How do you hire developers? - <AUTHOR> I am still an active developer myself but being company owner I also hire temp developers (mostly consultants ) here and there. Some of those temps worked with me for years though ;) .
I normally put desired fields of expertise but it is never Language XXX developer, ThisNewShinyYetAnother Web Framework developer etc. etc. Instead I ask what kind of projects they did and how. And how they would approach the problem I want them to solve for me. Sometimes a little test, like go home spend a day creating this little project in any language of your liking and get paid for it.
So I completely dumbfounded when looking at modern job listings: Language X: 5 years, Framework Y: 3 years, this: 2 years, that: 7 years. What, there is a factory that just bakes those? And how about ability to think and be smart and creative and able to solve problems disregarding language/framework? Where is a checkbox for that?
I do not want React/Vue/Svelte/Whatever  developer to build this web front end for me. I want a person who understands how web development works in general, how to account for business and scalability requirements in general, how not to get locked in etc. etc. I've never seen these mentioned in requirements. So as I've already said I am puzzled. <comment><USER2> The requirements are meant to discourage people who won't cut it. Everyone else has to make it through the interviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are thinking like a founder, you need smart people to solve problems, not a react engineer, or a vue engineer etc.

Most job postings are usually created by recruiters that get details from the teams on what skills are needed. So the ads read like an ingredient list of sorts.

And like you said, the job ad needs to state what the responsibilities are and should detail the current stack so people know what they are applying for, but that shouldn't be used to exclude quality candidates. I have hired people with no experience in a specific language but by talking to them they were highly competent engineers and I wasn't worried about them picking up a new language.

One of my major disagreements with the current hiring methodologies is that it rewards people who study for a test of sorts but may not really have experience solving real world problems. Or other "tests" that focus on whether someone can write some useless piece of code just to satisfy the interviewer that the person is competent. But the reality is it never accomplishes what hiring engineers think, because they didn't really talk to the person to figure out what they know, what their experience is and whether they understand architecture or coding choices really. I've been interviewing engineers (as well as everyday business team members) for somewhere around 25 years now. I went through the dotcom boom/bust where we did some weird interviewing methods many that seem to have made a sad come back again. And the key thing hiring always comes down to is understanding peoples decision making process more than their ability to write code for this contrived problem in the next 2 hours.

I do not use coding exercises at all with candidates, and I do not give them take home tests or anything of the sort. I have found it commonly eliminates the very people I need to attract. I want the guy who is smart and thinks through problems and who has experience and values his time. I want the guy who when he sticks his resume out he has 20 people wanting to interview him and he doesn't have the time to do everyones 4-6 hour "test" plus another 4-6 hours of interviews, because if he did that for everyone he'd drop the ball at his current position. I want to talk to these people, I want to walk through problems with them (sometimes walk through code I provide so they can comment on it and I can ask them questions), I want to talk about what they have solved and how, and I need to see that they can communicate with me & the team as well as fit in. Of course I ask them specific language questions if I am hiring for a specific need, but I don't care about seeing them write some piece of code in the next 2 hours, I just want to know how smart they are and where they have weaknesses (since we all do). And I need to hire people that complement my teams weaknesses not multiply them.

*edit to add this -- Also the reason I can hire really good candidates before others most of the time is my rule is from initial contact to decision is 5 days or less. That means while other companies are screwing around we already made a decision and gave them an offer or passed on them. Most startup hiring processes take weeks to get through and suck up a huge amount of time from company engineers, founders etc taking away from dev/product time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with everything except the tests. Ususlly do not need those but id did happen couple of times when I wanted to be absolutely sure that the person can work in particular domain. Basically take it home and come back in a week or whenever you feel like. The test was the actual problem but greatly simplified and should not take more then a day to solve so the person gets paid for a day.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with you when a candidate has already been through a thorough interview process but the company has some concerns around a special and unique area of concern. It is very fair IMO to ask someone to do a little test around that special area or go through a more detailed interview there, I've done this for specific candidates myself too. But that area needs to be something so considerably unique to your business that the person can't have conceivably done it 20 times before. What is ridiculous is asking them to solve a puzzle unrelated to the job, or write loops or look up data from a database when all those things are something they have done likely 100's of times and you can easily ask questions around. In this specific case, I don't think a small test is out of line at all, as long as it is paid and short and the person knows they are the short list ready for an offer, or an offer has been made contingent on the test.

What I object to is all these companies that do a 10 minute call (or not even) and then ask a candidate to spend many unpaid hours doing a test before they even bother seeing if the candidate is a fit for the position. And frankly, even paying for it doesn't make it fair for most experienced engineers. For example, I have seen most companies that do offer to pay, offer typically around $50 for 4 hours or $20-40/hr and they want an NDA that contains non- compete clauses many times. I have seen 5 startups doing this in the last few months, one was a company I had been mentoring off and on, the others were mainly companies friends had applied at and were dumbfounded. But if you take my scenario where the test is legit, you are testing something that is specialized knowledge and isn't useless to the company so you need to pay a fair consulting wage for the time, not a discount amount. Hopefully that makes sense, it does in my head but I am not sure I articulated it well.

The overall goal is move through interviews fast, find smart candidates that will solve problems and don't put so much emphasis on meaningless details. I have seen a few companies doing a solid technical interview and they do ask quite a few algorithm based questions. I normally would disagree with algorithm questions when they are done just as a CS question. But when they are being asked because the candidate will literally need to be implementing them or understanding them at a deep level because the product and position being interviewed for is handling millions of distributed transactions a second or something similar, then they are legit and very necessary questions. But they are more or less useless (with a few exceptions) when you are a startup and you don't even have a working product or customers, in that case, the company just needs people with experience to get the product out the door and stop worrying about crazy algorithm questions or useless tests.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix movie 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' to change the way we watch TV – again - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/netflix-movie-black-mirror-bandersnatch-wants-change-way-we-watch-ncna952951 <comment><USER2> Watched many of the paths in the movie. I seriously doubt this will change anything just like choose your own adventure books didn't change how the majority of books are written.

The format actually annoyed me. It just felt pretentious somehow. I want to be told a story passively, not wonder if I missed half of a TV show.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't have linear movie types make interactive content. Instead have game producers publish on Netflix, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think interactive storytelling is awesome. It's where the fun comes from in D&D, CYOA books, and many video games.

Also, Ayn Rand wrote a play, "Night of January 16th"[0], where the audience plays the role of the jury, deciding how the play ends. It's cool to see these ideas brought into the modern era.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_January_16th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_January_16th)</comment>


The origin of Silicon Valley's dysfunctional attitude toward hate speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/origin-silicon-valley-dysfunctional-attitude-toward-hate-speech <comment><USER2> There is little or nothing in this agitprop essay that actually undermines or even directly confronts McCarthy's original points. There's two irreconcilable philosophical positions at play here: either you believe that there are things - like preventing people from seeing "hurtful" humor - that are more important than freedom of expression, or you believe that freedom of expression is foundational for all other human freedoms. Neither side is ever going to convince the other because they want to live in fundamentally different worlds. If you're on the former side, your only option is to silence your opponents; if you're on the latter, your only option is to resist being silenced.

<comment><USER3> Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare? It works in basically all aspects of public life and things seem (more or less) alright.

