money virtually insures that once formed, the lobby will live past it's useful lifetime. As well Occupy did not do much to effect regulations because those in power do not feel the pressure to change. A group of people in the street does not generate the required economic or military pressure to regulators. It raises awareness, but it does not create pressure. The Occupy movement was trying to prolong the occupation to generate that pressure, but there are superior ways to generate that pressure more rapidly. I think the people trying to organize a tax revolt would probably have a larger effect should they be able to coordinate it, at which point the powers that be would feel the real need to reign themselves in. ------ kurtvarner What we need is more direct and visual support from the big internet players. Imagine if Google restricted all the YouTube videos for one day and simply stated "YouTube's future if SOPA passes". Or if Wikipedia blocked all their content for a day to make a stand. Although very unlikely to actually happen, these actions would get the attention of the entire public and demonstrate the seriousness of the issue.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A hacker's loneliness - maryrosecook "The computer is more interesting than most people. I love to spend time with my computer. It is fun to write programs for it, play games on it, and to build new parts for it. It is fascinating to try to figure out what part of the program it is in by the way the lights flicker or the radio buzzes.<p>"...The computer has moved out of the den and into the rest of your life. It will consume all of your spare time, and even your vacation, if you let it. It will empty your wallet and tie up your thoughts. It will drive away your family. Your friends will start to think of you as a bore. And what for?"<p>Shaken by the break-up of his marriage, Tom Pittman decided to change his habits. And he did. He later described the transformation: "I take a day of rest now. I won't turn on the computer on Sunday.<p>"The other six days, I work like a dog."<p>- Hackers, Steven Levy. ====== menloparkbum "Is this indifference to the world a consequence of too much intercourse with machines that give the appearance of thinking? How were he to fare if one day he has to quit computers and rejoin a civilized society?... The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them." -J.M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature and former IBM programmer, from "Youth, Scenes from Provincial Life II." ~~~ arjungmenon It makes me regret when I recall how much of my life I've lost to programming. I spend most of my mid-teens (15,16,17) writing pointless C programs (interpreters, compilers, etc. for pathetic new languages that probably no one except me will use). While my classmates from high school went out dating girls, watching new movies, etc.; I would be sitting in front of my computer palms on forehead fixing hard to find C pointer bugs. The only person I could have a decent conversation with was my CS teacher. In the end it was only after coming to college I realized how much I had lost. I barely had any communication skills, absolutely zero sexual experience (haven't even walked holding hands with a female - even today) and the reputation of being a geek. And you know what? I realized I wasn't a happy person anymore. I think this kind of a life is seriously screwed. Very soon (been trying) I'm gonna totally quit "being geek" (programming for a hobby, etc.) and try to be normal like everyone else. ~~~ notdarkyet Quitting is a poor idea. Maybe the work is something you love or maybe you are simply using it to occupy your time and create an excuse to avoid the anxiety of social situations. Either way the key is going to be moderation. My previous roommates in college found it odd that I would spend Monday through Friday alone in my room working or reading, yet on the weekends come out an be completely extroverted. They were almost offended that I didn't want to sit around and watch tv with them during the week. That is somewhat of a sidetrack, but this balancing method allowed my to keep somewhat of an equilibrium with my life. Take the approach starting tomorrow the same way you would if you were learning a new programming language. It would be insanity and a complete suicide mission to dive into the properties of compilers without even understanding the basic "hello world". You need to take smalls steps and develop your social skills in the same way you would your programming ones. And by the way, normalcy is overrated. ~~~ arjungmenon thanx for the advice ~~~ greyman Don't be a fool arjungmenon, you have a good prospects for the future. While your peers waste precious time, you are sharpening your skills and working on something you enjoy. While you are young, it is a great time to learn new things and advance. You will become expert in programming, which you know is an exciting field, and then it will be relatively easy to get good paying job, or can start your own company if you feel like it, and later, when you establish yourself professionally and will find your path, it will be easier to have meaningful longterm relationship. I also spent a lot of my young time in from of a computer or solving math puzzles, and I don't regret it at all. On a more personal note, I had my first gf when I was 24 and married at 32. And I don't feel like missing anything. ~~~ anc2020 His peers were not "wasting" their precious time, they were having fun and doing something they enjoyed. Moderation is good, and its good to remember not to take yourself too seriously (you appear to have serious plans for arjungmenon, greyman, stop taking yourself so seriously). I doubt your days of hard programming were a waste. They are an experience at least, a side of life you are aware of that your peers might not be. Knee-jerks - bad. Moderation - good. Trying new things - exceptionally good. ------ bufferout Moderation. If you let any one thing consume all of your time then you're missing out on all the beauty and diversity the world and life can offer. Feed your brain new experiences and it will reward you. ~~~ truebosko This is key. Apart from hacking away at the computer (I also do it for 8 hours a day at work), I cook daily dinners/breakfast as a hobby, I spend lots of time with my girlfriend (easier when you live together) and I try to generally disconnect from the computer for a few hours a day wether it be right after work or later at night Some nights I won't even go near the PC except to turn on a movie, and some nights I will come home and work all night on the computer. It varies As bufferout said, Moderation :) ------ fgimenez This is sad, I feel this way while doing a CS degree at Berkeley and working in front of a computer for UCSF in my spare time. Instead of just complaining and racking up karma, I propose we meet up at a bar in the city (San Francisco to you non-bay area residents). Who's with me to get drunk and tell nerdy jokes on Saturday night? I'm totally not kidding. If you need an excuse, call it networking. If you don't, call it partying. [Edit: I'm down for seedier mission bars, but anywhere is fine if there's enough interest.] ~~~ iamelgringo A group of us do this on a pretty regular basis at Hackers and Founders: <http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/> We're getting together Next Wednesday. ~~~ fgimenez Wow, that definitely sounds like something I'll be doing. Unfortunately, I've got 2 midterms on the Thursday afterwards, so I'll have to pass on this Wednesday. Thanks for the heads-up though. Hope to meet you there. ~~~ iamelgringo We're getting together almost every other week, so if you can't make this week, we'll have another get together in another couple of weeks. ------ woid There is also problem with relationships with some women. I think, most women don't mind you are spending so much time with a computer (as long as you are making good money doing it). But they are jealous they must share the love and attention with something like a computer. That is something unbearable for them. In this case, you as a hacker have to lie that you hate your daily work, your boss is an asshole and you have to stay at work longer just to pay the bills. Don't even think to be honest for second and telling truth that you love your work, you escape there because you are resting by working, by being creative and by seeing your code/product running. If you have family, maybe is better to take well-paid but boring 8-5 job full of assholes, where you will look forward for the end and rushing home to wife and kids. Computer you may use just for reading news on Friday evening. Are you more a mad scientist or a family guy? :-) ~~~ menloparkbum This happens to many people who are very into their work, computers or not. I have 2 good friends who are both very successful artists, and they are both divorced because of their commitment to their work. ~~~ woid My opinion is maybe biased by living in central Europe. But I see many people who are not satisfied with their work and realize their passions somewhere else (family, hobbies, you name it). I'm a little afraid here it is still social norm even 20 years after communism era. As far as I can observe women are more often these unsatisfied workers because they tend to have worse and less paid jobs and what more: they are naturally "hardwired" to be passionate about family in the first place. So they don't understand someone is going to work not for money, but for fun and his passion. ------ maryrosecook I wasn't sure if this is appropriate. However, it expresses the loneliness that I, and, I expect, some other hackers, sometimes feel. ------ omarish You guys realize that girls and loving your work are not mutually exclusive.. ------ markbao The problem I have is that not only I both love to spend time with it, but that I know that I _should_ be spending time with it to get the product done faster. Sometimes it may be fun, exciting, etc. but sometimes it's just an obligation. ------ vaksel I feel like the whole loneliness thing is mostly the person's fault. Instead of being your own man, you are trying to live up to someone else's expectations. Lets face it, as a startup founder you have a LOT more on your plate than some ex-highschool football quarterback who works at the Gap. ------ hunter107 Mostly I see that Hackers tend to be generally unsatisfied with the state of things around them, and will compulsively seek to improve or atleast _know_ the system. The lonely part arises from these traits I think which puts them at a somewhat alienated position in society, because of their intolerance towards incompetence or the irrationality of the world around them, which I believe puts them at a risk of withdrawal from society towards the rational and logical world of computers. As for moderation, I don't think hackers are quite known for it. Hackers are by definition among the extremes of the computing society, so moderation would be viewed more as a stepping down. No wonder most hackers tend to be INTPs. ------ pavelludiq I would say that its not computers that make us this way, its mostly because we are this way, that we love these machines. we are thinkers, makers, dreamers and loners. Yes, i have friends in the real world, yes, i have social skills, but its my obsessions, that give me a reason, its my quest for knowledge and wisdom that drives me, people are mostly a biological need, not exactly like food, or water. God dammit, its my last year of high school, i gotta find me a girlfriend, but thats probably bad for my "coding happy hours". ------ herdrick I've been doing the "no computer for one day a week) plan for one week now. It's been great so far. (And I was inspired by that very paragraph of that excellent book). ------ yters Would it be different if hackers had the prestige of, say, a celebrity? From what I understand, most super successful people work horribly long hours, but I suspect the feeling of fulfillment is also based on the social prestige of what they do. Computing is so ubiquitous (and also the cause of lots of frustration for some people) that those who drive the field don't get the recognition they deserve. Maybe the whole startup culture will change this, since the risk and