Chatbots aren't as difficult to make as you think - <AUTHOR> https://mlwhiz.com/blog/2019/04/15/chatbot/ <comment><USER2> Question to HN. How do you feel about chatbots?

Every time I encounter one, I backtrack and search for a phone number or email or twitter or _anything_ else. To me, chat bots are an opaque interface on top of a flowchart with no discoverability. Might as well just give me the damn flowchart.

I feel like chatbots are an innovation in the field of cost reduction for businesses, but a huge step back in terms of customer experience. What are your opinions?

<comment><USER3> I really enjoyed [https://woebot.io/](https://woebot.io/) for a few months. I was really surprised at its depth when I kept on discovering new flows after weeks of interacting with it daily.

But that kind of chatbot is surely an exception. And Andrew Ng is the chairman of WoeBot, so I expected it to be good quality.

<comment><USER4> The big difference here is that the bot is the product. (An interesting one at that!)

What I find utterly annoying is a chatbot popping on some software webpage, reducing my field of view and interrupting my progress toward the documentation/download/career/whatever section. In this case I find it an overly hyped widget that I absolutely do not need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sample applications are rarely difficult to make. I built a bot as an experiment for my team ([https://m.me/PigeonCorps](https://m.me/PigeonCorps)) and we've run into a lot of issues that fall outside of intent classification and response. The most complex issues related to non-trivial chatbots (or atypical chatbots) in my experience have been:

      - session management
      - horizontal scaling
      - dealing with platform changes
      - dealing with platform downtime/bugs
      - hierarchical data presentation
      - matching intents within hierarchical/nested flows

I agree, however, that most chatbots we see are not incredibly complicated, however, I think the typical points that are emphasized in these types of articles (intent classification) are not the hard parts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree. But most of the functional chatbots we see on websites are using intent classification only.

In my view, this is mainly because we haven't yet reached the stage where we can create intelligent chatbots. So we make do with rule-based. Sort of Chat based IVR services.

We might be able to do better in the future that's the plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Making a chatbot that's useful is more impossible than you think.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do agree it is hard. As per usefulness, Customer service industry can use it in a pretty good way. Also i think they are fun :)

<comment><USER7> What would you gain over a well organized FAQ page?

<comment><AUTHOR> QWe can always switch to a customer service executive if we sense something going bad. Or the Chatbot not able to get the intent it has been trained for.

<comment><USER6> How does this beat a simple form of FAQ with a floating action button to get some help?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its not only FAQ based bots that we intend to remove. It won't serve many purposes. Customers call banks to know about their balances. Or retail Customer care to know the status of order. Once I saw a chatbot use case where chatbot recommended dresses if we talk to it in a natural way. For example: "I have to go to a Christmas party today " and it handled this...

We are only limited by our thinking on how to create them.

<comment><USER6> Customers who call banks to know a balance hit an automated system. The kind that end up calling instead of checking online/ an app AND end up needing an operator don't use chatbots

Same with your retail example.

And a million others.

And take your second example, with dresses.

What kind of events does it understand? There has to be a limited number of event types it knows, it's awful that there are infinite types of events, the bot understands practically none of them compared to infinity, and you have to guess how to frame your query to fit in its bag, instead of having a list with a search box for event types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Here we learned how to create a simple chatbot. And it works okayish."

Not knocking the author's work, but I feel like you can say "it works okayish" for pretty much every chatbot ever created.

<comment><USER9> So you're saying chatbots aren't as difficult to make as you think?

<comment><AUTHOR> Precisely. I thought they were too difficult. They are not if the use case is viable and you can solve it programmatically. The Hard thing is to guide the flow of the user and really designing the flow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The hard part is not making (launching) the bot, but maintaining it and making sure it stays usable and useful. A very important piece that is missing from many open-source chatbot frameworks is some sort of web-based administration tool.

You need a tool that is capable of the following:

\- Collecting analytics about each session, so that you can notice user problems early.

\- Providing an interface for improving your training dataset using new data from actual user interactions.

\- Evaluating the model after each update (simple accuracy metrics are not good enough; it is possible to maintain good accuracy and have one of your core flows messed up after re-training).

Even when you have an admin tool capable of these, you need one or more people (depending on the size of the bot) to review historical sessions and curate newly generated training data almost daily.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've recently built a barebones chatbot. I took a different approach than most, given that I elected not to do any NLP. This is excusable based on the requirements for the bot — it's going to be part of an interactive theater piece, and its purpose will be to convey specific plot information.

My bot operates off of keyword matching only. There's a web interface to edit "exchanges," which act like a directed graph from message to message.

My chatbot struggles when things are not phrased in the right way (for instance, it has trouble with negatives, as in "I am not well today"). The exchanges that we're designing for the theater piece have to be carefully worded to try to avoid encountering problems like these.

Overall, I think my chatbot is a good tool for its specific application.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. Command based bots might be the way to go for simple applications. Banks might do very well with command based bots. They know most of the questions being asked by the customer, why not automate the process.