<comment><USER4> There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".

<comment><USER5> It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.

<comment><USER6> > It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm.

Society is not a uniform group with a single way of thinking.

<comment><USER7> apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact. Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.

<comment><USER6> > Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our > social interactions.

I agree, but as far as I know in the US the spirit behind such interactions is pretty much described in the constitution, and the first amendment makes it very clear that freedom of opinion/expression is paramount, no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The attitude this piece bemoans is something that used to be widespread in Internet culture, and I am sad to see it dying out.

I suppose the goal to make a freer world out of the Internet was always destined be lost. The battle against the Clipper chip was a huge victory for that culture and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA were a huge loss. But it was a loss the culture was conscious of, a bid by outside forces to keep it from getting "too big for its britches."

Now it feels like that culture has been entirely swallowed up. Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are beholden to advertising dollars and their internal speech mores look, from outside Silicon Valley, to be indistinguishable from other circles of their location and social class.

</comment><comment><USER9> As others have noted, this article is terrible.

That is unfortunate though, because the book it is based on looks really really interesting. I am thinking that The New Yorker (although is seems with Mr. Cohen's help) just chose the most "out-of-touch-liberal-that-only-has- rich-people-for-friends-way" to spin the book. That is sad because again, the book looks good.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Ah, the walking corpse of yellow journalism!

The ultimate problem is that so much power has been centralized by the surveillance industry, that the politicking gadflys can't not come buzzing. Google, Twitter, Reddit et al are already turning over every rock hunting for our time's communists, but according to this article they still aren't prostrating themselves hard enough! The choosing of the losing strategy of appeasement never cease to amaze me - this is what _real power_ looks like in a democracy!

The obvious answer is to let these centralized surveillance cesspools wither and die, assisted by the blight such as this article. The Free world will move past the sinkhole of "web 2.0" and on to uncensorable decentralized communications. As the identity politickers (aka racists) turn grey, their kids will be discovering the actual Internet.

</comment><comment><USER11> I get a sense from this article of being slightly satirical (while also being blatantly critical).

The following quotes illustrate my intuition a little more clearly.

From the article:

"newsgroups...that streamed onto the school's computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today's Internet forums."

"I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. "Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance," they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide."

Along with the retro-looking GIF, the specific mention of Usenet's age, as well as the use of the word "terminal" seem to make a connection. Specifically, it seems to be drawing a parallel between this type of thinking (censoring free speech to protect certain groups) and old technology.

One may find this analysis off-base, but it caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd share.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am a fan of Cyberspace Manifesto. I think one reason where normal people don't appreciate freedom of speech and computer experts do is the analogy between our own thought processes and communicating with other people.

We certainly don't want society to censor our own thoughts (with technology). But why should the government then censor willing communication between two people? From a computing perspective, those are the same.

Sadly, as was already noted, the article is nowhere close to arguing this point.

</comment><comment><USER13> I disagree with absolutely everything in this article, and while the whining that "nobody responded directly" to various complaints is likely an exaggeration, I will nonetheless offer my piece:

>Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful

Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from doing that, they start to distrust the authorities.

>Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media.

It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications; it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you.

That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are _private spaces_. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy: Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as _public_ communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her _private_ communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades fighting against one of Brown's key premises.

>One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the _Stanford Review_ , a sort of collegiate _Breitbart News_ for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in "The Diversity Myth," his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, "Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings."

>Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team's attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel.

Peter Thiel and the _Stanford Review_ do not play an integral role in the events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article. The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel and, apparently, _Breitbart_ , even though the author presents no evidence of such an association.

>That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted.

If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan, you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your government doesn't find out about it, that is. Being from a refined background has _nothing_ to do with being able to say what you want on the Internet, unless a government or corporation intervenes in precisely the way the New Yorker wants -- then it really will be only the right kind of people who can say what they want on the Internet. If you have money, you'll always be able to buy your way around censorship; it's the people from un-refined backgrounds who are actually censored.</comment>


SCOTUS Denies Certiorari - <AUTHOR> http://www.peirson.guru/?p=693

<comment><USER2> I'm usually the last person to regard information as out-of-scope, but can you explain how this is relevant to hackernews?</comment>


The nuclear reactor in your basement - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-02-nuclear-reactor-basement.html <comment><USER2> What a wonderful description of the new theory behind Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, which used to be known as cold fusion.

Essentially ...

"We start by processing nickel so that it can hold hydrogen the way a sponge holds water. The hydrogen is ionized, meaning that each hydrogen atom has its electron stripped away, leaving only a proton. Electrons in the metal are made to oscillate together in such a way that the electromagnetic energy stored in tens of thousands of them is transferred to a relative few, giving them enough energy to merge with nearby protons (the hydrogen ions) and form slow-moving neutrons. Those neutrons, as we noted, are immediately captured by nuclei of the metal atoms, setting in motion a chain of events which turns the nickel into copper and releases useful energy."

When Widom-Larsen Weak Interaction LENR Theory is better understood ...

"One percent of the nickel mined each year could meet the world's energy requirements at around a quarter of the cost of coal."

Hopefully, renewable energy costs will be even lower, but LENR is far, far better than fossil fuels regarding climate change, and space exploration - which is why NASA is sponsoring the research.</comment>


What's the best country for a baby to be born in in 2013? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life?fsrc=scn/tw/te/eoy/Dec29

<comment><USER2> So Ireland is now the 12th best place to be born!

Not sure about that. For starters, we're up to our neck in debt.

Nothing is planned here with the long term interest of the general population at heart. We have a dysfunctional political system.

For example, we've never had a debate on immigration and yet from about 0% 15 years ago, now about 25% of births are to foreign born mothers.

And now the leader of the party that, while in government, bankrupted us just a little while ago, is again the most popular party leader according to the latest opinion polls.

I'd take this prediction with a pinch of salt.</comment>


Why You're Experiencing JavaScript Fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://www.joshmanders.com/javascript-fatigue <comment><USER2> Chasing the shiny new also lends to version 1.0 types of problems. You would have designed it differently if you had _just_ known that one thing you didn't totally understand. If you are working with your well known toolset you are much less likely to get the design wrong. Also not just using the shiny and new for each new project, the long lived project that has chased the shiny and new and has way too many shiny and new frameworks that have since been thrown on the trash-heap of development time.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any service that lets me push code and it automatically scales? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a solution like Heroku where I can push my code to but without the restriction of the limited resources that Heroku provides (without me having to manually upgrade resources).
I know ec2 can handle this kind of thing but if I understand correctly, it would still require me to write extra code to start and stop ec2 instances based on traffic.
I want to be able to just upload my web app somewhere and have it scale no matter how many requests it get. I shouldn't have to manually purchase resources, that should happen automatically based on the traffic the app is getting and the resources it needs to support that traffic. <comment><USER2> You don't want EC2, you want AWS Elastic Beanstalk. However it only supports Java, .NET and PHP: <http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/>

</comment><comment><USER3> google app engine. set the request delay in admin console, architect for scalability with datastore (or use less scalable cloud sql). choice of python, go, java (and jvm languages like clojure).