self determination gives it more of a romantic flair. At any rate, quitting, or even moderation, may not truly solve things if a person has a very deep love for their work. I think this adds a morally noble element to being a hacker startup-founder: it helps the whole field realize their true sense of self worth. ~~~ Hutzpah also the prestige thing is a multi-dimensional thing. high-brow vs low-brow and things like that play into this. ~~~ yters It's weird, high brow people have a stereotype of high brows and visa versa. I didn't think the terms were so literal. ------ endlessvoid94 That was a great book. Also check out "Crypto" by Steven Levy. ~~~ silentbicycle _The Code Book_ by Simon Singh (<http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Code_Book.html>) is quite a bit better, IMHO. ------ msluyter I sorta have the opposite problem. I'm quite introverted and enjoy programming for its own sake, but I have a difficult time making myself work on projects outside of work because it just feels too lonely. ------ kajecounterhack It hasn't driven away my family, but it does drive away friends. Lol. ~~~ PieSquared It did that to me for a while, too; I would always want to explain to them my latest idea or tell them about some awesome new language or something. They would yawn. They're still awesome people, but sometimes I wish there were people around me who I could associate with and discuss computer hobbies with. (Sadly, being in school doesn't give you many opportunities to meet new people very often, it seems to me...) ~~~ kolya3 School is THE place to meet new people. In fact, enjoy the variety of people you meet at school now. It's harder to meet interesting people later on, after you are out of school. Most people are content with discussing what they saw on TV last night and what their lunch companion has on their plate. "Is that pesto?" Enjoy your school years :) ~~~ bbb Statements like the above always frustrate me. I'm in school (and have been for a long time). Many people that I respect told me: grad school was the best part in their lives, that I should enjoy my time, and that it only goes downhill afterwards (no more research, family obligations, boring jobs, administration work, etc.). Great. But what if I don't like my situation right now? What if I don't like grad school that much? What if I don't like most of the people around me? If the sentiment that grad school is the best part of life is correct, then what else is there to look forward to? What's the point? (sorry for being all gloomy, but the parent's post really struck a nerve) ~~~ gizmo For many cheerleaders high school is the high point in their lives. Popularity, likeminded people everywhere and absolutely zero responsibilities. So unless you're very similar to the person who tells you that grad school was the best part of his life, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe you _like_ being responsible, maybe you _like_ to work. The thing is, many people give up on their dreams just after grad school. Compromise suddenly trumps all. (And maybe you're just chronically unhappy person. Unhappy no matter what happens. Unhappy for no describable reason. Food for thought, huh?) ~~~ maximilian <Anecdotal evidence> Don't they have research where they track 2 sets of people before and after a traumatic event. One set goes through an extremely negative event (like paralyzed, etc) and one set wins the lottery or something similar. They find that the people, once they returned to steady state after the event, were about as happy as before, independent of their event (positive or negative). I kinda think that people make their situation into the way they are, and its independent of the situation. </anecdotal evidence> ~~~ kalid Check out the work by Daniel Kahneman -- I believe he performed or referenced the study you mention. [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2003/923773.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2003/923773.htm) ------ timmy2shoe9384 Couldn't have put it better myself Steven Levy! The part about the consuming, Im here commenting to a comment that would never ammount to anything in the common society we know as human. Why do I waiste time? Apparently it consumes the part of life...::BLANK::.... O~~~~----______ ====~ (Fill) ('n) (Bla'k) ------ computerguy16 Get this guy a 'Real Doll' ------ mroman With time, I have felt that loneliness, yet, after a couple of hours of being around people, I can't help but think about the work I could be doing, the wonders I could be exploring. ~~~ ynd I feel the same. But I started to change my ways so I don't become too isolated. ~~~ mroman I hear you. I have done the same for a couple of months at a time, and the interesting thing was that it happened spontaneously - it wasn't a conscious decision. I do think that isolation partly exists within a person's mind, as I have felt isolated when surrounded by a roomful of people. It's a part of our condition, a challenge that we must deal with successfully in order to hack on . . .	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Considering a job offer at a “unicorn.” What should I know about equity? - trying222 I'm deciding between job offers - one at a Big 4 company, one at a so-called 'unicorn.' I like them both and know I'd enjoy the work and teams at either. On paper, the later offer is better - slightly higher base, much more equity (on paper).<p>My question: how does one compare the value of RSUs from a Big 4 company (with a clearly known value and relatively predictable future performance) with shares in a private company? On paper, the shares in the latter are worth much more (based on the current public valuation). Are there any caveats I should know about - can I assume the numbers I'm being given are reasonably accurate? Obviously, there is much greater risk at a company where the valuation is heavily based on future growth.<p>What questions should I ask about the shares, or what other factors might I want to consider when weighing these offers purely on compensation? I've read about different types of shares, liquidation preferences, etc. How much of this could a candidate expect to know about and should it factor into a decision? ====== rahimnathwani Where do you need help? \- Valuing stock options or shares in a private company? ([http://www.payne.org/index.php/Startup_Equity_For_Employees](http://www.payne.org/index.php/Startup_Equity_For_Employees)) \- Negotiating compensation? ([http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary- Make-Minute/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary-Make- Minute/dp...)) \- Establishing a benchmark? (check AngelList) Similar questions are asked every few months on HN. Search hn.algolia.com to see answers provided by others. A few of them are worth reading. Mine aren't the best, but might be worth skimming: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7370839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7370839) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8092653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8092653) ~~~ trying222 Thanks for these. First link (and similar others I've found) has helped me get up to speed on terminology and other issues at play. I haven't been given information about what % of the company the shares I'm being offered represent. How critical is this do you think? Can I take the company at their word in terms of what the shares are worth at what they state is the current valuation of the company? ~~~ argonaut You should definitely press for as much information as you can - how many shares (or stock options, or RSUs) you're getting, how many shares are outstanding, the common stock / preferred stock breakdown, liquidation preferences, etc. It's unlikely any startup will be willing to share _all_ of that with you, though. That being said, they definitely cannot lie to you. ~~~ trying222 Thanks, this is a helpful list of questions. I'll go ahead and ask and see what they say, worst case they won't be able to answer any of them. ------ rahimnathwani "On paper, the shares in the latter are worth much more (based on the current public valuation)." By 'public valuation' I assume you mean a $ figure that was announced after the last funding round. Your shares probably don't have liquidation preferences, whereas the investors' shares probably do. So, you can't rely on a valuation calculated by a journalist. You need to do the math. "How much of this could a candidate expect to know about and should it factor into a decision?" Companies are used to dealing with people who don't understand, or do not look too deeply into the numbers. So, I guess they will expect you not to ask for details. However, without knowing the details of the cap table (including, as you say, the volume of shares outstanding, and the different rights attaching to different classes of shares) you can't hope to arrive at a useful valuation. Many people on HN suggest valuing startup equity at $0, and this is one of the reasons. ~~~ trying222 Well, the number I'm using is what the company has told me is their current valuation (it's slightly higher than what was reported by press after the last round of funding, but not dramatically so). The share prices I'm being given are stated as a fact based on this valuation (along with optimistic projects of what they might look like were the company to multiply in value). Should I ask about liquidation preferences? % of company that the # of RSUs I'm being offered represents? I guess there's no harm in asking. ~~~ rahimnathwani "The share prices I'm being given are stated as a fact based on this valuation" If the company multiplies in value, and VC funds' liquidation preferences are 'non-participating preferred', then the liquidation preferences won't have any effect, and each of your shares will be worth the same as each of theirs. (Oh, and this assumes they don't have any anti-dilution protection.) But, the company's value going up by a multiple isn't a sure thing, so your shares are probably worth less. "Should I ask about liquidation preferences? % of company that the # of RSUs I'm being offered represents?" If you want to know how much your shares are worth, then yes. ------ ams6110 Equity is something that is often effectively worthless. Ask yourself, if you were in a position to exercise your options, is there actually a market for them. Paper value is meaningless, if there is nobody who will buy your shares. ~~~ trying222 I've been told that there are various gray market (?) channels to sell shares in a company that is not public, but I don't even know what to search for to find more about these. Do you have any pointers on that? ~~~ jyu The people most interested your shares are people who agree that company is a unicorn. Usually existing shareholders with some money (angel investors, VC, advisors, founders, other employees) or potentially new shareholders that want a piece. Your ideal time to take money off the table is while they are raising the next round.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Any good open source sports games? - kenjackson Despite the fact that most devs at one point or another have wanted to do a game -- and sports games are among the best selling -- why are there no open source sports games?<p>I was looking at the trailer for NBA 2K12 and just awestruck by how nice it looked. I thought for a second, maybe I could spend some time and contribute to an open source version. Alas, there's really nothing.<p>Does anyone know of a good baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey open source games? ====== MaxWendkos Ken, can you please e-mail me? max@fanbeat.com	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work? - menloparkbum I've decided to leave my current job to work on my startup. It turns out working on a startup while you work at another startup doesn't work out, time wise. However, I only have enough money to last through the end of the year. I'd like to bank about $5-$10K more before applications for the winter YC funding cycle are due. I have a few personal connections and about 7 leads since 9 am today, but am trying to collect as many options as I can before making a commitment. Does anyone on HN know of any resources for contract work other than craig's list and dice/elance/odesk ? I'm in San Francisco, so info about any local networking events would also be helpful.