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ummagumm-a

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cup_it_ds_split_with_lang

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[ { "score": 0, "text": "I like the "block" abstraction. It seems like a good way to visually work with structured content. It also makes the editor really easy to customize (at least conceptually), which I find a big plus.At least in the example, there did not seem to be a way to undo things. This is a bit annoying, especially because it forces a confirmation step when deleting things. I think most common use-cases would be much better served by being able to undo a delete than having to confirm it each time. Even if you don't want to have a general undo button, I would prefer a GMail-style undo link that only pops up after you've deleted something to the current behavior." }, { "score": 1, "text": "You might want to see my take on a concept of a structured block-based editor for Markdown — http://andreypopp.github.io/markstruct/It's still a rough draft — so expect it to work best only in Blink/WebKit now.Some shortcuts:* Arrows — move between blocks* Shift + Arrows — rearrange blocks* Enter — creates a new paragraph* Esc — merge with previous block (only for text based blocks, remove current block otherwise)* If paragraphs starts with # it transforms into heading (repeat # for more heading levels)* If paragraphs starts with ``` it transform into code snippet* Images are entered as * HR — *It's just about 500LOC, Thanks to excellent React[1] library. No inline markup yet, but it's not difficult to add. Also needs some more polishing and tests.[1]: http://facebook.github.io/react/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Structured editors are cool. Not everything needs to be org-mode, but I feel like this project could learn from some existing tools:• Quip's block level editing (https://quip.com/). This avoids the problem where users can't decide whether they should make multiple paragraphs within a block, or if they should make multiple blocks with one paragraph each — Quip makes it so that pressing return puts you into a state where you've created a whole new block-level chunk of information. Whether that's a paragraph or a heading or an image or a table, it doesn't matter because it enforces that the space must mean something. It even prevents you from pressing return multiple times, which would be handled in other wysiwyg editors with multiple <br>s or javascript margins or god knows what else.• The ability to track and apply revisions a la substance.io (http://substance.io/#substance/manual). Having granular control about both the contents and placement of blocks is very important, especially when considering that a lot of content is edited while being written and revised once published. Substance's extension API is worth checking out too.That said though, I think you're doing great work, and I'll be watching this project closely. Death to TinyMCE!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Looks good. Should slot into quite of lot of interesting applications.Strange name though. Since the author is british, I assume it was named after this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_McDonaldEdit: "Brought to you by ITV.com" kind of confirms it" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Ehhh.... To be honest, I find the editor to be clunky and this would not be something I would enjoy using. Somebody enlighten me what's so great about Sir Trevor except that it comes with an MIT license." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "How these objections work depend very strongly on the nature of the startup. It's something I'm very concerned about. My own work is going to be chock full of sensitive customer data about their system configurations (it could be described as a DevOps analytics tool). Privacy and security will be huge concerns for customers. I'm starting with SaaS, but I fully expect pressure from some customers to provide a COTS version for internal deployment, due to "security".I don't want to do COTS at first because I want the ability to iterate quickly for new features and bug fixing. I can do that with SaaS, but enterprise COTS is the land of programs that haven't been updated in years. I don't want to put myself in a position of supporting antique versions of the code, even if it comes with lucrative support contracts, because it's a drag in other ways. So my answer to customers who can't deal with SaaS security in the short run is probably going to be "Sorry", and my efforts focused on pleasing the customers who are comfortable with a SaaS solution.On the other hand, I'm not even in beta yet. I may well have to eat those words in fairly short order, if that's what it takes for survival and growth a year from now.That all said, I've put a lot of thought into addressing customer objections about their data, and a lot of it is baked right into the architecture." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've also heard, "How do we know you won't sell the company and have the product wither on the vine."This is why startups tend to deal with startups, and Crossing the Chasm [0] is so difficult.[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm" }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's a great set of questions, and a set we hear constantly.To slightly extend, there's also the question of "Will you raise your pricing for the same offering at any point?".Plus, in addition to can I get my data back, "will it be of any use to me when I do get it back?". i.e. is it exported to some standard format, will I get enough source code to run it long enough to build (either myself or collectively) some way to get the information (as opposed to the data) out?"Can I get my data back" actually figured in our architecture prior to building, that's why we went for bring-your-own-storage. Google Drive and Dropbox both now provide direct JavaScript on the client to their servers functionality, the data doesn't need to go your servers any more for storage (only for processing, should you need that).Our SaaS isn't our main, or even a pay-for, product, we heard this constantly. We do now have a set of answers, but it's taken a good couple of years to put them together in a way that satisfies people." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm unsure what to make of this post.> Your data stays with you: It is scary enough to hand over your company’s most precious data - your customer database - to a large company with all the data break-ins today. But with a start-up, the risks magnify, as there is the added worry that the start-up will fail, or will be acquired. What happens to your data then?> We never ask our customers to provide us with their data. We ask our customers for descriptions of their products and descriptions of their customer’s pain points. That information is enough to provide a continuous stream of targeted leads to our customers.Considering that the "data" being collected & sold by Compile doesn't belong to its "customers", where is the question of trust? Also, why would any customers who are buying leads from you ever share their customer data with you?Or maybe I'm missing something here?[0]: https://www.compile.com/technology/" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Clicking on your logo in the blog should go to your main site. If not, please add a link to your main site. It's very difficult to navigate as most in-app browsers don't have a url bar." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Part of the issue around transparency is that email inbox silos may be the wrong tool for a collaborative and productive tech company.In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nested indent history from. As the ShowHN projects assert, email's a poor To Do list tracker.To refine that slightly, emails tend to be requests.You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item. You create a new email thread to ask someone for something. The recipient doesn't care about your agenda. You're the interested party asking, and you need to track your requests.Employees and clients email requesting action from someone: do this for me, let me do this for you, give me a resource, read this, take action on this, file this, and of course, receive a copy of this to cover my ass. Your To Do items (emails) are now in their lists (inboxes), and once there, you've lost control over the prioritization and handling of them. You'll probably lose visibility too, the moment you stop getting CC'd on your own email thread.So, we quit using email.Instead, we use Request Tracker, tracking all those requests. Instead of the Inbox, we have the RT dashboard, backed by automation with full extensibility: http://bestpractical.com/rt/screenshots.html\n http://bestpractical.com/rt/features.html\n http://bestpractical.com/rt/extensions.html\n\nWe all use it, and clients are trained (by sales, by contract, and by firm account managment and support response) to use tickets for anything as well. If there's no ticket, you didn't really request it. RT makes this easy, because the client can still just use email -- there's no web interface (well, there is, but they don't have to use it) for them to have to learn. They can just email a team (internally, an RT \"ticket queue\") and be sure the team will sort out who's handling it with an SLA promise.If someone on a team has a family emergency, it's no issue, as anyone else on the team can take over that person's tickets till they're back, and immediately see the whole history.All this is public within the company and fully searchable, going back about a decade.When I said above we quit using email, I lied!We actually all use email, but what we're emailing are RT tickets. So throughout the day, we can use any email capable device in the world to interact with this shared request handling history. RT automates the history and the cc lists. You can search your own requests using your email client, or hit the web interface to search everything. Through the web interface we enjoy the benefits of the dashboard summary, automatic response SLA monitoring, cross linked issue tracking, and visibility/searchability by everyone.Note that RT can pick apart email addresses and subject lines, so you can route all your RT queues through a single Gmail account if you want, spam protecting your system and giving you a master archive searchable using Google's search tools as well.Stripe is essentially slowly reinventing Best Practical's Request Tracker. Might be worth giving RT a try." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've known companies that had pretty good email policies....until they got sued and every email debate was turned into the evidence that they knew X or considered Y or thought about Z and were therefore guilty. :-(" }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"We use Gmail for email and Google Groups for lists.\"\"What we have today works pretty well for our current size—around 45 people.\"So if I can manage to get the Google authentication credentials for just one of Stripe's 45 employees, I can get access to the vast majority of Stripe's email? I hope they require two factor authentication." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Very cool experiment. How do you deal with less technical people in the team who don't find it fun to tweak email filters all day long? Is your tooling to the point of polish where that's no longer an issue? Or are you simply at a stage where you don't (yet) need to hire non technical people? We've found this to be the main obstacle in getting full adoption for things like this." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This is cool. We had cargo-culted the idea of open email and CCing the entire company at CircleCi, so its great to see the details exposed. Looks like that structure will be really useful once we get a few more people." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Erlang has been my latest hobby language, and while I'm not very deep into it yet I'm having fun looking through the source code here to see what \"real Erlang\" looks like.https://github.com/basho/riak_csIf any experts happen to notice particularly good or heinous examples in this source code, it'd be interesting to point them out." }, { "score": 1, "text": "We've been pretty happy users of Ceph for months now, but it's great to now have a second S3-compatible solution for distributed storage.http://ceph.com/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Mildly-shameless plug here: Riak CS will a big topic at RICON EAST this May in New York City (in addition to Riak and other distributed systems goodness). You should all attend.- Conf info: ricon.io/east.html \n- Tickets: http://ricon-east-2013.eventbrite.com/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is excellent news. Questions though...does Riak CS need its own dedicated Riak cluster or can you use \"its\" Riak nodes directly in the usual Riak fashion? If so, is it possible to access the CS-created chunks directly? (Not saying that is a good idea...just trying to understand how Riak and Riak CS fit together.)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "+1 on the excellent news, makes it especially easy for hobbyist like myself to mess around with this sort of thing.Awesome to see use of vagrant to get started quickly!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "What is it? That isn't clear to me at first or even second glance. It's nice that you provide information such as \"do I need to make a long term commitment?\" but first make it clear a commitment to WHAT?Edit: I see, you linked to the signup page. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I stared at your frontpage for a good 3 minutes (great design, by the way), and I still have no idea what it is that you are offering. What exactly is \"Flowdock\"?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "You really need to work on your website content. The design is very nice, but after TRYING to figure out what it does (which most people wont do) I really don't have a clue. Your about page is a bunch of marketing speak which doesn't mean anything and the home page isn't much better. What can you do for me and what is my problem that you are trying to solve? The tour gets close, so move much of that to the home page and try again. I really like how the site looks but I don't know what it does... sorry." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I think this is an awesome implementation of what can be a tricky concept.Out of curiosity, what percentage of users use their Google accounts? Facebook accounts? Have you noticed any trends in terms of \"serious\" users (e.g. higher plans, more likely to convert to paid users) using a Flowdock account vs. their Facebook or Google?I've always thought that Facebook/Google sign in worked well for free sites or \"lightweight\" sites (e.g. ones my entire business doesn't depend upon), but I'm curious how many people use them effectively with a site like this that's more \"vital\"." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Nice. When I go for the \"Flowdock\" option, have the focus on the First Name textbox." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The fundamental problem with most commercial infrastructure providers (which is pretty much all wired and wireless ISP) is that competition can never be perfect because of the laws of physics.There is only so much room to put cables in the ground, or wireless spectrum to use. Thus, the governemnt auctions these roles off (often at far far below their actual worth), and companies use their physical monopoly to extract maximal profit with as minimal infrastructure as possible.The obvious solution is pro-consumer regulation. Eliminate long term contracts and make unlocking of phones mandatory after contract expiration. Force all carriers to have common carrier status, so the physical infrastructure is a dumb pipe. This list could go on and on...The problem with this is that anyone in the industry will lobby against this and they already have the political will against any change, as they're making a ton of profit via their monopoly status." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they still can.The fundamental problem is lack of competition. When there are only a small number of providers, none of them have an incentive to slash the price of texts to a more reasonable level." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I would love to hear the HN community thoughts on my article. My new blog is a work in progress and I am always open to suggestions how to make it better.Cheers" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I am not unhappy with my carrier, China Unicom. I have a good 3G for 15$/month, no contracts. I go to the nearest cigarette seller and buy cards to pay them, and it stops when i stop paying, that's all.When I see my relative in France talking about their locked contracts, I cry with them." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There's still room for disruption in the U.S. wireless space. Check out our latest project, http://ting.com, which went into private beta last week. Hopefully its a boat-rocker." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Wow, I would think there is some serious potential here. Awesome idea - very well thought out.Monetization without ads might be done (at least in part) via a paid smartphone app? You could offer the full site experience for free, and ad-free, but charge for the app with shopping list integration etc?With that said, I wouldn't fear advertising on a site like this. It's a great chance for targeted ads, and a few unobtrusive ones would not detract from the service or experience.I had to dig in and really look for the faq to get an answer to why instructions weren't showing up in a recipe - should you detect when instructions aren't present and put a little note as to why? Even better, let me know that I can click edit and copy/paste the instructions in myself when they aren't automatically retrieved.Might be an edge case you want to investigate: The first time I tried to use the bookmarklet was on this page, and it did nothing: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I too recently launched a MVP of this same idea. You can see the yc thread here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598 and the site here http://7courses.comThere are several features missing before I do a full launch, I have been working steadily though, and plan to launch it fully (with a normal login system) within a week.Very interesting product. You focused more on making a Hub for storing recipes, where I just needed a dead simple tool for jotting down recipes I use. There is currently a mobile web app. We should talk/compare notes, you should email me templaedhel at gmail dot com. Nice product." }, { "score": 2, "text": "That is a pretty impressive bit of coding to be able to pull out the recipes, especially from more free form places like reddit.I like the thinking about a one-time payment system, but the problem comes in that all your revenue would have to be from new sign ups." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is beautiful. I really do hope you won't plaster ads over it. Once you get some traction, selling a premium account for a one-time fee might be a good idea.If you could show the instructions on a timeline, that will give a quick visual overview on how long a recipe takes, the number of steps involved and if there's much gap or overlap between steps. It could also serve as a way of comparing and choosing between two similar recipes.If you choose to go with a non-advertising business model, please feel free to email me. I'm building an online shop which might help you sell your product." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Cool idea. I love that you create a shopping list. You definitely want to connect this to your phone so you can pull shopping list in the store.Revenue will be tough. My experience with recipes are that people dont like to pay for them. You will need ads, and therefore scale. That said, if you have the capital to wait and develop real usage, its a great advertising opportunity (person looking at there phone in a store ready to buy)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The \"teardown\" term here (in the rewritten title of the submission) is misleading, there seems to be no tearing down of hardware (as this term is usually understood), but rather digging up information from the published Glass kernel -- which is still a very interesting feat." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The sensor revolution continues. Gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, proximity sensors all packed in there with a wink sensor too. It's only missing a barometer, hydrometer and thermometer! Perhaps those will make it to a future production version of Glass." }, { "score": 2, "text": "One sensor that I have not seen mentioned anywhere is GPS. The pair I tried a few weeks ago had GPS built in and it worked when glass was not connected to a phone or WiFi." }, { "score": 3, "text": "> A major win for TI (FWIW), considering that it has nonchalantly quit the mobile-SoC market citing a low RoI.I don't know whether to laugh or cry." }, { "score": 4, "text": "TL;DR:\nGoogle Glass runs on Texas Instruments OMAP4430.Google Glass has a built-in Accel, Gyro & Compass.Google Glass has a \"glasshub\"Google Glass has a \"Proximity\" sensor." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I wished I had half a reason that I could use to justify buying one of these. As it is I barely use the laptop that I've got, as my eyes are getting steadily worse I love my big screen monitors and associated fonts. Of course I could hook one of those up to a laptop but that would not give me anything I don't have today.Still, this is by far the coolest hardware project I've seen in a very long time.Nice quote from the article: "A company called Myriad noticed that Novena used the same breakout header as its own software-defined radio (SDR) board, and offered to re-spin a version of the board specifically for use with the Novena."Very very neat. The Novena is really what open source is all about and I may end up buying one simply to support the poject (though I suspect that once I have it I'll see my productivity on commercial projects drop substantially)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I love this project. I probably would have jumped in if there was a more conventional laptop around the $3k mark. The $5k heirloom, more-traditional version was pretty cool, but tough to justify for myself." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It will look like this https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop" }, { "score": 3, "text": "It is GREAT to the crowdfunding of this eclipse their goal! This project is a great example to show that hard work and know-how can produce something truly fantastic." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Any chance they could use RISC-V in the future?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think its partially due to the size of the market.Most British startups start out building products for the British market. So they have a 10-20 million target. Once they achieve major success, they figure they'll go overseas.U.S. startups start out building products for the American market, so they have a 300 million target. And since our version of English is much more prevalent online that target is even higher.Since growth rates are more or less the same, you have British companies at a disadvantage. While a US company might have 10 million users after 5 years, the same exact company in Britain would only have 100K users.The market share may be the same, but due to the sheer size of the market, the U.S. company has a lot more customers. And once those customers start paying, the U.S. company has a ton more $$$ to play with to grow even further.There are obviously a number of exceptions, British companies doing well in the American market. But those are the culturally aware companies, that realize that the British culture is different from the American one." }, { "score": 1, "text": "For Google, Twitter, and Facebook, the main reason is that there are fewer and more conservative investors in the UK. Google and Facebook in particular seemed super risky at first, and were only able to raise money from angels, even in the Valley.Microsoft is a different case. They're a generation older, and didn't rely on investors. They were in the US because the microcomputer revolution happened mainly in the US. The reasons for that are complicated, including the fact that the British government interfered with (in both the British and American senses) the British computer industry, and that getting rich was effectively banned in the UK at the time the startup was being invented in the US." }, { "score": 2, "text": "In my own limited experience with brits I've found that culturally they love creativity but only within conventional constraints. If you try to do something that is really subversive I've gotten this \"who do you think you are?!\" kind of attitude. They just generally don't share this American sense of \"you can be anything you want to be!\" Just a contributing factor." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The US strikes me as having less aversion to financial risk than any other nation.It's how they get into trouble (economic downturn) but it's also how they pump out true innovation.The US also has an overall aversion towards the distribution of wealth. If you make money, you keep more of it there than in many other countries.That attracts the people who want to be financially successful. And when you have more of those people around, the more likely something good is going to happen.Go big or go home? They live it.Clearly they have societal issues, but the US is a great place to be if you've got money and talent. If you don't have those things, live somewhere else. . . ." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Spotify are UK / Swedish. I think they'll be bigger than Twitter." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Just like great art or hot women.You'll know it when you see it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Quality code is any code written by me.\nPoor code is any code not written by me.me = any developer:o)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Great code is simple. Simplicity is the cornerstone of all the other attributes of beautiful code - ease of extension, ease of understanding, often even efficiency or at least amenability to optimization. " }, { "score": 3, "text": "Quality code is the kind that someone else maintaining it doesn't feel the urge to rewrite..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "couple of salient features:\n - easy to maintain\n - easy to extend\n - obviously correct\n - <this space is for rent>" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Whatever philosophical complaints you have about the check cashing business, CashNetUSA was a well run, professional business with great technology.I interviewed at CashNetUSA last year. It was the second most-appealing job I've ever been offered (I interviewed for my current job, the most appealing, at the same time so I didn't end up working there). They had a great tech team, extremely smart and experienced guys. They employed 400 people (mostly call-center reps) and paid well (not sure how they're doing post-bust). They sponsored and hosted meetings for the Chicago Lisp User Group when we were active.Site in RoR, they programmed their own call center using Asterisk, self-managed Linux infrastructure, quants generating real-time risk assessments for customers to determine individualized rates, etc." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I wished the article explained a little better why his business was not shady. From the article, it doesn't sound much different from the paycheck cashing places...Maybe his new real estate business is more respectable but it was made possible by his previous business.Can anyone explain why we should look up to him? I understand that there might be a need for \"payday loans\" but it still looks like exploitation." }, { "score": 2, "text": "He was an angel investor for a start-up founded by two friends of mine. A very decent guy, with high moral and ethical standards. There can always be an exception to the rule - even in the cash loan business." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm watching The Merchant of Venice right now, then I pop over here and read an article about a 28 year old Jew from Chicago who made millions of dollars lending people money at an extortionate rate. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; I'd do it myself had I but the wherewithal. I just found it funny. Like, you know his friends have to mention it to him occasionally, rib-jab style. Heh." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Seeing Woods's law play out is always amusing.\"Whenever the private sector introduces an innovation that makes the poor better off than they would have been without it, or that offers benefits or terms that no one else is prepared to offer them, someone—in the name of helping the poor—will call for curbing or abolishing it.\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Woods#Woods.27s_Law" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "My impression is that people are overconfident in their ability to plan an invasion and under-confident in their ability to pitch manure. There are other examples, but in general there seems to be much less variation in results than there should be. Some of the things listed are very easy, some are very hard." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I answered every question positively, because I thought in terms of 'if my life depended on that' or 'if there's no one else to do the job'. Surely, the outcome wouldn't be the best possible. However, it's realistic that all sane and non-disabled people at least have an idea what is involved in those tasks and can come up with some results." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Since the criteria was having done the task at least once, I am quite impressed with all those who checked yes for died gallantly and were still able to fill out the survey." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Who are these people who can't butcher a hog but can plan an invasion?In fact is there any 1 person in the world who could plan a modern invasion on their own?I imagine the process of going to war involves large committees." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm still not sure what \"set a bone\" means. Is that something like picking the bones out of the ashes after a cremation at a japanese funeral?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This a big win for all the partners, and a potential barrier for anyone who's not a fb partner. I doubt that the real-time media playback sync is going to be available to normal fb apps. It would be really difficult to compete with any media app, music or video, that has partner integration with fb." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Has this sort of conglomeration been succeeding in technology? The big example is iTunes but Apple is such an outlier everywhere that I don't know whether it generalizes." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's funny- I remember everyone saying that Facebook was victorious over MySpace because it didn't allow people to customise their profiles and put irritating music players on them.Now, Facebook has a customisable header (effectively) and integrated music playing. I'm not trying to suggest that the implementation is the same as MySpace's, but it's funny how these concepts come back around again in time." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This looks to tactfully aim to do what Beacon clumsily tried to do years ago: capture/publish as much user activity as automatically as possible. The timing is great, too: integration with these new streaming music sites might be the use case that really sells this to the public. As last.fm and turntable.fm have shown, music listening can be so naturally social that auto-publishing should be popular." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Neat feature -- but I agree with one commenter on the site of the article -- why not just get together with you friends and listen to music at the same time? There's lots of live music out there, and most performances are under-attended :(" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is going to be a fairly controversial opinion, and I fully expect this text to end up about one shade off white approximately five minutes after posting (at least if my last few attempts mean anything, hence the following wall of text), but I notice a few things, without fail, whenever this topic comes up.1) The advocates for all of these restrictions on data are incapable of doing so without resorting to flawed arguments, if not outright scaremongering.A couple selected pieces from this article:* "If you've ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place.."Can't say I have. Perhaps your Facebook interactions are all dour and joyless because the people you interact with are dour and joyless online? In any case, it's hardly proper to speak this opinion as if it were fact.* Comparison of ad targeting data to the "pink files" collected for the express purpose of destroying LGBTs, or data collected by various secret police.Why this is problematic is left as an exercise for the reader.I'm going to coin a phrase here. You know "reductio ad absurdum"? I'm going to call this "reductio ad missionem malum" - reduction to the worst case scenario. A close relative of the slippery slope.In this case, the thesis appears to be "Lots of data is collected, therefore burn it all to the ground because it can be misused by the bad guys with guns."2) Their arguments are not followed to their logical conclusion.Much hand wringing is done (not by the author necessarily, but in general) about the world when everyone's "youthful indiscretions" and "every mistake" are available online, permanently, for the world to see. Fast forward a decade or so after that line is crossed. What happens when everyone has dirt on everyone? Does that not greatly lessen this impact? It's pretty hard for the guys in suits and dark glasses to blackmail you for something when that information is already out there.It would be a type of "post-privacy" society, in other words. It is fundamentally different from what we have now, where we have a public personality and a private personality. This carries some positives, some negatives, and I feel it has yet to be discussed in an objective way.3) Instead of advocating for greater privacy controls that make sense, they instead advocate for measures like the EU's misaimed and "feel good" "right to be forgotten" law.Look at what the author advocates for:* "Limit what kind of behavioral data websites can store. When I say behavioral data, I mean the kinds of things computers notice about you in passing—your search history, what you click on, what cell tower you're using."I for one GREATLY LOOK FORWARD</s> to the day when bureaucrats tell me how my nginx access logs must be formatted and stored (after all, they contain, fairly explicitly "what you click on"). I also look forward with the same enthusiasm to how such a thing will ever be enforced and to find out how much money will be allocated to this particular measure.I think this is approaching the problem from the wrong angle.The author says that this is an implementation problem. I, for one, do not want that implementation decided by people who don't understand how technology works. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case whenever you have tech-by-legislative-diktat.Let me give you an example by way of the next item:* "Enforce the right to delete. I should be able to delete my account and leave no trace in your system, modulo some reasonable allowance for backups."Remember how I said the EU law was misaimed and "feel good"? A case where this would do more harm than good: Hacker News. Or indeed any other discussion forum or mailing list archive. Imagine a prolific and quality contributor here, like such as tpacek or even PG. Now imagine that for whatever reason, one of these people want to be "forgotten" and invoke this law.Imagine what this would do to every single thread that person has ever participated in. Context would be utterly annihilated. This would eviscerate, in the most disgusting sense of the word, most any discussion forum.I came up with this edge case in less than 60 seconds of thought, and I don't even begin to rank on the list of smartest people on HN. If I can locate such a problem with so little effort, that means both that the people who wrote this law don't know what the fuck they're on about, and it also means that worse edge cases probably exist.I would say that the legislation needs to target behavior, not tech. Ensuring that private data remains so even after mergers, acquisitions, etc? Excellent. Penalties on companies that misstep? Great idea. Ensuring that government types have to go through the full judicial processes (none of this secret-court-rubber-stamp malarky) to access this data? Awesome!Making me destroy my website because someone wants to disappear themselves? Less so." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is a great quote, and very timely with the recent metafilter kerfuffle:"If you don't run your own ad network, advertising is a scary business. You bring your user data to the altar and sacrifice it to AdSense. If the AdSense gods are pleased, they rain earnings down upon you.""But if the AdSense gods are angry, there is wailing, and gnashing of teeth. You rend your garments and ask forgiveness, but you can never be sure what you did wrong. Maybe you pray to Matt Cutts, the intercessionary saint at Google, who has been known to descend from the clouds and speak with a human voice."" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm now more hard-line than this on data privacy:I have come to believe that businesses should not be legally allowed to store any consumer data unless it's obvious to the consumer that it's absolutely required for the primary function of the service, and they should only be allowed to store data for that one function, with an exception if the consumer explicitly and voluntarily opts-in for each additional function.Large internet companies have been collecting swathes of data with the claim that they are secretly using it to improve people's lives. But it seems to me that A/B testing has failed to improve anyone's life.Example:\nI use search engines to search for something I'm looking for.I do not benefit from being shown 'targeted' ads, nor from the search engine identifying the most populist answers which it uses to spoon-feed me later rather than serve what I asked for, nor from the search engine identifying which particular arrangement of pixels will leave me personally more addicted.Businesses are welcome to use my data in ways which are in my interest, but they should not get to decide which of these uses are in my interest." }, { "score": 3, "text": ">There was an ad for the new Pixies album. This was the one ad that was well targeted; I love the Pixies. I got the torrent right away.I laughed very hard on this!In all, an excellent article. I disagree with blind faith in technology to solve all our problems and not create new onesPeople often forget that technology is tools (and not always neutral tools, as is another naive belief: some inventions have larger inherent "harm potential"), and that policy matters as much, or even more, as does the kind of cultural landscape we guide our use of the tools.(Remember the classic xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/538/ )." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The thesis the talk pivots around is this one, in my reading:"Investor storytime only works if you can argue that advertising in the future is going to be effective and lucrative in ways it just isn't today. If the investors stop believing this, the money will dry up."" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I really like this message. It has a lot of similarities to a life-changing (for me) audiobook that I recently finished (Brian Tracy's The Psychology of Achievement).Here's a short summary:If the situation [can be remedied], then there is no need to worry about it. ... The appropriate action is to seek its solution. Then it is clearly more sensible to spend your energy focussing on the solution rather than worrying about the problem. Alternatively, if there is no solution ... then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you cannot do anything about it anyway.If you are motivated by a wish to help on the basis of kindness, compassion, and respect, then you can carry on any kind of work ... and function more effectively with less fear or worry, not being afraid of what others think or whether you ultimately will be successful in reaching your goal. Even if you fail to achieve your goal, you can feel good about having made the effort. But with a bad motivation, people can praise you or you can achieve goals, but you still will not be happy.[In order to not be overwhelmed by the difficulties,] it is vital that we make every effort to find a way of lifting our spirits. We can do this by recollecting our good fortune.[Negative thoughts and emotions - such as hatred, anger, pride, lust, greed, envy] are thus the cause of our destructive behaviour both toward others and to ourselves.There are many methods [to train the mind] ... It is this pattern of thought [focus on turning adversity to advantage].... one of the mind’s most marvellous qualities is that it can be transformed... [Those who attempt to transform their minds] will become more disciplined and positive." }, { "score": 1, "text": "> If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it. In other words, if there is a solution or a way out of the difficulty, you do not need to be overwhelmed by it. The appropriate action is to seek its solution. Then it is clearly more sensible to spend your energy focussing on the solution rather than worrying about the problem. Alternatively, if there is no solution, no possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you cannot do anything about it anyway.This is all well and good, but what if you don't know there is a solution. Only \"worrying\"/thinking about it will you know if you can find one. And then the solution itself might be difficult to reach or people disagree with your solution etc leading to stress." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It would be so cool if the Dalai Lama posted on Hacker News.Just sayin'." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Don't let your surroundings determine your mental state. The guys who survived the concentration camps in Germany were the ones who had found peace, meaning and value in their lives even in the worst condition imaginable. Practice being happy for no other reason then choosing to be happy. I'll add years to your life." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Yes, if I had devout followers and full financial support and security myself, not to mention hollywood friends, I would not have much stress too..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Could someone who deals with PCI compliance please explain some other nuances of credit cards that I've been curious about:* Fault/Decline Codes returned from processors like CyberSource. How are these factored? How do processors do Regex on names/addresses? [1][2]* CVV numbers and what they mean/how they are treated in the system? If CVV number is included does this increase chargeback protection?* How CHIP cards work differently in the processing system, if at all?* Do "knuckle-busters" (carbon copy physical imprints) follow any sort of compliance anymore?[1] http://apps.cybersource.com/library/documentation/dev_guides...\n[2] http://apps.cybersource.com/library/documentation/dev_guides..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's certainly not necessary, but my guess is that it follows from the "Don't Make Me Think" school of UX design. If a majority of consumers have been conditioned to expect a credit-card-selection menu (or series of clickable icons), then the absence of such might confuse them and cause measurable drop-offs in the purchase completion funnel. It seems a little farfetched, but I'm sure at least someone has done the tests and proven this to be the case. (And if not, then there is truly no reason for the continued presence of these menus.)Anecdotally, I've noticed that more and more sites are using autodetect features based on the first 4 digits entered. It certainly didn't put me off as a shopper; in fact, I found it a lot more elegant. But I'm an unusual guy, as are most people who work in tech. We can't assume that what's appealing or efficient to us is necessarily the same for the broader masses." }, { "score": 2, "text": "If you only accept the 4 biggest card issuers, you can get away with some dead-simple code to indicate to the user what card type their number indicates they are.Personally, I bind an onkeyup event handler to fade in the appropriate icon based on the first digit of the number. This is not safe if you accept more than these 4 card types, (we don't). function detect_cc_type(number){\n return {\n '3': 'american_express',\n '4': 'visa',\n '5': 'mastercard',\n '6': 'discover'\n }[number[0]];\n }" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I think it was just a convention and made people feel better about having entered the form correctly. It makes sense to tell a merchant what type of card you are using even though someone "in the know" might know that it can be sussed from the digits.Most payment gateways still require it even though it's probably superfluous.I've also wondered why forms ask for name on card even though I'm pretty sure it's not checked by most/all processors and would never lead to a decline. Worse is that hardly any merchants pre-fill it if they've already collected your name." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'd like to see an A/B test between the 2 options. It sounds plausible that a less-sophisticated buyer might see the Visa logo light up after they've typed the first digit of their card and get confused ("WHAT WITCHCRAFT IS THIS")." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The London Congestion Charging scheme is an interesting example of this.There is a network of number plate recognition cameras to enforce the congestion charge. But there were initially assurances that this wouldn't lead to a blanket database for policing, they can just request particular images.Pretty rapidly there was an exception for "national security" purposes, and more recently the mayor has proposed giving the police full access to the camera network[1].[1] http://www.london.gov.uk/media/mayor-press-releases/2014/02/..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Maybe the best solution is to create a rule that mandates publishing of all data police has access to. If that were the case, police and politicians could be tracked by any concerned citizen, their behavior analyzed and publicly debated, every action publicly questioned." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is a bullshit headline, which is rather unworthy of the EFF.The EFF isn't seeking data on the operation of the Automatic License Plate Reader (like LAPD internal documents on how the system should be configured or the protocols for handling data), it's seeking a week's worth of output from the information gathering system - presumably with a view to pointing out how many vehicles have had their license plates recorded.The LAPD most certainly did not argue that all cars are under investigation. Rather they argued that:a) such bulk data release would include information pertaining to criminal investigations, which is privileged from release; andb) that such bulk data contains so much personally identifying information that it should not, by law, be made public. Yes, that means the LAPD has access to it and the general public doesn't; the the LAPD has institutional responsibilities and is subject to institutional oversight in a way that private actors are not. finally,c) the EFF has already been given abundant data on how the system operates in accordance with CA public records request policies. Asking for the output of the system is superfluous.This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity.Well, you know what they say about assumptions...our Constititution says that no warrants will issue without specific indicia. The EFF is basically arguing that the police must be blind until such time as a crime is reported; by this standard it would be illegal for an LAPD officer to observe or act on events in the street unless and until s/he had been dispatched to investigate a specific crime. In fact, police officers are entitled to observe public comings and going in search of patterns, or even to follow people on a hunch as long as they don't interfere with a person improperly, eg by searching without some probable cause. Observations are not the same thing as a search, nor do they by themselves comprise an investigation. Such observations don't interfere with Constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly; it's a long-established principle that people do not have any expectation of privacy for their movements and behavior in public, but the EFF's position appears to be that government should be forbidden from storing any data about such movements.I get that the EFF is saying that the LAPD shouldn't be able to engage in such bulk data gathering. But to claim that the LAPD considers itself to be investigating all cars in LA is twisting the department's argument into a pretzel. The EFF says:Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.Well, no it wouldn't, but let's accept the similar premise that law enforcement would be able to conduct round-the-clock surveillance of every aspect of our public lives. The LAPD might keep that data confidential from the public, but they wouldn't be able to hide its use in a criminal case, which would be a violation of someone's civil rights." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'd not be against this if the data was 100% free and public and had no exceptions for cops, judged, politicians or any other privileged class.But, of course that would never happen. Cops, judges, politicians want protection from retaliation and etc. Well so fucking do the rest of us." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Any private person can collect license plate data with a computer too. Surely that's not illegal? Imagine thousands of hobbyists doing this and building a database of when and where cars are moving around the city. If this data collection is only allowed on "small scales" but when people combine or publish their records it becomes illegal for the group (but not the individual members?), that would become a pretty hairy legal gray area.Also cars are a massive cause of death and heavily used in violent crimes so it can actually be useful to track them, unlike trying to catch near-non-existant terrorists." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I can say from experience that as you get older and develop a broader understanding of the world, two things conspire against your focus; old ideas presented as new ideas, and scars of things not done.In the first case you will find you are presented with some "new idea" which is so revolutionary it has its own set of buzzwords, its own methodology, and its own unique values. Except that it isn't new, its like those folks who drag up popular HN posts from 2 or 3 or 4 years ago and re-post them for the quick karma hit. There is are people who re-wrap old ideas and pass them off like holiday presents at a white elephant gift exchange. The trick there is to spend enough focus points to validate that the idea isn't really all that new, identify where (and if) it varies from what you've already seen/heard/done and then either discard or integrate it into the same slot.The second is tougher. There was a really funny skit on Saturday Night Live where two psychics meet for their first date. As psychics they foresee all of the events from first date to heady romance to angry bittering to rejection and separation. They decide not to go out. As an experienced entrepreneur it can be really disheartening to be asked to walk down a road you've been down one or more times before where you know there is a pit of pain at the end of it. And then not proceed knowing the probable outcome without risking the possible better outcome. For example, try to find anyone, who did any startup in the 90's. to do a startup where you are selling pet food over the Internet.Because of these effects I think experience can really have a damaging effect on focus if you don't actively work to avoid it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Life, and therefore getting things done (especially as a startup CEO) is all about setting priorities. The number 1 priority always somehow gets done, regardless of what it takes. And there are things that one "should" do, and never does.But then there are also the hybrids, the ones that start out as unimportant back markers, and then move up the ranks over time, predictably so. It's funny to observe how you absolutely know they are there, how you see them coming, getting closer and closer, how you know they will become critical at some point, because you have been there before, and how you still manage to find something "better" to do up until the very last minute. They feel like that heating pipe in your basement that you only fixed provisionally with duct tape on a summer weekend and meant to get repaired for real before the cold season starts. It's always on the back of your mind as summer comes to an end and fall approaches, but, well, "tomorrow" will do as well....As time goes by, you live more and more in denial, you start getting anxious to the point where you are simply angry with yourself for not taking care of it while it was still easy, hassle-free, inexpensive, and non-pressing. In the end, you find yourself in a situation where something becomes your number 1 priority not because it is per se important, but only because you have no other choice but to make it happen on that very day.. "Again?" is the question you ask yourself when you finally dig through all the documents you need for preparing that damn corporate tax return on the 14th of March. "Really?" goes through your mind when you start packing a bag for an upcoming trip 2 hours before you have to leave in the middle of the night.And as frustrating and senseless as it might be, it seems to be one thing above all: human. As a startup founder, I have come to appreciate that in the end it doesn't matter how you got somewhere; the only thing that matters is that you made it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I left this on the main blog but think it relevant to the HN discussion too:I’ve heard a lot of different theories about how things get done. I’m interested in this topic, so I pay attention and see how the theories hold up.This is tangential to the rest of the post, but you should get a copy of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey, which is a compendium of short, fun descriptions of the conditions in which artists do their art.The similarity between artists and entrepreneurs is strong, even if stories about the eccentricities of the former are far more common than similar stories about the latter." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Totally agreed with Sam here. We built Parse with this simple program: 10 Ask users what they want\n 20 Synthesize the feedback and build it\n 30 GOTO 10" }, { "score": 4, "text": ""The best hires I’ve made or seen other companies make are usually friends or friends of friends."perhaps this is confirmation bias -- that by hiring friends your actual relationship becomes the interview and therefore by the time you actually hire, you have pretty much minimized your risk of a bad hire.The other problem is that that this is not a secret. And therefore everyone "networks" and nowadays more and more people see their relationships as a form of currency. When you meet someone new and "interesting" there's a subtle hope for some sort of payoff into the future.Then again, anything I say isn't from experience, just my inner internet troll offering unsolicited criticism. Thanks for sharing your ideas." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm confused how this is like Netflix at all, except for them paying for the shipping. You're giving them something instead of them giving it to you, and you're selling it, not renting it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "So...obviously they are reselling them somewhere else that has a similar assurance of re-payment. The question is, who is that? I'm guessing that their buyer gives them a shopping list of items they need and only then do they offer to purchase them through \"gazelle\".There are a lot of super, super shady \"electronics dealers\" who sell crap using high pressure techniques, and who keep costs low by not having inventory. I'm guessing that these people are gazelle's buyers." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Hi - Thos from Gazelle here.\nJust wanted to chime in with a response to a couple of these.\n @sysop073 and @thorax - the Netflix connection is right now is more about how easy we want to make it for folks. We try to take free shipping one step further by sending pre-paid packaging to our customers to send their stuff back to us.\nLooking at it longer term, by providing a model where people can sell end of use items to us with no hassle at a fair price, owning a cell phone could start to be more like renting a movie.\n@mynameishere - You are right - there are a lot of super shady dealers out there. However we're not selling to them. We've invested a lot in the technology and process behind the scenes to develop optimized channels to move the items through. We're trying to encourage reuse as much as possible - the majority of what we buy isn't junk at all, and in fact has at least one round in the consumer cycle left in it. We sell some of it directly to consumers ourselves ( http://stores.ebay.com/SecondRotation for example) and have carefully selected wholesale and recycling partners that will take whatever we have. We're absolutely committed to behaving in an unimpeachably ethical manner." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Resources are worth that much? Would recycling an iPhone even yield enough money to pay for shipping it around the world?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Man, I might use this service. Seems like an excellent, hassle-free way to unload junk.Excellent submission." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I wonder if Apple will sue. A new exception was added to the DMCA last year specifically to address things like this:\"Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.\"So it looks like this new law specifically allows you to hack your phone if all you want to do is unlock it. I'm actually kind of hoping that Apple sues the guys who did the unlocking, just to set a precedent when Apple loses." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Next: Linux on the IPhone please. Are there any Linux phones besides OpenMoko yet?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "What about visual voicemail and push email? You can't legally clone those without Apple/AT&T blessing. Also, you are limited by the carrier signal since iPhone only works with the EDGE/GPRS." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Is this going to be like Bootcamp? In that case, Apple waited to release their own tool so they'd get two Intel Mac news cycles instead of one." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It's good news. This was pathetic from the beginning. They didn't even care to disguise their hunger for power and control. I liked Apple for Mac. I don't any more for iPhone." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There's even stronger arguments that this article doesn't make. Cures last forever (at least until the entropy death of the universe assuming we can become space-faring and continue to exist for ~10^50 years) benefiting incalculable numbers of people. On the other hand, preventing one terrorist attack, has very temporally limited benefits. New knowledge lasts forever." }, { "score": 1, "text": "We aren't giving up liberty to obtain safety. Those in power are using terrorism as an excuse to do what they want to do anyhow, and it's successful enough to provide just enough cover that successful resistance never quite formed.Educating people out of beliefs they mostly don't have is not going to solve the problem." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I completely agree that we've overreacted, but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception.That means that it plays in the same game as everything else in the PR world: politics, advertising, social signaling, and so forth. The last thing it has anything to do with is logic.It would be great if we could tally up all the things that kill us and spend proportionally on those. It's the logical thing to do. Heart disease would come first, then cancer, and so on. But instead we spend and give attention to those things that the public perceives we should: AIDS research, nuclear war deterrence, terrorism.And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic.The problem here is that, with the Cold War over, the defense and intelligence industry saw 9-11 as a call to arms. They're going to go out and do things a good defense and intelligence industry should. And as Americans we have traditionally been forgiving of having our civil liberties temporarily trampled on during times of war.But you can't have a war forever. A democracy cannot survive this. Instead of the natural overreaction to a war that always happened, we started creating permanent infrastructure to address all terrorism, forever. We're fighting a war with nobody to surrender, and no amount of spending or government monitoring will ever be enough.The original laws around 9-11 were temporary, and for a very good reason. But somehow politics has gotten to the point where terrorism is the new third-rail: some national politicians might grandstand a bit, but nobody is going to do anything except for give the security state apparatus whatever it says it needs. Otherwise they'd be thrown out of office. Public perception demands it.Adding up numbers has nothing to do with it, unless you're using them to make some kind of persuasive argument, and then we're right back to public perception and politics. You're in the same boat as those who asked for more cancer research instead of AIDS research. Different people, rightly, see things differently, and everybody deserves to be represented. We're running a country, not an insurance agency." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Now consider also this: the medical privacy rights have the effect of withholding from research vast amounts of medical data, which would be extremely valuable in, say, cancer research.How many people did CANCER kill in the US 2001-2012? Roughly 6 million. 6,000,000 people. 2000 times more than terror attacks.Cardiovascular disease and stroke: roughly the same, and just as likely to benefit from medical data.I - personally - would much prefer that my medical data becomes known, than my e-mails and telephone conversations. I think that applies to 99+ % of us. Certainly the argument "if you did nothing wrong, you got nothing to hide" applies to medical data - few medical problems would land someone in trouble." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Sent this letter to Conor Friedersdorf (article author):The trouble with the idea of "terrorism" is it doesn't distinguish between Boston Bombings and a 500k+ casualty attack from a nuclear device. The former can and should be dealt with within the normal rule of law and using normal law enforcement. In the case of the latter, we hope and expect that the full national security apparatus is directed toward preventing the event, and that a suspension of the normal rule of law could probably be appropriate.The problem is, like the 2008 financial crisis and the 2009 Gulf oil spill, the probability of these massive impact "black swan" events is much higher than naive statistical modeling and intuition would suggest. That is, the distribution of these events is "heavy-tailed": the probability of an extremely bad thing happening cannot be easily extrapolated from looking at the frequency with which less bad things have actually happened.I think people may have a sense that the distribution of terrorism events is "heavy-tailed", making our reaction not entirely irrational (though much of it is). The real problem is that the word "terrorism" conflates normal garden-variety shootings, bombings, and ricin-laced-letter-mailings with the events that could kill millions. If the NSA is only working on preventing the latter, then I think most people would be happy to let them read everything. But when peace activists are called threats to national security (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/peace-activists-nuc...), and people in the IC joke that Glenn Greenwald should be "disappeared", it's hard to have faith that our national security apparatus is appropriately allocating its resources." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This appears to be reviewing IDEs with debugger frontends, not debuggers themselves, though a few integrated commercial debugger packages make a showing among the gdb frontends. Just a heads-up." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I use Nemiver simply because I don't need to have an ide installed to use it.Ease of setup makes Nemiver really good for when you need to debug something, but don't use an ide with an integrated debugger.." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Funny how IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans) written in Java and used primarily for Java development turned out to be the most functional C++ debuggers and beat dedicated C++ debugger frontends." }, { "score": 3, "text": "No mention of Solaris Studio, which is something I've always been curious about. Unlike most (all?) of those others it can use a completely different compiler than gcc or clang." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The review of KDevelop is wrong. It claims: "It has single-button hotkeys, but lacks toolbar buttons for stepping through the debugged program." Yet the screenshot in the article clearly shows toolbar buttons.http://twimgs.com/ddj/images/article/2013/0613/debug7a.jpg" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Wait a second... this guy sent a letter to a firm looking for employment and had it along with his personal details paraded around - what looks to be - the industry?How is that not a serious violation of privacy? I'm pretty sure this would violate even the most basic privacy statement. I highly doubt they asked the submitter if they would enjoy being emailed to the industry. In Canada or the EU you'd be violating Government legislation too.Hope it works out for him, but this just goes to show how little Wall Street thinks of people outside of their own circle. If I were a high up in Morgan Stanley (it's the only company name not blacked out) I'd be pissed." }, { "score": 1, "text": "After reading the responses, I'm really glad I'm not in finance. \"Hilarious but bold\"? \"Best cover letter I've ever received\"? It's good, but it's not exactly groundbreaking.For tech startups, I feel like this kind of thing is almost required if you want to get anywhere. If I'm reading cover letters, I want to see some personality, and yes, I want you to be honest. Have some fun with it, even. Is that really such a novel concept? Or is my perspective just skewed by the startup world?" }, { "score": 2, "text": ">I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out thereI think that's funny. My brother works in finance, and I work in engineering. We both interview candidates and we were discussing our approaches recently. What struck us is how different our approaches are. A few key differences:* In general, his approach is based more on intuition, whereas mine is very objective. We both spend a lot of effort determining 'fit', but my technical requirements are far more specific.* Education matters a lot more to my brother. He has HR throw out resumes that aren't from an ivy or aren't from a top 7 business school. I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same.* He likes it when people put their extracurricular activities on their resume, for me it can't help you but could be a negative.Basically, my brother wants smart, hard-working, interesting people. I want someone who does a high quality job, doesn't need hand-holding to get up to speed, and is not a jerk to other people in the company. The guy's cover letter wouldn't impress me much, but my brother would probably love it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One of the comments: \n\"It's funny that all these guys loved the letter, yet didn't realize it's their fault that the letter even had to be written. If only they hadn't been falling for trumped up resumes and bogus cover letters for years.\"" }, { "score": 4, "text": "This isn't a good resume because it's blunt, it's good because he describes himself as basically exactly what you would want in an intern.\"I'm looking to pad out my resume for a few months until my dad can score me a cushy job at his firm\" is also an honest, blunt thing to say in a cover letter... but I doubt it works as well." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This may have been a fun and interesting project for you (and a great way to learn the unix utils), but I wouldn't recommend that other startups follow this path.Rewriting something in C should be the last thing you do, not the first. The first thing you should do is find out why it's slow. In your case, it sounds as though you were fetching one url at a time (blocking). Switching to async io all could have fixed this.Btw, if you're using the Gnu utilities, it's unlikely that they were written in the 60's and 70's (also, people were processing much smaller amounts of data back then)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Great post!Please, HN, change the color of text in posts like the above. There is very little contrast between #828282 (copy) and #F6F6EF (background), and I for one am sick of having to fix this with Firebug." }, { "score": 2, "text": ">The unix text utilities were written in the 60's and 70's when computers were 33mhz and had 5MB of ram.I'm not positive (I was born in the 70s), but I'm pretty sure they had less RAM and speed than this." }, { "score": 3, "text": "scumola, this should have been a blog post that you linked to. I'm not saying this because I don't think this is HN-quality material, it's actually an awesome little story to read. But if this was on a company blog somewhere, it would be generating juice for your company in addition to for HN.This is great news and a great way to spread the word about your service. Don't let that opportunity go to waste!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Okay, there is a lot of noise in this thread, so this needs to be clearly stated:Good job, scumola.It's impressive that you diagnosed the architectural bottleneck of your design and solved it with the least amount of effort (from your standpoint) and achieved a 48x speedup. There are many developers who simply can't do that; they have tunnelvision, wasting a ton of time on improving portions of their systems without first thinking deeply about the problem they're trying to solve (and about simple ways to sidestep that problem).In your case, you identified the correct problem, which was \"How can I maximize the number of sites crawled per day?\" and not \"How can I optimize [the database, the perl scripts, etc]?\" And then you did the most straightforward optimization you thought of, accomplishing your goal in one or two nights. Your solution is valid, maintainable, and most importantly works, and so I personally don't see anything wrong with it. Again, nice hack." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "You can get outraged that updates do not list every package affected, or you can have your software used by people who think both Internet Explorer and Firefox are actually called \"the Google\", but you cannot have both. I think MS is making the right call here: assume that a user who has expressed desire for a toolbar, via installing it and requesting an update, wants it in all browsers.The four people in the world who use both IE and Firefox and wanted the bar in IE but not in Firefox are capable of tweaking that setting themselves." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I can't figure out which bothers me more: Microsoft being so underhanded with these updates to software it doesn't produce or that they allow pretty much any company to install an add-on within Firefox without user consent. This has happened once before with Microsoft and it's even happened with Skype, a company founded by modern, savvy entrepreneurs. Why won't Firefox add a feature to disable an installed add-ons until flagged as wanted by the user?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "If only we could sneak in Google Chrome Frame into IE this way..