For developers, this could be fun too. One idea is to run a chatbot script on all the servers and every time I have to run system commands I can do it straight from telegram.

<comment><USER6> Why is this better than a form?

Geico did something similar. Instead of auto filling one form, you get to have 15 parts.

It's very simple to me as a user: if your chatbot is simple enough to be easy to implement, it should be a form.

If it's hard to implement with NLP and what not odds are discoverability will suck, complex operations will fail, and your bot will drive general unhappiness in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article looked pretty cool for creating a chatbot and using graph databases.

[https://chatbotslife.com/next-generation-of-chatbots-with- nl...](https://chatbotslife.com/next-generation-of-chatbots-with-nlp-services- and-graphs-cd811a8165d7)

any thoughts on whether this might be a possible way of creating a good chatbot?

</comment><comment><USER12> Hi, Joel here, I'm founder of a conversational platform here in Brazil (Ubots). In fact launching a bot should not be a technically complex task. On the other hand there are several disciplines where the complexity resides, such as dialog management, dialog state tracking, analytics (decision support), and mainly designing conversations which actually solve people problems in a simple manner, given that the big picture can become increasingly complex over time (if you want some control over it). There are also less supervised approaches where you normally need less / none intervention, but the more unsupervised it is, the less control you have.

</comment><comment><USER13> Off-topic here but I actually am annoyed by the capital letter 't' from "Think"

<comment><AUTHOR> haha. Why? I Am not good at grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not used it yet but: [https://botman.io](https://botman.io)

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought chatbots were "the cool thing" in 2016/2017, and are out of favor again now.

</comment><comment><USER16> But is bing the first search engine you've ever chat to???

</comment><comment><USER17> You might want to revoke that token...

</comment><comment><USER18> > pip install chatterbot

well yes but

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand what you are saying here ;)</comment></comment>


Trolls and conspiracy theorists making the YouTube shooter a free speech martyr - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17198774/youtube-headquarters-shooting-censorship-free-speech-martyr <comment><USER2> The spirit of the article isn't wrong, but The Verge is starting to pull this rhetorical trick a little too frequently.

In this case, they take an otherwise defendable belief (censorship kills) and make clear the unsavory company you will find yourself in, should you choose to go public with this belief.

<comment><USER3> If you always find yourself liking things mostly unsavory people like, maybe you should think about that thing.

<comment><USER4> Your definition of unsavory is likely different then someone else's.

I like whisky. I presume people who fit your definition of unsavory do as well. Should I re-evaluate my appreciation of whisky?

<comment><USER2> Exactly, you'll commit a ton of unforced Type 1 errors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: REST API Design Guidelines? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to embark on designing an API for my startup. Are there any guidelines available online regarding things like:<p>- Which response codes should be returned - How errors should be handled - How the xml/json should be structured - How to handle authentication<p>Or can someone point me in the direction of a particularly well thought out REST API in the wild, that I can learn from? <comment><USER2> This took some finding but I read your question and remembered coming across one particular article which made a lot of things clear for me when I was looking into building the API for my startup.

Check out "Get Your API Right" by Trek - [http://wonderfullyflawed.com/2009/07/02/get-your-api- right.h...](http://wonderfullyflawed.com/2009/07/02/get-your-api-right.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers, I'll have a read

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I believe the Twitter API is one of the most widely used API's and would be a good resource. I really like their documentation, it makes integration a lot easier to have it well defined.

Also a huge plus with most API's is a test/development environment. This depends on what the product/service is, but in some cases this is a huge issue.

</comment><comment><USER4> The classic document on this topic is _Richardson's Maturity Model_ , which is quite well and compactly explained by Fowler in his article:

[http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...](http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html)</comment>


Lua to Javascript translator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js

<comment><USER3> This is a cool project, but sadly it's not a complete Lua. It's missing two of Lua's most powerful features:

A lot of the metatable functionality just won't work: <http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#2.8>

Second, it's missing co-routines. Which is a way to suspend the execution of a piece of code.

These features aren't possible in a compiler that simply translates from Lua to JS because JS doesn't have the ability to reproduce these concepts in its own constructs. You would have to output significantly different code to simulate these features.

Without these you're just writing JavaScript in another dialect.

<comment><USER4> Looks like the only metatable stuff they don't dupport is weak references and garbage collection hooks (finalizers/destructors) Other then that t looks like the support most of the other stuff since table access and things like tha through intermediate functions such as lua_tableget and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool project!

I know that this is somewhat off topic, but I'm thinking about this from the perspective of the ClojureScript compiler. The translation snippets in the Lua.js README make me really thankful for the design of Clojure. It's highly amenable to compilation. As a result ClojureScript is able to produce extremely well optimized output. For simple cases, the translation is no more unreadable than CoffeeScript. But even for complex cases, the performance is excellent because most forms compile to relatively plain & boring javascript.

        Lua      init(1, 2, 3)
        Lua.js   lua_call(lua_tableget(lua_script, "init"), [1, 2, 3]);
        CLJ      (init 1 2 3)
        CLJS     cljs.user.init.call(null, 1, 2, 3)

        Note that cljs.user is the default namespace in the ClojureScript REPL.