<p>I'm looking for something with cool people, but in a decidedly temporary arrangement. ====== jon_dahl I did contract work for 5 years before founding a product company. Most of our work came from two sources: reputation and relationships. Reputation took several years to build, so it isn't 6-month solution. Relationships, on the other hand, can be built quickly. The best relationships for us were relationships with other developers. We've gotten dozens of good leads this way, and have passed out dozens to other developers. What technologies are you going to use? Local user groups for those technologies can be a great place to start. Figure out where the local momentum is (Ruby? Python? User Experience? Startups?) and meet people. ~~~ hhm How do you advertise yourself for contract work? Do you have a one person company, or you are just a contractor? While both things may in the end mean more or less the same, their perception might be different and you could be able to get paid more in the first than in the second case. Or am I wrong? ~~~ jon_dahl I went from 2 people (myself and a partner) to 8, so I didn't do the individual thing myself. In my experience, a single person ("John Smith" or "John Smith Consulting LLC") isn't at a big disadvantage against a small company (John Smith as sole member of "Razor Consulting LLC" or whatever). We would often compete with, and work alongside, individuals. It's all about getting your brand out there. You want people to hear about and trust your brand - whether it's your name as an individual, or a company name. But don't confuse people by pushing both. I actually recommend using your individual name unless you want to grow bigger than 2 full-time employees. I have several friends who are individual contractors, and most of them have incorporated under another name. But they are known by their personal name, not their company name. That's their brand, so to speak. ~~~ hhm I'm currently using my name plus a descriptive word (say "Smith Software" or "Graham Tech"), and if I think about it, what I'm doing most is contract work myself (along with some consulting). Do you find it advisable? ~~~ jon_dahl Tell me if this answers your question: if I were you, I would form an LLC ("Smith Software"), but push your personal name ("John Smith") as you network, look for jobs, introduce yourself, etc. So Smith Software goes on your contracts, and (maybe?) is your domain name, but you want people to get to know _you_, not Smith Software. Especially if you're good. "John Smith the ruby/python/design expert" is a perfectly legitimate way to be known. It's easier than "Smith Software, the small expert ruby/python/design house", IMO. I know 10-20 independent programmers and designers in my area, and in every single case, I think of them by their personal names. I'm sure they all have some LLC name, but in most cases, I don't know what it is. Even if they put it on their business card, I'm more likely to refer them to someone as an individual ("I know this good designer - Mick Jones - you should talk to him") rather than by a company name ("I know this good design shop - Compelling Solutions - you should check them out.") I think this changes when you grow beyond 2 full-time folks. At 2, people can remember both of your names. But beyond there, they're likely to remember the company name, plus one of the principles. ("You should check out Compelling Solutions - talk to Mick Jones.") At least that's my experience. :) ~~~ hhm This is great advice, thank you. An only extra question... being a single person means that I can't do more than one or two development projects at once, but at many times clients ask me to (and I have to tell them I can't, I'm already busy, etc). Do you think it's a problem? How do single contractors handle this? I guess it's a lot easier if you push yourself as an independent programmer, as it's reasonable that a single guy is already busy at the time you call him... but as soon as you introduce a company name I think the expectations change. So that's an extra reason to follow your advice. ------ thomasswift My advice: Attend networking events, meetups etc. Tell people you are looking for work, most of my work has come through friends (which you have seem to done) Charge what your worth beginning day one, maybe cut your personal friends a discount, but doing work for next to nothing to build your portfolio is great, but trying to raise your price afterwards is very very hard. To answer your original question: check dice.com and craigslist, but dice.com will be true contract jobs that don't want companies that consult, but contractor (most of the time) and craiglist will be full of build digg for 10$/hr types of people(maybe they'd hire you on for what your worth but I doubt it). ~~~ xlnt How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell. ~~~ thomasswift My short and fast rule Is charge about 4-6x your hourly salary of doing equivalent work. You pay more taxes, you are not receiving benefits, and most of all you are doing difficult work. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. If you make $20/hr slinging code. Consulting that be $80/hr. May seem high, but really it is quite low. The big boys charge $250/hr. I think that rate is fair for small businesses. If you need justification for charging a certain fee. Research numbers on how much it costs to actually hire someone full-time and all the extra costs associated with it. Time, Interviews, Job board placements, training, benefits(big costs long haul). If your being hired to do something you know and pretty much getting going on day one, they should be paying a decent sum of money for you, because you had already done the legwork, you step in and work. You are also temporary to them if the contract ends(a.k.a they fire you), as employee you get unemployment(extra cost to the company), exit interviews, more time and money wasted. If you an IC the contract ends, what are you going to do. Look for the next gig, more time spent with no money coming in. My favorite pricing quote is the one about the artist, name escapes me. A lady asks him to paint her caricature of face and he get out a piece of paper, paints a few lines and she says it's amazing and ask how much, he says 5k or something. She says thats ridiculous it took you five minutes. He responds no it took me my whole life. I'm not saying I'm picasso or monet or whatever, but the work you do today will be added to your overall experience and knowledge that you will apply to the jobs of tomorrow, and you should be compensated for that. i also don't change $1000/min (it be nice) - sorry for rambling ~~~ brianlash >My favorite pricing quote is the one about the artist, name escapes me. I've heard that story. It's probably apocryphal, but instructional. The artist is Picasso (at least in the variation I encountered). ------ gexla You didn't say what sort of contract work. You are doing a "startup" yet getting into contract work is also a "startup." They are both businesses and any business takes time to build up to a point where you can make a living from that business. It also takes time. There will likely be times when you are freelancing where you don't have enough time or energy left over at the end of the day to work on your other projects. Networking is definitely important for freelancing. You have to let people know what you know and that you are available. Finding someone to work on a project can be hard and you need to be on the top of the short lists of candidates when people are looking for help. Another way to start freelancing is by establishing yourself as a known expert in niche communities. This takes time and effort but when you get to that point and people are looking for dev help in that niche then your name will come up. ~~~ menloparkbum I should mention that I worked as a contractor for 5 years, so I'm familiar with how to manage contract-based employment. However, this was on the opposite coast, and since I've been in the Bay Area, I've been working at other people's startups. I'm a bit out of the contractor networking loop. What I'm looking for is some piece of something a startup wants or needs to do immediately, but doesn't have time. I'm altering the details on this example so that I'm not breaking an NDA, but the most promising candidate out of the leads I've received is an online service that needs a simple desktop based upload/sync application. I'd be writing the upload/sync app. Stuff like that is what I'm most interested in. ------ noodle look on any of the niche job boards. authenticjobs.com is a good start, and it has some links to aggregators where you can spread out your search. also, freelanceswitch.com's job board is decently good. they're not all designed for freelance/contract work, but they do have plenty of postings for it. ~~~ menloparkbum cool - thanks! ~~~ noodle no problem, i feel your pain :) also note that, typically, elance/odesk/guru/etc. isn't worth trolling for work, because they're dominated by cheap, lower quality labor and project- based pricing. ------ initself I've found small contract jobs through Dice and jobs.perl.org. <http://www.dice.com/> <http://jobs.perl.org/> ------ prakash Firstly, congrats! Try the gigs board on 37 signals: <http://gigs.37signals.com/gigs> ------ bprater If you have cash in reserve until the end of the year, why not get serious and launch your own product based startup? With some emphasis in marketing, you could quite easily bank $5k-10k from the product and be in a good position to show off your project (that is already making moola!) for winter YC. ~~~ menloparkbum Because I went broke at a previous startup and am paranoid about having cash in the bank. ~~~ holygoat Don't listen to the commenters saying "just go for it" -- having cash in the bank is important (if you aren't wasting time earning trying to get the work to do so). As long as you stay busy, building a buffer is a good thing. ------ wensing If you're a Django person, you probably already know about <http://www.djangogigs.com>. Some of the opportunities there are short term. ------ ucdaz Check out meetups, web 2.0 parties, and ppl you know within your hacking community.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
USA loses again in OAS: 23-3. Foreign ministers reunion 8/24, case Assange. - pitiburi http://www.telesurtv.net/articulos/2012/08/17/oea-convoca-a-reunion-de-cancilleres-en-washington-para-analizar-amenaza-britanica-a-ecuador-656.html ====== coco236 I don't get it, I went to both the CNN and the BBC sites, and they talk about the most unimportant things, but there is nothing at all about this. And this is some big deal, it means the whole south america is going as a block against UK, letting US and Canada on a corner. Is the very international politics changing before our eyes, the whole region getting autonomous and slipping out of US hands.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Easy way out or hard way freelancing? - mythriel I left my high payed job 2 months ago and now I got an offer that is even better than the previous payed job...my dilemma is to take this job or continue freelancing and working on small projects for myself and looking for projects. The thing is it wasn't bad since I left my job, I have done some freelancing work and also some side small projects but the thing is I do not really like the part of freelancing where I need to look for clients and when I do find clients most of them do not have the kind of projects I am looking for. So I wouldn't really take this job offer but it is a lot of money and since my savings are going really fast it looks like an easy solution. What should I do? Should I post that I am looking for work on HN, because I think it is the best place to find good work and fun projects and not having to work for clients that have crappy projects and do not understand how the industry works. The thing is I am not sure how much long time work I would get from HN and how fast and that's why the easy way out to a high paying job looks like a good solution. ====== czbond Freelancing is not easy - you have to put in the time and effort to network. Work won't just come to you for some time unless you are constantly telling people that you're available and what you've done. Posting on HN is good, but don't bet on most of the work landing. (Remember there are many freelancers on HN also responding to those posts). Partnering with other freelancers is also a good option to fill in gaps. I would suggest contemplating why you left? The hours, the pay, the career progression, the responsibilities. ------ katherineparker If I were you, I'd get a piece of paper and a pen and write a pro/con columned list. It will help you get your thoughts together. I think the basis of a decision for freelancing vs. the job offer should be about your happiness and which one you prefer overall (all factors: salary + work environment etc...). Good luck with your decision.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