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Firefox central can \"recall\" and block any rogue extension.They did it last year when Microsoft tried this, they should do it for this one too asap.I purposely do not run as the default firefox profile, so I don't think Microsoft got me this time..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This happened last year too:\nhttp://annoyances.org/exec/show/article08-600" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The cheating pygmy in this article isn't being \"rationally selfish\" (a phrase used by Rand). One who is rationally selfish doesn't harm others by their selfish actions. Instead, they just make sure that personal and family needs are met first. Any benevolence would be a personal choice not influenced by feelings of guilt or peer pressure." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"What he has found is in direct opposition to Ayn Rand's selfish ideal. For example, in 100 percent of LPA societies ... generosity or altruism is always favored toward relatives and non-relatives alike, with sharing and cooperation being the most cited moral values\"Would Rand think it is wrong to be an altruist just for your own family? (E.g. your family's survival).John Galt chose to exit the corrupt society and start (a small) new society based upon his values. If I remember correct he was waiting (and actively helped for) society to implode so he could reboot it. He didn't do what the article claims: \"He refused to participate in society and no one has seen him since.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Can someone explain to me why Ayn Rand and a work of fiction is held in such high regard? (I'm not trying to be facetious). As a foreigner living in the US for the past almost 7 years, I find it interesting that so many people (some with important jobs like our politician friends in the far right) base so much of their ideals on fiction. One could draw a comparison with Scientology where a whole religion was started by a science-fiction writer..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The Objectivist viewpoint:I will collaborate with the other hunters because I value their wellbeing and community and they can help me fulfil my own goals.The altruist (in the Randian sense) viewpoint:I will collaborate with the other hunters because the needs of the tribe supersede my own." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am so pleased to see such low snarkiness levels overall in a discussion regarding Ayn Rand. There is a lot not to like about the harshness of Randian principles, but I find the ideal she paints of the human condition compelling." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So this benchmark measured \"how the population actually experiences web browser performance\", and the article pronounces Google Chrome as the obvious winner, with the slight sidenote that FF 5 has a faster \"perceived render time\"?It just seems slightly disingenuous." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"The second metric, perceived render time (green), refers to the amount of time it takes for the visible portion of the page to load in the browser. Again, Chrome did well here (2.374 seconds), but in this case, Firefox 5 did better (2.18 seconds).\"I bet this gap gets larger the more tabs you add. Chrome starts choking after about 40-45 tabs... Firefox can handle 200 easy.The problem with Firefox is that \"tab groups\" function is horribly broken(as in, should not have been included yet) and that Tree Style Tabs just encourages opening hundreds of tabs." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Chrome is very fast and I do love it, but it still doesn't have a hardware accelerated HTML5 canvas. So if you open up a HTML5 game, IE and FF5 skip along nicely, but Chrome gets very choppy.I hope they fix this soon, because if your \"real world\" involves \"playing HTML5 games\", Chrome is one of the slowest!Edit: here's a little HTML5 \"game\", try it in IE9, FF5 and Chrome: http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I find Chrome for Os X as being very \"aggressive\" with caching. \nSometimes it's misleading as what I am seeing is not what I should see.\nThat forces me to clear the cache more often than other browsers.\nI love the speed but start to wonder wether the price to pay is worth.\nI'm not even sure what I am saying makes any sense, does it?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "It would be interesting to see some additional data - for instance, the load & perceived render times for each browser under different operating systems - how is Safari on OS X vs Safari on Windows? Chrome & Firefox across Linux, Mac, and Windows?I imagine that Safari is predominantly on OS X, and IE on Windows. Does that affect the load and render times? I guess since the two fastest (Firefox & Chrome) are also on all platforms, and probably more equally distributed, that would suggest that the OS isn't as important - but without more information, that is just a guess." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This isn't new, and it still causes the graduate's debt to increase very quickly so the risk is very real. If the gov paid the interest that would cause both moral hazard and reduce real risk on the graduate." }, { "score": 1, "text": "something to know:Generally, if you are responsible for making loan payments, and the loan is canceled (forgiven), you must include the amount that was forgiven in your gross income for tax purposes. However, if you fulfill certain requirements, two types of student loan assistance may be tax free. The types of assistance discussed in this chapter are:Student loan cancellation, andStudent loan repayment assistance.Student Loan CancellationIf your student loan is canceled, you may not have to include any amount in income. This section describes the requirements for tax-free treatment of canceled student loans.Qualifying LoansTo qualify for tax-free treatment, for the cancellation of your loan, your loan must have been made by a qualified lender to assist you in attending an eligible educational institution and contain a provision that all or part of the debt will be canceled if you work:For a certain period of time,In certain professions, andFor any of a broad class of employers.see: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p970/ch05.html" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is just the IBR plan, right? The one which has already existed for years?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Wow! This seems like is could be a really good initiative. Are there any success stories form this program yet?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Did they really need to provide "fictitious examples?"" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Umm... fuck no.There is no reason that you can't use git as a master repository system--that's how most people treat GitHub anyway.OTOH if you want to do anything besides the basic commit or update with Subversion, it's ridiculously difficult. Subversion is a SCM tool where people actually prefer to merge manually rather than deal with its conflict handler." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Don't be a git, use subversion\" - no one ever" }, { "score": 2, "text": "If you must keep with subversion, explicitly authorize the use of git-svn for developers who are using git.Git use causes smaller incremental commits, which can be squashed into bigger ones for re-merging, but makes for better, more ambitious changes, and easier rollbacks to working code. You get 85% of the benefit by allowing those who can handle it to use git as a subversion client." }, { "score": 3, "text": "No need for an inflammatory (link-bait) title IMHO." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I think what the author is trying to say is that by saving a command for 'every action' that you take on git, you can offset the hours and hours of conflicts and manual work you get every time you try to merge a branch into trunk on SVN. Or maybe not." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm not seeing the conspiracy, sorry. What evidence is there that MS selling patents to AST was part of an evil plan? AIUI, AST (Allied Security Trust) isn't known as a patent troll.AST members include: Verizon, Cisco, Google, Telefon AB L.M., Ericsson, HP. Source:http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/patent/allied-secur...If \"not inviting\" OIN was part of the conspiracy, surely a group that included Google shouldn't have been included either.AST on their website even assert that they don't assert patents against infringers:> Will AST assert these patents against infringers?> No. The purpose of AST is to provide the freedom to sell products and cost reduction. Member companies who wish to participate in a particular patent purchase are granted a worldwide non-exclusive patent license.Source: http://www.alliedsecuritytrust.com/q-and-a.htmlThis is a non-story." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Without knowing how much MS sold them for, there's another possibility.\"We don't want to sue Linux, but we want to make them pay...Hmmm, what if we 'auction' these patents, knowing they're of most value to OIN etc so a related organisation will pay top dollar.\"It's probably not as much money as a massive lawsuit, but it's much cleaner, and doesn't tarnish the reputation or line lawyer pockets." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Well imagine if MS did hold an auction and invited parties interested in promoting Linux. What would the reaction have been like? I can imagine lots of \"MS screws Linux via extortion 'auction' process\" stories flying around on the internet on such a day. Or how about, \"Proprietary software company stifles Free Software innovation using Patents\".Regardless of their intent, there is no way MS will ever get any positive reaction from the majority of the \"open source community\" (I use that term lightly - I think everyone who reads this will know which, very vocal parties I mean though).It's hard to do business with people who are constantly demonizing you. Is it any surprise MS wont make much of an effort engaging with such parties?Patents + Linux = PR disaster for MS no matter what. The best they could ever do is minimize the damage." }, { "score": 3, "text": "So basically someone gave money to Microsoft for patents they could probably never have been able to enforce?Wow, Microsoft really got screwed up again..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The only way forward with software patents is to start ignoring them en masse.By buying up these patents effectively the message is we respect the authority these patents pretend to convey.I've had the video patent trolls after me for a while, they wanted a piece of the action on ww.com because of their broad ranging patent on 'video over the internet'.I told them to put up and sue or go away (only in less nice terms). I never heard from them again.It's nice that big companies like Oracle and IBM carry a torch for open source. But that's only because they realize that in the long run the days of closed source software are numbered.There is no such thing as software patent infringement, there is such a thing as a software copyright violation.Software is the ultimate vehicle to embody ideas in strings of numbers, your unique string is yours, the ideas embodied in that string are public domain the moment you publish.If you do not want that then please, do not publish and keep your secrets to yourself. The world will be a better place because of it.Any company that ever sued because of a software patent was a patent troll, no single software patent ever awarded should have been awarded in the first place.And don't get me started about patents on genes." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I hate this modern trend to trick users to sign up: on the first page, pretend all will be easy and peachy, no sign-up necessary. As soon as you enter anything, the evil \"sign up first before you can see anything at all\" pops up.What I am saying: I saw a \"sign up\" form. Not very impressive, seen those about a zillion times before.Edit: not saying you can't require users to sign up eventually, but please show me SOMETHING about what benefits to expect before I sign up." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I like the site - at first I was a little put off because I thought I needed to register to see anything but then realized I can still see other people's requests/answers.The colors seem a little dull to me in this \"Web 2.0\" world - I think if you make the design look more lively it 'll increase the appeal of the site.Also, are you you are allowed to use the images you are using? I have no idea what the Amazon TOS are." }, { "score": 2, "text": "One small nitpick, but it always bugs me: don't rely on browser resizing for images! Especially for really small thumbnails. This is what I see in Firefox:http://www.clutterme.com/users/alex/thumbs_unresized.pngThis is what I could see if the images were resized before being sent to my browser:http://www.clutterme.com/users/alex/thumbs_resized.png(I resized the middle two thumbnails from the original images)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Do you manually make recommendations for each request or is there some sort of natural language parsing algorithm that you've built? If the latter, then really cool this has potential.." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I think it's neat, but it seems like something that would exists as a B2B licensed product, rather than a consumer-facing tool." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Lots of things on the Internet can move quickly but browsers are not Internet software the way that Google or Facebook are. Browsers are still desktop software and things don't move as quickly there thanks to slow PC upgrade cycles and the absolute dominance that software like Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer had a decade ago. Turning that massive ship took longer than many imagined but it is happening.Jamie gave the open source Mozilla project about a year and a half, including the months of pre-source release preparation (and I think that's being generous.) Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker didn't give up so easily and thirteen-plus years later they're still giving all they've got to make sure that Mozilla continues to be successful in promoting choice, opportunity, and participation on the Web.Some things are worth fighting for and I believe that the Web is one of those things. I'm proud to work with some of the founding members of mozilla.org and think it's a phenomenal thing that such talented people are willing to commit their professional lives to the Mozilla mission when there were and still are far sexier opportunities available to all of them." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I interviewed at Netscape shortly after they announced they would release the browser as open source (June '98, ended up going to Inktomi). I remember being very excited about this, and downloading the source when it first became available. I found out that my (decent) desktop machine was not powerful enough to compile it. When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours.No surprise that it remained a Netscape project for so long." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Excellent documentary on YouTube covering the year long open-sourcing of Mozilla, right up to the point of jwz leaving Netscape.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig(via codinghorror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/lived-fast-died-you... )" }, { "score": 3, "text": "5 short years later, mozilla.org shipped a product that was finally ready for prime time." }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company\"Awesome insight. Absolutely breathtaking. Explains so much of what happens at larger companies." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "That's not the consumer debt figure. Consumer debt, which is credit cards and other unsecured, mostly high interest debt, is $2399 billion.http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current/default.h...That comes to $2399 billion / 307 million people = $7814 per person." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This has to be mostly mortgages, which makes it a little misleading." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I actually think this is an incorrectly attributed number.If you multiply $43,100 * 300 Million people (remember the population number is 2008) you get around $12.9 Trillion dollars. That's around where the National Debt Clock would have been in Q3 2010 (http://www.usdebtclock.org/)So this is each U.S. citizen's share of the U.S. National debt not Consumer Debt" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I was a bit disappointed that when I changed the \"s\" to \"k\" (and tried variations on that theme), Wolfram didn't have the answer.I want to like WA, but I feel like its data is so sparse and often spiked just for demos like this. I'd really love to use WA to do a consumer debt comparison for the western world, but they don't ingest most other country data." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Is there an investment opportunity around this number?For example, $43,100 in consumer debt per capita seems totally unsustainable, and one way it might get corrected is through very high inflation, which would make our past debt more reasonable by comparison. So investments that perform well in inflationary periods would make sense... Other ideas?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": ""The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums."Definitely reads like a crack team on the case. We're all safe now, folks." }, { "score": 1, "text": ""The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums. The subject has a significant amount of money flowing through his bank account."Well I'm fucked. That's my job!!!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "If 16-year old can mount 300 Gbps DDoS imagine what adult could do!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Should have used bitcoin." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Today's kids are in dire need of a pastime." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "An anecdote from somebody who is very successful, when presented with a similar question: \"Buy my girlfriend a bracelet for $180, spent $20 on sending email to my opt-in list.\" \"But what if you didn't have the opt-in list?\" \"Not my problem, but if it will eventually be your's, start working on that opt-in list today.\"Stupidly, I forever put off doing that one!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Something I learned on HN a long, long,long time ago was that if you wanted really cheap, unfiltered traffic, you could buy quite a bit of it using Mechanical Turk. As the commenter said \"It's pretty amazing what will happen if you throw up a few nickels\". I've only used it once, but it worked.But with only $200 you want to make sure every dollar -- every penny -- counts towards getting action. So I would use it on the most targetted ads I could get. For most fly-by-night web apps that only have a $200 ad budget, adwords would be the best way to do this." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Adwords can provide nearly instant gratification for driving traffic if that's all you're after.However, it would be foolish to neglect the free and (arguably) better way to drive traffic: SEO.Patio11 has a blog full of information about enhancing your SEO, creating targeted content, and building your site to generate a lot of traffic without the need to spend money.Edit: Start Here - http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/\nI know it seems like a ton of stuff to read, but it is absolutely worth it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "You're going to hate this answer, but it depends.Reddit has good CPC and engagement rates, so long as you have content or an application that appeals to that crowd. (See Gabriel Weinberg's post on the topic).StumbleUpon has a more mass-market appeal, but relatively high cost-per-view with low engagement.Adwords is expensive unless you spend a long time honing in on niche keywords. Even then it is expensive.There was a great post on ASmartBear this morning (guest post) about how effective cold-calling can be. And that's essentially free (not counting your labor hours).Pud has a great write-up on this topic: http://pud.com/post/5239917032/usersThis is something I struggle with too, so I'll be interested to see the other responses." }, { "score": 4, "text": "A friend once told me that to get things done, it is money and time. If you have no money, then you have to spend time.The important theme online though is to leverage someone else's audience.Adwords, SEO are all leveraging Google's audience.Approaching bloggers in that space is leveraging on those authors' audience.Finding complementary products and offering them a commission is another way of leveraging an audience. There were a few interviews on Mixergy where SaaS makers deliberately integrated Freshbooks or Shopify because it brought them customers." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "<RANT>Why can't Justin.TV fix their platform so that people can find the videos?Every single time there is a startup school thread on HN, there is a sub thread of Justin.TV urls passed around like dodgy bittorrent urls. Surely the platform should support this?The titles on the URLs make it even worse: \"Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv\" - hours & days after it isn't being broadcast, isn't live and is only on Justin.TV because they happened to record it.</RANT>" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I read about whether or not to start a startup on hacker news often. In these discussions there's always the 'startups fail', 'billion dollar company'. I can say 2 things about these two things.For myself, failure is quite okay. I spent the entire weekend at a hackathon where I failed to have anything to demo. My teammate and i were the only ones there to fail to have a demo. I had had success at other hackathons so this hurt. Ultimately it doesn't scare me though, as I'll explain later.And on the billion dollar company, I have to say I can't relate. My friend and I come from middle class (blue collar working town middle class) families, so we've never had much money and we don't really chase it.So for us, it's not about the money, it's always been about building great things that we want for ourselves. And with each failure and each success, we learn more, and what we make becomes better and better from our learning. I like the idea of failure because it's only ever made the things that I make better, and helped me to be sure that I am doing what I love. Ultimately every time I ready one of these articles, and I realize that I embrace failure as an opportunity, and see money as a distraction, i feel more right with myself that we should indeed be starting a startup.Disclaimer: I am a student who has no idea what I'm talking about." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's been said before in another thread, but Ashton Kutcher blew my mind at this Startup School.Goes to show how good an actor he is too - I never would've imagined that the same person who played the doofus Kelso in That 70's show, or the guy from punkd would be giving solid, down to earth business advice at such a young age." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I have a better question: Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better.Why?If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for.Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question.Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought to be immovable." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Make things. (Hat tip Caterina Fake.)And if those things need a company as a vehicle, make that, too." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is such US-centric thinking.Foreign companies never even started in the US, so there is no question of them \"leaving\" or \"paying their fair share\". If US companies are going to be competitive, they have to get out. Otherwise, investors will just choose non-US companies. It's better to set up overseas to begin with, and save the trouble.Same thing with the US taxing citizens living abroad (unlike other countries). And so the IRS sticks its nose into every single financial transaction in the world in order to get money it doesn't deserve.The US government should just stop being so greedy and entitled." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Almost everybody is in Ireland,\" Sullivan said. \"All the pharmaceutical companies, all the high tech companies. You're stupid if you're not in Ireland,\" he replied.And this is why it doesn't change These big companies are telling everyone, the US public, the Irish public, the Irish government that the low tax rate works. The goal of the low Irish corportion tax is exactly this. Create job in Ireland, bring companies to Ireland.(Ireland is currently almost bankrupt and needs an IMF/ECB loan. Everything is on the budgetry chopping board, income tax, vat, new property taxes, reductions in capital spending, reducing number of teachers per student, delaying the age at which children start school. Everything. Except the 12.5% corporate tax rate, the government parties (a centre left and centre right) view it as that important.)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Accompanying text: http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-18560_162-20046867.html" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Of course Google, Microsoft et al were telling Ireland the other month that they couldnt raise their rates or they would leave. There is too much power here. Aligning tax rates globally will be necessary, like the EU did in Europe.On the other hand if GE is paying 3.6% then some loopholes need closing. Remove the ways to avoid tax and you can cut the basic rate. That was the plan for the abortive Reagan tax simplification.Governments are too weak for all the pork barrelling loophole generation and then get screwed by this type of evasion. Drastic tax simplification should be back on the agenda, but is as unlikely as ever." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There is a lot of loaded language in that report, and I got the feeling that the reporter should have taken an economics class before doing it. It was like watching a ignorant economics student get lectured about reality and she not wanting to accept any of it.So, instead of pulling down a bunch of theory from the shelf and going over it, I'll just point out the obvious flaw: she believes that the country \"owns\" all the businesses inside of it and that by the companies acting in their own best interest, somehow they are cheating the rest of us. Most folks who have really thought about this realize that everybody acts in their own self interest and that government's role is to set things up so they grow and that a reasonable amount of money can be harvested to help fund things. At times it sounded to me like she wanted the country to be a prison: set up shop here and you can never go abroad. Paying a tax lawyer to make the best moves for your company was cheating. Etc.I am deeply troubled that people are using mental models of business that look at businesses like the corner shopkeeper when business doesn't work like that anymore. Business is increasingly location-independent. Ranting about how unfair all of this is? It's not going to change that fact. It's 2011. I can live in Aruba, have corporate offices in Switzerland, have officers scattered around the world, make things in a dozen countries, market on the net, and sell in a hundred countries. You're using a mental model that doesn't match up to reality. You'll never make progress like that.Never once did she mention that the United States double-taxes income where no other country in the world does - a critical part of the entire discussion. That omission alone should tell you how well-researched and thoughtful the piece was." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "As a french entrepreneur who has hosted dozens of US friends in Paris, some of them being prominent members of the "hacker" community as we call it, I have always been struck with amazement at how little "hacking" these friends would apply to their Paris trip, easily falling for the Tour Eiffel visit, desperately wanting to see the Moulin Rouge (which is probably the worst place to visit in all Paris – and probably in all Europe), still marveling at the shitty 50m2 studio in Montmartre or Ile Saint Louis they were about to rent before I offered to host them and show them my version of the city, etc. How can it be 2014 and people still want to experience Paris by showing up on a Saturday morning at Notre Dame only to stand in line for hours amidst hundreds of Japanese people and their cameras the size of a small Segway.I am not saying it is easy to "hack" a city you've never visited before, and for the 2 years I spent myself in San Francisco I still believe I coud have hacked my way around much better. But if I were to provide a few advices to anyone about to embark on a Paris trip, that would be:– Buy the Paris edition of the Lonely Planet and decide to not go to all the places they mention.– Don't come in August (most of the city is basically shut down during the holidays). May, June, July, September, October, November.– Most of the most interesting buildings (+ the overall Haussmannian architecture of Paris) are better seen from the outside: better spend 30 great minutes on le Parvis du Trocadéro watching the Eiffel Tower, than actually waiting 3h in line to get "inside" the Eiffel Tower.– Get in line at museums roughly 1:30 hour before they're about to close: shorter lines, people on their way out. You have less time but it's clearly optimized.– When in doubt, rely on locals: I know many Americans actually living and enjoying their life in Paris. You're always a few friends away on Facebook from knowing someone who lives here.– Somewhere in their inboxes Parisian people have crafted for friends and/or received from friends "lists" of insider places to go that they'll happily forward to you once you've made connexion (I made a very long and detailed one of my favorite restaurants once).– Use local guides. If you're a foodie, following the Lefooding.com recommendations for example is always a guarantee to both eat at wonderful places and visit fun areas where these restaurants are located in. For all the things we suck at if there's one thing the Paris scene is amazingly good at is food & restaurant innovation.– If you're part of the tech community: damn it, you just need to hit your local counterparts. At the opposite of gross taxi drivers, young french tech people are very welcoming and easy to get in touch with.– You can definitely hit me up anytime even if we don't know each other, I'm always happy to help.I'm probably omitting a ton here but there's an apéro down my street with friends waiting for me to show up :)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I never perceived Paris as a particularly welcoming or friendly city, and I imagine few people do. All the things you read about the Gallic Shrug and general rudeness are absolutely true there, but I found you can have amazing fun if you just choose to be entertained by it instead. In the end, it all boils down to the fact that in Paris, nobody will help you with anything. On the other hand, it's mostly a city where you don't actually need a lot of help to get by. If you can manage to blend in and not care about strangers, it's quite a fun place.The article itself portrays very well that Paris syndrome is probably not real (in a statistical sense). There is a big number of tourists in the city at any given moment, some of them will statistically snap during their stay. I do like the theory that disillusionment and added stress contribute to the timing, though - especially if the trip was expensive.Since the article mentions it, Jerusalem syndrome is similar but qualitatively different. Many people who go there are not just tourists. I'd wager that for over 90% of travelers there the city has some kind of religious significance. They are essentially pilgrims. And you'd have to be to want to go there: the city itself is a dirty, oppressive mess filled with scary people and shady salesmen.Combining these factors, it wouldn't surprise me if the incidence of Jerusalem syndrome was much higher than Paris, mostly due to the clientele but also the city itself.Now Stendhal syndrome is more interesting: it's a generalized description of these kind of psychotic breaks, though they are mostly understood to be a little bit more benign than Jerusalem syndrome. By definition, these effects are attributed to exposure of a susceptible individual to an object of great personal importance, such as a piece of art. In this context, the same pattern of breakdowns has been studied with tourists who snap while visiting Florence." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Seems like a variant of culture shock[1] which has similar characteristics. The difference being the degree of anxiety experienced seems to be particularly acute for a minority of Japanese tourists in Paris.Anthropologists and ethnographers are trained in, and can experience severe culture shock since their goal is often immersion to learn more about a culture. Panic attacks in severe cases of culture shock are not uncommon, one of my professors did a stint in Spain and lost it when she saw a slaughtered pig being carried through a market place. She described being short of breath, and other classic symptoms of a panic attack.Another instance I know of is a Japanese American female anthropologist being immersed into Japanese culture while staying as a guest at a family. She found herself panicking at the supermarket. After nearly a year there, dressed in "homewear" with a stroller and the family's children looking to buy food to make for the night's dinner, in the midst of the crushing social obligations she had such an identity crisis right then and there that she abandoned ship and moved in with a friend she knew in Tokyo. She still finished her book, which is really good.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_shock" }, { "score": 3, "text": "4 day visit with wife in 2010. Paris for me :Groups of women with clipboards surrounding you trying to pick pocket when you hold the clipboard.The horrible wedding ring women and the blokes that are always nearby.The wrist bracelet creeps. Don't let them grab your wrist, they won't let go unless you pay (saw this happen).Tricked by "helpful" man who gave us fake tickets in exchange for real money. I know. Naive.These sets of cunts really pissed me off. I was glad to get back to to UK I felt safer, I didn't get the impression the police in Paris were tackling the issue.Otherwise very nice and I should go again a bit wiser (just said that for a balanced post)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Paris-fetishization isn't limited to the japanese. In other asian countries paris is also put on a pedestal as some sort of cultural and fashion peak of civilisation. Just a few weeks ago I was talking to a thai girl who excitedly told me that her lifelong dream was to go to paris - it's so built up there; marketing, films, the setting for drama, and yet some locals seem to lack the context to apply the same sort of reality checks they'd naturally apply to marketing treatment of something more familiar.Paris is a lovely city, in parts, but the "media hologram" builds it up as more than that - it's a utopia, the birthplace of romance and art, a lifestyle. And maybe it is, but not the theme park portrayed in the media. So I found myself wondering what that girl really expects if she ever does make it there, and whether reality would match up to her dream." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If you're in a startup and happen to be married, your spouse is a cofounder whether you like it or not. So are the spouses of all the founders.This applies both from a legal perspective and an emotional one. Plan for it. Write it in to the original agreement. Don't wait for divorce or (worst case) death to find out how much trouble this can cause.I have to say though, having my wife actually involved, for us, makes everything better. Its much easier to bear the risks and make tough decisions with each other's support. Your mileage may vary." }, { "score": 1, "text": "My wife and I cofounded our company. She is very good at product development and relationship building and I handle the technical side.Plus since we have a near psychic connection our meetings are very short." }, { "score": 2, "text": "My wife and I have been co-founders of our nights/weekends startup from day one. She runs customer support (phone and e-mail) and is the prototype \"seller\" in our online marketplace. I handle product development, marketing, finances and some front-end design.We spend most evenings laptop-to-laptop in \"Genlighten World Headquarters\" (our daughter's old bedroom.) Last night we worked the booth together at a startup demo event. It was tremendous fun and particularly exhilirating to be doing it as a couple.Our CTO lives in another part of the US, and so far (~2 years) we haven't experienced any obvious problems with the couple + third founder arrangement.Bottom line: it works for us." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Sometimes, late at night, maybe you're pair programming with your co-founder and your hands accidentally touch. And before you know it you're in a full-on agile scrum, burning down the back log, one of you the chicken, one of you the pig.It happens. It's extreme." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Erin isn't my cofounder, but she works for us full-time (both of us in technical roles). It works." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The step of just adding yourself to the userlist seems ill-conceived. Automatic merges are just going to overwrite the last person added unless manually merged. Can I propose this just use github for authentication, and only allow those on the contributors list (http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#list-contributors) to successfully log in?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's amusing because I've seen so many people mad at HN's lack of features, and spend so much noise demanding pg add this or that, or creating bookmarklets to "fix" it, or even forking the entire site just to try to modify a part of its functionality. But when offered the chance to collaboratively control the whole thing, on github, now it's "meh? why would anyone want that"." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Unfortunately I'm not interested in working on this code for the sole purpose of posting comments on this website. I honestly don't have that kind of time." }, { "score": 3, "text": "also interesting because presumably... as more of the low hanging fruit get fixed or added...it will take more effort to become a member" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I had never thought about using the git push/pull model for anything but code and data. Could git, tunneled over ssh, build the decentralized web that we're all bandying about?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Did any of you actually read the article? Despite the sensationalist title, they're only admitting to 10 incidents since 2006 including one where a young boy's life was possibly on the line. I'm as anti-spying as anybody, but ~1 incident per year seems like a reasonable rate to me if a serious threat is motivating it. This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky." }, { "score": 1, "text": ""Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Is the unmanned aspect the main difference here? Police have long used both planes and helicopters, and warrants aren't typically required in those cases." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This doesn't bother me. I get that it's being equivalated to living in a police state but I don't view it that way. Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical. When I'm in public I expect that I don't have privacy.EDIT: typo" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Two questions:1. If I'm in my backyard and I have a high fence (private). And an FBI target walks by my property (public), how can they claim to not be surveilling me as well?2. Is it unconstitutional surveillance to use Google Earth to see if I was home on the specific day their imagery was collected?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The reason why Bank of America (or any lender) jacks the interest rate up on people failing to pay is quite obvious - people will pay off the most expensive debt first and then work there way down to the low interest rate stuff. By positioning themselves as the highest interest rate, that lender gets paid first. But that makes the debtor more likely to simply default because the interest is killing any hope they had of escaping. Add in multiple lenders all trying to play the same game and it is no wonder so many are simply unable to get out of debt.It would be nice if lenders really stopped giving loans and credit cards to these people in the future, but I think plenty of people will default and in 5 years be back on new credit cards and new mortgages that some will end up defaulting on again." }, { "score": 1, "text": "People don't do it lightly, they do it because they are desperate and realistically the only consequence they really face is a crappy credit score. They are okay with that... many already have tanked credit before they start this." }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"With all the bailouts the government is giving everyone, no one has any personal accountability about their own debts.\"So true. The sanctity of an obligation, as the article discusses, was destroyed when the government ruled one side of the obligation less sacrosanct than the other.Is that an excuse for lenders to run away from their problems? Absolutely not. It is no more valid than the child's argument \"he/she did it first!\"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This article is severely lacking in a discussion of consequences. Publishing an article like this, given the average intelligence level of Americans these days, is irresponsible. I have debts to repay (student loans!), and the idea of \"just not paying\" is very charming, but there are real consequences for these actions. It's not something to be done lightly or 'because I want to'." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I hope that society developes a different view of debt and consumer debt in particular through all this.One thing to note, is that either the paying off or writing off of debt is deflationary -- something that was an asset on someone's books, either simply vanishes, or else is replaced by money that was extracted from the economy." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "“back-to-front”—the chosen boarding process of most U.S. carriersNobody boards back to front. First class boards first. Then frequent flyers, who typically get the seats toward the front of the aircraft. Then there's some semi-random zone thing whereby big hold-ups occur waiting for people in the front and middle of the plane to put their bags in the overheads.If airplanes got rid of the overhead bins and really did load the planes back to front, boarding would go a lot faster." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Amazing how we assume there is a need to board the plane faster. It likely doesn't matter how quickly you can board the plane, since the process of loading luggage, fuel, and preparing the airplane for flight will still take as long as it does and often takes longer. Have you ever sat in your seat and watched the baggage handlers load luggage?Deplaning is another matter, of course, and generally I think that is actually quite efficient. People who hold up the lines are usually embarrassed and therefore police themselves. Every once in a while a fool holds up the line, but mostly each person adds no more time than the space ahead of them can allow.Proof? Ok, how often do you find yourself in a secondary lineup, bag in hand, near the door of the aircraft? Nobody in your way now but the lineup ahead to get out of the corridor." }, { "score": 2, "text": "One rule will vastly increase speeds:\nIf you do not bring an overhead carry-on, your first piece of checked luggage will be free.If the weight limits are the same, this will not significant impact costs and will save airports/airplanes time." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I suspect with enough data you could do a bayesian analysis and pick out the troublesome people who screw up the boarding process for everyone. ("We notice that whenever Jane P. Slowpoke is on a flight, it correlates to it leaving 3 minutes later")A modest proposal: Then take the worst 1% and put them on the no-fly list. Problem solved." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I never understood why people usually rush to board the plane, only to end up sitting in a cramped airplane chair and breathing stuffy air.I usually opt to sit and wait outside the gate until I can assume that most people have gotten to their seats inside the plane and won't crowd the aisle. The seats are assigned anyway, it's not like I'd get a better spot by being early. So why not wait outside where there's plenty of space and (usually) fresher air?No, the only reason I can think of is that people want to make sure they have place for their oversized carry on (as the article alludes to). If that's the case I have no sympathy for them, and hope they all get stuck next to a fat person with a cold." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just make a twitter list containing only your VIPs and check that when you want to find out? If I'm not mistaken, all this service does is email you the contents of a twitter list once a day...?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "What I found from using this product in the past few weeks is that it helped me re-engage with the people I missed their tweets, either by replying or clicking through the links.Twitter also has the dailiy / weekly digest functions, but it's organized by most popular tweets (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications). Sometimes I just want to know what my cousin back home or an ex-colleague tweeted about, which is useful for.One thing I'd like to see is to make more than one list, or be able to set email digest for some of my existing lists." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Or you could just only follow the people you are actually interested in." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I like the idea, but I'm starting to get a lot of this daily recap emails...And if just one of your VIPS has had several discussions on twitter on a specific day, you'll still need to scan through all that. We need only the interesting tweets from our VIPS ;)I'm going to stick to using lists (not perfect, but easy to check out on Tweetbot)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The server is starting to be sluggish to get the gist of the product you may want to take a look at the video I put together:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGEloIzNE7w" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I would add this to the complaints:- NOT AMENABLE TO SOURCE CONTROLHalf the code lives in the database, configuration is all mixed up with content, and there's no reliable programmatic way to extract it. It makes doing deployment a nightmare.And the worst part? Drupal developers by and large have such a narrow range of experience that they don't even know what they are missing. They have no idea what good coding standards look like, a lot of them don't even have a development/production separation: they just hack away on the live site with no source control or backup. And no one writes tests, or sees why they would be useful.Some of the big professional drupal shops appear to have basically written their own cms on top of drupal, with a bunch of terrible hacks to try to make source control kind of work, and just use the drupal name basically as a marketing technique.So glad I don't have to deal with any of that insanity any more." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Moving away from Drupal was one of my biggest steps forward as a web developer.I worked with Drupal full time for a little over two years. I spent much of that time clicking around in config screens, and when I did have to get my hands dirty with some custom code, I usually felt like I was just stumbling around in the shadow of the behemoth that is Drupal's API. I thought, \"Surely this isn't what web development's supposed to be.\"Turns out I was right. On recommendation from a developer friend, I started experimenting with a bit Rails, tried a couple of \"proper\" PHP frameworks, and then discovered Python and its excellent web development ecosystem. That's when it really started to click for me—all these pieces that Drupal had so kindly obscured from me started falling in to place. Rather than trying to push around a monolith, I learned how to keep things lightweight and use only the pieces I needed. And importantly, I was actually writing code. Sweet, readable, maintainable, version-controllable code. None of this \"serialize a hugely long options page and dump it all in the DB\" stuff. (On a side note, learning git was another big catalyst for my move away from Drupal. D6 always felt like a pain to track in a VCS, especially when I was collaborating with another developer—though the situation may be improving.)I should point out: I think a big part of my frustration was the fact that many of the sites I was building didn't need something as big as Drupal. I've since found WordPress to be a better fit for most of the \"easy\" stuff, or even static HTML/CSS if it makes sense for the project. When I'm building something more complex, well, there rarely seems to be any reason for me to use Drupal anymore." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Developing a large web application in Drupal from October 2011 to May 2012 was, by far, the most stressful period of my professional life. The most difficult part is that the vast majority of learning materials for Drupal are aimed at non-developers. So much literature is dedicated to impressing people who otherwise couldn't create a website with things like, \"LOOK! You can implement access control, put a smiley face next to all comments, AND have a YouTube video feed!\" that finding documentation on actual code is extremely challenging.Another aspect of the project that was difficult was that the client had very specific needs. In almost every piece of functionality they requested, there was some wrinkle that made using an off-the-shelf module impossible. This meant having to code against the behemoth Drupal API. After about 3 months of work, I created an OO-wrapper module around Nodes called Doodal (https://github.com/rybosome/doodal) that makes it possible to code in an MVC-like way. This made the rest of the project somewhat easier, minus the parts that involved interfacing with native Drupal. Drupal was created at a time when PHP didn't have object oriented features. Their solution to the problem of needing OO-like behavior but not having it was to emulate it, which is an abstraction that quickly falls apart. For instance, the shortest line of PHP you could possibly write to simply print out an optional \"first name\" value from a node representing a person is...array_key_exists('und', $person->first_name) ? $person->first_name['und'][0]['safe_value'] : '';While I was wrapping up this project, a friend of mine pointed me to an opening his company had for a Drupal dev, paying about 1.8x what I was making at the time. I declined without even thinking about it, and have not regretted it for a second." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I am puzzled by this:\"Good Drupal developers are making a lot of money right now, much more than I'm seeing for Django or Rails or Node devs in general.\"I am curious where this is? This is not true in New York City, where I am. Developers who are good with a given PHP framework (Drupal, Symfony, etc) will make something like $60 to $70 an hour. The top Rails devs will make at least the same amount, and usually a little more than that." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I don't have this problem, currently. But I've previously used boring, lucrative work to bootstrap my way into more interesting work. Here are the steps:1. Identify what you would rather do2. Keep doing boring work, but part time3. Reduce expenses4. Use money from boring work to subsidize skill development in interesting area5. Switch to interesting areaObviously, this only works in fields where you can get away with ~4 per day spent on your main work." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It will be helpful if you specify what the candies are made of. I can imagine people with specific tastes, vegetarians, people with allergies, etc will be interested in knowing such details." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It surprises me how many people try to build an MVP before looking at the existing competitors :)Graze.com has been doing a recommendation-engine driven snack delivery service for several years now (they raised a $2.5m VC round from Octopus and DFJ) and are making revenues in the high millions.Graze have a pretty proven business model by this stage, but given they only operate in the UK there's obviously the potential for someone to clone their business in other countries." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Pandora for snacks: awesome tagline and concept. This would make a great gift for kids (of all ages).One suggestion: change the look of your site. Add pictures of candies. Make my eyes burn from the hot neon colors. Turn up the fun dial on the design!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "target=\"_blank\" on \"see sample shipment\"WHY???!???!!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Great idea. Looking forward to my first candy." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think one factor people don't consider enough is the tradeoffs you need to make in order to make your app have incredible reliability. This article and other ones talk about a bunch of work you can do to help ensure you application stays up in rare events. However, maybe for you particular product, having 99.5% uptime and offering a ton of features is going to help you become more successful than 99.9% uptime.When you are a Google or a Twitter or an Amazon, you lose lots of money per minute of downtime, so economically speaking it makes sense for them to invest in this. However for an average startup, I don't think having a couple hours of downtime per month is actually going to be that big of a deal. Of course you need to ensure your data is always safe, and your machine configuration is also easy to deploy (via AMIs or something like puppet) so you have the ability to get back up and running in catastrophic cases, but at the end of the day having a good \"We're currently having technical issues\" screen could very well be a better investment than shooting for a technical setup that can still be up during catastrophic events." }, { "score": 1, "text": "You can't just put nodes in different regions, even with a database like MongoDB. It will work in theory, in practice you'll have all kinds of latency problems.WAN replication is a hard problem and glossing over it by waving your hands is a disservice to readers.\"Real\" solutions are to run a database that is tolerant of partitioning, and have application level code to resolve the inevitable conflicts. Riak, Cassandra and other Dynamo inspired projects offer this. On the other hand you can use a more consistent store and hide the latency with write-through caching (this is how Facebook does it with memcached + MySQL), but now you have application code that deals with managing this cache.Either way you have to have very specific application code to handle these scenarios, and you may even run a combination of solutions for different types of data you need to store. There is no silver bullet, there is no framework or product that does it for you." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Reading all of these post-mortems and guides to keeping your servers up and running, it strikes me how much AWS jargon is in there.The fact that so many developers have invested so much time into learning Amazon-specific technologies means that developers are left to deal with the problem within that worldview. Going multiple-datacenter means learning two of every technology layer.You could solve all of these problems using standard non-amazon unix tools, technologies, and products, however Amazon has enabled a whole class of development that makes it easier to just work within their system. It's easier to just wait for Amazon to figure it out for the general case and trust them than to figure it out and implement yourself.There are other risks with being the lone-wolf but for a lot of people, being in the herd has a certain kind of safety, despite the limitations.Not making a judgement call on it but it is something that I have noticed with these outages." }, { "score": 3, "text": "https://status.heroku.com/incidents/151I assumed this was a response to the recent hella-long outage:\"There are three major lessons about IaaS we've learned from this experience:1) Spreading across multiple availability zones in single region does not provide as much partitioning as we thought. Therefore, we'll be taking a hard look at spreading to multiple regions. We've explored this option many times in the past - not for availability reasons, but for customers wishing to have their infrastructure more physically nearby for latency or legal reasons. We've always chosen to prioritize it below other ways we could spend our time. It's a big project, and it will inescapably require pushing more configuration options out to users (for example, pointing your DNS at a router chosen by geographic homing) and to add-on providers (latency-sensitive services will need to run in all the regions we support, and find some way to propagate region information between the app and the services). These are non-trivial concerns, but now that we have such dramatic evidence of multi-region's impact on availability, we'll be considering it a much higher priority.2) Block storage is not a cloud-friendly technology. EC2, S3, and other AWS services have grown much more stable, reliable, and performant over the four years we've been using them. EBS, unfortunately, has not improved much, and in fact has possibly gotten worse. Amazon employs some of the best infrastructure engineers in the world: if they can't make it work, then probably no one can. Block storage has physical locality that can't easily be transferred. That makes it not a cloud-friendly technology. With this information in hand, we'll be taking a hard look on how to reduce our dependence on EBS.3) Continuous database backups for all. One reason why we were able to fix the dedicated databases quicker has to do with the way that we do backups on them. In the new Heroku PostgreSQL service, we have a continuous backup mechanism that allows for automated recovery of databases. Once we were able to provision new instances, we were able to take advantage of this to quickly recover the dedicated databases that were down with EBS problems.\"Then I checked the date. It's actually Heroku's response to their super-long April 2011 outage. Yet, it appears the \"we should go across Regions\" lesson wasn't learned." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It seems like you can make a good tradeoff between Chef and AMIs by nightly rebuilding the AMIs off a fully configured system, and then when the machine comes up you run Chef to make up the incremental difference." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I would not call that unrealistic. A few comments:(1) Only on HN would anyone dream of referring to your list as "everything". You are actually targeting a very narrow, focused skill set: those required for a small(-ish) software or software-intensive business. Like it or not, you're proposing becoming a specialist (albeit with a somewhat broader specialty than a typical job description would call for).(2) In the real world, "everything" includes many, many other things. To get good at all that stuff on your list, you'll need to leave other skills by the wayside. The comment by taprun mentions chess, running, and cooking. You won't be getting better at any of those.(3) The I-do-everything approach sets a hard limit on the size of a business. An important reason for hiring & delegating is so that a business can grow." }, { "score": 1, "text": "In economics, I learned about something called a "trade-off". Basically, if you spend time learning something, you are spending that time not learning something else.I remember meeting someone who was fantastic at chess. He destroyed me. Repeatedly. My mental model of him was essentially "me but good at chess". It didn't occur to me until much later that he didn't know how to program a computer, couldn't run a mile without stopping and didn't know how to cook Chinese food.I think if you stop seeing people as "you but can do X", these feelings will go away. Alternatively, read up on the concept of "comparative advantage" and realize there is a mathematically proven reason not to try to be an expert at everything." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is largely the same goal that I've set for myself. I spend a good amount of time doing each (less marketing lately, more towards coding/design), and find that while I outpace most people in these fields, there's always people who specialize even further and know way more about them than I do. The trick is to spend as much time learning from these people as you can. I talk with my direct superiors at work a lot, because they're both insanely knowledgeable engineers. I also have some buddies that do full-time marketing, copywriting, design, etc, and each of them are constantly teaching me things. Make a point to regularly associate with a wide variety of deeply specialized people, and as a result, while you'll probably never be as effective as any of them in their given fields, you'll certainly be way more effective than most people. From there, pick one or two fields to use as anchors for your T (or W) shape, and then leverage that in your dealings with other fields.Think of yourself as a pupa. Right now you're just incubating, you don't have to do anything fantastic, just learn and grow. Then, when you're ready, you'll break out of your shell and spread your wings :)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Of course, you can learn most of those things. However, it is my belief you will soon tire yourself. Getting to the top of everything is hard enough, staying there even harder.I used to be up to date in a lot of domains. 3D modelling, app frameworks, web technologies, back end, front end. Those days, I find it's hard enough to focus on being up to date and relevant with front end web development while balancing an healthy life with friends and family.You can do it, but remember that there is an upkeep to being relevant in a lot of domains. If you can deal with it, sure, go ahead!However, what I would recommend you is a good team. I'm finding I connect easily with people that have complementary skill sets to mine, and it's a great experience." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I don't think its unrealistic - the bar is just very high for what you want to do.\nPerhaps it may make sense to talk to people who would be looking for such an integrated skill set and find out which ones matter more than others and to what degree/level.That will give you an automatic prioritization of how to go about getting these skills without becoming overwhelmed." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The “bridges” mentioned are potentially one of the most interesting developments of the next few years. We’ve seen a huge, huge explosion of Arduino projects, but soon enough it’ll be commoditized and simplified for the layperson as in the Twine box(1). However, I’m particularly excited by CSR’s BLE (Bluetooth low energy) chips (2), a SoC promising 3 years battery life on a coin-cell for wireless peripherals, which could potentially create an entire universe of environmental sensing motes, similar to Nike+’s shoe-sensor. Unfortunately CSR is not particularly hacker-friendly, requiring a nearly 10k developer seat (3) to develop for the otherwise cheap chips.[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...[2] http://www.csr.com/products/45/csr-energy[3] http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=16425" }, { "score": 1, "text": "The technical culmination of this vision would be that all of our expensive devices (i.e. refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters) will have simple APIs that can be controlled by any administration tool on any device.For instance, our heating/air conditioning systems can have a standardized API that really only has the following functions, available (with some simple authentication) over any wifi connection:1. Turn on\n2. Turn offThen an administration tool (probably on the cloud) can handle all the daily/weekly/monthly automation, provide a clean and easy to use interface, with all the complicated and special features we would like to see. We could change and upgrade our administration tools as we see fit. We would access them with our smartphones, home PCs, or for old schoolers, the wall mounted device." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The airplay rollout has not been executed well.Overall, it is successful of course. It's a killer feature and highly popular among consumers.I believe it has been mismanaged for the following reasons.First, rollout has been incredibly slow and there is still a major dearth of airplay enabled devices. This is not due to limitations of technology. Airplay comes from a company called BridgeCo, not Apple. BridgeCo did not do a good job of building OEM relations and following through to see Airplay implementations. This is not BidgeCo's fault, entirely. The BridgeCo team was a small (>6) executive staff in the states with an engineering team in India. While I do not know the full extent of Apple's imposed limitations, I know they were a factor. Still, BridgeCo had an opportunity to build a robust ecosystem- instead they were focused on selling SDK's for >$20k and not the front end UX. I do not think they were a Silicon Valley company culturally.Apple has not taken a lead on pushing the technology as a standard at all. For the first year after Airplay's rollout, the only A/V receivers with airplay capabilities were super high-end Denons with a pricepoint near $1k. Not consumer. For the record, I haven't checked recently, this could still be the case. The market for 3rd party all-in-one speakers, the obvious destination for airplay technology, also developed very slowly.Fortunately, apple sells a $99 airplay antenna called the Apple TV which can plug into just about any home theater system. Within the last few months though, Apple has been pushing updates to ATV's which has completely destroyed the airpay experience by locking down the format. I can no longer play downloaded video media on my non-jailbroken apple tv. Apple wants me to purchase streaming media from the Apple TV market- I don't care. I want to play the downloaded media on my laptop on my HDTV. Crazy, I know. Apple says no.And this, of course, is the biggest fail of the Airplay rollout. Airplay is not just audio- it's video. This feature has zero presence on 3rd party devices- possibly positioning for an Apple HDTV launch. Still, BridgeCo (now SMSC) should have pushed the tech on HDTV OEMs.While interesting, and slightly sad, none of this matters since ultimately airplay is the standard and I will continue to watch its development and buy airplay devices since there are no alternatives due to there being no other company developing next-gen core computing user experiences." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I thought he was going to say that cheap devices will be smart as in they will collect our data, etc (so they can monetize) and expensive devices will not (because they're expensive and come with the added advantage of privacy)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "The author does not seem to understand that with long upgrade cycle products, you want to include the minimal number of new / improved features. Otherwise, I won't buy a new tv for 15 years and you'll make no money. But what is that? You say you have Plasma? LED? HD resolution? Better refresh rate? Gimmicky 3D that no one supports? Of course I'll buy a new one!With cell phones and tablets, the expected lifetime is only 1-2 years anyway." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Cuisennaire blocks / rods are useful to show fractions etc. available in wood or plastic. Here's one cheap set but many others are available. http://www.woodentotsmk.co.uk/Library/0330%20cuisinaire%20ro...Pound o dice: you can buy a pound (weight) of dice with diiferent numbers of sides from amazon and ebay etc. these are usually Chessex (a quality brand). They are bright and shiny and fun. Don't eat them. You can work out your own dice games and problems. Button men is a simple quick game to play http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_MenUse estimation in everysay life - how many bricks in that wall, how many leaves on that tree, how many cookies in the packet?Rules and tape measures are fun and lead to simple arithmetic. How many cm taller is A than B?Math teaching techniques might be different now than when you were taught. Heres a good book \nhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0224086359" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Dreambox is a good online option for self-directed math exploration. Otherwise the best results will come from interaction... be prepared to answer lots of questions, and ask lots of interesting questions.There are plenty of fun games you can introduce, one of my favorites is graph-paper racing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_(game) Also Monopoly or any money-based game where you can learn to make change. Set and Quirkle are good logic-based games. I'm experimenting with some tabletop gaming with my 7yo, starting with Battletech quick-start rules. It's a hit so far. Not very challenging math-wise, but a lot more fun than Monopoly. :)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Life of Fred is pretty entertaining. Though you may need to read the stories to your son. Teaching Textbooks, my older daughter's favorite, has video tutoring. Singapore Math is good, too. There are programs you can look for that have lots of manipulatives. Don't recall the company names.Learning how to use an abacus was something the kids enjoyed and helped with ways of thinking about numbers quite a bit.You may find researching what home schoolers are doing for math programs helpful." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The Miquon Math materialshttp://miquonmath.com/have a playful spirit of exploration and go well with the Cuisennaire rods already recommended by DanBC, a recommendation I heartily agree with. My children all began their initial math instruction with the Miquon Math materials, and my oldest son, grown up and working as a hacker, definitely benefited from playing around with mathematics a lot as he grew up." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Art of Problem Solving is a good web site for math enthusiasts, and their "Beast Academy" books may interest your son. A math curriculum I like is Singapore Math.I suggest searching the Davidson Gifted Forum http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ for posts about math resources and posting there." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The first half is an argument with a strawman:It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and\nput some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a\nbunch of programmers in a cafe.The story about the programmers in the cafe was not evidence for\nany claim. It was just an explanation of what set me thinking about\nthe problem. It's not a pillar holding up anything, so attacking it\nproves nothing.(Incidentally, a moment's thought would have made it clear that I\nhave in fact \"put some time and thought into it.\" I've spent 24 years as a\nprofessional programmer, during which I've observed thousands of\nprogrammers working for all sizes of companies. Plus I've seen\nfirst hand the transformation undergone by roughly 200 YC-funded\nfounders so far.)The second half is fallacy:But rather than pointing out fallacies, a better way to refute\nGraham's evolutionary argument is by reductio ad absurdum. ... Our\nancestors lived in a world that was shrouded in darkness half the\nday, therefore we would be happier without electric lights.This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad\nabsurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our\ninclinations based on how we evolved.(Bad example, incidentally. There do seem to be conflicts between\nelectric lights and human biology:\nhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02...)Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point\nof the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point\nis that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural\nforces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to\nthe size of the whole tree. That we work better in groups of 10\nthan 100 I feel is obvious enough not to need justification. The\nargument from evolution is just an attempt to explain why groups\nthat size work.Though on the whole my reaction is \"I want my 20 minutes back,\"\nthere was one encouraging thing about this experience. Even these\ndishonest DH5s are more civil than Atwood DH2ing\nabout my choice of metaphors." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is wrong, but being a civil argument, at least there are concrete things to refute.One problem with direct observation is that it's hard to get a representative sample. It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a bunch of programmers in a café.False dichotomy. PG's sample is neither a deliberate project, nor the people in the cafe. It's the programmers he has known and observed over his life. There's no reason to doubt representativeness of his sample.a case where an ad hominem argument is relevant and valid.There's never a case where ad hominem is valid. If it's valid, it's not ad hominem, by definition. A logical fallacy can't be valid. But I'm nitpicking here. His point is:The fact that this observation confirms his preexisting belief in the worthiness of startups makes it less credible than if the same observation were made by someone who had no particular interest in startups.Occam's Razor suggests that PG works with startups because he thinks they're better, not that he thinks they're better because he works with them. He is rich enough to work on whatever he wants.A creature that's perpetually dissatisfied, always striving for advantage, wins out over a creature that's happy.Then why does happiness exist? Why hasn't it been eradicated millions of years ago? Answer: because it serves a purpose. It's how evolution tells the organism, \"keep doing what you're doing\". Not everything that mentions nature is an appeal to nature." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I somewhat agree with sah in that Roth's essay did not fully address the central point of Graham's essay: the effect that large hierarchical structures have on people. The discussion of ad hominem arguments aside, I would point out that you could phrase Roth's argumentative method as, \"you've argued for x given method y, and I can use method y to also prove z, you don't believe z, therefore you can't prove x\". A rough sketch might look like this:\ny --> x\ny --> z\ntherefore z <--> x (this step is hard to sketch out because it's unclear)\n~z\ntherefore ~x.The difficulty with this argument is a fallacy about implication. Roth states that the \"evolutionary argument\" supports pg's view, but that he can then use that same \"evolutionary argument\" to prove an absurd point of view. Then he holds that he has disagreed with pg's central viewpoint.This method of argumentation is fundamentally flawed because pg's view might be supported by a multitude of arguments, the truth or usefulness of the \"evolutionary argument\" is not a necessary condition for the truth of pg's view of organizations, bosses, and human nature. Hence, Roth has merely attacked pg's method of proof while leaving the central claim untouched. I have other criticisms of Roth's argument, but even if I am wrong in such criticism the argument would fail to disagree with pg." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This reads like Mister Spock's review of a punk rock concert.\"I don't understand why the audience was asked if it was 'ready to rock', as they clearly did not have instruments. Also, it was illogical to ask them to 'fight the power', since power is an abstract physical quantity that cannot meaningfully be 'fought'.\"And did PG's monumental catalogue of rhetorical errors mention the rule about \"not arguing with straw men\"? Because I don't think the real PG actually believes that literally everyone \"wasn't meant to have a boss\", nor would the real PG ever endorse the concept that \"you weren't meant to have a chair, because our ancestors didn't evolve to sit in chairs.\"" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I find it kind of upsetting that none of the various disagreements with pg's essay that I've read have been in reaction to what I felt was the core of the essay. As far as I'm concerned, the centerpiece of the essay is this interesting observation about organizational hierarchies, and why they might necessarily place limitations on individual freedoms.He also makes some guesses about the effects of those limitations on the happiness of employees in companies of different sizes, which I think he marks off pretty clearly as being drawn from observation. What's so incendiary about those, anyway? Regardless of whether it's true or not, isn't the stereotype of the creatively stifled employee of a large company a cultural cliche?I'm ready to stop hearing about this now." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Just what OS X was missing - RegEdit ;)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Wouldn't it be nice if OSX kept its settings in text files under /etc like any civilized OS should?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'd like to see this website implement a simple up/down vote feature per setting." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Is that running on Google App Engine? The response headers say, \"Google Frontend\"." }, { "score": 4, "text": "seriously.. is this kind of thing hn worthy? it's definitely not NEWS and it was already referenced on some other \"ASK HN for Mac stuff\" thread..go on, vote me down" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This article is obviously proposing something that Germany would never agree to, but in doing so the article lays bare an important truth: the adjustments necessary to save the Euro zone should perhaps come from everyone -- including Germany. Along with Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and all other 'peripheral' Euro zone countries, Germany is partly responsible for the current crisis: it financed the consumption and housing booms in those other countries.Let me offer a poor analogy which I find insightful: Germany acted like a rich neighbor who irresponsibly lends a ton money to his poorer neighbors so they can throw a really costly, drunken, all-night-long party, and then demands to be repaid the next day without acknowledging that he knowingly made a really stupid loan.The main implication of the article: Germany is trying to force austerity and deflation unto the Euro zone's 'peripheral' countries, but the adjustment would be a lot easier and faster for everyone if Germany simultaneously forced profligacy and inflation unto itself. (A higher rate of internal inflation in Germany would have roughly the same impact as a revaluation of a newly reissued Deutsche Mark were the country to leave the Euro zone.)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "This article is absurd.The cost of doing so would be gigantic. Nobody in Europe would want to pay that.Actually the Euro was introduced to keep Germany under control:http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/historischer-deal-mitt...Without the Euro the Bundesbank had controlled the most important currency, the Deutsche Mark, alone. Many countries in Europe had been depending on the Deutsche Mark anyway - without being able to influence any decisions.The Anglo-Saxon press is obsessed with the Euro. I've been reading a lot now over the last years about the Euro - mostly written against it. Article over article predicted its death, often within days or weeks. The Euro is still there.Instead the articles get more laughable day by day." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The problem with the Euro is the moral hazard that it creates.People in the \"PIGS\" countries were able to borrow and spend based on the credit of more robust economies such as Germany. So now, the people in these countries will be suffering for years under devaluation or austerity, but the rich who were the biggest beneficiaries of the bubble are completely safe, with their fortunes migrated to strong German banks with the click of a mouse.The Germans and northern Europeans are culpable in this -- they essentially co-signed billions of loans to countries like Greece that lack the governance ability to function with a German credit line." }, { "score": 3, "text": "... and thereby killing the Swiss economy, thankyouverymuch. We're struggling enough with the strong Swiss Franc against the Euro as it is. A further devaluation of the Euro would be pretty devastating for Switzerland, even if a strong Deutsche Mark would mitigate the effects a bit." }, { "score": 4, "text": "An interesting proposition (and seemingly fiscally sound), but it misses a lot of the point of the European integration, which is long term peace in Europe.Separating Germany seems a particularly bad idea in that context." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Another good place to start would be Haskell. Real World Haskell is a good book, and there are several resources to get you started on the web (http://learnyouahaskell.com/ , http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/YAHT ).I just started immersing myself in RWH (had to take a brief break from it because I switched clients) but I really liked the book.Naturally I agree with apgwoz that SICP is another good place to start if you decide to go with Scheme. It is definitely a book every programmer should read, so you do get two for the price of one ;-)Good luck." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Most people would say start with SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), and I think I would agree. It really stresses higher order programming.OCaml would be nice too, for you, since F# is at least as powerful as it, and you could start using that in your C# environment." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Since you explicitly mentioned C# and F#, I'd suggest OCaml. There's a free translation of a French O'Reilly book, _Developing applications with Objective Caml_, at http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/ (the site seems to be down for me at the moment). The first few chapters focus on functional programming, then imperative programming, then compare their strengths, weaknesses, and when using each is most appropriate. (OOP and others are covered later in the book.) It's a pretty good intro to FP, imho.Once you know FP techniques, you can apply them in many languages people don't tend to think of as functional (though tail-call optimization helps, and support for higher-order functions is all but necessary); I write strongly FP-influenced code in Lua, for example.Scheme is also an utterly fantastic language, but I'm going to defer recommendations there to others. (Except: I really like Chicken - http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Erlang is a nice, practical one that has some very evident sweet spots and is good in the real world. Haskell seems to be where a lot of the academic world is at, if you're going for something that's more a learning experience rather than something strictly practical (not to say you can't do real world stuff with Haskell, but historically, that hasn't been its emphasis)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "No matter which language you choose for productivity, I would start with the exercises in the Little Schemer or Little MLer. They're disarmingly simple while still challenging your brain to shift into a recursive/applicative mindset.As for what functional language you want to end up using...well, it depends on your goals.I'm personally partial to the family of languages which use ML-style type systems, which include OCaml, F#, and Haskell.The core of F# and OCaml are very similar. F# has better libraries whereas OCaml has both a more powerful type system and more powerful module system.Haskell is less straight forward than OCaml and F# and has many more esoteric features you need to learn before being considered an expert. Nonetheless, many have found the process of learning to be a mind-expanding process. Also, the Haskell community is much larger and more vibrant than what you'll find with any other statically typed functional language." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It comes down to an investment decision. Do you want to invest 2 years worth of salary into a company without a product in exchange for 4%? You're basically giving the company a yearly salary x 50 valuation. Pretend you're an angel investor and think about whether or not this is a good investment." }, { "score": 1, "text": "| my stake will be protected from dilution at all stages.So you are being given preferred stock? That's the only stock that I can think of that would prevent dilution during later stages. I find it difficult to believe that a smart startup company that would give out preferred stock to employees. I also can't imagine VCs/angels who would invest in a company that had just given preferred stock to a \"Legal and compliance director\" (no offense but that title isn't necessarily thought of in terms of bringing revenue in as highly as a developer or salesperson).A 2% stake could easily get chopped down to 1% or .5% on liquidation due to various means. Assuming a five year growth-to-liquidation, does 1% of a $100m sale ($1m) justify taking no salary for 2-3 years and then a below-marketing salary for the remaining time? Balance that with the risk that the startup may fail, not raise as much money as they thought, etc...A least two key factors you need to think about are (1) what you expect the company to get acquired for, and (2) when you expect to be acquired. A $10m sale in year 1 means you get $50k-$100k (being optimistic) for one year of work. A $10m sale in year 3 means you get $50-$100k for three years." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I can't imagine that in any real company, employee shares would be \"protected from dilution at all stages\". It is, for what it's worth, largely not up to the founders; if they want a VC round, they're going to alter the structure of the company to suit the VC.4% of a company that has been operating for 18 months is a huge stake." }, { "score": 3, "text": "On the outset if you think the startup would do well, then I would suggest to join even at a 4% rate - the reason being that its better to join a more promising startup at a below market compensation rather than the other way round.One way of coming with a good figure is as follows:Assuming your market salary is x /mnth and the founders is y /mnt. Also, assuming that you get funding in about an year. Then finally based on the assumption that the startup equity is a function of hte risk that you take, then each founders total investment comes to:12y + 18yand your investment comes to:12xSo essentially your stake in the company should be around12x / 3*(12y + 18y) + 12xAlso, there is no basis for your stake to not get diluted and incase the startup goes for multiple rounds 4% might looks like a very high figure which the founders might end up not being very comfortable with.I would suggest, and for other reasons also, that you might consider negotiating a bigger stake and accept dilution." }, { "score": 4, "text": "As the 5th member that's pretty low. Last year I was offered 1.5% and would have been the 12th employee at a company that had been around just under a year, the only reason I didn't take it was the salary was too low to live any kind of half-enjoyable life. Now of course the company has about 35 employees and they seem to be doing well, although they're in a saturated market and I can't imagine them fairing very well in an economic depression. At this point I'll only kick myself if they get acquired and my 1.5% is suddenly worth upper 6 to low 7 figures.If you're to be the 5th and crucial member, I'd fight for more or don't bother. The fact is most startups don't get acquired and you aren't going to get rewarded for your 80 hour weeks and below market salary - but you will have learned a lot and you'll probably have less hair." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Here in Philadelphia, software developer interns are typically paid $15-25 per hour. Drexel University runs one of the nation's largest coop programs (required work experience as part of the degree), and the employers that work with them to list jobs for students pay an average of $16,000 for 6 months across all majors. Most of the majors with a coop requirement are engineering related, including CS." }, { "score": 1, "text": "One of my friends is now a sophomore at Berkeley with some good hacking skills and he made about 8k/month at a start-up over this past summer in SF. He does iOS and JS.That would be about $65/hour based on his hours." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The university of Waterloo publishes the salary ranges and averages for its students [1]. You want math or engineering, work terms 4 or higher.The ranges cover mom and pop shops in small towns as well as big tech companies in Silicon Valley. Hopefully it's a good starting point![1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/co-operative-education/hourly-earnings-..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "My Coop while I was a Georgia Tech student payed 16.50$ to start out. The people I knew who did some free lance or part time development charged or were payed between 10$ to 30$ depending on their reputation." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I was paid $18-$24/hr as an developer intern in college in Raleigh, NC (about 5 years ago)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Is it me or do I see a \"add a live chat room to every website!\" startup/idea every 6 months, either by apps, HTML framesets, whatever, then followed by press saying it will change the world/internet/whatever, then I never hear about it again. Perhaps nobody actually wants an anonymous chat room on every site :P" }, { "score": 1, "text": "_why was one of the first to implement this, in 2005. It wasn't a chat, but a comment system for hackers.The installation instructions were intentionaly elusive:http://web.archive.org/web/20051125122020/http://hoodwinkd.h...The IP adresses point to DNS servers that serve two custom domains: hoodwink.d and ___._ (or you could add them to your host file? not sure...).From there you could browse those sites that had further info, and enjoined you to install a greasemonkey script that injected the comment div in the target pages.To add hoodwink'd comments to a site, you had to register it at hoodwink.d, with an URL regexp to recognize the site, and an xpath query to locate the point where the comment thread would be inserted.There were also RSS feeds, that allowed to follow a commenter, or get all the updates of a given site.Cool stuff.\n.Here is some more infoA longer description: http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/01/hoodwinkd.htmlMagnus Holm, debugging the system: http://oldblog.judofyr.net/posts/who-broke-hoodwinkd.htmlA few screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/3838274563/in/phot..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This always seems like such a good idea to me. Like walking around a busy city bustling with people all around.But then I realize I would never use it. The idea of broadcasting my browsing habits page by page to a third party is creepy beyond belief." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I once tried to convince my employer to let me do something like this via a Java applet in the banner ads we were running (yes, banner ads can include applets). The idea was that all the people seeing our ad could chat among themselves, and the hope was the would be unusual enough to get people to actually notice the ad.Sadly, they wouldn't let me try it." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If people start using it, it could have very interesting social implications. Live communities can form for different sites--facebook, reddit, HN, youtube--and each community would be interesting to observe." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The key idea is very simple and is very clearly explained on pages 6-7:"When the public branch is longer than the private branch, the sel\ffish mining pool is behind the public branch. Because of the power di\u000bfferential between the selfi\fsh miners and the others, the chances of the sel\ffish miners mining on their own private branch and overtaking the main branch are small. Consequently, the selfi\fsh miner pool simply adopts the main branch whenever its private branch falls behind. As others \ffind new blocks and publish them, the pool updates and mines at the current public head.""When the sel\ffish miner pool \ffinds a block, it is in an advantageous position with a single block lead on the public branch on which the honest miners operate. Instead of naively publishing this private block and notifying the rest of the miners of the newly discovered block, sel\ffish miners keep this block private to the pool. There are two outcomes possible at this point: either the honest miners discover a new block on the public branch, nullifying the pool's lead, or else the pool mines a second block and extends its lead on the honest miners.""In the \ffirst scenario where the honest nodes succeed in \ffinding a block on the public branch, nullifying the sel\ffish pool's lead, the pool immediately publishes its private branch (of length 1). This yields a toss-up where either branch may win. The selfi\fsh miners unanimously adopt and extend the previously private branch, while the honest miners will choose to mine on either branch, depending on the propagation of the noti\ffications. If the selfi\fsh pool manages to mine a subsequent block ahead of the honest miners that did not adopt the pool's recently revealed block, it publishes immediately to enjoy the revenue of both the \ffirst and the second blocks of its branch. If the honest miners mine a block after the pool's revealed block, the pool enjoys the revenue of its block, while the others get the revenue from their block. Finally, if the honest miners mine a block after their own block, they enjoy the revenue of their two blocks while the pool gets nothing.""In the second scenario, where the sel\ffish pool succeeds in \ffinding a second block, it develops a comfortable lead of two blocks that allow it with some cushion against discoveries by the honest miners. Once the pool reaches this point, it continues to mine at the head of its private branch. It publishes one block from its private branch for every block the others \ffind. Since the sel\ffish pool is a minority, its lead will eventually reduce to a single block with high probability. At this point, the honest miners are too close, so the pool publishes its private branch. Since the private branch is longer than the public branch by one block, it is adopted by all miners as the main branch, and the pool enjoys the revenue of all its blocks. This brings the system back to a state where there is just a single branch until the pool bifurcates it again."" }, { "score": 1, "text": "The authors argue that if a "selfish" mining pool of size above a certain threshold keeps newly discovered blocks secret, this pool will be able to build a private block chain that is temporarily longer than the public one, frequently enough to make the selfish strategy more profitable than the honest one (by revealing longer private chains just before the public one catches up), so in theory more and more rational miners will join the selfish pool, which will therefore quickly grow to control a majority of all nodes.In theory. There are many complex and subtle issues that must be thoroughly analyzed before passing judgment on this paper. For example, what if other miners, instead of joining the selfish pool, decide to create their own competing selfish pools? Also, as nullc points out elsewhere on this thread[1] and the Bitcoin Forum[2], peering between miners is already so extensive that temporarily keeping blocks secret could be much costlier than assumed by the authors of the paper.The Bitcoin community must go through this paper in detail, but IF the authors' logic and math prove correct, this could be a real vulnerability.--[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669735[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324413.msg3476697#ms...--Edits: moved paragraphs around and added sentence about and footnotes pointing to nullc's thoughts." }, { "score": 2, "text": "My (Greg Maxwell, a developer of the Bitcoin reference client) preliminary look at it is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324413.msg3476697#ms...In short, the new thing here is the assumption that the attacker uses a network positional advantage to eliminate the loss associated with delaying blocks.I am not fond of their proposed solution, since it creates a size advantage for large miners (of sizes which have already existed) in all cases, even without the network attack.I'd rather initially focus on strengthening the network against the formation of the positional advantage in the short term. (There is already some belief that there is extensive peering between miners making the attack ineffective, but its impossible to know if its adequate, so there is no harm in in strengthening that some.)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is a summary of my understanding of their method after a very quick scan of their docs:They assume working as a malicious/selfish pool having less than 50% of hash rate, but still a significant portion of the total hash rate. All other miners that are not part of the selfish pool are called honest miners.When selfish pool finds a block, they don't advertise it but continue mining their forked, private blockchain. They have an advantage of one block over the public blockchain now. Of course they have no chance of building longer blockchain in the long term, as they have less than 50% of hashing power and the public blockchain will always get longer after some number of blocks. But what they count on is this:Scenario 1: honest miners discover a block and the public blockchain gets the same length as the selfish blockchain. They immediately publish their block as soon as they discover someone else discovered a block. They hope to create a race condition and a public blockchain fork - so that some hones miners will get the “honest” block, but some of honest miners will get their “selfish” block and start mining using it as a base. Having some of the honest miners on their side they have a chance that their fork will get longer and the “honest” fork will be declined by the network.Scenario 2: selfish pool is lucky and discovers another block, giving their blockchain two blocks advantage over the public blockchain. They continue mining and they publish one block for every block discovered by the honest miners. This creates race condition with some of the honest miners on their side, but they still have some blocks found and not published. They publish all their remaining blocks as soon as their advantage decreases to one block. The network chooses their branch as it's longer and they get all the reward coins from their secretly mined chain.Now, I know nothing about blocks discovery/notification mechanisms over the network and how fast it works, so an important question to someone knowledgeable is if this is a probable scenario that their block published only after some competing block has been found and published has still a chance to get to some significant number of honest miners first so that they start mining over their block - as this is required for their strategy to work.If the above is viable, then this strategy of course requires some significant hash rate share, but I remember that even having 10% of total hash rate, the probability that you will mine couple of blocks in a row is quite high - and that's all you need to create situations when you have two-three blocks advantage over the public blockchain." }, { "score": 4, "text": ""We propose a simple, backwards-compatible change to the Bitcoin protocol to address this problem and raise the threshold. Speci\fcally, when a miner learns of competing branches of the same length, it should propagate all of them, and choose which one to mine on uniformly at random."Former algorithmic trader here. This solution does not appear to be incentive-compatible.Suppose there are two branches, 0 and 0'. Miner receives 0 first. The probability of mining a block is proportional to the time spent mining. Miner thus (a) starts mining 0 immediately upon notification and (b) has a greater probability of finding a block on 0 than 0'. It is thus in Miner's interest for 0 to become the blockchain versus 0'. Since other miners are following a similar logic, it is in the miner's interest to propagate 0 over 0'.Randomly selecting which branch to mine is rational only if (i) both branches arrive at the same time and (ii) there is no information about which branch other miners are showing preference towards." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "One of the speakers here. I found the online reaction to my talk pretty interesting as a case study in internet telephone. Here's the talk itself:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6AFirst party viewers mostly seemed to like it:http://seen.co/event/startup-school-2013-cupertino-ca-2013-6...CNET gave a second party writeup:http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57608320-93/a-radical-dream...Then third party people started mischaracterizing it:http://valleywag.gawker.com/silicon-valleys-ultimate-exit-is...Finally, the Hill wrote a fourth party account, quoting these third party accounts, and that's what Washington DC saw:http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/state-a-local-politics...Not everyone got it wrong; I think this account is closer:http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/virtual-expatriates-a...But I encourage you to open up those tabs and go through them one by one to see a kind of pinball reflection of the tone of the talk. In microcosm it's an example of the emerging gap between Silicon Valley and DC, and gives a sense of how policy makers can inadvertently form their opinions from echoes of echoes. Doubly ironic and somewhat sad as we can use the internet to make direct connections between people these days. The good thing is that interested parties can see the primary source directly." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Oops, I'm not even done submitting them all yet. Office hours are uploading now, and Chase's talk will follow right after.Sadly, consumer internet upload speeds haven't kept up with video quality. And these are only 720p, down-sampled from the 1080p source material." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Blog spam. Here are the videos: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/vide..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Damn where is Chase Adam? His was the best talk!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've made a YouTube playlist of all of the videos. They're in chronological order following the agenda.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp2YsIKlDZm3wBt5ijB7X..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I hit a wall in college where math just stopped being something I intuitively "got". I'm sure that given enough time and motivation, I could have continued being "good at math" even at the higher levels, but these were luxuries I did not have, given everything else on my plate at the time.My biggest problem with math, especially once I got into academia, was how it was taught. So many professors would scribble what seemed like nonsense on the board (symbols that change from professor to professor, or even from lecture to lecture) and then go on to say things like "...and the proof is trivial" or "...it obviously follows that...", and I'd sit there wanting to shout "NO, NO it's not obvious!"Finally, I'd find a tutor to explain to me what it was I was missing, and it really WAS obvious. If only it had been taught that way in the first place!Admittedly, not everyone has the same learning style, but the classes I took seemed really tailored towards the students who already had the intuition that I lacked." }, { "score": 1, "text": "One thing that worked well for my wife was a series of games from Nintendo called Fire Emblem.This isn't a series of educational games: it's actually turn-based strategy. But the mechanics are all derived from very simple arithmetic, and although they don't give you the actual formulas, they give you, up front, every single number that goes into them formulas. Use a FAQ to get the small number of formulas involved, and the randomness all but vanishes: for any given unit on the field, you can always tell exactly which other units can attack it, how many times those units can try to attack, how much damage they'll do if they hit (and the exact odds of them hitting), how much damage you will do in response if your counterattack hits, and so on. The game will do this for you, but only for units that are directly in range at any given moment. With the numbers, you can calculate for any unit on the field, and that lets you start thinking multiple moves ahead.The end result is that if you work out the math in your head, you can Neo your way through the games, and this is exactly what my wife did. I have never been the math-head in the family, but before she started this, I was still handier with numbers than she was: now it's the other way around. I should look into this myself." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I aced all my high school math classes including calc. Because my school was small and rural they didn't have any more classes for me. So senior year I had no math.Got to college, took a math placement exam and bombed out, so upset. Then as I was leaving knocked a chair down and everyone stared at me.I ended up with a BFA in Drama.Fast forward 10 years and like the author I worked my ass off to get into a top MBA program and not only that, major in finance.So yeah, it can be done. Hard work, and not accepting the bullshit line "oh I'm not good at math." And without attacking my own gender, women tend to be let off the hook more easily with this excuse, as if we accept that girls can't do math.Fuck that.This post rocked. Thanks to the HN community for bringing it to my attention." }, { "score": 3, "text": "For whatever reason, I hit a poor grades stretch in math for my first three years of high school. It was just boring, and high school had distractions. My school almost blocked me from taking calculus. When I hit Calculus, I had my "Aha, I get it now" moment, and had great grades in math ever since.Some students don't need to be motivated to work hard. Others do. Some in the latter camp are led to believe that they're not good at math, when the reality is that they're just not motivated for it. I'm glad that I ultimately found my motivation.The OP seems to have found this moment too." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Jim Fowler's calc II course on Coursera[1] is wrapping up right now, and I think he's the most engaging math professor I've ever had to please of learning from. Highly recommend.He's also a maintainer of an OSS MOOC platform, MOOCulus[2], built with Rails.[1]: https://class.coursera.org/sequence-001/class\n[2]: https://github.com/ASCTech/mooculus" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The other implication is that control will become unbundled from money and advice. An investor who offered money without requiring founders to give up control--board seats, rights to block acquisitions, etc.--would gain a competitive advantage when trying to get into the best startups.Angel investors are already doing this at the seed stage. Crowdfunding will push it up to series A." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The negatives posed in this post are hardly negatives. Companies will be able to raise the money they actually need and not have to deal with shitty advisors or gain great advisors and dilute a little more. To an extent, this separation will weed out the shitty VCs, which is an ultimate win for the industry. Is my logic correct?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's clear that well tuned campaigns with 10-100k seed capital can raise $1M+ for (partially) physical products.One big question is how that will translate to software businesses. Successful non-game software projects are few and far between. And they raise a lot less [1]. Will JOBS act equity investing change this? I think it will take 4-6 years for a few people to win big with it before there is a bubble-level rush of speculators.