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks interesting, but it doesn't support RoR or node :(</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Do you want a "small talk" filter for twitter? - <AUTHOR>

It might be interesting to build one in a way similar to a spam filter complete with a "Report small talk" and "Not small talk" buttons. <comment><USER2> Check out Philtro ("A Personal Noise Filter for Twitter"): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730819>

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know how I can get around this error? I tried deleting the Philtro cookies, but it didn't help.

"Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit."

<comment><USER2> Posting the error to Hacker News probably isn't the best way to get support. Email the Philtro people: <http://www.philtro.com/contact/></comment></comment></comment>


An easy way for NYC renters to schedule apartment showings - <AUTHOR> http://www.nakedapartments.com/blog/showings-on-demand/

<comment><USER2> I just rented an apartment in NYC this week and using Naked Apartments and RentHop were great -- forget about Craigslist. Naked Apartments combines duplicate listings which was definitely a helpful feature in my search. This new feature seems really great and helps prevent waiting around for email replies (some brokers are ridiculously fast, some aren't).

<comment><USER3> Craigslist is completely useless in NYC, but largely as a result of brokers poisoning the well. They will indiscriminately post in roommate categories, no-fee categories, and basically any category remotely related to real-estate.

I've seen coverage about some NYC apartment startups recently, and while some of these features are useful, I keep hoping for someone to come in and actually fix the _core_ problems with NYC real estate - i.e., brokers.

There was a startup that had some buzz locally a few months ago when they launched who claimed to be upsetting the broker order, except it turns out they were doing this by becoming a mega-broker themselves and charging basically the same brokerage rates as brokers. Meet the new boss, etc.

If there's any aspect of NYC that desperately needs generous application of our "disruption" buzzword, it's renting.

<comment><USER4> It's one of those "you aren't the client" situations. The brokers are horrific for apartment searchers, but are more convenient for landlords than trying to show and rent units themselves.

Very large apartment complexes (e.g. Stuyvesant Town) tend to have in house sales staff. Although even there some poor schlimazels end up needlessly paying a fee.

<comment><USER5> It seems rather silly that they don't charge their clients though, instead charging their victims.

If they directly charged the landlords, maybe some of them would consider whether the service is worth 10-15% of a year's income.

<comment><USER4> Who pays the broker is generally a sign of the market conditions. When it's a renters market the landlord eats the fees, when vacancies are down, like now, it's the other way around.

Also, for all the reasons mentioned in potatolicious's other post [1], it's difficult for a landlord that is renting directly (i.e. without a fee) to convincingly communicate that fact to potential renters.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6027785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6027785)

<comment><USER5> Has it ever been a renter's market in NYC? It seems that NYC's rental market has to have been deeply in favor of landlords for a very long time in order to create a market for these brokers to even exist.

<comment><USER4> In 2002-3, I remember landlords not only paying broker's fees, but also offering 1-2 months free. Then in 2009-10 there was another dip after the banks laid off all those people.

I wasn't renting in the Dinkins' era, but from what I hear it was an entirely different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it very difficult to find a good apartment for rent in NYC? What do people need to know who are unfamiliar with the landscape?

<comment><USER3> It's difficult, but the biggest barrier is money. If you bring a lot of it to the table NYC is not a _huge_ pain to rent in (less so than SF, actually).

Some basic issues:

\- 40X Rule. As a rule of thumb, your rent multiplied by 40 needs to be less than your annual pre-tax income. Failing to meet this means you're probably not getting the apartment, or if you do, you'd be expected to pay a huge deposit, or in some other way mitigate the landlord's risk.

\- Brokers everywhere, and on the whole they are extremely corrupt. In NYC it's very rare to contact an actual landlord through a listing - you're contacting a broker, who will expect a commission of 12-15% _of your annual rent_ for the privilege of being allowed to rent this apartment.

\- Every channel where a renter might contact landlords directly and cut out the broker middleman is flooded with deliberate spam. Bait and switching is common - where they list on a "no fee" listing site, but when you call the apartment "suddenly rented" but there is a broker-fee apartment still available at the same address...

\- Obfuscation is common. Some apartments are exclusively represented by a brokerage firm, where they've come to some arrangement with the landlord. Other apartments are actually fee-less. Brokers will attempt to suppress these apartment listings from getting out into public view, and repost them instead as "their" listings. The easiest way to recognize this is when the posting refuses to reveal the exact address (instead they will list nearby intersections).

\- More bait and switch: brokers will frequently try to upsell with fake listings. This is common done by either posting a very good-looking apartment at a great price, and then arrange the showing. Once you actually show up to see the apartment they will try to pivot you to another, more expensive apartment that you didn't sign up for. This is also frequently done by showing the actual apartment, but relabeling it to be in a more desirable area. You can often tell this is happening if the broker refuses to meet near the listing's location, and instead tells you to meet them "by their office" in a nearby, but less desirable, location.

\- Unlike most aspects of NYC life, there is no effective police action against the above abuses. You can file a complaint with the real estate licensing body, but unlike, say, the taxi licensing body, no real consequences result for the cheating broker.

\- Terminology bingo. NYC is very space constrained, and as such landlords and brokers alike have come up with specialized language to describe their apartments that make them sound better than they actually are. Learning to read between these lines is a pain. A "flex" 2-bedroom actually means a 1-bedroom apartment where a makeshift living space has been constructed in the living room (this can be anything from a semi-legitimate wall to a curtain). A "1 bedroom" is frequently just a plain lie, it's a studio apartment. "Charming" usually means run-down. It takes quite some time to really figure out the hidden meaning behind a lot of apartment postings.

\- Fake apartments altogether. This is particularly true if you're young, not used to renting (even in other cities), and trying to rent without being in the city to look at places. Lots of places will collect rental application fees and then reject all candidates. Rinse and repeat. Warning sign is an abnormally high application fee.

\- Quality of landlord. Sometimes even good-looking apartments are actually run by slumlords who won't fix the heat, won't fix the water, and generally let everything go to shit. Because most NYC apartments rent in a matter of days (if not hours), there is no ability for the renter to do due diligence on the landlord. This is changing - the city has made building complaints public via API, and more and more real estate sites are incorporating this data.

\- Simple noise. This is a real tragedy of the commons situation. Most listing sites are _filled_ with duplicates as one broker tries to out-spam the others. Brokers also spam listings across unrelated sections of sites in the hopes of getting a hit (relabeling a studio as a 1-bed, a 1-bed as a studio, posting it in a different part of the city, etc). Stale listings that no one has bothered to remove. It goes on.

If that hasn't scared you away yet. Welcome, have fun :)

<comment><USER7> Is this specifically Manhattan experience? My experiences in Brooklyn were nowhere near this bad (before I eventually got out of the renter's market and bought here).

<comment><USER3> I suspect so. This has been true for everywhere I've looked - which has been all Manhattan. Even in the more run-down parts of Manhattan (coughChinatowncough) it's still the case.