CDC banned from using 'evidence-based' and 'science-based - Ice_cream_suit http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/healthcare/365204-trump-admin-bans-cdc-from-using-evidence-based-and-science-based ====== Ice_cream_suit "The administration has reportedly banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using the phrases “evidence-based” and “science-based” in official documents. Senior CDC officials distributed the list of “forbidden” words and phrases to policy analysts at the CDC on Thursday, The Washington Post reported Friday. The list also bans the use of “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender” and “fetus.”" ------ YouAreGreat "Because science!!!" surely ranks among the least scientifically pleasing modes of argumentation. Nothing bad can come from a ban on stating "because science!!" as a reason for anything, because the natural substitute _—where it exists—_ is just actual real reasons. ~~~ the_af > _Nothing bad can come from a ban on stating "because science!!" as a reason > for anything, because the natural substitute —where it exists— is just > actual real reasons._ Well, according to the article, the _actual_ substitute appears to be "CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes." Which is a bit worrying and may indicate this has little to do with how to best communicate scientific recommendations. ------ vorotato Frankly the CDC should be able to say whatever they damn well please. I really don't understand how this isn't protected under the first amendment. ------ jacquesm This has been submitted several times now. ~~~ oceanswave Please refrain from the use of the words ‘submitted’ and ‘several’, as they may indicate providing facts that have later been retracted. Also, ‘times’ has been replaced with side-plus, in accordance with the Improving Education and Freedom in Arimthmetic act of 2018. Thank you citizen, \- Department of Fraternal Homeland Internet Freedom Security ------ moomin Time to start using “fact-based”. ~~~ alsadi you forget /s	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lifestyle Startups Stigma - hristiank http://appicurious.com/2011/10/27/lifestyle-startups-stigma/ ====== cwp Gimme a break. There's no mystery here. "Tech elite" is a code word for venture capital. VCs pooh-pooh lifestyle and bootstrapped businesses because there's no opportunity for them to profit. VC-backed founders have been successful at raising investment, so of course they're not interested in a business that doesn't require it. Both groups want to define success in terms that give them a business advantage. ~~~ timjahn Perfectly said. ------ dmor I think this stigma exists because on some level, sometimes, when things suck at your high growth crazy startup (even if its just a bad day or week) you think, "man I wish I ran a skate shop in Huntington Beach with an online store". And it stings to see other people doing that. It's a lot harder to delay gratification and swing for the fences, not just intellectually harder but emotionally harder. Sometimes I feel like my friends doing lifestyle businesses just don't understand what I'm going through, and other times they give me really bad advice that would be great if I was building a company to operate like their's but doesn't do anything for me at scale. My family business is a lifestyle business in finance, I worked there from age 14 - 20, and its a totally different animal from a startup. Because it isn't a startup, its a self-sustaining business. Was after 12 months. So it makes me think a lifestyle startup is a myth - these aren't startups, they're small businesses trying to dine out on the glory of the name "startup" without takin the risk. What do you think? ~~~ fleitz Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is what I think. I don't care about the 'glory' of a startup, glory is something you tell stupid 18 year old kids so they feel good about going to die for 60 year old kids. If you can make money with out risk you're an idiot to go and find a business with lots of risk controlled by someone else. Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Did you know that the people who sell plastic wrap for hard drives have a higher profit margin than those who make hard drives? Think about the ramifications of that for a second. Laugh inside when you get made fun of for not having the stomach to risk digging for gold. Enjoy your life find your esteem from yourself and not from the opinions of the masses, it's you who has to live your life, not the others commenting on it. If raising VC makes you happy, then raise VC. If a lifestyle biz makes you happy run a lifestyle biz. If being a programmer in a cubefarm at a megacorp makes you happy, do that! ~~~ guylhem "I don't care about the 'glory' of a startup, glory is something you tell stupid 18 year old kids so they feel good about going to die for 60 year old kids." Beautiful :-) But what about passion? "Did you know that the people who sell plastic wrap for hard drives have a higher profit margin than those who make hard drives? Think about the ramifications of that for a second." No I didn't, but that's very interesting. Yet I doubt anyone here would be funding a company making new plastic wraps. ~~~ fleitz I'd put passion largely in the same category of glory. It's an emotional good used to get people to accept lower returns. I'll use the video game industry as an example, people are passionate about writing video games, their not passionate about not being able to see their family and friends for weeks. People are told they need to sacrifice to follow their passion but really they are sacrificing so the company can hit some arbitrary date and extract more rev from each employee, eventually to be discarded by the company when they are no longer profitable. If your passionate about video games it's probably better to get a iPhone / Android / XNA dev account and make video games than to go work for a video game company (or your VC). People are passionate about leaving their mark on the world via a business, not making sure their VC gets their 2X earn out. ------ ctdonath An odd insight to "lifestyle startups" I had (and posted about) a while back... For a while I was fascinated and amazed at projects pursuing absurd mega- goals, attempts to get something off the ground so big it was nigh unto stupid. A floating city configuring an independent libertarian utopia nation. A billion-dollar indoor ski resort just outside Atlanta. A bridge from Spain to Africa sporting a 5 mile suspended span. A world-class [fill in the blank, how much ya got?] facility annex to a super-mall in "why would anyone move there" Syracuse NY. A "fast ferry" across Lake Ontario connecting Toronto with "why would you go there" Rochester NY. And so on, one project after another with big flashing "ain't gonna happen" signs over them. Then I realized. It wasn't success of the project that was the goal, it was keeping a small team of creatives employed in a perpetual state of promotion and study-funding: find someone with deep enough pockets, and they'll shell out a livable fee to be able to say "hey, look at this..." to other deep pockets. No way that Atlanta ski resort would happen, but the idea was exciting enough to elicit enough funding for studies to pay the bills (at least until the vital-to-snow-making nearby lake almost dried up) for a few people in modest offices. You can make a nice, if modest, living promoting stupid ideas. And if the stupid idea actually pans out, takes off, and succeeds, well, the possibility of success is awesome enough to keep trying. ------ pg There's already a word for a lifestyle startup: a business. ~~~ JoelSutherland The author says: "There is a stigma against running a lifestyle startup (business)" PG Says: "Please don't even use the word startup when describing what you do." ~~~ pg In current usage, a startup means a new business that is designed to scale rapidly. (Most don't actually manage to, but they're at least intended to.) It would be inconvenient if people started using the word to describe new businesses generally, because then we'd need to invent a new word for the subset designed to scale rapidly. ~~~ kbutler Merriam-Webster disagrees: <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/startup> 1: the act or an instance of setting in operation or motion 2: a fledgling business enterprise Fledgling also lacks any connotation of scaling. Perhaps the VC/angel community has adopted "startup" to imply design for rapid scaling, but the broader community uses startup to mean "new business." ~~~ pg That's about as precise as most dictionary definitions. It doesn't mean the actual meaning of the word is that broad, just that dictionaries don't go into excessive detail. ~~~ rooshdi There seems to be varying opinions on what a startup actually is. Some definitions focus on the ability to rapidly scale, while others emphasize the fragility of startups. For instance, Eric Ries, author of _The Lean Startup_ , defines a startup as "a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." This definition would tend to include almost every new business, while your definition of a startup would only include those which are structured for rapid growth. Maybe I'm being a bit too pedantic, but it seems the word "startup" is being used so inconsistently nowadays that it has lost a bit of its meaning. ~~~ DanielRibeiro The problem lies in the definition of "new" and "extreme". Both are very loose. In the standard Techcrunch definition of "new", and "extreme", "new" is "new" and hasn't been done successfully before (or at least in the reach of the startup in question). And "extreme uncertanty" usually means: you have a burn rate which forces you to rapidly achieve product-market fit, pivot, get more money, or give up. The above definition of "new" adds up to the "extreme uncertanty", as you are not sure what you are currently doing is something people want, and even if you pivot into something else, you will not be sure about it as well. Therefore, a new old' fashioned bakery is a new business, but it is not doing something "new", neither has "extreme uncertainty" attached to it. ~~~ rooshdi Yes, but won't that new old' fashion bakery still have "extreme uncertainty" in its successful outlook, especially in today's dire economic conditions? ~~~ DanielRibeiro The old' fashioned is not creating anything "new", by definition. If it is delivering it in some way like Zappos delivers shoes, or Uber send cabs, it is another story. The "extreme" part usually conceives that you don't know if what you are doing is something people want. We know old fashioned bakeries is something people want. This can be seen on how much Eric Ries talk about "pivots". A bakery pivoting will not be an old' fashioned bakery. Again, the definition is loose. Eric Ries' mentor Steven Blank has a more precise definition[1] which removes these cases: _a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model._ I don't think these definitions are made to replace one another, they are made to give different views of the same object. The same way an elephant is not a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope[2]. _Edit_ : Swombat recently argued[3] that the difference between a startup a and a lifestyle business is that _a "lifestyle business" lacks vision._ [1] [http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first- princ...](http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#John_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#John_Godfrey_Saxe) [3] <http://swombat.com/2011/10/19/startup-vision> ------ nroach It's simple really: lifestyle businesses supply enough profit to fund the creator and his or her employees and suppliers. They do not typically create enough free cash to interest investors. Investors/VCs/Angels define "success" as an investment that returns enough cash to not only make a positive return on its own, but also to offset losses from the other "misses" in the portfolio. That investment return can come directly from profit, or it can be achieved by telling a compelling growth story that allows others to buy out the investor's position and provide an exit for the early investor. So, the question is really one of audience: do you aspire to provide a good living for yourself, your employees, and your business partners? Or are you swinging for the fences and able to provide returns to the investment community as well? Whether you consider Google, Groupon, or Joe's Garage to be a success really depends on who your constituents are. ------ fleitz My personal view is that this stigma stems largely from two sources: 1) VCs who have a vested interest in getting people to give up equity in order to raise money. 