[1] Annecdotal plug: we just had a subscription fitness app crowd funded, but it took a lot of work and the median pledge level is way lower than in most hardware projects: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acgourley/bitgym" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Is there room for an advisory-only VC that's not beholden to LPs? And if so, what would that look like?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Curious where the evidence is that advice and money are becoming separate. The boards I've seen are very full of VC's, who have both invested and give plenty of advice.Sam, if you're reading would love to hear your thoughts." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Making a website that works on desktop, tablet, and mobile all at the same time is difficult and expensive. Responsive Design's value proposition is that it is somewhat less complex and expensive than having a bifurcated experience on an m. subdomain. It also avoids some issues attendent with bifurcated experience[1], and maybe you can even have a decent tablet-specific design.The head of webdev for my company says that a responsive design is usually about 20-30% more expensive than a traditional mobile-ignorant design. This is significantly higher than 0%. It is also significantly lower than the ~100% increase it would take to build a separate dedicated m. experience. The resulting mobile experience is significantly more full-featured than the shitty bifurcated experience[1] you could otherwise get with 30% of the main site's budget.Responsive Design is not a silver bullet, and should not be sold as such. If it is worth your time to make a mobile version of your site, it is an extremely attractive option for doing so, and generally superior to the alternatives. Doesn't mean it's free or perfect, just means it's better than the other ways of doing it.[1] http://xkcd.com/869/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "This post is only the preface to a novel that could be titled \"The Devil's Advocate's Guide to Responsive Web Design\". The complicated decisions facing those tasked with developing and maintaining a responsive site are legion.To start, determine your breakpoints so you can employ the magic of media queries......which are neat, but little more than a parlor trick in real world application since serving all the CSS for all possible views is an anti-pattern......especially under the currently accepted best practice/mantra of \"Mobile First\" site development, which dictates initially assuming a visitor is on a smartphone (to achieve the fastest response for the weakest use case, i.e., relatively low power device+high latency/unstable network) then dynamically scale the content/features based on client capabilities......requiring a solution for feature testing and/or device detection, which is performance overhead somewhere in the stack and, though evolving quickly, will remain a elusive target for the foreseeable future......which THEN means (just as the OP says) you aren't really developing, maintaining, and serving a single responsive site but one of 3 or more variations which, depending on who you ask, should have context appropriate content.What's that? You have a highly-performing, flex grid-based, sugar-coated wonderland of a site? Tell me how efficient your responsive/adaptive image workflow/solution is...TL;DR Thank you @beep for the job security. ;)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "The numbers suggest that more and more users are going to be hitting the web on mobile devices (numbers vary a bit, but the consensus seems to be close to doubling annually and around 10% at the moment).It seems to me that it's not a question of responsive design or not; and it's not a question of responsive design vs. separate sites (completely or substantially separate code). Rather, it becomes a question of how much time do my analytics numbers suggest I should spend making my mobile presentation better?It definitely cuts both ways, and for some using a decent responsive framework will certainly be fastest, for others, a quick mobile-only lander that directs to a native app might be more well-suited. This problem isn't going away anytime soon, and I'm keeping an interested eye on the almost classic 'responsive vs. mobile-specific vs. native' debate (and all of its variations)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of this piece, but I think the distinction between layout and design isn't highlighted.If you use a framework like Bootstrap to underpin your html and css then having a responsive layout is really very easy. The point of a responsive layout is that your site is legible and clickable to users on non-desktop screens, not that your site looks beautiful for every user." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The article states, \"Take a look at your Google Analytics first, see how many visitors are coming to your site from different devices, look at their screen resolutions and operating system and then decide who you want to please first.\"That does align nicely with data driven decision making, but I'd sure be worried that new visitors, upon visiting my site and realizing the competitor's responsive site is a much nicer experience, decides not to return.I help run a small store online with enough traffic to matter to me and I think I'm at around 12% mobile new visits. That's a lot and I'm currently not responsive. I'm becoming a bit anxious wondering about new user experience on my site and whether I should start the move sooner than later." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Why should it be lame to point to my own work? There's nothing wrong with that at all. A lot of things people are linking to are projects or writing that they have invested some serious time or thought in. They ought to be proud to point out what they've done." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Not entirely, no. Some people need input and an unbiased pair of eyes on their startups, and this is a great place to get it, or someone who posts a blog entry they think others might find interesting or beneficial, it's worse not to share your knowledge with others." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This has been discussed before. I think the consensus was if your own writing is good, submit it, if other think it's good, they'll vote for it.As long as people aren't gaming the system, who cares?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I have posted a few scripts that I have created and found useful. These weren't to show off but just because I thought others might find them useful. I don't even care if they get voted up to the front page I just want other people to point out flaws." }, { "score": 4, "text": "No, I don't think so, especially if it's something you've worked long an hard on, or if its a piece of open source software that you want to share.Or, you never know, you may find something that you really need from an Ask HN submission." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "As a side note, why is it that I have to sign in to Google in order to be able to see this? Is registration /really/ necessary for Google Groups?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Can someone please explain to me why running native code coming from a web site is a good idea?Because I see this as \"Google's ActiveX\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm a fan of fast native code, but I worry that this promotes sneaky code in the background once it gets widely adopted.With javascript we basically have open-source web apps. I often skim through js source to learn new tricks - and obfuscation doesn't really stop me (apart from google's java-translated js) . With compiled NaCl I probably wouldn't be able to find out a lot.I'm not talking about \"stealing user data\" when I say sneaky code. No, with compiled native code a whole new game is started: computational-intensive code. It wouldn't be that difficult to include code that gets a job to work on for a few minutes: breaking captchas, brute-forcing passwords, anything that shift computational effort from a server to a client." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I wonder when we will see the first obfuscated C for NaCI code contest." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I wonder how it handles a bogus printf format string." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Another \"How would you move Mount Fuji?\" interview question. If only people would realize they don't need someone to move Mount Fuji." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Hint in Perl, Python, or Ruby: blank programs are valid." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Check out this \"quine relay!\"\nhttp://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20090916/p1The Ruby program outputs Python that outputs Perl that outputs Lua that outputs OCaml that outputs Haskell that outputs C that outputs Java that outputs Brainfuck that outputs Whitespace that outputs Unlambda that outputs the original Ruby program.(I was unable to get it to work when I tested it, but I still find it quite impressive!)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "So here is a much more interesting problem. Can you code a program that runs a function on its own source code?Hint: It is a generalization of a quine." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've heard of a quine but only confuse myself trying to think of a way to write one in Ruby that doesn't involve something like eval-ing strings. Reg Braithwaite -> FAIL.That being said, something tickles the back of my head... Are quines combinatorial? Something about a program that prints its own source code makes me think of some of Raymond Smullyan's various problems in the field..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm not sure if Feynman would endorse the scientific framing that is being applied, in that article, to the haphazard process by which society evolves.Science experiments should try and be, at least to some extent, repeatable.When the article starts talking about 'social experiments', e.g.:\n\"He’s referring to laws of nature of course, but let’s take a step back and imagine that society is a scientific enterprise. Discovering good legal rules, good regulations, or good constitutions is hard — they are not ‘given’ to us. They evolved. They appeared through different experiments in different places at different times, by different people. They will continue to change.\"I think that's stretching it, and going towards the dangerous territory of framing social debate as if it were a science, and as if the 'disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs' was scientific experiment.I think Feynman was exacting about what could be considered an experiment. From his commencement address, on 'cargo cult science', which covers this general area:\n\"I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.\"He also points out that it can be bad to use the language of science, if you aren't really doing science:\n\"Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.\nYet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do \"the right thing,\" according to the experts.\" http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.phpI'm not saying the article is making the mistake of cargo cult science; but just that it seems to be skirting a little close to that territory, by applying the language of science to situations in which people are not trying for rigorous experiments, and where isolating variables is particularly hard.I don't think that disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs would meet Feynman's definition of science. I like the framing of a startup as a company set up to test a hypothesis about a business model, but I think there's a distance between entrepreneurship and science." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Eugenics in this context is a bad example, because in this case controlled breeding definitely gets results, i.e. the theory (sort of) agrees with the theory, at least in the case of animals. You should thank such manipulative practices when you are enjoying a seedless banana.Of course, the practice is abhorrent! But, and I think this is important, the ethical part has nothing to do with the science part. Consider the piece from NYT that reported Robert Spitzer's apology (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/health/dr-robert-l-spitzer...) for defining homosexuality as a \"disease\" and trying to cure it. When he published his study one commentary:\"...cited the Nuremberg Code of ethics to denounce the study as not only flawed but morally wrong. “We fear the repercussions of this study, including an increase in suffering, prejudice, and discrimination,” concluded a group of 15 researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where Dr. Spitzer was affiliated.\"I think that a scientific theory can we wrong or right (or currently undecided) but it cannot be morally wrong. The way you perform the experiments to test it may be morally wrong, though. There were significant faults with Spitzer's research, these should be pointed out rather than its moral wrongness.Similarly eugenics should be attacked for its unintended consequences (e.g. extinction of Cavendish bananas http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/bananas.asp) and its nineteenth-century simplistic approach to the human genetic-psychological relationship which, as we now, is vastly complex." }, { "score": 2, "text": "1) The article writer completely missed Feynman's point. Feynman is talking about the nature of reality, not about society and its actions. If I say \"bricks are nutritious\" and the government forces everyone to eat nothing but powdered bricks, that doesn't change the fact that bricks are not nutritious.2) There is a slight caveat to Feynman's point -- if a theory disagrees with experiment, it's possible that the theory is correct but the experiment / data interpretation / etc was flawed." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Would the analogous lesson for entrepreneurs be that if the market doesn't want it, it's wrong? I'd think there's some cases where products are ahead of their time, i.e. they're right at the wrong time." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Democracy itself is supposed to be a method of experimenting with governance. Try making a law; if it doesn't work, repeal it and try another, or else tweak it until it is right. The federal system is the same way; try one set of laws in California, another in Texas, and see which set works out better.I do think we could go further along these lines. Wiki and Github style \"let the people edit the laws before voting on them\" may not be the right answer, but our current system is definitely not ideal. Finding a way to tighten the feedback loop will be tough, especially when a constitutional set of ground rules seems necessary.Other commenters are right though, no matter how we frame it, society is not science. It's just that we feel benefits could be had by applying something like the scientific method to the laws which govern us." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Hey! I just want to say, this is awesome and I wish you the best of luck.I am a Developer and I noticed a few really concerning things in your CSS:1. I believe you're committing the greatest CSS Sin: Emulating the DOM structure using nesting. Here is one example: "#site-header.newheader nav>ul>li>a.buttonGreen"That CSS Selector should not exist like that. You shouldn't be using ids (first) and second this should be be: .buttonGreen {}It looks like bad Sass or LESS is being used and nesting is being abused. If you'd like more advice on how to fix this I have written many talks.The reason these selectors are a problem is because of the extremely long paint time. Right now your site takes around 30ms to paint. It should be closer to 10ms.2. The CSS classes used are meaningless. Above there's a "buttonGreen" class. However, what if you redesign and that button is now blue? Do you just edit the CSS (like should have to be done) Or do you change your HTML and CSS to reflect a basic styling change? This only hurts you and maintaining your site.3. You're loading 2.4 MB of data on your home page. 1 MB of that is images, which is fine, but that means you have 1.3 MB of data loading. The good news is that on mobile almost 100% of what you are loading are images, however, that number is still 2 megabytes. I'd see if there is a way to lower that number.4. It is extremely busy. I was really confused when I got to the site. I am not a good designer so I cannot give specific advice, but I'd think "calming" the site would help a lot.5. On Chrome Mobile I cannot click the hamburger button. It does nothing.6. You need to simplify your creation flow. You have 4 pages right now, it should only be 1.7. Your select boxes need a dropdown arrow.8. USE NATIVE SELECTS and restyle them using CSS. Use a fallback for IE and IE only!9. Mobile functionality is not the same as desktop functionality, this is a big one that needs to be fixed. You should be able to do the EXACT same things on mobile that you can on desktop.10. The goal of the site should not be browsing, I don't think. I think it should be about: Creating lists and sharing lists. Browsing should certainly be an option, but make creation and sharing more prominent than browsing." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Oh man, not another "11 sexy girls with star wars tattoos"...Normally I would follow "if you don't have anything nice to say" but since you literally asked for it:Your site tries to build a better mousetrap in one of the worst corners of the internet (better means 'worse' in this case). "List sharing" is a known cheap trick for internet marketers who are the bottom of the barrel, exploitative of both original content creators and those prone to being sucked in to mindless content (aka internet junk food).Maddox has a memorable rant that sums it up better than I can: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucksYour site is not unlike the "reply girls" cancer that devalued youtube, or the fake thumbnails showing cleavage on related videos for everything.Why would you want to "revolutionize the world of lists"? This doesn't even make sense." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I call BS. This appears to be a new take on "Show HN"...trying to get attention. The site works, looks OK, and you appear to have users, so it doesn't really suck. If you thought the concept sucked, then you wouldn't have done the site in the first place.If this were a legit post, I would say this:I think this is a relatively crowded niche you're in. I'm also sure that you dramatically overspent if you actually spent $200K getting this developed. But it appears that your developers did what you asked them to do...."make me a functional site that does X". So if the end result "sucks" to you (99.9% of your users don't know or care about CSS and other issues mentioned in these comments), then there is only one person to blame." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The content and audience are I suspect far more important than what your site does at this stage, and you should narrow the scope on both of those.You have what looks like a serviceable site to produce lists (not really a complex challenge). I'm not sure why you think your site sucks? I'm sure you'll get some feedback on styling, content etc (it's not really to my taste, but hey, it's not terrible either), but if you are seeing slow growth, it's probably not because your site tech/design sucks, it's because no-one really deeply wants to make lists in the first place. The idea and marketing is the problem, not the execution.So, who is the site for, what's the target market/demographic? Who are they making the lists for?Perhaps instead of targeting everyone, you should narrow your focus, and start targeting a particular market. This sort of site needs either a very specific focus to which the list making and content are tailored - say shopping lists, or it needs a specific demographic.If you want to make this a social site, perhaps target a demographic like Norwegian teens OR mums if you have experience there, but don't target the entire world from the start.If you want to make money from shopping, maybe tailor this to just best of lists of products for particular niches and invest in content?As it is I don't see how lists about These 7 Things Will Make Any Man Want to Fight for You and Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8 are going to keep anyone on your site. The content just isn't compelling at all (there are hundreds of existing content farms churning out stuff like this like buzzfeed etc) and it is far too scattershot.PS Install some caching software prior to posting on HN :)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "It lacks the touch of a good designer. Everything seems slightly off... from colors, to fonts, to text placements, to 20 other small touches. It all adds up to an amateurish feel. Some examples:1. The colors. Ugh.2. The formatting of the content boxes should be more consistent. All pictures should go to the edge and have the same height. Logos should have padding, not stretch to the edge (e.g. YouTube). Even once this is fixed, the different palettes in the different pictures are what's contributing to the clutter. Maybe make all the pictures b&w... not sure. Do you need the chrome for these? Boxes with shading and extra lines is a bit dated. Check out digg.com for a better example of this style. Generally this is the biggest issue.3. The "Popular Lists" graphic should be half/half on the area above/below. Right now, just a few pixels lay on the green area. Plus the white is too close to the off-white of the section below. If not for the shadow, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you were going for.4. Something looks odd about the font in Chrome. Certain letters seem bold, or somehow "stretched" a few pixels too tall. (e.g. The "E" from E3, the "B" from Best Viral Videos)5. The anti-aliasing is inconsistent. Text isn't being anti-aliased at all. The logo is anti-aliasing unnecessarily (at the top/bottom of squared letters). The pictures seem to be low-quality JPEGs which contributes to this issue.Assuming all the formatting is done via css a good designer should be able to fix most of this in a few days." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Google+ does this too, except for top-level articles. My office was using G+ to share articles and status updates, but Google seems to have gone out of their way to make that as frustrating an experience as possible. There's no chronological view anymore, and sometimes it just doesn't show articles from some people unless you go directly to their profile." }, { "score": 1, "text": "We've had the same issue on our page (VLC 93000+ likes), and we really thought it was a bug: the reply was above the question...We tried to remove and redo the comments, but it always ended like that.I'm glad to not be alone :)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Commenting online is an afterthought, and it is really sad to me why this is so. Disqus and Livefyre are what most people use, but they have a ton of room for improvement. Some might say that they are doing really well, which would be true; however, there is hardly any competition, so anything Disqus and Livefyre do will be perceived as well, or simply, good enough.I've been working on a way to redo commenting in my spare time, and I would like for it to become a thing. My idea consists of synced comments, an RSS like feed, a one column design (no threaded comments!) with expanding and minimizing replies, and a currency connected with real money that people can use to tip one another. I know it sounds far fetched, and it is, but I truly believe that commenting should be given saliency if writing and publishing online is going to move forward.The next step is making my designs and ideas into a reality, however, I don't know how to code. I'm seeking someone who does, and in the meantime, I am teaching myself how to get starting with programming. The thing is, I could spend the next 1-2 years of my life learning how to code what I want to do when there is someone out there who knows how to do it already.I suppose this comment is also to raise awareness for what I want to do for the future of commenting online. Send me a DM on Twitter @raymondduke if you are interested. I do have a plan to monetize from day one. I'll gladly tell you what I want to do and if you are interested maybe we can start making this happen." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I haven't noticed this myself (and I have the replies feature) so maybe it's just one of many things they're testing with a limited number of users. I agree with the OP though, I don't see how this would be useful for anyone." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Threaded comments are a good thing. This seems like a UI problem. One suggestion:1) Put the thread reply text field at the top of the comments and show new replies at the top, at least for the user who made the comment.2) Replying anywhere else should require clicking on Reply under that comment.This makes it intuitively clear that thread replies are not replies to a thread comment.This would take users some time to adjust to, but should fix the problem.I know at least one site that does this. Ahem.EDIT: Looking more carefully at the second screen shot, it looks like they did this. Seems like a non-issue in that case. The first screenshot for some reason doesn't have that change. Who knows if they are A/B testing or what. Strange that the OP did not notice this difference." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The multiplicity of APIs demonstrates that the problem is hard. The needs of game developers pull the APIs in a specific direction. And these requirements must be addressed, because the games market is huge and pushes the envelope.But other users may have different needs. OpenGL is used by games, but not just games. For example, at Taodyne, we use OpenGL for real-time 3D rendering of business information on glasses-free 3D screens. I can tell you that my pet peeves with OpenGL have nothing to do with what's being described in any of the articles.Some of the top issues I face include 3D font rendering (way too many polygons), multi-view videos (e.g. tiled videos, which push texture size limites, or multi-stream videos, that bring a whole bag of threading issues), large numbers of large textures without the ability to manually optimise them (e.g. 12G of textures in one use case).Heck, even the basic shader that combines 5, 8 or 9 views into one multiscopic layout for a lenticular display makes a laptop run hot for a mere HD display, and requires a rather beefy card if you want to have any bandwidth left for something else while driving a 4K display.Many of these scenarios have to do with limitations of textures sizes, efficient ways to deal with complex shapes and huge polygon counts that you can't easily reduce, very specific problems with aliasing and smoothing when you deal with individual RGB subpixels, etc.Of course, multiscopic displays are not exactly core business right now, so nobody cares that targeting them efficiently is next to impossible with current APIs." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It seems no one has mentioned the long peaks fiasco yet, which is an important part of understanding OpenGL history and the committee(s) in charge of the standard:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Longs_Peak_and_OpenGL_3....TL;DR: This is not the first time people are pissed at OpenGL. Last time when industry, developers, etc were sick and tired, around 2006-2007, and it was decided to do something about the API, an effort was initiated. Once the work was close to finishing, those who had seen the glimpse of this yet-to-be-released API were excited and were eagerly waiting for the release. Then the OpenGL committee vanished from the scene for a year or so, and when it re-appeared, it released the same old shitty API with a handful of function calls on top of that." }, { "score": 2, "text": "OpenGL might well be the "only truly cross-platform option", but it seems to me that, for games or mobile app development, getting stuff drawn on screen is only part of the problem. The rest is about doing so with the minimum use of cycles - either for better frame rates or better battery life. I can easily imagine that this is a classic 80/20 problem, with the 20% that takes 80% of the time being adequate ("butter smooth") performance.So, given that the capabilities of the graphics hardware can vary a lot, how closely can a single, unified API like glnext approach optimal use of the hardware? And without the kinds of platform-specific code paths which are necessary under current OpenGL?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "All the whining and complaining makes me wondering how anyone was able to write something with OpenGL at all. This is fascinating because a great amount of people were actually able to write awesome Games and Applications with this API.Look at the whole lot of mobile devices. I have no numbers to base this statement on but I would be bold enough to claim that OpenGL is thanks to the multiplatform ability by far the most successful graphics API out there. The set of devices that brings some or another form of OpenGL support outnumbers other graphics platforms. This alone is a huge accomplishment. Heck, even Minecraft was able to run on PowerPC systems until they pushed the java version supported[1].But now I need to look at the link and have to admit that the criticism is still correct. The API is still pretty rough and could see some improvements. I know this myself, I also played around with OpenGL at some point. There is a lot of boilerplate code that needs to be written before you can start yourself with the real game. This was always the case. This is why we always had an engine, a framework to built on.But to say that it all is a huge pile of shit is a little bit harsh …[1] https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/884921-mine..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Now they just have to create ONE single API, instead of forcing everyone to write multiple code paths to target the various flavours, extensions and drivers workarounds.Specific graphics APIs only matters when graphics middleware is not an option.Which OpenGL always requires. Since the standard leaves out how image/shader/texture/fonts/GUI/math are handled.I think the commoditization of engines will be the second coming of the OpenGL 2.0 - 3.0 stagnation, if they don't improve on these areas." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So, this is a totally superficial comment, but here we go.Brian, as part of all of this crisis stuff, I think it's time to have a new profile picture taken. One where you don't look so, how should I say... 20.From rough calculation, I'm only a couple years older, but one thing that's stood out for me visually in all of this is that ... well, let's just say that it's one of those times where looking like the young silicon valley hotshot works against you.Having a PR shot to pull out of the drawer that looks older, more serious and decidedly less hip would do well when people are worried.(As for the actual content of the story: well done.)Edit: Rational or otherwise, people read a lot from a face. Heck, it's obvious that Airbnb gets that since it's part of their trust system. Since trust is a big part of what makes Airbnb tick, I think it'd be worth the time to craft a profile shot that inspires such. This may even be an inflection point in Airbnb's history where it's transitioning from the couchsurfing-but-with-money branding to I'm-trusting-these-guys-to-keep-my-home-safe.Edit 2: So as a bit of redux, I'm genuinely surprised that this was the most upvoted comment, since it's a minor issue relative to the good that's going down (and specifically, insurance is something that I was personally rooting for since that's what'd kept me from listing a room there prior to this whole shebang.). As for the photo, I think it's actually kind of an interestingly shot, but I don't think it's the one you want plastered all over the interwebs in a crisis scenario." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Two things immediately pop out from this:\"Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post trying to explain the situation, but it didn’t reflect my true feelings.\"I'm not sure how I feel about this line (I assume it's referring to his TC post). On one hand, it's nice that he's now 'fessing up with a this-is-how-I-feel post. On the other, it's a pretty clear admission that he's had no problems in the past sending out PR spin as a blog post under his own name - so what should make the reader think this (or any future posts) are actually him, and not more spin? It seems like it's muddling the authenticity of the message a bit.\"In working with the San Francisco Police Department, we are happy to say a suspect is now in custody.\"Haven't they been saying this for a while, and each time they do, it turns out that when someone tries to verify it with SFPD, the suspect isn't in custody (because they've been extradited to another community)?As for the potential for fraud, that doesn't concern me that much. If they're doing a blanket insurance policy like this, then they're contracting it out to a legit insurance company - who will presumably have adjusters and claims people who will investigate every claim, the same as other forms of consumer insurance (like you get on your rental car).I'm also interested in the legalities of this insurance - particularly in places where short-term rentals to strangers are illegal/contrary to bylaw/in violation of the occupant's lease. You'd think that insurance companies would have a problem selling a policy to cover the side-effects of a prohibited activity; that all Airbnb hosts would have to sign a line that certifies under penalty of perjury that they're legally allowed to host a place on Airbnb, which most can't.If I was a landlord who had a tenant who put their place on Airbnb, and which then got trashed, I'd make the tenant fix it up (which they'd pay for, presumably, from the insurance), and probably try and sue the tenant for violating the terms of their lease. Could I then sue the insurance company as well, for helping my tenant break the conditions of their lease?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Giving credit where credit is due, I think Mr. Chesky and Airbnb have done a good job here. Corporations aren't intrinsically ethical (by law) but start-ups are small enough that they can (a) afford to act human and (b) be held accountable by their customers in meaningful ways. This is why people like Airbnb and why they (myself included) were disappointed in the way the situation was handled. I loved reading Mr. Chesky's response and although this clearly changes things for Airbnb as a business, they are now a company I care to see succeed." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Will this submission have it's title changed to the original post (\"Our Commitment to Trust & Safety\"), as was done for the original submission of EJ's blog post?EDIT: Here's to consistency! Title has been (presumably mod-) edited." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Well, this certainly drags AirBnb into the eBay and PayPal sized fraud prevention industry... and I wonder how this will affect the vibe of the website. Certainly, AirBnB will survive this ordeal, and gain more name recognition from this event. Hopefully it doesn't do things like kill their profit margins or harm the ease of renting through AirBnb." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "at least be humane about it.you don't simply \"fire\" people for performing below expectations. do the extra legwork, and find a way to get them properly \"laid off\", ie, \"eliminate their positions\" -- which shouldn't be too difficult here, as after all you say you'd rather hire more senior people -- so they can (1) get unemployment benefits, (2) roll their insurance off into CORBA if at all possible (or the equivalent of you're not in the U.S.), and (3) have at least a theoretical possibility of rehabilitating themselves and getting another job.