My impression from coworkers is that it's the same in the "hot" parts of Brooklyn. Park Slope, W'burg, DUMBO, etc. Things may not be so bad further out though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thinking back to apartment hunting in NYC a few months ago makes me want to vomit. I am never going to do it again, I'd rather leave. I had a lucky break that did not involve using any of these services nor a broker.</comment>


I.R.S. Fights Back Against House Republicans' Attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/us/politics/irs-fights-back-against-house-republicans-attacks.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article presents the issue as a partisan one, but on the Democrats' side Elizabeth Warren is currently championing a bill [0] directing the IRS to reduce their cooperation with third-party tax preparation services and develop their own competitor, plus develop a return-free filing method, all without simplifying the tax code in the slightest. Which seems to me to be in a similar vein of demanding that the IRS "fix" the problems caused by our tax code: instead of making the tax code simpler, she wants to just direct the IRS to do people's taxes for them, on top of all the IRS' other responsibilities.

[0] previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492025)

</comment><comment><USER2> The IRS has been a tool for the Democrats for decades. It can't be a coincidence that many more Republican/right leaning groups have been relentlessly audited.

This should also be investigated.

<comment><USER3> it was. it's right in the middle of the article. turns out a bunch of left leaning groups were targeted also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> you can't simplify the tax code without carving out a bunch of corporate welfare that got them elected.</comment>


Multi-monitors and fullscreen Flash video - <AUTHOR>

Currently, Flash video cannot be used as a TV replacement. Thats because any loss of focus of the window will result in the video losing fullscreen.
This is particularly annoying in a multi-monitor scenario, where you may want to use one monitor for video playback. Clicking anything outside the flash window will exit fullscreen mode.
So far, solutions to this problem have involved direct hacking of the Flash binary ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwH_-C2-93E ), but it won't work on the long term.
So any other suggestions? <comment><USER2> This is an irritating problem. Adobe say that its by design for security reasons, similar to how fullscreen flash instances cannot receive keyboard events, to prevent phishing.

The only obvious route that presents itself to me would be to look at how others have patched the binary, and attempt to create some kind of generic patching mechanism that wouldnt require constant revision for each version of flash. That's way out of my depth however, I don't even know if thats possible. Maybe go and ask some people who write cracks/keygens, as thats basically what we're doing. It's also just as illegal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well I'm using the beta flash on the beta ie9 - and much to my great surprise and pleasure fullscreen, while working on another screen, works.</comment>


Tesla Road Trip - Debunking the New York Times - <AUTHOR> http://strassenversion.kinja.com/tesla-road-trip-debunking-the-new-york-times-247951069

<comment><AUTHOR> A number of Tesla Model S owners recreate the trip of NYT's John Broder to prove the cars aren't as awful as the article made them out to be.

Interesting read.</comment>


Ask HN: US-based freelancers - how much is health insurance? - <AUTHOR>

I'm from the UK, my wife is from the US, and we're in the early stages of considering a move to the US, and I was just wondering what the typical range is for health insurance costs for a healthy ~30 year old male freelance programmer.  I'm just looking for a ball park. $500-1000 per month? <comment><USER2> If you have enough savings, you can go with a 'high deductible' plan, in which you cover the first $x thousand dollars out of pocket, then split some costs with insurer, then insurer covers you after $y dollars spent.

The price is highly dependent on what state you live in. In North Carolina, I have a high deductible plan with a $5500 deductible for $270/month, which covers my wife and I, both older than you, and we're not in perfect health.

A side benefit is that if you use a high-deductible plan, you're allowed to put money in a 'health savings account' which is tax deductible, and you can use that money to pay for pretty much any medical expenses you have. It rolls over year to year, and can be treated like any other retirement account (investments, etc).

If you go with more traditional 'i don't ever want to pay anything out of pocket' coverage, you'll likely be looking in the $500-$1000/month range, again, depending on what state you're living in.

For a single person in Michigan, for example, it might only be around $200 - <http://www.bcbsm.com/myblue/plan_individualcareblue.shtml> but similar coverage with a 'high deductible' might only be $60/month - <http://www.bcbsm.com/myblue/plan_flexibleblue.shtml>

<comment><USER3> I did not realize HSA could be rolled over. I am an employee and my place of employment offers an HSA thru AFLAC, but I remember the AFLAC rep stressing that it was a use it or lost it deal.

<comment><USER2> That's not an HSA then - that's a 'cafeteria plan' thing I bet. HSA is your own account via an HSA-capable banking institution. It's basically just another IRA, but you can pay for medical expenses from it with no penalties.

The 'cafeteria plans', IMO, are a bit of a joke, specifically because of the 'use it or lose it' clause, which forces people to waste money or buy stuff they don't need.

I did have one HR person tell me once that they'd cut you a check back for the diff if it wasn't spent, but then it counts as 'taxable income' and this was said with some degree of gravity, as if that was some type of 'ultimate sin' - having taxable income! I'd rather keep the 70% of my money rather than spending it on something vaguely 'medical' that I do not need, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First, I'm about your age, and I'm living in California, so that's where these numbers come from.

If you are /really/ healthy, I mean, no medication, nothing but good checkups in the last three years, you can get really good insurance for well under $500 a month. A high deductible plan where you pay the first three grand a year of expenses might be a better deal at $150-$160, though.

<https://www.kaiserpermanente.org/> is pretty good and has online quotes; that's where I got these quotes.

Now, if you have had anything wrong with you in the last three years, you simply can't buy health insurance without a job, as far as I can tell, for any amount of money. This is the situation I'm currently in, and I'm going to end up getting a job for a few months. The thing is, if you have a job with health insurance, you can continue that health insurance for 18 months after you leave the job (and another 18 months for a total of 3 years, if you are in California.) you just have to pay the premiums. Uh, last time I did that my premiums were $518/month for some /really nice/ insurance that covered everything.

My CORBA just ran out a few months ago. (note, you have to do some legwork to get CAL-Cobra.. you have 60 or 90 days from when your first 18 months is up to do so.)

what's wrong with me? a history of ADD and a (successfully treated) detached retina a few years back... not exactly cancer.

Oh, if you really are perfectly healthy, private insurance is often cheaper than CORBA continuation of group coverage. The problem is that if anything really expensive happens to you, a team of professionals will go over your original insurance application with a fine-toothed comb in an attempt to get you disqualified. Group insurance, on the other hand, you get no matter how sick you were going in, and they can't disqualify you because you made a mistake on your application. (which is why it costs more)

My own personal plan is to get a regular job with health insurance once every three years. At least until 2014 when the new health insurance regulations go into production.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you happen to end up in New York, check out Freelancers Union: <http://freelancersunion.com/>

I'm paying around $300/month for a decent basic PPO and dental (for just myself)

<comment><USER6> anything like this in california?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google for a broker in the area you're moving to and call them. They should be able to generate a quote for you over the phone and give you a more concrete idea of insurance rates for your demographic in that area.

Rates are dependent on many factors, age, tobacco usage and location (sometimes down to your county or zip code for some carriers).

You may be able to find a quote service online as well, depending on the location you're moving to; that way you don't have to talk to anybody.

</comment><comment><USER8> Where in the US will you be living? Based on the current comments, it makes a pretty big difference. I have a plan for my family (me, my wife + 2 kids) and have a very high deductible ($7500) and still pay $500 a month. I live in California. I've seen my rates increase from less than $300 a month to the current $500 a month in the last 2 years. I was one of those hit with Anthems/Blue Cross 40% rate increase this year.

<comment><AUTHOR> If we move, in or near a big city is about as clear as I can be at this stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I paid $270/m for the "best" plan I could get at Kaiser Permanente in SF. (~30, male, no significant health issues.)