2) People who have sold equity in exchange for VC money need to make themselves feel good about their decision so they look down on others who have a business plan solid enough not to need to tap the capital source of last resort. ------ clintavo However, I think a lifestyle business can evolve into a startup. These discussions sometimes seem to forget that life isn't always neatly planned out in advance. For those of us living outside of the Valley, the tech community needs to remember that not everyone and their brother is plotting their next "startup." What can happen is (and this is an amazing thing about the times we live in) that a side project takes off, slowly becomes profitable, allows the founder to quit his job, focus on it full-time and then one day, he looks up and thinks "wow, I could swing for the fences." I guess that could be classified as a "lack of ambition" for not having a vision in the first place. OTOH it could be considered a smart move because the founder has already made something people want. Mailchimp, Balsamiq, DuckDuckGo to an extent, and in a smaller way, my own "startup" are examples. ------ paulitex "Revenue generation is third on the list. It is really “nice” your balance sheets to have 7 or even better 8 zeros next to Revenue. Profit…" This is just wrong. Even Google had early minor revenue. Revenue traction is king, it's the best kind of traction. User traction is a higher-risk proxy and thus must be more impressive to result in the same valuation after the risk discount. Aside: Wanting to start a lifestyle startup does imply, correctly so, less ambition than the swing-for-the-fencers founders. That's why they're easy to pick on, ambition makes for much better stories. ~~~ aaronblohowiak > ambition makes for much better stories quite a lot of tragedies have ambition as the "fatal flaw" of the main character. Having revenue or profit also starts to give a point of reference for your valuation if you are raising money, which may or may not be what you'd like. ~~~ paulitex > quite a lot of tragedies have ambition as the "fatal flaw" of the main > character. Agreed - still a good story. ------ rokhayakebe I agree with you. However sometimes it feels as if building a lifestyle business takes the same effort (in the beginning) as building a large business. For example think about all the small web development companies with 3-6 people in their teams. That is a lifestyle business. On the other end think of Instagram, 10M users, 6 people. Or Weebly, millions of sites, 3-4 people. Or Craigslist hundreds of million in revenue, 30ish people. ~~~ dmor I totally agree with you, they take the same effort at the beginning. Because of that, I think a lot of people figure they might as well swing for the fences. ~~~ Zimahl I think the point is that it's fine to swing for the fences, just make sure you don't skip other 'lifestyle' opportunities in the mean time. You may never get your homerun pitch, nothing wrong with a base hit. You watch enough pitches go by, you end up striking out. ------ nmcfarl So what I don’t get is the hate. I run a small crowdsourcing biz, (that was pretty risky to start btw, it ate both the founders life savings and more), and I’ve once or twice been told I don’t belong at various startup/hacker meet-ups. Or to "start a real company." From my perspective the companies are the same size, the tech is the same, the risk to personal wealth is if anything greater, and heck sometimes the market is the exact same. Why I can’t talk about these problems with people just 'cause I didn’t take funding mystifies me. Of course, not for long, as generally the people who make these comments are just rude, and not the kinds of people that I’m going to think too much about. Still in the moment it kinda stings. ------ tlogan I was always under impression that lifestyle business is a startup which cannot or is not willing raise money. Meaning sometimes even if your business is profitable (like my little business), VC will not invest since it lacks growth potentials. So business goes like this: "find business model" -> "optimize business model" -> "scale your business" Sometimes, in the first step you find a business model which is profitable but it can optimized only on small scale or it cannot scale. ~~~ fleitz Raising money does not necessarily mean taking VC or giving up equity. Have you ever thought that VCs have a vested interest in perpetuating the idea that to be a "real" business you need to give up equity in order to raise money? ------ davidhansen I wouldn't call it a stigma. I'd call it a general disinterest. It's the same kind of disinterest that follows bootstrapped businesses or any business that chooses to make money instead of burning it. As the cofounder of a bootstrapped business myself, I'm no fan of the shadow we operate in, but I understand it. The story of a company that doesn't have the luxury of positive cash flow to fall back on when things get tough is fundamentally more risky, and therefore exciting. You get larger magnitude successes and a larger number of failures, which is far more dramatic. And narratives with more risk, more reward, and higher drama, are the kind of narratives human beings love. ~~~ dmor "narratives with more risk, more reward, and higher drama, are the kind of narratives human beings love" I love human beings. ~~~ dmor Ummm downvoter I wasn't being snarky, I genuinely think this is part of what makes humans awesome.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What increases signups by 28%? ‘Watch a video’ or ‘Get instant access’ - paraschopra http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/increase-newsletter-signups-watch-a-video/ ====== sp4rki I just want to point out two things: 1) Get instant access means nothing to me. Watch a video does, and if I take the time to actually watch the video I'm more likely to commit if I find your product worth my money. There's a disconnect on what 'Instant Access' really means and what potential customers think of it. 2) The first button is amateurish (design wise) in my opinion. There is something wrong about it, the colors, the composition, the blue line under it, and most of all the text on top of it just feels wrong. The second button is much much better and it has a bit of a resemblance to Amazon's buttons, which might be a good thing depending on your userbase. I'm inclined to think that the button design has a much larger role on the conversions than the copy though. ~~~ alttab I came here to post this. The second button has implicit trust due to the fact it looks a lot like Amazon. ------ revorad Don't you think the different button styles are affecting the results? The "Watch the video" button looks more familiar to me (it's like an Amazon button). ~~~ paraschopra The definite answer can be had using a multivariate test with button style and text. But I doubt that style here would be a major influencer because landing page focussed all attention of the visitor on the button. So, visitors would have definitely not missed noticing the button (which is the primary role of button style). Button text would make them decide whether to take next action or not. EDIT: clarified ~~~ revorad But how do you know it's the text of the button and not the style which increased conversions? ~~~ paraschopra I agree that, in theory, button style could have influenced conversions and a follow up test would definitely prove this conclusively. ------ throwaway__11__ I would guess that the audience is familiar with 'Get Instant Access' as something that normally precedes a porn site asking for payment and therefore has some negative associations. ------ elvirs You said I will show you how to do it, thats why people expect a video of you showing how to do it and Watch Video worked better. When you say Instant Access it sounds like you are going to allow the visitor access tons of information (in text format for some reason) I bet if Google Books was a subscription only place, your Get Instant Access would outperform the Watch Video button by 95% ------ zazi There are so many things they changed for the 2 different test scenarios that I don't think that we can get anything out of the test except B is better than A. This experiment doesn't really tell me much except that maybe it helps conversions if people learn about my product more rather than just asking them to sign up right off the bat. And that is a BIG maybe. If they ran an experiment which all they do is to change the text from 'Get instant access' to 'Watch a video' and the results are significantly different, then we probably would be able to draw more from the findings. ------ lachyg Interesting results. Will you be running any tests on the bar you added to the bottom of your site? I'd be interested to see if that increases conversions. ~~~ paraschopra Yes, definitely. Right now watching the statistics of how users interact with the bar. Next step is to split test it with different versions and also presence and absence of versions. Though I noticed that not as many people interact with the bar as I imagined. CTR of creating a new test using that bar is < 5% now. Any feedback? ~~~ revorad If I remember correctly, those bars are usually a different colour from the rest of the page (probably a shade of blue or green). Yours looks just like a footer because it matches the colour of your page header (black). ~~~ paraschopra Correct, it looks like footer. So, you did not notice it in first glance? ~~~ revorad I noticed it only when I scrolled. And then I was disappointed there was no hide button :-D	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