\"firing\" per se is just plain vindictive, and seriously endangers their ability to look out for their physical welfare on the short run, and to right their course (in terms of finding a career that's better suited to them) in the longer runI know that you aren't particularly concerned with their welfare (you sound like you're basically fed up with these people, and couldn't care less). but the bottom line is that you still have to recognize that the company shares at least SOME responsibility for the situation. (after all, who hired them, anyway? was it, umm... you, by chance?)and also, treating people humanely just happens to pay (considerable) dividends. as in, the morale of the rest of the team, your company's reputation (and your own reputation).i've seen the (lingering) after-effects of letting go of people gracefully and magnanimously, and of doing the opposite, many, many times. it's well worth the money to do these things properly (and humanely)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "If they're average, not terrible, I'd agree with 37signals - there is no such thing as rockstar people, just rockstar environments.If you're not sure you've built an inspiring, learning environment where everybody feels driven to do their best, are you sure a) it's them, not you? b) anyone you'll hire will do any better?The way you've worded it though, it sounds like they are a bit rubbish. Maybe it's the kindest thing, it's painful all round if they're trying and failing." }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"no talent\" is \"average\"? That sounds a bit... well, wrong. Granted, really talented people are orders of magnitude more productive, but \"average\" means someone that's worse than half of people, but also better than half; more or less." }, { "score": 3, "text": "It really depends. For example, you could have an average developer who has a huge amount of domain knowledge. Their coding skills may be sub-par but that doesn't mean they are not valuable. They may also have strengths in UI, sysadmin,\netc.On the other hand a developer could be average due to lack of experience, which is something that can be remedied by time and training - code reviews can help, as well as a reading list etc. We all have to start somewhere. Give those that show promise - but lack experience - some guidance.It also depends a lot on where you are in the development cycle. Are you mainly doing maintenance work, bug fixes, minor feature additions ? An average team should do fine.Where you don't want mediocre developers is in the early stages of a big project - bad design decisions and poor programming practices can make later development a nightmare.I'm working on such a project right now and it's highly demoralizing - every day I find a new WTF and I just don't have the time to refactor everything - my recommendation at this point is to scrap the lot and start over, but that's not likely to happen. That's the result of mediocre developers in over their heads without a clue, and it can have a huge negative impact on your company's productivity and bottom line." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If you're in a 1st world country you can't just fire people for being average without opening yourself up to a lawsuit. That's why good tech companies develop harrowing interview gauntlets." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Education has been on a lets get as top heavy as we can kick for years. Go to any educational institution, anywhere in the US. Check out the oak paneling in the administrative offices. Check out the explosion of administrative positions.\nCheck out the rise of administrator salaries. That is where the money goes while class sizes increase, teacher salaries nosedive, and essential core subjects get trivialized or cut." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The percentage decline in tenure track faculty might be fine. Straight-up instruction (non-tenure faculty) is also important; it provides employment for those who don't make tenure.Tenure level academia is demanding:a) Once you've made it, you have a solid reward: a sustainable lifestyle salary, freedom to work on what you wish, and, notoriety.b) To make it, you have to work insane hours for about a decade or more (PhD, post-doc, 5-years) -- where the first few years (5-8) pay very little, if anything.c) The odds of making it are against you -- many drop out in their PhD (\"ABD\"), fail to get post-doctorate work, fail to get a tenure track slot, or, fail to get tenure.The promise of tenure is the carrot that feeds expectations that can only be met by talent and hard work." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think this is old news. Tenure as a whole likely costs the system more than it brings in intellectual freedom benefits. It's a fallacy to think that more experienced tenured teachers are better educators, when it's research success that got them tenure.Jeff Selingo (http://www.jeffselingo.com/) writes extensively about how colleges are reacting to changes in demographics and technology. He doesn't think Yale or Harvard will need to change, but the public and private schools a tier below will need to. His book (http://www.amazon.com/College-Un-bound-Education-Students/dp...) is a good read for parents." }, { "score": 3, "text": "What is the trend for the overall number rather than percentage of tenured college professors? Surely a large part of this is explained by the explosive growth of higher education as a consumer commodity. We should not expect the percentage of professors to increase if the demand for academics is being driven by an increasing number of lower quality colleges." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Meh.There are two roles for Tenured College Professors: * Making intellectual bets that might not pay off for decades\n\n * Making Graduate students work hard\n\nEverything else is gravy. The university and country that puts most effort into these two will over the long term get the most out. The important thing here is tenure. The next most important thing is you get to be a professor because all the other professors think you might make a good one.Just pay up the money, and make the empirical sciences better paid. Its like a magic machine is edication. Put in money get out more.If you want to see my poster-child for College Professors (#) go http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sddb0Khx0yA.(#) No, not that Playboy spread. Different poster." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Previous submissions:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140283http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078831http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485286http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290590http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467703Some have more comments than others." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Some comments:1) I've heard many (non-physicist) people argue/think that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a law in the sense that, say, General Relativity or Conservation of Energy is a law. That is not true. As explained here (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4201/why-does-the...) the basic laws of physics are time-symmetric, i.e. there's no currently known fundamental reason that entropy behaves the way it does.2) I've read this story 20+ times, yet each time it gets me. I think the force of the story comes not from the scientific predictions but from the poignant depiction of humanity's futile fight against oblivion. Aren't all monuments erected for this purpose? The fact that the story is very light on the tech details paradoxically increases its punch.3) The described technology is a curious mix of far-sight and ridiculous backwardness: In describing harnessing the power of the Sun, Asimov may have had in mind something like a Dyson sphere, which Dyson described in 1960. However, the technicians still use a teletype to communicate with Multivac in 2061!4) One thing that I think Asimov got wrong fundamentally is that researching the \"final question\" should have taken all of Multivac's CPU capacity. It's stupendous that Multivac just runs that question on a separate thread while doing everything else. The Hitchiker's Guide gets this right: when Arthur asks a very powerful AI (the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser) to make tea it totally paralyzes the machine.5) I've never been able to find a good interpretation of Cosmic AC's response \"NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Another favorite of mine: Learning to be Me - Greg Eganhttp://qwerjk.com/force-feed#learning-to-be-me" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Why do humans have to re-submit these? If a post is 1. Timeless and 2. Popular shouldn't this be automated?Surely this post adds to the experience of some as do many others like it. The first step in this trend would be a Hacker New reading list composed of posts that fit this profile.Secondarily you could have a way to inject each of the posts on that list into each users front page based on if they had seen it before (followed link checking or HN logs). If I'm new to HN perhaps my front page would have these scattered throughout.Next you could use them as content on slow news days in combination with the per user information above.I, for one, would love it if my local movie theatre re-ran Star Wars during slow months, and I wouldn't mind being (re)exposed to classic posts on Sunday afternoons :)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place...minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other\"\nSeems it's going to be true. When you google for something it's already some kind of thought of Man. For now connections between individuals are very slow, but it will be solved soon. I'll have a chip in my head which will allow me to share my thoughts immediately with anybody." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": ">Stations that use vulnerable gear should upgrade to version 2.0-2, which is available by sending an e-mail to [email protected] for fuck's sake. I hope Ars screwed up that email address. Sometimes I feel like regulatory capture has totally screwed our national defense.I'm from Maryland. I know a lot of defense/NSA people. Some are fantastic. Others... let's just say not everybody is the best and brightest." }, { "score": 1, "text": "If you were building a system with legacy firmware (so, for examole you couldn't rotate keys in case of a breach), how would you mitigate against situations like this? Can anyone give a brief overview of how to architect a more secure system?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is why smart cards should be used. You should not be able to accidentally distribute a private key like this." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Your medical records are somehow safe? It's only a matter of time before the govt mandated exchanges go "oops" in a similar way" }, { "score": 4, "text": "FTA:\nStations that use vulnerable gear should upgrade to version 2.0-2, which is available by sending an e-mail to [email protected] a "broadcast-emitting-messages-company" admin: would I really upgrade a system, which functionalities include complete take-over of my broadcast equipment, that is vulnerable to someone mistaking the private and public ssh keys of his "taking-over-any-equipment" equipment ?I'd rather un-subscribe from that "service" in the limit of legality until that point of failure is fixed." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "IBM is about to make these APIs (and many others) much more accessible as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku). I lead the team in charge of developing the Watson platform. Ask me questions!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "If you want access to the API, you have to fill out a form, here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys...This is buried in the docs as a comment on this page: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis...Edit:No real support for 'playing around' with the API. Bummer.Edit2:Just went through the application process linked above. Be prepared to give info about yourself and your company and an explanation of why you want access to the Watson API, as well as what type of information you'll be working with. I stated 'just want to play around with the API'. We'll see how they react to that." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Out of curiosity I googled the same request.https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+h....I think this might be useful if Watson was being feed with a medical database. Otherwise I don't see any need for it; is there any?edit: Watson as a legal consultant would be great. There might be a product in that, not as an replacement for a lawyer but more as guide/search tool." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Has anyone at HN used either IBM Watson or Wolfram Alpha to build a real (commercial) app? It feels like there should be a whole wave of apps built on either of these technologies but it doesn't seem to be materialising.What is holding back the killer apps for answer/computation engines?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am helping a customer integrate Watson into their system so I am very happy to see the news about BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/) that apparently will allow me to keep experimenting with Watson after my consulting engagement is complete.If you read the documentation, you will see that preparing training data and questions is fairly straightforward." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Oh this is a very good interview. I have read and seen others but this is one of the most detailed ones on Binney.Binney came before Snowden and he raised all these issues and it didn't really sway the public. That was pretty frustrating. He didn't bring a database with him so naturally some assumed he was making stuff up because he was bitter his system was being used and deployed under a different compartment and he was sort of not part of it.One interesting thing here is that it really undermines the often repeated PR phrase "Oh why didn't Snowden just come to us (higher ups) and tell us. There was no need to go public like that". The implication is "we could have listened and fixed the problem".Here is Binney years before trying to do that. Yes he didn't go directly to his bosses, I think it was clear they wouldn't have listened. He went to Intelligence Commetee (Congress). Went to DOJ. Nothing happened. Some anemic 90% redacted reports. "Vows to take to be more careful in the future", nonsense like that.All it ended with was FBI raids and persecution for those involved.The crucial part comes at the end and that is Snowden studied their case and he made sure to take documents out with him." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The whole Frontline 'United States of Secrets' episode is very good and worth a watch. Part two is this week, I think on Tuesday." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The whole discussion about deleting code vs commenting it out seems to imply that the NSA wasn't using any sort of version control system in 2001. Does anyone else find that odd?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "William said if one wanted to comment a line of the source code, they'd place a C at the beginning of the line.Is this a familiar language behavior to anyone, or are they using in-house languages/interpreters. I wouldn't put it past them, but I found that comment interesting and would like to know more if anyone has any data." }, { "score": 4, "text": "They really need to update their site for mobile. I couldn't read anything" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "OK, the analogy is dumb, but the point stands on its own. Dynamic linking has been around for so long that it's a sort of dogma, never questioned. Of course you do dynamic linking!Just step back and consider all the problems dynamic linking has caused us (DLL hell, package management headaches, C library incompatibilities, various ABI issues) and the sheer complexity of the systems invented to solve those problems (Side-by-Side assemblies; InstallShield, Windows Installer, and umpteen other install frameworks for Windows; LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ldconfig; APT, RPM, and umpteen other Linux package managers)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that \"reasoning by analogy\" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today.\"Edsger W. Dijkstra" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Yay for irrelevant analogies! Who cares if they shed any light on the topic whatsoever?! Let’s give red-blooded patriotic Americans something we can all get behind, hatred of the dirty commies!You know what else dynamic linking is up to, Mandrake? Sapping and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There's a simple counterexample to this argument: operating systems. If it were not possible to create shared code, it would not be possible to write operating systems, which are nothing but shared code. Shared code does demand more careful management and versioning, especially of interfaces, and if you don't do that you are indeed hosed. But if you do then you aren't." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Libraries also open up a gate to exploits. For example the return to libc technique.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-to-libc" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This article is neat about the engineering/marketing (seriously, it’s clear and direct and has useful pictures; that part is highly recommended). The part about vision and color is pretty sloppy though.This sentence:> “The reason this trick works is that rods are 20x as dense as cones in the retina, meaning the eye has approximately sqrt(20)=4.5x the spatial resolution in detecting intensity or luminance transitions compared to detecting color or chrominance transitions.”... is simply false. The reason that we see lightness differences with better spatial resolution has (almost) nothing to do with numbers of rods vs. cones (indeed rods are almost absent from the fovea – the center of the retina – which we use for fine detail perception, basically the opposite of what was claimed), but instead happens because the signals from the three types of cone cells are processed into a single (monochromatic) lightness response, which we use for perception of fine detail. The signals from the cone cells are also processed into two color difference signals, but over bigger patches of retina: sort of a neurological analog to the “chroma subsampling” that happens in JPEG compression. In other words, JPEG compression does work because we see fine details monochromatically, but instead of “leveraging” this mostly irrelevant cone/rod difference as claimed, it’s really using the same basic approach (averaging/tossing out color data) that the eye itself uses.Actually, the next few sentences are somewhere between misleading and wrong, too.> “The eye is more sensitive to quantization levels of green light than to levels of red or blue light, which is probably related to the fact that the sun emits more power in the green region of the visible spectrum than in red or blue. (The eye's spatial resolution in each of the three primary colors is approximately uniform.)”The eye is more sensitive to green light because we use three cone receptors with the biggest overlap in sensitivity in the green part of the spectrum, so that when you add up their responses to a signal (in the combined lightness signal I mentioned), green wavelengths have more of an impact.It certainly has something to do with evolution and the spectra of reflected sunlight, but various animals have different spectral sensitivities, so the causality is complex. The sun emits light over a huge range of wavelengths (far beyond the visible spectrum in both directions), and exactly which part makes it to our eyes depends on time of day, weather conditions, altitude, etc.The three “primary” colors are somewhere between extremely simplified model, useful engineering approach, and myth. We also have somewhat different spatial sensitivities to the three primaries in a computer display, as far as I know.> “Also the blue and red subpixels are twice the size of green, making them twice as likely to be illuminated at the perceptual edge of a hard intensity transition than green.”Let’s see here. 1/3 the total area is green, 1/3 the total area is red, and 1/3 the total area is blue. How is it that edges are twice as likely to fall on red or blue than green, again? (In other words, there’s some difference because of the different pixel sizes, but whatever is meant here is being poorly explained, and important assumptions about the edges in question are left unstated.)Vision is complicated, and there’s a lot of heavy math going on in the neurons in your retina, before signals ever get transmitted through the optic nerve. It depends on adaptation to current light level and color, on what size blobs you’re looking at, on the surrounding colors, and on inferences about objects and how they’re lit. These complexities lead to all those famous optical illusions. So it’s worth using simplified models, to cut out complexity incidental to whatever you’re trying to explain. But that doesn’t give license to just make up stuff.For anyone interested, this is a good place to start:http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color1.html------One last thing. I’m pretty suspicious of this:> “Overall, it is hard to see any really good advantages to the PenTile layout.”Presumably the engineers who designed the thing had some compelling reasons. (It’s conceivable that it was driven by a desire to make a worse display that could be better hyped by marketing, but that seems extremely unlikely to me; I’m suspicious.) I’d like to hear what those are instead of just a hand-wavey “I don’t know what they are so I’m going to imply there are none”." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Don't miss the rainbow picture on page 3, it's a pretty cool hack:\"I then developed a far more nefarious test of color fringing: an algorithm that would take an arbitrary full-color image and generate a pure grayscale stipple pattern that appears colored on the N1 screen. The interesting thing about these images is if you display them at anything other than 100% zoom, the colors disappear and you only see the grayscale stipple pattern.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I have an iPod Touch and a Nexus One in front of me now. When looked at side by side, the Touch seems drab and fuzzy and the grid layout of the pixels stands out; while the N1 is crisp, and the white background of text is solid.The thing it reminds me of most is a comparison between a CRT and an LCD. Apple seems to like applying more anti-aliasing to their fonts, certainly more than is customary on Windows, and it really shows on the Touch - whatever about the N1 having slightly fuzzy text when zoomed well out, the Touch's text is plainly fuzzy when zoomed to normal reading size.Things other folks have brought up, like 18-bit with dithering vs 16-bit, I'm less concerned with. There's more contrast range in that 16 bits (by itself enough to make banding more obvious), while dithering doesn't strictly relate to the pixels displayed on screen and can be done in software. I expect updates can improve this.The Cooliris Gallery browser the N1 ships with certainly does scale down photos before drawing them on screen; the browser is similar. This is annoying, especially if you want to zoom into a section on the photo, but again it's not related to the actual display. It looks more like an optimization designed to fit the image into a texture for hardware acceleration. Other photo gallery apps don't necessarily have the same implementation (e.g. B&B Gallery).One actual aspect of the OLED display that does bother me somewhat is the way it \"fizzes\". When using the screen in the dark with the brightness at the lowest setting, all lit areas of the screen can be seen to be constantly flickering and alternating between different brightness levels at very high speed, a bit like the way the head of a freshly poured Coke's froth is constantly dissipating and getting renewed. But this is a very minor quibble.As to contrast ratio with bright ambient light, I haven't found it to be a practical problem. I don't use my phone much outside during the day - even if I'm using the map, I'm more likely to be doing that in an evening - but even then, it seldom gets sunny enough in the UK to make the screen hard to read when it's at full brightness." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One thing that I couldn't find mentioned is exactly what the pixel addressability is on the display. In figure 2, the layout of the first two rows is (using RR and BB for the double-wide subpixels): RR G BB G RR G BB G RR G BB G RR G BB G RR G BB G\n BB G RR G BB G RR G BB G RR G BB G RR G BB G RR G\n\nIs the upper left pixel in this (RR G BB), which the article seems to assert, or (RR G BB G) ? If I set the screen to entirely black and turn on pixel (0,0), which subpixels will light up (I don't find Figure 1 shows this well enough)? If (0,0) lights up (RR G BB), then the second pixel at (1,0) is (BB G RR) and overlaps the first? If it doesn't overlap, then the second G from the left in the first row is not part of any pixel. If one pixel is composed of two green half-sized subpixels and one each of red and blue full-sized subpixels, then the ratio of screen area to colored subpixels actually is the same for all pixels, it's just that the green subpixel is spread out more and the order of the subpixels is different in each row -- the later would undermine traditional, plain subpixel smoothing that assume a consistent, regular layout on all rows.Notice that if you count subpixel groupings in figure 2, it's exactly 5 pixels across if you use (xx G yy G) subpixel layout (where xx and yy are either RR or BB depending on which row the pixel is on).I find this paragraph confusing considering the layout given:You can see from the photo above that each logical pixel on the Nexus One screen contains one green subpixel and either one double-width blue subpixel or one double-width red subpixel. So the red and blue color channels on the Nexus One display each have half as many subpixels (480800/2) as the green channel. Basically, half the red and half the blue spatial information in the 2D image being sent to the display is simply thrown away or spread to the nearest matching subpixel by a convolution or intensity-dispersion process.*And if (xx G yy G) defines one pixel, then this paragraph's math is just plain wrong:One way to count raw pixels, ignoring the effect of all the signal processing on the PenTile display, is to calculate total effective RGB triplets on the screen. You can do this by taking a weighted sum of total number of red, blue and green subpixels, and then converting back to an effective screen size. The total number of effective physical pixels, counted using a weighted sum, is (480800/2)2/3 + (480800)1/3 = 256,000, exactly two thirds the claimed total number of pixels (480800=384,000). This is equivalent to a screen with edge dimensions sqrt(256/384)=82% of the claimed length, or (48082%)(80082%) = 392653 = 256k.*... as the ratio of the areas of each of the subpixels is the same, at least in figure 2.If green has more prominence in the way the human eye picks up color, then it actually makes sense to spread out the green over separate areas (or different shaped areas) to give greater prominence to the harder to pick up colors of red and blue, which are more concentrated and thus brighter/richer. It seems from figure 1, the subpixel smoothing takes into account that the red and blue subpixels are ordered differently. It's also possible that the subpixel smoothing recognizes that the alternating ordering of red and blue can be exploited along the vertical axis to achieve the following layout (this is two pixels side by side): RR G BB G\n BB G RR G\n\nwhich is also the same total subpixel area per pixel, but the whole pixels are more square (1.5 subpixels wide by 2 pixels high vs 3 subpixels (6 half-sizes) wide by 1 pixel high).I personally don't see \"waviness\" in the lines on the screen, but I do see some stippling at the screen edges (easiest to see on an almost fully white lit screen, like the background (not the white border) of the HN content area). This would seem to be caused by the ordering change of R and B subpixels, not of the half-wide G subpixels." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There's been a few sites which brought this up..On a totally unrelated note, anyone know if VOIP is working better on the nexus one's these days?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Talking about Twitter in the same breath as YouTube just doesn't make sense - YouTube's troubles stem from the fact that its costs are through the roof, being a streaming video site and all. In order to come out of the red, they have to make a pretty large amount off of each viewer, and that's tough to do when advertising rates are depressed.Twitter, on the other hand, sends 140 character messages back and forth. Yes, they've had scaling issues, but that's because they blew up from a tiny operation into a major success overnight without the manpower to handle the growth, not an indication that their costs are too high. If they flip pretty much any monetization switch, they'll become profitable quickly." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Good for Twitter, but this will not translate into any money for Biz Stone, one of the site’s founders, until the microblogging platform is monetized.\"Umm, tell that to the YouTube guys (ironic given that that is the example he uses to make his point). There's no law that says your company has to turn a profit before anyone can buy it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Good point re: Youtube, but the fact that eBay thinks they can spin Skype off into an independent company implies that it's profitable or near to it.edit: A little digging confirms it -- http://www.pehub.com/37158/is-skype-profitable-now-we-know-y..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Quality > Quantity.Big Quantity of Quality > Small Quantity of Quality" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Uninformed choice of examples: Skype is very profitable. (See the link aston provided.)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> Don't rewrite code without consultation.This is linked to a pet peeve of mine, especially with restless, young developers. There's a significant difference between the two statements \"I don't get this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it.\" and \"I understand this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it\". I don't know how many times I've seen someone go down the path of seing battle-tested code, not understanding it, thinking they can rewrite it better only to spend a month falling in to all the same pitfalls that lead to the original code. The middle road is of course refactoring. Cleaning up the code in small, discrete steps to something you can understand and work with is many times better than just tearing stuff out and restarting." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I hate this list. It should really be called the Ten Commandments of Good Little Worker Programmers. The 'commandments' are all about creating nice friendly programmer cogs that work smoothly together, minimising hassle for their employers.There's nothing there about programming as an art. There is nothing there about pushing the boundaries of what is possible through determination, vision and, yes, ego. There is nothing about solving complex technical problems through sheer force of will.To hell with 'egolessness'. Why shouldn't programmers have an ego. And, indeed, doesn't it take an ego to do anything great, to think that preposterous thought that you can do something no-one has done before." }, { "score": 2, "text": "> The only true authority stems from knowledge, not from position.That's certainly not the full story. In many organizations, having a lot of knowledge about something that someone else is supposed to know more about is a good way to make them feel uncomfortable or in extreme cases dislike you.From a practical vantage, knowing how to apply what knowledge you do have (and having the will to follow through) is a lot more valuable.It doesn't help to have a broad and deep understanding of software development and business but be socially awkward and suffer from severe akrasia." }, { "score": 3, "text": "It is interesting that all of us are getting a different takeaway from this list; something different resonates with different people.It also surprises me that these lessons originated in 1971 (though I had not heard of this text until just now.)Back then, IBM was hiring English majors and training them in assembly to work on OS/360 etc. It would not have occurred to me that developers back then would have cultivated a stereotype of a \"prima donna.\"Because to me, and perhaps this is a reflection of my age, it has only been recently that the popularity of joelonsoftware-esque \"pamper your developers!\" has led to a culture in small companies where we demand free beer and 36\" Macs as a condition for employment.Or has it always been that way for developers (of young tech companies; none of this really applies if you work at Fidelity Investments) modulo the greatest tech of the day?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "* Be kind to the coder, not to the code. ^\n* Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience. - My friend/cofounder has been inspired by the codeyear thing and have been bringing to me a lot of silly code issues... guess i was being a bit rude with him lately." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm a bit drunk, so uh, yeah.LSB steganography is trivially easy to detect. Do not use LSB steganography.Steganography can be provably secure, with the correct amounts of plain text and \"cover data\".Here's one PDF. (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/PSS.pdf)Some people need this kind of stuff to work to avoid torture or other serious consequences, but most implementations are toys to demonstrate proof of concept or to play with the ideas.tl:dr a real cryptographer will be along to correct my mistakes and provide sensible links." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Interesting work. My own JS stego tool uses a similar technique, though I implemented encryption and message scattering as well:http://oakes.github.com/PixelJihad/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "and detect those messages in plain sight.http://www.outguess.org/detection.php/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Related: Lenna http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I wrote an essay/slides a while back which may be of interest to people wanting to know a bit more about basic steganographic image creation and detection:\nhttp://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/R08/work/slides-at443-...\nhttp://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/R08/work/essay-at443-s...Quick improvement to the LSB method: Use JPEG and embed the data in the LSB of the DCT coefficients (still detectable, but not as trivially)Cool demo though - I'd add a disclaimer though. It's easy to think that it's obvious that people shouldn't use this to store their password in, say, their Facebook profile photo, but.." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So now my domains can be hosted by a company famed for its responsive and transparent customer service!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "http://domains.google.com/about/features.htmlIntegration with Google cloud resources (a la AWS Route 53), 10 million lookups/year free, pricing appears off the bat to be $12/year, free private registration.And support! "With Google Domains, you get phone and email support (M-F, 9am to 9pm EST)."" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Serious question: What happens in three years when Google decides to "sunset" this service like Wave, Labs, Reader, Buzz, Code Search, Knol, etc? Their target audience doesn't know how to work with registrars, which puts them in the worst possible situation when Google Domains is dropped. Will they help their users transition to other registrars?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "So it is now possible to give Google, who is solely responsible for a high percentage of your site's traffic, access to:- Your traffic (Search)- Your analytics (Analytics)- Your income (AdSense)- Your advertising (AdWords)- Your hosting (App Engine)- Your DNS (Cloud DNS)- Your domains (this)That gives their search algorithm a pretty full picture of who owns your website, where you get your content, how much customers like it, any other sites you own, how much traffic you get, how much money you make.And they can delist you whenever they want.No thanks. I'll keep my Google to a minimum." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This is great. Google is a company that is very serious about security, and has essentially no customer support so no way to social engineer your way around that security. Perfect for domains." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This person seems to be confusing culture with random shit I click on." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Does anyone else find it disturbing that the image of Java programmers in the video is a sea of anonymous men in corporate clothing? Is that really the average Java programmer's image of what to aspire to be??" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Oh you think geek culture jumped the shark? Wait till the Facebook movie comes out." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The word Geek has essentially become meaningless, because it's been applied to too many different things and people that don't have much in common.Let's just stop using meaningless words and use meaningful ones." }, { "score": 4, "text": "“I want to program like they do at Oracle …” - now the dream come true." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "A quote: "So while it's interesting to hear that women are less likely to die of heart disease if they have a partner, no one's going to go out to find one in order to have a marginally better chance of making it to old age."The above sentence shows that the author -- and most readers -- miss the single most important thing about cohort studies -- which is that they can't distinguish causes from effects. Contrary to everyday understanding, the statement "women are less likely to die of heart disease if they have a partner" does not mean that choosing to have a partner results in a reduction of a woman's chance to die of heart disease, and it does not mean that seeking out a partner will reduce one's changes to die of heart disease. It only means that having a partner, and reduced chance of dying of heart disease, are correlated.The above very common confusion is the source of any number of meaningless "breakthroughs" in science publishing, and fuels any number of public controversies with little or no scientific substance." }, { "score": 1, "text": "We need services that curate how much you should actually pay attention to a given study. Science journalists have proven themselves inadequate to the task because they are after eyeballs. Large, well designed studies, with applicable samples and large effect sizes? Yes. Small studies with poor design on rats, or elderly Finnish twins with diabetes? No.Why can't I find a list of some of the largest and most robust systematic reviews and meta anlyses ever done?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's rational to be irrational, because being irrational feels good, which is what makes life worth living. At least this is true for the average person. There are individuals who get a lot out of a more methodical evidence-driven life." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The misunderstood scientific study is still a flawed manual for living." }, { "score": 4, "text": "... And discussion on the internet." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> we can assume that very little of that 5% is coming from the really truly poorNo, you can't, not when it's the whole basis of your argument. My impression at an elite university was that if anything the upper-working class was least represented; there were plenty of students from the top, and some from the very bottom.If you're going to claim that Harvard or MIT's financial aid is poorly targeted, you need to actually provide evidence for this." }, { "score": 1, "text": "All that reducing donations to selective research universities will do is to reduce the quality of research. Given that universities like MIT and Harvard form the scientific backbone of the United States, I hesitate to condone the idea of sacrificing that for the sake of reducing Ivy League "elitism."It shouldn't be a situation where we have to pick 1 option out of 2. If you really want to reduce the socioeconomic gap in education, spend more money on public education as a nation. Donations from wealthy donors with next to no affiliation to local community colleges won't solve anything." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Most people don't donate to an alma mater just to support financial aid for lower-income students, nor just because they want to establish their family as a legacy; they donate in order to improve the institution and the quality of education, research, and inspiration it produces. It's a way of paying it forward, much the same philosophy as why people might go into education." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The dynamism of America partly depends on new entrants into the uber-elite of money and power. (Poor kids becoming super rich within one generation. They shake things up and change the way things are done.This is partly a result of:\n1. Poor kids getting into elite universities \n2. The existence of highly elite universitiesIf you provide less funding to the Harvards and MITs of the world do you really expect them to keep getting better and better?And if the overtime become "less awesome" then the benefits one derives from attending will decline.In that case, the poor kid that managed to get into Harvard, etc (or any of the Ivys, they all provide great financial aid) wouldn't benefit the way today's attendee does. The path for that poor kid to break into the uber wealthy just became harder.The Mark Zuckerbergs, Steve Schwarzmans of the world make America dynamic. Poor or middle class kids that break into the uber wealthy and disrupt the way things are done.Non-elite universities don't make that path easier - regardless of how much money you throw at them.Elite universities provide poor kids with things we need:\n1. Status / credibility - maybe not important in tech, but definitely important in high-finance, politics, etc2. Exposure to those who come from families that have done really well3. Access to leading faculty and research opportunitiesYou can throw tons of money at non-elite colleges, they still will not be able to provide the above. I'm not saying that non-elite universities are useless - they are incredibly important for having a healthy middle class.But what makes America great in my opinion is that every few years 5-10 kids that grew up poor make it to the top, change our world, and kick those that were complacent while at the top out." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The whole article is based on the assumption that people make donation to universities as charitable donations. I find that a bit unrealistic. Give money to universities are gesture of appreciation from alumni, gain more opportunities of networking/recognition from the university for the donor and his/her family, etc. For donations with the pure purpose of helping the poor, there are other institutions for that." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'll be the first to ask: Why not on Android?What does this strategy get them? Are they afraid of cannibalizing Fire sales? It would seem to me that this would be a short-sighted concern, given the number of Android owners out there that would happily pay for Instant Video (myself included).I don't think the higher-ups at Amazon are slow in the head, so I assume they have some reason for this, but I can't think of it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Without Airplay this is mostly worthless to me. I just don't sit down and watch movies on my phone. I'd like to stop using my xbox (and paying for xbox live) for amazon+netflix+hulu, but apple tv doesn't have all of them yet. I should probably get a roku, but i'd like to also get airplay in addition to the above 3. :-(" }, { "score": 2, "text": "FWIW it has been available on the iPad for some time, but I think the iPhone/iPod Touch is new." }, { "score": 3, "text": "As often happens, my excitement was short lived :\"Is Amazon Instant Video available on Apple devices outside of the United States?No, Amazon Instant Video on Apple devices is currently available only in the 50 US states and District of Columbia.\"The same goes with the different app stores by country... I understand the bureocratic hardships, but it's hard to believe that in the age of globalization we can't have such services at global level." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I don't understand the logic behind lack of airplay support. Can anyone explain the rationale?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I must have missed a lot of your comments. I just went through all your threads. I must say they are tremendously useful. Thanks!There was a time when HN first page would be more full of startup material (in which case you would have been able to educate us all lot more).This is what necessitates tagging on HN - newmogul too could have been just one more section on HN filtered by economy and finance related threads. The community definitely has a huge overlap." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I hope he isn't leaving to pursue a new career as an Erlang programmer." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It was nice having an actual lawyer around here instead of the usual bunch of bloviators.Hopefully you're off to do something interesting!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Sad to see you go. Still following your blog. Great stuff.What would a community do differently if it didn't want people like you to feel misplaced? Just too technical?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "You'll be missed George, you're like NYC on /. only (much) less abrasive.There was some pretty good stuff in your postings, I know I learned from them.I hope to see you back here some day!this one should probably be in your bookmarks:http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_010.html" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Before the city officials left, they commended LeMessurier for his courage and candor, and expressed a desire to be kept informed as the repair work progressed. Given the urgency of the situation, that was all they could reasonably do. \"It wasn't a case of 'We caught you, you skunk,'\" Nusbaum says. \"It started with a guy who stood up and said, 'I got a problem, I made the problem, let's fix the problem.' If you're gonna kill a guy like LeMessurier, why should anybody ever talk?\"I was waiting for this line throughout the first 2/3rds of the story. The story began almost framing LeMessurier as criminally incompetent, failing on a flourish and retiring to his private island to consider it, but he not only acted with incredible responsibility but discovered flaws in NYC's building test codes and typical practices concerning joint construction while building an effective response team to fix it.I suppose it makes the whole thing more dramatically structured to insinuate a little bit of character transformation and reveal, but that guy deserves the kind of acclaim that was reserved until the last few paragraphs." }, { "score": 1, "text": "And this is why I dislike the way that software people misuse the word \"engineer\".Engineer means something. It means, \"The person who signs off on the design and who is liable if the design sucks.\" If you're not legally liable for your software, you shouldn't be called a software engineer.In fact in some states misusing the word engineer is against the law. For instance see http://www.tbpe.state.tx.us/eng_req.htm where it says that using the word engineer in your title is against the law if you are not, in fact, an engineer." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Beautifully-written article - wouldn't usually spend half an hour reading about construction engineering but the article really drew me in." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Use the link below to view the story in a more readable form:http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.edu%2F... [viewtext.org]" }, { "score": 4, "text": "One nuance of the story that I think is the most interesting is that the problem wasn't discovered until LeMessurier decided to look back on his completed design and re-review some parts of it out of intellectual curiosity.Sometimes when I'm nostalgic, vain, or super-bored I'll go back and read code that I've written. Sometimes I find something that I've forgotten and once in a while I'll find bugs. Having that curiosity (or is it just excessive pride?) is a good thing in my opinion." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> How using Google Images can cost you $8,000Better title: “How wilfully infringing copyright can cost you $3,000”> We were under the mistaken impression that before anyone could be sued, the offender had to ignore a request to take down the copyrighted image.That’s only if a third party, i.e. not you, put it up on your site." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Wait, so someone is surprised that taking an image they found through Google image search and just pasted onto their blog is copyright infringement?What did they think would happen?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "2. We should’ve noticed that the photo used in the blog wasn’t up to par. It just wasn’t a good shot, and there are about 5,000 others would’ve been better suited for the post. Which has absolutely nothing to do with anything here except sour grapes grumbling. "Yes, we took the photo, but it was a bad photo"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Flagged, because this is a complete non-story. It's not interesting, it's not well written, they probably feel like they've come out ahead by getting lots of views for their crappy blog. I know everyone on HN wants to pile on and show how smart they are that, but it's basically just long-form flamebait and we've been sucked in." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This is one of those rare examples where copyright enforcers have my support. There's just too much image theft on the 'net. I would like to find out the name of the lawyer who got $3K out of them. I've had pics stolen, and usually there's no recourse. DMCA helps, but how long can you sit around monitoring the 'net?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "...And some of them highlight just how steep a hill it is to bring tech matters to the general public's attention:https://twitter.com/#!/herpderpedia" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Well today, i feel great. I am essentially glad that the community can stand as a whole and keep aside their mutual competitive agendas. Today will defiantly be seen as a special day when they teach \"internet history\" to the next generation. And it feels great to be a part of it and witness it first hand. Plus seeing my non-geek friends posting about SOPA is not very bad either." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Others were mentioning before today that \"Twitter should black out because it's one of the few services the people in the government use, so they would experience the impact of SOPA.\"Twitter is a sounding board for the internet, and I think by having it available, SOPA is getting much more attention than it would have gotten than if it was blacked out. 250k/hr regarding one topic sure is nothing to sneeze at!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "As wonderful as this is, we've got to remember that tweets are only a symptom of success. We've got to continue translating virtual action into actual action, like the NY Tech Meetup did today.Even with that, I'm familiar with at least one SOPA agnostic who walked right by without noticing them. This still doesn't feel life and death to the Bobs and Marys around the country." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This means nothing b/c if there were a vote, less than 10% of the people would show up at the polls over this issue... that's actually probably very very optimistic." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Or, just name your company quickly and move on. We lost a couple weeks early on to naming Matasano, and after some false starts, eventually gave up and thumbed through a list of exotic plants. By the time the book of plants had been opened, the naming premise had been accepted: we were done trying to find a semantically \"fitting\" name for the company. We just picked a plant with a cool name.We ran into two \"problems\" down the road; first: it turns out that a \"Matasano\" is a \"quack doctor\" in South America, which we discovered shortly after hiring someone from Argentina. We quickly convinced ourselves that the irony was a value-add, not a cost.Second, we kept getting confused with Monsanto. This sounds (a little) sillier than it actually is. A lot of our clients, particularly back in 2006-2007, were large enterprises where the staff was particularly likely to have some confusion. We had more serious conversations about renaming over the Monsanto thing than over the \"quack doctor\" thing.Ultimately, we just got over it and kept plowing forward. Equity goes into your name; it usually doesn't get extracted from your name. There's some sense in picking a good name, but keep in mind that weeks of time --- which is what we were facing --- is a very steep price to pay for something that might only be marginally important down the road.I submit that the term \"Airbnb\", while memorable, has very little intrinsic meaning to most people who rent out their places on Airbnb. Ebay has none whatsoever. \"Heroku\" was one of YC's biggest acquisitions; that name breaks one of the rules of thumb of this post (3 syllables, yet means nothing to its customers). \"Stripe\" and \"Square\" and \"Paypal\" are great names, but \"Braintree\" seems to be doing pretty well too, and if \"Braintree\" is OK, I humbly suggest that \"Mindweasel\" and \"Thoughtpants\" will work too.This is a good post. All I'm saying is, be careful of the procrastinate-y issues that come up early in your company. They all matter less than execution on everything else." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Hey guys you know what is a cool name? HeyZap. There's a lot of names you could call your company, like Zap Hey, or Hi Nap. But I really like HeyZap. You know what looks awesome? Lighting bolts. You know what name has a Z which looks like a lighting bolt? HeyZap. Did I mention HeyZap is a cool name? Do you like the name HeyZap? If you're trying to name a company I think you should pick a name which really has PUNCH, something disruptive, something like HeyZap. Don't you think HeyZap is a great name? Obviously you're not going to think of a name as cool as HeyZap, but if HeyZap wasn't already taken you should really think about naming your company HeyZap. Has anyone heard of HeyZap? It has an awesome name, it's HeyZap. We really put a lot of effort in; we tried HelloBuzz, HiZing, GreetingsEbullience but we finally decided on HeyZap. It's just so catchy, HeyZap, HeyZap, HeyZap." }, { "score": 2, "text": "A good list of considerations. The most important ones I think are still the classic two:1) Emotive - The name should evoke some sort of emotional connection. This is essential to being memorable and likable. This is why computers.com and chairs.com are not so great for selling computers and chairs unless you are going for mass-market, price-based, SEO-optimized, unbranded sales.2) Meaning - The name should evoke some sort of actual meaning associated with your product. This becomes less important as a company becomes established. When a name is established is the right time to separate the meaning component, not when the company is formed. Apple was formerly Apple Computer, but Apple would have been a terrible name choice in 1979 because it would require too much explanation.Hipmunk is terrible name for a travel product, despite Jude calling that out as a good one. It has decent, if confusing, emotive response, and zero meaning or association with travel. Establishing that as a travel brand will be much more work than, say Kayak, which has at least some association with travel. I, for one, struggle to recall \"Hipmunk\" much more than Travelocity, Kayak, or Orbitz.AirBNB is a good name, but fails is the secondary concern of being easy to communicate and spell. Despite that, it is strong in the two primary concerns above, so it is ultimately a good name. I agree with Jude that at some point they may follow the path of Apple and reduce the name to a more essential emotive component, such as just Air." }, { "score": 3, "text": "... All that and the best you could come up with was \"Heyzap\"?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Something missing here: SEO considerations. It matters less as the days pass, but there is still value to getting an important keyword or two in the domain name (or to be the important keyword, better still).This is especially true if your business is planning to generate lots of business through organic. Especially false if it doesn't." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Let's see. Linkbait title, latest buzzword, consistent use of \"bureaucracy\" (I do not think that word means what you think it means - you cannot wave a magic DevOps wand and make bureaucracy go away) and insinuations that operations departments are \"outdated\"... Yeah, seems like a worthwhile article with a good point.I sure want Joe Random Engineer committing code that goes live on our real, grown-up site, where we make real money, and a failure leads to us losing real money. Ops departments exist so that that can't happen. If that means you have to wait a day before testing your latest code in production, I don't see this as a bad thing.The \"cultural problem\" is in people who think that operations departments don't need to exist because \"like, how hard is it to run servers? We'll just put it 'on the cloud' and magically all of our security, reliability, and availability problems will be solved\"The biggest piece of nonsense is this concept of a \"private cloud\". What the fuck is a private cloud? Oh, you mean a remote datacenter, like we've had since the 70s. OK." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Jamming ephemeral cloud infrastructure into an ITIL-style bureaucracy is like jamming a square peg into a round hole. You can push as hard as you want -- it ain't gonna fit." }, { "score": 2, "text": "looks like somebody didn't like it when boss said \"no, you can't put the new accounting system on heroku\"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "A few of the responses here are snarky and understandably so considering the author's reasons for this post, yet the problem remains. How does cloud computing fall within the traditional IT ops model? Anecdotally I've worked for a large city and they're still a little hesitant of cloud computing because they see it as a threat to their employees. I'm not sure how it'll shake out but they'll move towards cloud computing eventually and developers instead of operations could/should manage it." }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"agile management\" is pretty much always going to mean \"less management,\" so it's understandable that management is kind of schizophrenic about the DevOps movement" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Why is this website not banned yet? They're very well known plagiarists.http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/infosec_institute/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's interesting that this malware only targets certain models of Dell PowerEdge servers with particular RAID controllers. Since the average terrorist isn't likely to be using one of these, it would seem that the purpose of this malware is for spying on businesses or government agencies." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Here's another reason why using a free BIOS like Coreboot is a great idea - if malware attempts to reflash it with an infected copy of presumably the original proprietary BIOS, it will be very, very obvious.Another "tamper detection" idea, if you're OK with using proprietary BIOS and/or Coreboot isn't supported, is to add a small piece of code to the existing BIOS that simply hashes the ROM contents and prints out a human-readable string to the boot screen based on that. If it goes missing or changes, then you can suspect something happened. Of course, the trick is to not have everyone doing this with the same code, or backdoors will just detect and spoof it. I modded the BIOS of an old machine I have to do this, it prints out "Customised by {my handle}"." }, { "score": 3, "text": "If the page author reads this: I find the delayed sidebar animation very annoying. Also so distracting I'd say the "Want to learn more?" boxes are less effective this way." }, { "score": 4, "text": "So, I was making the correct determination when requiring that all server and desktop hardware puchased by my companies originate from BRICS nations. Avoiding dell/cisco/juniper/hp for networking equipment, and opting for Custom RK3188 and AllWinner A23-based routers/switches and desktop thin clients running (Debian/Angstrom) linux are gonna throw more than one wrench in any surveillance plans.I wonder how many exploits the Five Eyes have for Tahoe-LAFS running on LVM disks. I'm betting on very few." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Cool article. Our office is down the street from the American Underground and I'm down there fairly regularly. The space is definitely starting to gain quite a bit of traction and is getting to be a popular location for small teams that need a starter office. The Underground's growth is probably due to the growth of the Durham entrepreneurial community in general. There has been a lot of startup activity in the area over the past couple of years and it doesn't show any signs of slowing.I'd love to see Durham get a co-working space of some sort (something I've heard is in works), which might be a way for even smaller teams to meet other people and work together." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I worked in the adzerk office this past weekend during Triangle Startup Weekend. At first I was a little bothered by the lack of natural light but I quickly got used to it and actually enjoyed the environment/architecture there.Since moving to the triangle though, I think the best decision I've made is moving to Durham. It's still affordable, has a lot of character, and offers the same amenities that Raleigh and Chapel Hill offer. I think this why the startup scene in Durham is taking off." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's awesome to see NC on the front page of HN and it not be related to how backwards our new broadband laws are. :DI was curious if anything similar to American Underground existed in the state, glad to see it does. Thanks for writing!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Durham gets a bit of a bad rep from the rest of the state, but it's an awesome little city on the quiet - in addition to the tech startup scene, it has a blossoming food truck community, a big arts scene, tons of bars, and they didn't bat an eyelid when my wife and I applied to get married by CCB Plaza in Pac-Man outfits last year :).(and on that note, when I finally get this damn visa, anybody in the area interested in hiring somebody with sysadmin / JavaScript/Ruby development experience? ;))" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Durham's a great town putting a lot of effort into enticing startups to settle there. Check out Bull City Forward http://bullcityforward.org/ an incubator backed in part by the city." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Ok - VCs are not like record labels. I'm convinced. Who cares?I know this post is by a venerable member of the HN community and so questioning his posts may get me downvoted into oblivion, but I read this post and wondered why this matters at all." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've seen VC being called the \"dark side\" of entrepreneurship a few times (as in \"I launched a startup, got a successful exit and I now turned to the dark side of VC\"). It's of course partly joking, but probably also revealing of how VCs are seen by the startup entrepreneurs.I really says something about the record industry when comparing that \"dark side\" to the recording industry is seen as derogatory to the \"dark side\".Kinda reminds me of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStanda... on tvtropes.org" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Seems to me the fundamental economic difference is that record labels control distribution, so they have much more leverage than VCs.edit, found a source: \"This pattern is mirrored in many other industries, such as the music industry, where record labels control radio / media distribution and are much more powerful than the actual artists, or the clothing industry, where small designers are beholden to retail outlets and have to take terrible terms to get distribution. The takeaway? Being the distribution platform is a lot better than being a producer.\"[1] http://areallybadidea.com/what-i-learned-from-watching-six-h..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Yea, so the only differences are cause by a less fluid market in the music industry than the venture finance community... Right now - as infomation asymmetries are being solved - labels are losing relevance. I guess the same can be said for VCs too..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I do a lot of work with record labels. VCs are incredibly different than labels, labels do not support innovation...they support packaged hits/artists and are on the way out. But I disagree with the comment, \"Imagine record labels staffed with nothing but the people from successful bands, using their money to give other artists a faster way to the top.\" - Not all VCs are staffed with successful entrepreneurs (some not even entrepreneurs) - I mean what even defines a successful band? By your logic - that would be hits and money - which is no longer an appropriate way to judge." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": " $ crontab -e */3 * * * * curl -m 5 http://myserver.com/ping.txt > /dev/null 2>&1\n\n\nMaybe I'll get their IP address at least." }, { "score": 1, "text": "95% of laptop thieves are not computer saavy. Rest assured they are not examining your hard drive for sensistive data or reading your email, data theft is too sophisticated for laptop thiefs and takes valuable time that could be spent smoking crack, but needless to say changing your online passwords is first order of business. If your laptop was a windows PC then the thief traded it for pot to a cousin who is currently installing pirated games on it. If the laptop was running anything other than windows then the hard drive has been reformatted. If it was a Mac laptop then it was traded to a fence for cash who reformatted it then put it on ebay.Fortunately laptops are getting cheaper. The best policy is buy a cheap laptop and assume it will be lost, stolen, or broken. Treat it as disposable.\n" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I lost a pair of pants once, but it was worth it to leave rapidly.Losing a laptop is never good, it is a reminder to us all to backup. The actual laptop isn't worth very much, but a laptop full of data seems priceless." }, { "score": 3, "text": "1) A car is for transportation, not storage. 2) Laptops, like children, should never be left unattended. 3) No one needs insurance until they need it. 4) Finish your code, make money, and buy a new laptop." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Check ebay for the next week or so. You might be able to buy it back!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I agree that navigation is generally paramount, but some considerations:I don't think that silently discarding the data is the best option. Depeding on the flow of the site, it is possible that notifying them that data will be lost is an option, but also a hinderance to their navigation. Based on that, something to explore would be saving the data to be repopulated when/if they return to the form. Obviously that can be a lot more complex than it sounds, so it would take some planning to make it fluid." }, { "score": 1, "text": "In general, I think navigation trumps everything. Assuming the user knows they're navigating, they're expressing intent to leave whatever they're currently in. Any roadblocks will be an annoyance." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Is the data in the text box to be validated only when leaving the box, or during typing (I'm not assuming browser or native application here)?As qhoxie mentioned, not simply discarding but warning the user or saving a cache if the text box contains more than a simple few characters.When/if the user returns to the page/panel/dialog, scope is immediately brought back to the \"unfinished\" box and validation can continue." }, { "score": 3, "text": "If you are using some sort of enter button to have the user submit their data and they fail to do so before navigating away from the page, then navigation should happen and the data in the text box should be lost.Otherwise the text box data should be acted upon as soon as the user hits the submit button." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Suggestion:Alert box/modal window/whatever:\n\"This will discard the information you entered in [xxx]. Continue?\" a la Safari's \"Are you sure you want to reload this page? You have entered text on ... If you reload the page, your changes will be lost ... reload anyway?\"." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"LATEST BUZZ\nOf all the different bug trackers out there, this is definitely one of them.\"Is that actually saying anything substantial? Maybe it's in jest, in which case I do find it humourous, but if not, it's not necessarily a compliment, is it?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "This looks really slick. avk and I were were planning on building bug tracking features into Outspokes, but we've stopped work on that project. Our original goal was to have a JS widget for teams to collaborate on their sites. Hopefully you guys keep it up and build out what we didn't finish. Let me know if you guys want any feedback or any help." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Since your tracker is oriented towards web development, you might want to take a look at my work here, a Firefox addon for taking screen captures of a web page, marking it up with arrows, highlights, and then posting them to the the bug tracker.This is the addon,\nhttp://ifdefined.com/BugTracker.NET.xpiAnd it works with BugTracker.NET\nhttp://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.htmlIt was the first time I played with the firefox addon technology. I wouldn't recommend my technical approach, injecting a div into the page. If I were inspired to redo it, I would do something more XUL-ish. But I do think that making it fast and easy to capture/annotate/post screenshots is key to making it something people want to use." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I was expecting more of the same old CRUD crap, but was pleasantly surprised. Good luck with it!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "It reminds me of firebug+bug tracking. Very useful for websites. Is there going to be a Mac client so iOS devs can log bugs just as easliy?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Looking at the hash rate reductions and how it seems to be explicitly controlled first (1) to drop just below 50% and then (2) fading out, it's almost as if Satoshi was thinking (1) build trust in the network by not maintaining a 51+% attack position and (2) the network is self-sustainable, my work here is done." }, { "score": 1, "text": "> It's clear that Satoshi was able to achieve some sort of fine tuned [hash-rate] control. I'm not sure how such control could be maintained, but I'm willing to guess that the standard client on a home PC wouldn't be able to do it.This is something the operating system can provide (or another application). No need for a 'special' client." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I find it increasingly hard to believe that Satoshi was one person. It is, however, in the best interest of everyone but journalists that they keep their identities hidden to avoid ad hominem attacks." }, { "score": 3, "text": "From this can we estimate what kind of hardware Satoshi was using? Like was it feasible to get that hash rate on 1 desktop computer back then, or would he have been using a large number of computers?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "very interesting read.definitely makes it seem as though Satoshi was a group of people running many machines.would be very interested to see more content like this in the future from other early-stars of the BTC world." } ]