<comment><USER6> Doesn't SF have a free health plan that covers anything the city hospital can do. (well not free but you pay with extra tax on retail products). Does this drive down the price of the KP plan?

<comment><USER9> The SF city plan is for individuals who make less than $55K.

I could have paid less for my insurance but I was making a lot of money and hadn't seen a doctor in a decade, so I wanted to make sure any horrible condition I had developed had the best care options available.

<comment><USER6> Do the news articles about Health insurers using the question "do you have any past health issues" and only looking into your past if something expensive comes up.

I read about this woman who had something minor, such as ear infections as a child you, and forgot to put it on the intake form. So years later when she got cancer the Insurer dugg into her past and found the minor issue that she forgot to put on the intake form.

This was such a big deal a Senator grilled the insurance company about it but they responded with "we are just doing what we our stock holders hold us to" or something like that.

I wish I could find the article that talked about this.

<comment><USER4> yup, it's a big deal, and a big reason to get on a group plan rather than getting individual coverage. Keep in mind, though, group plans usually cost more (because they accept unhealthy as well as healthy people, while the individual plans only accept healthy people.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can take a look at actual prices on freelancersunion.com.

Keep in mind that the next couple years are anyone's guess because of all the new healthcare regulations coming in. (A lot of insurance companies are hiking up their prices ahead of 2014 when they will be forced to offer more coverage at lower premiums).

It also really varies by state so you should mention where you are moving to.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for your responses. Some of it feels like I'm trying to understand a foreign language, but I've got enough information to start making some calculations.

Thanks again HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> I pay $200/month for health insurance from State Farm in San Francisco.

I use a high deductible plan because it saves me money, as I'm healthy and prefer to pay cash for low cost items.

</comment><comment><USER12> to add to mgkimsal's answer if you plan on having children and want that be covered be sure to ask about it. You may need extra coverage for such things.

<comment><USER13> I pay about $100/month with a $2500 deductible. Doctor visits are a $10 copay. I'm 27.</comment></comment>


Apple the Black Swan: Wall St. has never understood Apple. - <AUTHOR> http://stratechery.com/2013/apple-the-black-swan/

<comment><USER2> I think the issue Wall Street has with Apple is that they are hard to predict. I think that's a good attribute in a lot of areas but when you are talking about 400B in market cap we are talking about a lot of clams in play and you are going to be penalized if you are not predictable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's part of it. More specifically, their success seems wholly random to your garden variety analyst.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Developers in Edinburgh? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm based in Edinburgh and looking to connect with the development community.
A bit about myself - I'm a technical-turned-business person. There are a few startup ideas in mind that I am hoping to secure funding for. In general, it would be great to just connect with developers to see what's going on and what everyone is up to. I'm also well connected to other startups in Scotland/UK and happy to make introductions if you're looking for something.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> Hi,

I am developer based in Edinburgh. I would recommend popping along to a few meetups. There is something on nearly every night of the week!

[https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/area/62-edinburgh](https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/area/62-edinburgh)

Thanks, Stephen

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, Stephen. Never knew that much was going on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Based between Edinburgh and Glasgow. My email is in my profile and happy to have a chat any time.

<comment><USER4> Same with me, I'm in Edinburgh as well. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Will drop you a note :)</comment></comment></comment>


Major Bug Kills VMware Powered Virtual Servers - <AUTHOR> http://virtualization.com/news/2008/08/12/major-bug-kills-vmware-powered-virtual-servers/ <comment><USER2> FTA: _The problem apparently exists within the software licensing code, rather than the functional part of ESX software.The license code falsely identifies many implementations as being out of license, prevents new virtual machines from launching, or existing VMs from migrating to new hosts._

Another case of anti-piracy junk causing real damage to real, legitimate users. Its gotta be tough when your purchased software accuses you of being a thief and hoses your entire infrastructure to the point of locking your instances away form you so you can't even move them. I'd bet that doing away with licensing algorithms altogether and just accepting the piracy that might happen would have been much better outcome than this for all invloved.</comment>


33 Questions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MarkDunne/33-questions <comment><USER2> Fun to think about, but in the real world, no question neatly divides people, even the gender one. To quote Reddit's u/tailcalled[1], the exo- software/meatspace world is even less standardized than the software world:

Falsehoods programmers believe about gender: [http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods- programm...](http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-gender/)

Falsehoods programmers believe about names: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses: [http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe- ab...](http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about- addresses/)

Falsehoods programmers believe about time: [http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- programm...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

More falsehoods programmers believe about time: [http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods- pro...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time-wisdom)

Falsehoods programmers believe about geography: [http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en](http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en)

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1fc147/falsehoo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1fc147/falsehoods_programmers_believe_about_addresses/ca8sirp)

<comment><USER3> I dislike some of the examples of the "falsehoods programmers believe about time" because they typically _aren 't_ falsehoods, and will always hold true within the constraints of your system. Yes, time is a fickle thing that is marred by history, but in building a system, I choose a representation for the data I am storing in it. If I choose to store dates using a Gregorian calendar (because I'm following ISO-8601), then,

> Months have either 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.

Does hold true: months do have 28 to 31 days, _by definition_. If someone wants my Gregorian date in a different calendar system, then we must convert, but that a display issue. Otherwise, we're comparing apples and oranges, and of course all bets are off.

It's kind of like time: the hour "2 AM" never repeats itself on random politically appointed days, because I have chosen to store timestamps in UTC. If someone wants to see that timestamp in "PST" (or America/Los_Angeles), then that's a display issue that can be accommodated, but it does not suddenly violate the fact that "2 am" never repeats in UTC.

Of course, in real life, people don't know what timezone their date is stored in and things love to break randomly on DST switch-overs or leap days or the ends of leap years.

<comment><USER4> 2am doesn't even repeat in the local timezone, it's just that the timezone changes. So here for example, 1:59:59 am CDT increments to 1:00:00 CST, which does not conflict with the earlier 1:00:00 CDT. I think it would be better not to go through all this hassle though, myself.

<comment><USER3> Nitpicking a bit, but I'd usually argue that the TZ doesn't change: You went from "America/Chicago" to "America/Chicago". The timezone encapsulates more than just the offset: it also includes when and how DST works. Merely, you went from "1:59:59 am America/Chicago DST=true" to "1:00:00 am America/Chicago DST=false". I'd say this is just terminology, since "CDT" and "CST" work just as well (and how I envision it in my head, mostly due to the official TZ name being "America/Chicago").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this problem is solvable in any elegant form, but it is solvable. You'll just end up with massively conjunctive questions that you can't even hold in your head at once, like "27: Are you a non-practicing Catholic with exactly three children, or an asian owner of a minivan produced between 1998 and 2004 that isn't green, or a licensed boat mechanic with astigmatism, or..." and so on for the next 6 pages.

In short, you can draw categories to include or exclude as precise a number as you like, you just have to be willing to draw really, really complicated boundaries.

<comment><USER6> Here's my admittedly naive Sunday afternoon spitball on an elegant solution:

I like the idea of a human UUID/GUID type identifier.

I would also like to think that this is solvable using strictly biological and physical properties, sampled at birth.