F.lux in 10 lines of code - danielng01 So I decided to try in how many lines I can make blue light and brightness reduction software for Linux and this is the result.<p>10 lines and works on all linux distributions<p>See the source code here<p>https://github.com/danielng01/iris-floss<p>More about Iris here<p>http://iristech.co<p>:) ====== blumomo It's actually much more than 10 lines. It's unreadable in its current state. ~~~ kseistrup Try e.g.: $ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielng01/iris-floss/master/iris-floss.c \ \| indent -gnu \ \| wc -l 78 $	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What Does Redux Do? (and when should you use it?) - dlcmh https://daveceddia.com/what-does-redux-do/ ====== acemarke Great article from Dave, as always. Worth noting that this is primarily about how Redux works with data flow in a React app, and doesn't go further into its other benefits, like predictability and debugging. I wrote some similar thoughts in a post I co-wrote for Full Stack React on why Redux is useful in a React app [0]. The Redux FAQ also helps answer "when should I use Redux?" [1]. For those looking to learn Redux, start with the official docs [2] and Dan Abramov's videos on Egghead [3]. My React/Redux links list [4] has an extensive list of additional tutorials and info. [0] [https://www.fullstackreact.com/articles/redux-with-mark- erik...](https://www.fullstackreact.com/articles/redux-with-mark-erikson/) [1] [https://redux.js.org/docs/faq/General.html#general-when- to-u...](https://redux.js.org/docs/faq/General.html#general-when-to-use) [2] [https://redux.js.org/](https://redux.js.org/) [3] [https://egghead.io/series/getting-started-with- redux](https://egghead.io/series/getting-started-with-redux) [4] [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links) ------ bihnkim For anyone who has read this post, I highly recommend you read through the comments--in my opinion the author has missed the point of Redux completely (at the time I am writing this reply), and there's a key thread in the comments section that tries to set things straight.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NetSpectre: Read Arbitrary Memory Over Network [pdf] - razer6 https://misc0110.net/web/files/netspectre.pdf ====== tptacek The AVX side channel is neat. It relies on power management rather than cache: after 1ms of AVX2 inactivity (no 256 bit operations being performed), it goes into a power-saving mode; the next 256-bit operation pays a ~2x cycle penalty. They get 8B/min at low error rate with AVX2. In Google Cloud, from unrelated instances, they're getting 1 byte every 8 hours (3 if the target has an AVX2 gadget). Attacks tend to get better over time, but still, that's an AES key in a few days, and it assumes one discrete target; in a real deployment, that secret might be mirrored over hundreds of instances. ~~~ berbec It's an AES key if you know where to look. Do these style of attacks let you view the memory map or do you just pick a place? How troublesome is this, really? I'm actually curious. I never saw where you find the point in memory to point your Spectre gun. ~~~ eximius I'm a little vague on the details, but I think there are some tricks you use to narrow it down and then go spelunking. Maybe a particular variable needs to be in a page aligned struct so you only need to find a magic value at one of N places, etc. Like I said, I don't know the specifics, but there are methods of doing better than guessing. ------ kentonv The paper seems to say that they attacked a victim program that was specifically written to include vulnerable gadgets. Is code for this victim program available? I don't see it in the paper. Have such gadgets been found in any real-world programs? ~~~ tedunangst Checking a user provided index is valid before using it is certainly a common idiom. There are many reasons why attacking programs in the wild would be more complicated, but delaying publication until then is probably a poor option. The contribution here is not a single attack against vuln ware release 2.3.12, but a new (or expanded) attack class. ~~~ kentonv Right but didn't we already know that this hypothetical attack class exists? The possibility of remote spectre exploits like this was discussed in the original spectre paper. It's certainly interesting to construct an example and show it working, but this isn't surprising, is it? Just trying to understand if I've missed something here. (The AVX side channel is certainly new and interesting, though!) ~~~ chandlerc1024 Other than the AVX side channel, the interesting thing is that it demonstrates that the remote aspect definitely works. Before, it was theorized but might have proven to never give sufficient signal. While many were confident, now we know. Further, it shows how to do it (classifier) and gives a very good model for what bandwidth can be expected in practice. And still further, that bandwidth is entirely sufficient for attacking long lived cryptographic key material. Before, it was easy to theorize that the bandwidth would simply be too low. Now it isn't. This is also really good because the bandwidth _is_ really low. For data larger than a key (or where you would need to scan a lot to find the data), we can be much more comfortable with infeasibility arguments by basing them on some security margin beyond these experiments. As an example, if it would take 1 <timeunit> to exfiltrate a single credit card number even if the technique got 10 times better, maybe that means it isn't a sufficient risk. Or maybe it _is_. (All depends on the time unit and the risk.) But now we can make that assessment with a real baseline instead of a guess. ~~~ kentonv Indeed, that makes sense. Thanks! ------ api This can pretty much all be laid at the feet of overly complex CPU designs and instruction sets. Looks like complexity is as evil for security in hardware as it is in software. On the plus side part of why you see more of these kinds of attacks is that we have actually made progress on software security. ~~~ Eit4Choh > overly complex Speculative execution is what makes our sequential code fast by exploiting parallel execution pipelines that would otherwise sit idle. Avoiding this would increase complexity somewhere else, e.g. compilers would have to become even more clever or programmers would have to work harder to reduce the branches in their code. Sprinkling code with annotations to prevent speculative execution around sensitive data is of course just another way complexity does go up to let us keep the performance gains of speculation. ~~~ api Complex compilers seem better than complex chips because the former is software and can be fixed. I'm wondering these days if Intel was onto something with EPIC/Itanium and just failed in the execution. ~~~ PeCaN They were definitely onto something. They made something competitive performance-wise that wasn't vulnerable to all of these speculative execution vulnerabilities. Itanium's slowness is generally very exaggerated (at least in part because the first Itanium had a rather slow memory subsystem, and the performance kind of sucked as a result). Circa 2008 or so the fastest database servers available were Itanium. Unfortunately, it emulated x86 extremely slowly and amd64 ran x86 very quickly, so AMD kinda ate Intel's lunch. ~~~ api If I were at Intel management I might explore with engineering resurrecting the Itanium (rebranded and modernized of course). Today with so much open source there is less instruction set lock in, and with all these vulnerabilities you might be able to market it as a more secure architecture. In that case you might only need to equal x64 performance. ------ eastdakota I’d be curious the setup the researchers used. The paper doesn’t release the code or stack. It feels contrived but I’d be interested to be able to replicate. Trying in real, production environments, at least so far, has not been able to replicate any bit transfer rate. Has anyone else been able to reproduce? If so, can you share the specifics of your test? ------ greggarious Cool news! Does anyone know of a good writeup on the original vulnerability that's a little less technical? Like a lot of people on HN I came into programming via systems administration so I don't have a lot of low level knowledge. ------ djhaskin987 Spectre just became a much bigger problem. ~~~ tinix not really... this is only a vulnerability in so much as specific gadgets were intentionally placed in code. it's more of a danger for intentional data exfiltration covertly, not an issue of attacking random servers like ssh or web servers to get keys. show me a vulnerable ssh or web server and i'll be worried, otherwise, this is just hype about a new class of theoretical attack that has no known actual real world targets. ~~~ tinix to further elaborate, it would take 85 days of 4gbps network link being 100% saturated to leak a 256 bit key, assuming you know the memory locations, assuming no ASLR, assuming the key doesn't move or change, and assuming a vulnerable spectre gadget running on the system, which means you already have RCE in the first place. this class of attack is easily mitigated, and has no real world implications. if you don't notice a 4gbps link being fully saturated for months at a time, you have bigger problems. otherwise, if you don't reboot a server or restart services within 85 days, and if you don't use ASLR, you have bigger problems. if you let someone run spectre code on your system, you have bigger problems. this class of attack is theoretical, and all the hype is unsubstantiated. clearly y'all haven't read the paper. people never read past the headlines any more... you don't even have to take my word for it, READ THE PAPER: > As NetSpectre is a network-based attack, it cannot only be preventedby > mitigating Spectre but also through countermeasures onthe network layer. A > trivial NetSpectre attack can easily be detectedby a DDoS protection, as > multiple thousand identical packets aresent from the same source. However, > an attacker can choose anytrade-off between packets per second and leaked > bits per second.Thus, the speed at which bits are leaked can simply be > reducedbelow the threshold that the DDoS monitoring can detect. This istrue > for any monitoring which tries to detect ongoing attacks, e.g., intrusion > detection systems. Although the attack is theoretically not prevented, at > some point the attack becomes infeasible, as the time required to leak a bit > increases drastically. Another method to mitigate NetSpectre is to add > artificial noise to the network latency. As the number of measurements > depends on the variance in network latency, additional noise requires an > attacker to perform more measurements. Thus, if the variance in network > latency is high enough, NetSpectre attacks become infeasible due to the > large number of measurements required.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Git shines above Subversion at Merging - niyazpk http://tuxychandru.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-git-shines-above-subversion-at.html ====== hasenj I think this post is missing the point entirely. The strength of git has nothing to do with "magically resolving all possible corner cases". That was never the intended purpose of git. To quote Linus himself: > The important part of a merge is not how it handles conflicts (which need to > be verified by a human anyway if they are at all interesting), but that it > should meld the history together right so that you have a new solid base for > future merges. > In other words, the important part is the _trivial_ part: the naming of the > parents, and keeping track of their relationship. Not the clashes. [http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/...](http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/07/a_look_back_bra.php) In other words, there _are_ corner cases where git might fail to resolve conflicts automatically. If git does manage to resolve some obscure corner case on its own, it would be mostly accidental; it's not why git is better than svn. git would still be an awesome tool even if it didn't handle all the obscure corner cases. ~~~ brodie The post talks about merging working correctly with renamed files. That's not a "corner case"; that's exactly what Linus is referring to in your quote. The author could've given an example like this where he got a conflict and that would still be an infinitely better outcome than what Subversion's doing. You'd actually know that there are changes that you need to reconcile, instead of it silently succeeding. He's not missing the point. ------ westi So the one "small" hole in the merging infrastructure in subversion is what makes git "shine" above subversion? This issue is well documented and accepted as a deficiency - [http://svnbook.red- bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.advanced....](http://svnbook.red- bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.moves) Personally I have found subversions merging support to be good enough for the past few years and when you are introducing a modern VCS into a shop which has used VSS, CVS or PVCS for the past age it is a much easier transition for the users than git would be and provides much better merging support that VSS or PVCS users ever had! ~~~ DougBTX "Don't rename files on a branch" isn't a small hole. ~~~ ryanpetrich Really it's "don't rename files if you use branches at all" (because renaming a file in trunk will cause merges of outstanding branches to fail) ~~~ wcoenen I wouldn't say "fail". You'll just get a tree conflict where SVN complains that it can't merge changes because a file no longer exists. In TortoiseSVN such a conflict is trivial to resolve, because the tree conflict dialog gives the option to apply the changes to the renamed file instead: [http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn- dug-...](http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug- conflicts.html#tsvn-dug-conflicts-tree-1) ~~~ prodigal_erik The article claimed that "svn merge --reintegrate" did not complain about a conflict, just quietly gave the wrong result. I'm the designated svnmerge.py entrail reader at work, and I've seen that make even more severe mistakes. (They keep saying our git repo will be ready Real Soon Now[tm]. So looking forward to that.) ~~~ wcoenen The article demonstrated a silent bug in a specific use case: merging a rename for a file which was modified locally. I was responding to the generalization "don't rename files if you use branches at all". Things are not that bad. As I explained above, merging a change to a file which was renamed locally works fine: it triggers a tree conflict which is easy to resolve. svnmerge.py was deprecated by the introduction of merge tracking in subversion 1.5, so I'm not sure why you are still dealing with that. You can migrate with svnmerge-migrate-history.py ------ tbrownaw That's the thing about _distributed_ version control systems -- merging is such a central operation that is _has to_ work well. ------ littleidea Welcome to the not evenly distributed future.