Otherwise, time and culture factors would seem make it difficult to produce a static set of "apples to apples" questions and answers.

I wonder if the right maths applied to existing genetic and forensics big data sets could produce the 33 questions.

<comment><USER7> DNA is your UUID/GUID

<comment><USER8> Unless you're one of a set of twins/triplets/etc.

<comment><USER9> append datetime string of birth. Boom problem solved.

<comment><USER10> What if the twins are delivered via Caesarean, with the exact same datetime recorded? Including datetime (even as a string) also includes the aforementioned falsehoods about time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > To contribute to the project, open up a pull request and add your question > to the list below. All questions are open to debate and discussion.

This is a completely wrong way to approach the problem. Because the questions should all divide the population into two parts the questions should be 'matched' to each other. This approach is a bit like doing a PCA by figuring out one component, then the other, then the rest...

One way to solve this problem is to have a lot of yes/no questions (like a big Karnaugh-table), then everybody would have a long bitstring as his unique ID. Now you need to compress that bitstring -- like the minimization of the Karnaugh-table.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map)

\-- you need to generalize this for N number of questions (which can be done), then you'd have 33 complex questions like 'is it true that (you live in NA AND you are male) OR (you live in Canada AND you are white AND ) .. and so on and on.

</comment><comment><USER12> Assuming that the person doesn't necessarily need to know their answer (which is important for babies anyways) the answer is trivial. The first question would be "Given that we ordered all humans in order of the time of their birth, would the 1st bit of your position in the ordering be 1?", continue the other 32 questions with the remaining 32 bits.

<comment><USER13> lol too much

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting thought experiment. A few random thoughts:

Reminds me of Panoptic by the EFF: [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

Everyone's ID would change as time passed (if they move, if they age, if they get a sex change, etc).

The best questions for this are inherently "irrelevant", since "relevant" questions tend to be statistically linked. So, questions like "Was the second letter of your first girlfriend's middle name between A and M?" is better than "Were you younger than 20 when you had your first girlfriend?", since we can likely guess the latter based on the other statistics.

It's very unlikely every ID will be unique if only asking 33 yes/no questions. I mean, look at two twins living together -- very few questions will be able to differentiate between them.

I think it's possible to do based on a random snapshot in time, however less possible if it's meant to last a lifetime.

I also think the questions exist, but not in a manner that we'd be able to come up with on our own. As in, I believe that a program that knew every detail about every human could create 33 yes/no questions that differentiated people, however I don't believe we could do it ourselves.

I also wonder how many questions would be required to ask non-yes/no questions and get a completely unique ID for everyone. For example, questions like "weight? languages spoken? birth place?".

<comment><USER15> Only ~1/3 of population would even be able to answer a question like "Was the second letter of your first girlfriend's middle name between A and M?".

26% of global people are pre-teens; and approx half of the remainder aren't dating women.

Not even going into the fact that the social concept of 'girlfriend' isn't universal, there are multimillion cultures where the relationship stages of going from strangers to family are split differently, and none of those stages can be equated with western 'boyfriend/girlfriend' relationship; e.g. you may like someone but not be dating (so no girlfriend) and then move directly to engagement or marriage; or many other possibilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 33 questions is sort of the Shannon-Hartley optimal encoding of identifying information about human beings.

That means to come up with them is identical to finding an _optimal compression_ of identifying data.

Necessarily, as the second question already implies, for this question to correctly divide the population in half, you would have to group large amounts of small populations together, resulting in _very_ long questions.

For example, if you'd like to make another geographical question that's independent of the second one, it would have to divide in half every population of the 6 countries you mentioned. The next question would necessarily have to divide those 12 again.

By the way, the first question you ask is already suboptimal when combined with the second question, as those countries together probably do not have a clean 50% male/female split. (if they do, you should really explain that as it's not obvious)

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting exercise, which I'd call impossible in the given form. Imagine someone magically came up with 32 statistically independent binary indicators. Now you need to come up with the 33th question Q such that if you pick any two persons who are similar up to the 32nd bit, that single question must allow to distinguish them. Sounds hard.

<comment><USER18> Question 33 has to split any category of people formed from the first 32 questions - very awkward, as you say.

Here is a moderately-functional question 33, though:

"Are you further North than any other person who has given the same answers as you for the first 32 questions?"

<comment><USER19> > "Are you further North than any other person who has given the same answers > as you for the first 32 questions?"

What if one of the persons was not on the planet at the time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just use:

\- Birthday (19~ bits)

\- Rough Location (remaining bits)

And base the questions around those two, for example, where you born on a 1-15th, does the city you were born in start with the letter's a-k. This part would be an exercise in statistics, I would think.

edit: And one bit for if you were the first to be born of two identical twins =p

<comment><USER21> Lots of people don't know their birthday, or if they do, it was written down as 1st Jan (or another memorable date), because their parents/carer didn't know when they came to register them, if they ever registered them. There will be bias towards those memorable dates.

<comment><USER22> > Lots of people don't know...

We can go farther. People in a coma or with certain mental impairments will fall out of the system, if knowledge of any given fact is a hard requirement.

The only way this even makes sense as a thought experiment is if you have some magic biographical oracle that helps you answer the questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This project assumes we can know things that are not really knowable for everyone. It starts with gender and birthplace, both tricky questions in some situations.

So maybe we get to assume we have some oracle that helps us simplify the hard questions.

At that stage, it's easy. Begin with, "Assume we build a list of people sorted by time of birth (with some arbitrary tiebreakers, like proximity of birthplace to Barbados, or darkness of hair color...)."

Question 1: Are you on the top half or bottom half of this list?

Question 2: Are you on the top quarter or bottom quarter of the half?

Question 3: ...

<comment><USER3> I had come up with something similar:

Question 1: Are you north of an east-west line that perfectly divides the population in half?

(proceed to continue to divide each section in half.)

Of course, determining the position of those lines is damn near impossible. And as soon as someone hops on a plane, the whole thing comes crashing down.

<comment><USER22> I like it. Maybe "were you north of an east-west line" when this list was made.

I guess it gets tricky when people are born.

Wait a minute, just realized this whole question breaks down if we don't recycle numbers from the dead back to the newly born... and there's no guarantee that all of the dead will sufficiently resemble all of the newborns. I want my money back. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not enough to find 33 independent questions that evenly split the world's population.

An optimal, though inelegant solution to that goal might look something like this:

"Is the {1..33}th bit of sha1(name : location : date of birth) 1?".

Clearly you'll have tons of collisions with that solution, as you would have with any solution using 33 independent questions.

To uniquely identify people, we'd either need to use more bits, or look very closely at the population and derive very specific questions.

<comment><USER24> > Clearly you'll have tons of collisions with that solution

Why?

If we assume the hash code assignment to one of the 2^32 people is uniformly random from a set of 2^160 codes, the odds of finding a collision are astronomically small (order of 2^-95 or so). Am I missing something?

<comment><USER25> You are not taking the entire hash, you are only taking the first 33 bits of the hash. Since there are only about 8.5 billion different values for the 33 bits and there are about 7 billion people, the odds are astronomically low that each of those 7 billion people will receive a different one of those 8.5 billion possibilities.

This is the birthday paradox with instead of 365 days you have 2^33 possible answer values and instead of 23 people you have 7 billion people. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill in these values into one of the formulas to calculate the probability of successfully giving each person a unique 33 bit answer: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)

<comment><USER24> > You are not taking the entire hash, you are only taking the first 33 bits

Right, my bad, didn't pay attention to the problem we are trying to solve :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought it would be more plausible and probably more interesting to do this in maybe 40 questions. To do this in 33, as several others have pointed out, would require 33 questions that each almost perfectly bisect the population and are almost perfectly independent of each other.

With 40 or 45, we could relax that a bit and use questions that are actually meaningful. Two people who are within a few bits of each other would actually be similar in ways we care about, unlike two people who are similar because their transliterated last names both appear in the last half of the alphabet.

</comment><comment><USER27> So you want to create a data set with entropy = 1 . Think of this in terms of a hash function , You want to create a hash which only has an address space of 33 bits. Something in terms of H(Alice) = 0x12321 {H is a function which generates 0x12321 to store the data of alice)

Doesn't this sound like perfect hashing with limited memory. I don't really think that this can be done with such memory constraints. Even now we cannot produce a perfect hash function that uses 1 bit / key. The theoretical best we can do is 1.44 bit / key. And the practical best we have done till now is 2.5 bits per key. [1]

This may just be possible without the memory constraint that is , you answer N number of questions which uniquely identify you. (where N > 48 )

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function#Minimal_p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function#Minimal_perfect_hash_function)

</comment><comment><USER28> No one here seems to have mentioned Hunch ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunch_(website)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunch_\(website\)) ).

Picking discrete questions like this is equivalent to building a decision tree for humanity. This is actually something that could be approached as an engineering problem (and there are mechanisms for optimizing decision trees).

The problem still remains in the face of both the technological capabilities of decision trees, and practical implementations like Hunch.com, that decision trees are reductive and discrete. Reality is neither discrete nor reductive.

It may very well be the case that there is a set of questions that could uniquely identify humans, but the insight that could be drawn from those questions might be essentially pointless.

For example:

* Were you born in the northern hemisphere?

* Were you born on an even numbered year in the Gregorian calendar?

* Is the country of your birth governed through a representative system?

</comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of Akinator: [http://en.akinator.com](http://en.akinator.com)

It's a little spammy nowadays, but it's had enough input that it seems pretty amazingly accurate at "guessing" what / who you are thinking of in ~ 25 questions.

<comment><USER30> I thought of this too, or at least a site similar to it. It has so much input that it's good at even very obscure people/characters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't think it is possible with exactly 33 questions. It will probably require more than that. Binary numbers have the property of adding twice as many numbers +1 for every new bit. For example if you already have 7 bits and you add an 8th one, then you'll be able to represent 127 numbers with that bit off and 128 numbers with that bit on.

To properly mimic this property with yes/no questions, you will have to come up with questions that divide the whole Earth's population equally AT EVERY NEW QUESTION. Even the most obvious one, "are you (fe)male?" is slightly biased toward men (according to wikipedia). At every question that skew your 50/50, you'll have to add another question beyond 33 to catch up with this.

<comment><USER32> All questions must be independent. That's too hard. I would be surprised to find even a handful of questions that have no statistical correlation when applied to all people in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Question 1: What is the first bit in your unique 33-bit string? Question 2: What is the first bit in your unique 33-bit string? ...

<comment><USER34> I'm pretty sure you didn't mean what you wrote! But maybe I'm whooshing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think first you have to show a question exists that effectively separates identical twins before you spend much time working on broad questions like gender and geography.

<comment><USER36> Maybe something like "Do you have more older siblings than younger siblings?" would work. One twin has to be born before the other.

That question has some problems, but I feel like it could serve as the basis for a more specific question that would define how an only child or middle child would answer without introducing much bias. It would also have to define how half-siblings are counted and probably some other things.

<comment><USER37> So you are going to burn one entire question that is entirely worthless for the vast majority of Chinese that have been born recently?

<comment><USER38> Interesting read: "One Child Policy and Arising of Man-Made Twins". [http://paa2013.princeton.edu/papers/130113](http://paa2013.princeton.edu/papers/130113)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a fun exercise, but as others have pointed out likely impossible in its current form.

We don't have true constraints on space though; why limit to 33 bits? How could we still provide a meaningful UUID to each person?

A UUID based on time and location of birth might be more feasible than any other approach, since neither will change and it's the least likely to be ambiguous. Capturing UTC at the time of cutting or otherwise removing the umbilical cord could be one way of choosing as precise, non-debatable a timestamp as any. Adding lat/long and, say, the first byte of the UTF-8 character of the mother's name (or an aspect of the mother's UUID?) could get you the rest of the way there.

Of course, this falls over in places without access to precise timing and geolocation.

<comment><USER40> I think the limitation to 33 bits is because this is the smallest power of 2 which is higher than the world's population:

2^32 = 4.29 billions,

2^33 = 8.58 billions,

2^34 = 17 billions,

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Do the answers have to be knowable? Time independent?

For example, "are you below the median age at this exact second?" That is not a knowable answer, and changes by the second, but it does give you an exact 50/50 split.

Repeat N times for each split and we're getting very very close.

</comment><comment><USER42> These need to be questions that are invariant over a lifetime:

\- Were you born in the northern hemisphere or southern?

$2^{33}$ is sufficient for those alive now, but the human population is a dynamic function. Set a bit when the person dies?

<comment><USER43> The Northern Hemisphere has roughly 90% of the population[1]. That is far from 50% what we should be looking for.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere)

<comment><USER44> Are you born above or below the tropic of cancer then: replace with whatever latitude separates humans into equal groups.

<comment><AUTHOR> This make other questions based on geography useless (as in the second question). Thats not to say the already given second question is better than your one

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Added pull requests to extend the address space from 33 bits to 36 bits to accommodate our revered ancestors, and a bit to indicate liveness.

TODO: don't implement zombies or ghosts at this time (YAGNI principle).

</comment><comment><USER45> On a related note, this has a very interesting significance in the world of privacy and anonymous tracking.

[http://33bits.org/about/](http://33bits.org/about/)

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a really cool concept, but one that is totally impossible. In the actual world, few things are truly independent. Even if you could find 33 binary questions that did not correlate with each other at all, you still run the risk of having multiple people yield the same 33 answers.

Just because two things aren't statistically linked does not mean that they will never overlap.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wouldn't the best way to do this be to ask questions related to genetic markers? You require 33 yes/no questions that independently divide the population in half, but has near-uniform distribution otherwise (each populace half has no relationship to the other questions).

Are there 33 genetic markers that each has no correlation on the presence of the others?

</comment><comment><USER48> 33 is not the constraint. If we increase the limit to 50 and these 50 questions can fingerprint an individual then that will be really interesting.

Some hard problems :- 1\. Distinguish twins 2\. Using characters in names as some like Chinese use non-ascii names.

<comment><USER49> You could distinguish twins by first identifying the twins, then by asking which one's name starts earlier in the alphabet, or whatever analogue exists in languages without an alphabet. Encode appropriately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If anyone is interested in seeing such a application in a fictional setting, I suggest the anime Death Note, if nothing else for its entertainment value. For those who are familiar with the story, the questions L asked in order to narrow down Kira suspects to a limited demographics in a small region in Japan, among billions of candidates, were some good ones. A good article that analyzes the plot from a information theory perspective: [[http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity](http://www.gw...](http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity\]\(http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity\)).