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Up to 88% of Hong Kong Population Exposed to Tear Gas Since June - dsr12 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-05/up-to-88-of-hong-kong-population-exposed-to-tear-gas-since-june ====== hkmaxpro Hong Kong started using China-made tear gas canisters recently [1]. Reddit discussions on why those made in China are more dangerous [2][3]. [1] [https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/12/hong-kong-police- confi...](https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/12/hong-kong-police-confirm- purchase-tear-gas-canisters-made-mainland-china/) [2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dqjb5g/why_chines...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dqjb5g/why_chinese_made_tear_gas_is_more_dangerous/) [3] [https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dsh5b6/tear_gas_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dsh5b6/tear_gas_chemistry_by_popular_tutor_k_kwong/) ------ president Which is why we should be supporting sanctions against the PRC aggressors via the Hong Kong Be Water Act [1]. [1] [https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/Ho...](https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/Hong- Kong-Be-Water-Act-One-Pager.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Remark: The most efficient inbox in the world? - JoelMarsh http://www.getremark.com ====== ChrisNorstrom Please someone. Just listen. All my email problems will be solved if you just make a plugin for Thunderbird that groups all emails (recieved and sent) according to who they're from and to. If I had cancer and the make-a-wish foundation asked me what I wanted, that's what I would ask for. That exact thunderbird plugin. To be more exact, You know how message boards work? There's a forum which contains threads and those threads contain replies to the thread. Everytime there's a new reply in one of the threads, that thread gets bumped up to the top of that forum. Imagine that every contact you email or or every contact that emails you, is a thread, and all your emails are replies in that thread. That way everything's grouped under some kind of contact. And previous conversations are easy to find. If there's any justice in this world, I will get my plugin one day. _(That and Sony Pictures must finally release the full soundtrack to Resident Evil 2002)_ ~~~ Leftium I have a similar idea for managing contacts where the contact is "bumped" up whenever any type of communication is made (send/receive phone calls, emails, SMS's, etc) Less important contacts naturally settle to the bottom. You can scan the list once in a while for people you've neglected but wish to keep in touch with. Interestingly, KakaoTalk, a popular messaging app in Korea, organizes your chat rooms like this and I use it much more than the alphabetical list of contacts. ~~~ ChrisNorstrom YES! This. ------ Spas Yet another take on email - and how to use it properly. It says my inbox will be 66% more efficient - but I don't know what that means exactly. I am a heavy user of gmail labels to organize my email - and I am sad that mailboxapp.com does not support gmail labels yet. How is your product going to work exactly? - Are you going to put labels on emails automatically? - Delete emails automatically? - Archive emails automatically? ~~~ JoelMarsh Thanks for doing the test! And for explaining a bit about how you use email, that's helpful. We won't do any of those things, actually. Our inbox/app is structured much differently and your own natural behavior informs the algorithm (no manual teaching/rules required). Everything is controllable if you want to control it, but it's the other side that's interesting: if you want to be lazy and let things pile up, Remark will do the housekeeping and make sure you don't miss anything. Your labels will be safe, and we will never delete anything automatically. ------ dustin999 This is a classic product failure. I went to your page and don't know what problem you're solving of mine. I've adopted a zero-inbox policy for the last several years. What problem are you solving? Not trying to be a d __, just providing feedback, if you changed your landing page to identify the problem you're solving, it would make more sense. If it's a problem I'm unaware of, you need to convince me that this is a problem I should be worried about. In the 15s I spent on your site, I couldn't figure out what you guys do, other than you're going to do something with my email (my most personal, prized possession on the internet). ~~~ JoelMarsh Thanks for the feedback, (I don't think you're a d) and you're basically right. This site, though, isn't actually a product (yet). It's a test, to prove our inbox concept. Like glorified customer research, in a good way. That being said, maybe we could have been more explanatory. It's hard to know where to land for a "teaser" sort of thing. We'll think of you when we make the "real" product site later. ;) Thanks again! ------ JoelMarsh I am one of the founders of Remark and would love your feedback! I would really love to hear your result and a description of how you handle email! ~~~ soneca I did it (still no results), but please send me an email telling me when your app "remove itself" from my gmail account with a link to where I can check this myself (and cancel it myself if you didn't). This would make me trust you more. I would NEVER have it tested in the beginning if I hadn't see it upvoted here in HN. Actually, I realized now that don't even know where to go to manage this gmail apps. ~~~ drunkenfly You manage them in your Google Account under Security, Connected applications and sites ~~~ JoelMarsh Thanks. :) ------ atacrawl I have no idea what Remark actually does. What does an efficient inbox mean? What will clicking "Test your inbox" do? ~~~ JoelMarsh In the footer of the site (the FAQ type text) we explain a bit, but all we do is count things from your inbox. The actual content of messages or attachments is never downloaded (just the headers and such), and we only have read-only access for a short period of time. Nothing is re-organized or moved or labeled or anything like that. ~~~ atacrawl Fair enough, but the first FAQ is "What is Remark?" and the answer is "Right now, Remark is a work-in-progress." I admit that I stopped reading after that. Think about it -- why would I keep reading? If the service doesn't answer such a simple, critical question (what are you?), then there's nothing to compel me to keep trying to find the answer. ~~~ JoelMarsh The next sentence is: "...it will be a downloadable email app for desktop and mobile." ~~~ atacrawl That still tells me _absolutely nothing about the product!!!_ ------ ragmondo ?? what did I just authorise ?? Sorry.. I have no idea what you are doing with my data and I regretted almost immediately the "grant permission" thing when it just said "Thanks ! You are now going to be 99% more efficient !". I couldn't find the revoke access button fast enough ! ------ JoelMarsh WOW, the response is huge right now! We appreciate your patience if the test takes a while (your results will be emailed to you, so you don't have to wait). ------ hudell "Remark prioritizes, pre-sorts and cleans your inbox automatically." Good luck with that, I will stick with my email as it is.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Practical Reverse Engineering Part 5 – Digging Through the Firmware - j_s http://jcjc-dev.com/2016/12/14/reversing-huawei-5-reversing-firmware/ ====== NateyJay The link for deciding whether to be nasty or nice when enforcing open source licences is fascinating: [https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/...](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/2016-August/003580.html) Linus talks about the loss of trust, community, and developers that plagued Busybox after their GPL enforcement lawsuit. I hadn't realized the consequences were so dire. That lawsuit is still sometimes held up as the GPL working as intended. ~~~ matheusmoreira This is excellent. Thank you so much for posting that mail. I definitely agree when he says threatening lawsuits just makes you look like a bully. Violence can be defined¹ as a measure taken to force an unwilling person to change their behavior. Based on this understanding, I think lawsuits are a form of violence: legal violence. It takes real maturity to deal with the company the way they did. "Yeah, we're infringing your license, what you gonna do about it?" is a direct challenge that invites litigation. Clearly unacceptable behavior from a company that knows and admits its own guilt and uses its own impunity to make the developers look weak. Instead of taking them on, they worked with the company and convinced them to cooperate. I think that is a major example of constructive behavior. "Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" — Abraham Lincoln ¹ [http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/violencetypesBC.htm](http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/violencetypesBC.htm) ~~~ transposed The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy." \- Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib ------ hkon Wow, this article reminds of the early days of browsing the web. Interesting content written by someone with knowledge. A rare thing these days.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Hacker-Travelers, please share your techniques and experience. - jberryman This recent submission[1] sparked a really inspiring bunch of "me too" comments from folks with experience travelling the world while doing their life/company's work. I'd like to know how you travelling hackers work and what tricks you've picked up.<p>For example: do you keep to a strict work/adventuring schedule, or just do whatever you feel like? what kind of equipment do you use? Do you really feel like you can work from anywhere, or do you have to find coffee shops/libraries?