</comment><comment><USER51> Even if the questions were perfect (each question splitting the population in two exact halves, and all questions totally independent from each other) and therefore the algorithm would give each person a perfectly random number, the birthday paradox [1] tells us that even for just square(2^33)=~ 93k people we would have 50% probability of having a collision. To work we would need more bits. (Either that or create questions that are _not_ independent, so crafted in a way to make sure each person gets a different number)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)

<comment><USER3> No: the linked article requires that further questions split the previous groups each in half. The first question must split the group in half, the second question _must_ split those two groups in half, and so on. When we hit the last bit, the final question is splitting groups of 2 people into the last bit, and each person has been assigned a unique number.

In this manner, 33 bits is enough, and the birthday problem is avoided. The page mentions all this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> How many questions would you need to differentiate between identical twins, particularly if they live and work together? Take identical twin sons of a subsistence farmer - they live together, work together on the same things, know the same people, have the same genetic makeup, and whichever was the first twin born may not have been recorded. You could ask their names, but that's not a yes/no question.

Or even twins who are still babies, no work required? Some cultures wouldn't even have named them yet.

<comment><USER53> Multiple births would be bad enough, and then you have people with dementia who can't remember the answer to most of the questions, and people in a coma who can't answer questions at all. The chance of succeeding with this exercise is approximately zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> "As an example, having the questions "Are you male?" and "Are you below the median age?" will not work "

First question is "Are you male?". Made me laugh.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should reword that sentence to make the point clearer. As psuter said, you can have one but not both

<comment><USER54> It was much more clear after having it pointed out to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Another problem not mentioned is that the questions should be about the content that does not allow for the answer to change over time. Otherwise the ID is no good.

</comment><comment><USER56> Could you not have way more than 33 questions created, (maybe a couple hundred) but change what questions are asked based on previous answers? Use the previous answers to determine the strongest next question to ask?

If an early answer states the candidate lives in the north hemisphere, there's no point in asking them if they live on a landlocked African country... or whatever much more complicated questions could arrive.

</comment><comment><USER57> A boring solution:

Question n. Consider the number of your birth out of all people currently alive. When you divide by 2^n and take the remainder, is it odd?

</comment><comment><USER58> This seems like it would be a lot of work. The intensity and specificity of the questions that would need to be asked would have to be quite unique. It might be possible, but without excluding people of the world because they get lumped into a group, it seems like maybe 33 questions might not be enough to uniquely identify everyone in the world.

</comment><comment><USER59> A useful question might revolve around language or concepts a person knows, but then this becomes a lot more difficult if the questioner doesn't know which language/concepts a person wouldn't understand (and therefore whether they could even answer the question) - and if they do know, there is a priori knowledge effectively.

</comment><comment><USER13> The 33-question issue is a tough one for sure.

I'm instead left wondering how many extra questions (35 bits? 36 bits?) it would have to be expanded to in order to produce unique results but without having to be particularly clever in producing the questions. I bet it wouldn't take as many extra as one might be inclined to think.

<comment><USER60> Good point, especially because at 33 bits, storing everyone's ID would only take about 29 gigabytes.

7,126,462,675 people * 33 bits per person / 8 bits per byte = 29,396,658,534 bytes

World population source: [http://www.census.gov/popclock/](http://www.census.gov/popclock/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Do the questions have to be constant over time? If not it can trivially be solved by asking: Are you born before or after time _t_? 33 times, where _t_ is the median date of birth of your population. You just need to recompute _t_ 33 times (and know the date of birth of every single person in the world).

</comment><comment><USER62> If the goal is to have questions which can be answered only with yes or no. I don't think asking for location of the person is good thing, because there would be so many questions as there is locations.

"Do you live in China, India, The United States, Indonesia, Brazil or Pakistan?" is not good question.

<comment><USER30> "Were you born east or west of longitude X" (where X is a longitude that would split the population roughly in half).

<comment><USER62> Yes that would work and north of x..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Is the intent of this exercise to build a unique identifier that the individual could reproduce over the course of their life, or does it just uniquely identify them at the time they answered the questions?

I ask because questions like number of siblings, favorite movie, etc. would change over time.

</comment><comment><USER64> Are you male? This will not split the population 50/50\. One group will be slightly larger, and you then only have 32 questions to subdivide this larger group into further categories which is impossible.

This is not possible unless the categories _precisely_ bisect the group each time.

</comment><comment><USER65> Seems impossible to me, for example what question would separate two identical twins( identical in dna and when born ).

And let's say you find such a question, there is no way that question would divide half of the population.

<comment><USER66> Well if you had conditional questions, you could ask who was born first.

<comment><USER65> That question doesn't even apply since you can only ask it to two twins, not a single person.

<comment><USER67> Going along with what someone said earlier, your last question can be "Were you born after someone who answered the previous 32 questions the same as you", which works to identify twins as well as people in general. Although I don't know how this would work for triplets (or any larger number of "twins" than 2); you'd have to make the previous 32 questions split them into groups of at most 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Isn't this solvable to a degree by just asking a big amount of yes/no questions to a big amout of people and then removing all those questions that didn't identify people any further?

</comment><comment><USER69> I bet you could make a lot of progress by dividing GPS coordinates evenly by population. Simple binary search by primary residence and then leave some space for division within a household.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's an interesting idea ... But no I don't think it is possible in any way that is not turning the list into a set of questions about their genetics or DNA.

</comment><comment><USER71> An easy way to construct the questions is to ask for increasingly precise time and location of birth.

There will be corner cases, but then so does asking if someone is male.

</comment><comment><USER72> The set of questions that would do this is probably a list of genetic questions.

"do you have the _mumble_ allele?" etc.

</comment><comment><USER73> Less than half the population will be able to "read" the questions due to not speaking English...

</comment><comment><USER74> Fun version of that ...

[http://en.akinator.com/](http://en.akinator.com/)

</comment><comment><USER75> Do you speak english as your main language? Could be a good question too? What do u think?

</comment><comment><USER76> Possible, You need 33 answers but more than 33 questions.

</comment><comment><USER77> People have so much time on their hands.

</comment><comment><USER78> First 33 bits of SHA512(your DNA)

First 33 bits of SHA512(your 3D GPS location)

<comment><USER3> As someone else mentions, this doesn't work, as the birthday problem[1] applies here.

You need to ensure collisions won't happen; SHA512 does not to that. (The probability of a collision in 512 bits is near impossible; in 33 bits, much less so.)

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> This is really interesting actually. Your entire "uniqueness" can be summed up in 33 yes or no questions, in theory.

<comment><USER80> I don't think that's quite the right interpretation. Let's say that the human population increased by a factor of 1000. Does that mean you have 10 more bits of uniqueness? You didn't change at all.

In actuality, you already had those 10 more bits of uniqueness, and people just need to ask more questions to find out which one of the many unique people you are.

This is about _identification_ , not uniqueness.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't tinder have a web app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because they can't track your movements or other data if you aren't using a mobile app?</comment>