<p>1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3266772 ====== marquis I travel for pleasure and like to stay in new places for quite a while (more than a week if I really love the place). I find it easy to work out most hotels, stay with friends or use AirBnB. If I'm interested in relocating (which I do often) it will be because I've visited somewhere and fell in love with the place, or the language, or just landed in a good spot. The key I believe is just be interested in everything and follow your instincts. If you want to move somewhere really out of the way it may not be possible, but then again I've had great broadband along the Swiss Alps' lower ranges at friend's holiday homes for example, and in unexpected spots along the Croatian, Australian and Oaxacan beaches. Be surprised and hope for the best. Even better, if you can work offline and sync when you get to a cafe. My most productive days come when I'm not near a wifi signal. Oh, and if you're US based just get a wireless card and go roaming. If you can and want to go offline just be extremely communicative with your team, and always always keep your deadlines when possible: they need to know they can trust you. ------ SHOwnsYou I don't get to travel to far away lands while I program from the beach, but I do get to travel around the US for work. I was in NYC over the summer, Dallas in most of the fall, and now LA until Christmas and maybe some of next year. Because I go to work for different companies and actually work in their offices with their people, I also get all my travel and housing expenses paid for, on top of a nice pay check. So now I am travelling around on another company's dime while I explore some cool cities in the US. ------ volandovengo Some tips from a recent interview i did: Living in many parts of the world is much less expensive than living in North America. When you’re starting a company, it’s really important to keep costs low, so living in a place where the cost of living is much cheaper makes a lot of sense. I lived for two months in the south of Spain while preparing to launch Art Sumo. For a fully furnished, two bedroom apartment in the center of the city, I paid approximately $300/month. How can you argue with that? That said, be careful how much you travel around. Generally, I find that there is a serious tax to moving from place to place, because for each place you go, you need to spend approximately one week setting up (renting a place, getting sheets, finding a gym, etc). Keep in mind that while you’re setting up, it’s still time away from the business, so you must be able to plan for that. Also – if you’re living in a place that generally is very chill (eg. South of Spain!), it can be hard to motivate yourself to work 10 hour days when everyone else is getting up at 11 am only to take a siesta 2 hours later. More at <http://ideamensch.com/naysawn-naderi/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How I deployed a Julia web-app using Genie framework with Docker - anirudhmurali https://blog.hasura.io/how-i-deployed-a-julia-web-app-using-genie-framework-with-docker-1e04b24d3798 ====== piever Very nice write up! I haven't tried doing web apps in Julia since Escher ([https://github.com/shashi/Escher.jl](https://github.com/shashi/Escher.jl)) but this new framework seems interesting. ~~~ myrryr It is a shame escher isn't maintained. ------ mahmoudrafea Congratulation.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Native American Tribe Hopes Digital Currency Boosts Its Sovereignty - RougeFemme http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/07/287258968/a-native-american-tribe-hopes-digital-currency-boosts-its-sovereignty ====== jedunnigan Note, this coin is not officially backed by the Oglala Lakota Nation Tribal President Bryan Brewer or the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council.[0] Reservations have to follow federal not state law, I feel like this is issuing a currency. They (well Harris), could potentially get themselves in some trouble here. [0][http://www.indianz.com/News/2014/012781.asp](http://www.indianz.com/News/2014/012781.asp)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Downside of Specialization - alrex021 http://personalmba.com/downside-specialization/ ====== yannis Good points. Specialization is for insects!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
24.5 Trillion Gallons of Water - jostmey https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/30/harvey-has-unloaded-24-5-trillion-gallons-of-water-on-texas-and-louisiana/?tid=a_inl ====== secabeen My favorite statistic is that 24.5 trillion gallons of water is 75 million acre-feet, or slightly more water than all California agriculture uses in 2 years. ~~~ martinald Acre-feet? Is this a satirical unit of measurement?! ~~~ tbabb 1 acre covered in 1 foot of water. Makes sense where farmland is measured in acres, and actually probably a bit easier to visualize than "10^6L"\-- though I know what you mean. ~~~ nbanks Hmm... so 10^6L would be 0.1 hectare meters. Acre feet may be easy to visualize, but it's hard to convert. ------ melling There's been a bit of discussion about how Houston is prone to flooding to begin with because there's no zoning, etc. This Guardian article was written 2 months ago: “Where the built environment is a main force exacerbating the impacts of urban flooding, Houston is number one and it’s not even close.” [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas- fl...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-flooding- houston-climate-change-disaster) A more recent Atlantic article: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-c...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why- cities-flood/538251/) ~~~ jhayward These are rather viewpoint-based articles. As a thought experiment, test their cause-and-effect explanations against the historical floods that Houston has experienced since it was originated by the Allen brothers. Houston had terrible floods even in the 1920's and 30's. There was very little concrete and pavement in those days, especially in the areas they claim are lost prairie. ~~~ melling Saying there were bad floods before and there are bad floods now doesn’t negate the claim that humans have made the problem worse. [http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons- explosive-g...](http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons-explosive- growth-amid-disregard-of-flood-preparedness) ~~~ jhayward Nothing in that article demonstrates that the flooding was made any worse by any of the claimed mal-administration. The only demonstrable difference these days is that very heavy rainfall events are more frequent, and more severe. Which does not support the hypothesis. Edited to add: I will grant that there is more damage, because there are more structures now. Also that many of the structures built in the last decade or so a infill in flood-prone areas. So that's a good candidate for mal- administration. But the theory that the actual floods are worse, in terms of area flooded, flood depth, etc., is not supported IMO without better science. Could be true. But what we know for sure is it's raining more. ~~~ melling Hey, have you followed up with this story? Turns out could be true, is true. ------ elevensies There are ~500 cities with population over one million, so I think we are going to be seeing a 500-year disaster hit a million-plus city about once a year. ~~~ pizza Sampling a timeseries is not like sampling an ensemble. But nonetheless I agree we will probably see many more large-scale climate events than we have. ------ marzell This includes a visualization of a "cube" that doesn't have parallel planes. I'm not sure how much I can trust that lol ------ flexie That' almost 100 trillon litres. In a few hours it is. So 1 with 14 zeros after. A cubic meter is 1,000 litres. So we are talking 100 billion cubic meters. Or the same as 100 cubic km. Or the same amount of water as in a deep square lake which is 10 times 10 km wide and 1 km deep. Or a square lake which is almost 32 km on each side and 100 meters deep. Or a shallow square lake which is 1 meter deep and roughly 317 km on each side. ~~~ samstave I prefer all my lakes to be hexagonal or octagonal - please edit your comment. ------ sapienthomo As they say: Is that a lot? I hate the way headlines measure things in useless units, just to get a bigger exponent. Why didn't they say it was 19000 trillion teaspoons? That's just as easy -- i.e. impossible -- to visualize. I think a possibly easier-to-visualize description is enough water to cover the whole state of Texas six inches deep. ~~~ Johnny555 The diagram of the huge cube of water hovering over the city wasn't enough to help you visualize that it's a huge amount of water? They included several other visualization descriptions in the article. They can't put it all in the headline. ------ pc2g4d 24.5 trillion gallons of water is a huge problem... and also a huge resource. It's just in the wrong place, right? What if we had a system for rerouting water dumps like this around the country and could send it to a drought region? We have interstate highways. How about interstate drainage? Well, I guess that's what rivers are.... ------ dreamcompiler Another nice visualization: [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/8/28/16217626/ha...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized) ------ nashashmi That's it! We need a new unit of volume to replace gallons. A gallon is way too small. A barrel is difficult to understand. If only we had something standard like swimming pool or something... ~~~ ncr100 24 climate-change units of water? ~~~ Fjolsvith Melted Icebergs of water. ------ peterwwillis So basically, we need a pipeline from Houston to California. ~~~ sapienthomo California has only 20 million acre feet of reservoir capacity, which is currently filled to 125% of typical levels. The last thing that state needs is another 75 million acre feet of water. ~~~ dragonwriter California has very roughly a _billion_ acre-feet of _groundwater_ capacity[0], and it is so severely depleted from being pumped out to cope with surface-water shortfalls over the years that the Central Valley is sinking (and eroding groundwater capacity in the process.) California doesn't need 75 million more acre-feet of _surface_ water, but it could probably benefit from multiples of that being pumped back into the ground. [0] CA Dept of Water Resources estimates between 850 million and 1.3 billion, [http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/](http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/) ------ nashashmi NYC has reservoirs close to 500 billion gallons of water combined. And the water level only goes down to 80% during the summer. ------ racx If my math is correct, that would be 2.6 hours of foz de iguaçu falls. ------ the_d00d Fyi...there are no basements in Houston (or Texas really) despite what the article states about how water will have to be pumped out of all the basements. ------ jayess Can't view the page. It blocks me because of ad blocker. ~~~ msla It works for me with Firefox and uBlock Origin. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock- origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/) ~~~ overcast uBlock doesn't work with Nightly yet :( ~~~ medlazik RC works fine so far [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock- origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock- origin/versions/beta) ~~~ overcast awesome, thank you! Have you tried uBlock + ghostery together, necessary? conflicts? ------ ianai The take away is that there aren't likely to be technological remedies to the affects of climate change. Once the earths defense systems are triggered we simply die. ~~~ Johnny555 How is that a takeaway? The article didn't even mention climate change (and it's impossible to definitively attribute a single event to climate change. How is a big wet storm a "defense mechanism"? Why would the earth even have active "defense" mechanisms? What it is it defending? It doesn't seem like a very effective defense mechanism, so far reports are that there were only 20 - 30 confirmed deaths due to the floods out of 6 million in the metro area. While tragic in the real sense, more people than that must die of natural causes in the Houston area every day.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google adding gamified check-ins to G+? - mtkd http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/02/19/googles-new-latitude-leaderboards-suggest-gamified-check-ins-are-coming-to-google/ ====== AznHisoka Noone "plays together".. People use Foursquare to broadcast where they are to the world, not play a silly game. Google Locations and Facebook already have this. Adding a gamified layer won't do much to attract users. On the other hand, putting a link in front of Google.com will. ~~~ saurik (FWIW, the only two people I know who use foursquare actively compete to see who gets the most points every week.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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