        Lua      local numActive = activeChars.count
        Lua.js   var numActive = lua_tableget(lua_tableget(lua_script, "activeChars"), "count")[0];
        CLJ      (let [num-active (.-count active-chars)])
        CLJS     var num_active__10317 = cljs.user.active_chars.count;

        Lua      local distFromCenter = get_distance({x=1, y=2})
        Lua.js   var distFromCenter = lua_call(lua_tableget(lua_script, "get_distance"), [lua_newtable(null, "x", 1, "y", 2)])[0];
        CLJ      (let [distance-from-center (get-distance {:x 1 :y 2})])
        CLJS     var distance_from_center__10322 = cljs.user.get_distance.call(null, cljs.core.ObjMap.fromObject(["\ufdd0'x", "\ufdd0'y"], {"\ufdd0'x":1, "\ufdd0'y":2}));

        Lua.js wins on that last example, but if you need more speed, you can get it. All of the JavaScript primitives are exposed with highly performant macros:

        CLJ      (aget (js-obj "x" 1 "y" 2) "x")
        CLJS     ({"x":1, "y":2}["x"])

</comment><comment><USER6> Lua is a better language than Javascript in every possible way. I have half-a- mind to hack LuaJIT into Webkit, but I'm afraid that it may be futile at this point. The biggest shame in all of web development is the "type" attribute on the HTML "script" tag...

<comment><USER7> _I have half-a-mind to hack LuaJIT into Webkit_

I've been thinking for a while that Lua and especially LuaJIT are so good that there might exist a strategy to do an end run around vendors and get LuaJIT into browsers as (initially) a plug-in. It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in.

<comment><USER8> > I've been thinking for a while that Lua and especially LuaJIT are so good > that there might exist a strategy to do an end run around vendors and get > LuaJIT into browsers as (initially) a plug-in. It's possible that there's a > killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) > and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in.

Please don't create yet another plugin. Plugins are bad for the web, they fragment it and if they end up de-facto standards that causes many problems too.

> It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run > well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a > plug-in.

If you think there is something that needs improving in the web platform, contributing to that would be the best thing. If you have such a killer app that does not run well enough in current JS engines, you can contribute to one of the three open source JS engines to make it able to run your killer app.

<comment><USER7> If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool.

If it were merely a question of some minor incremental improvement, such as could be obtained by "contribut[ing] to one of the three open source JS engines", then I agree it wouldn't be worth the fragmentation. But then it wouldn't meet the definition of a "killer app" either. Nor would it be likely to gain traction. It would just be a gnat.

What I'm talking about is only interesting if it might be disruptive. I think there's a chance that Lua as both language and implementation is good enough that it might enable things that simply aren't doable (performantly) in other ways. Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall. And what is so amazing about LuaJIT is that it has already proven it does not know that wall.

At the same time Lua is so similar semantically to JS that it is not likely to mess with the things that made JS great, so integrating Lua into the web would arguably be a conservative design choice – more conservative, perhaps, than many proposals to "fix" JS by making it more static and proper-like.

<comment><USER8> > If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual > hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I > don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want > to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool.

Well, hack all you want (not like you need anyone's permission ;), my concerns were not with that part, but with

> a strategy to do an end run around vendors [..] drive installation of such a > [LuaJIT] plug-in

Hack it up if you want. But if you make a serious effort to drive adoption of a new plugin - that I have a problem with.

> Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their > bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by > JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the > existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall.

I also take Google's focus on Dart as partial admission of not being able to get V8 performance to where they want. But (luckily for the web), V8 is not the only game in town.

Competitors to V8 have introduced new approaches that show a lot of promise - background compilation in IE, full-program type inference in Firefox - <USER2> many more ideas remaining.

So I really doubt there will be a LuaJIT killer app. Lua might be faster on some benchmarks now, but it likely loses on others (like on any language comparison), and in any case the difference will become smaller over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool! Ignoring the relative strengths/weaknesses of the languages _themselves_ , JavaScript's killer feature is that it is ubiquitous in web browsers and Lua's killer feature is that it has an extremely small and easy- to-embed implementation. With a project like this you could write code in Lua and get the best of both worlds.

When it comes to actually comparing the languages though, Lua is the language that you'd get if you had 10 years to refine JavaScript's design and throw out the cruft, IMO.

<comment><USER10> Don't you lose the compact advantage of Lua in the conversion?

<comment><USER9> Sure, but it could allow a single code-base to be portable to _both_ to the tiny Lua VM _and_ the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Javascript is an usable language, just need an open mind to learn it.

Javascript is a simple language. Compile(translate) other language seems good. But complicated things.

<comment><USER4> Lua is simpler though

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What abilities does it have to interact with the DOM?

</comment><comment><USER13> Hum, i think everyone love javascript, but no one wants to actually write some ...

<comment><USER13> (thats what i can deduct from all these lib to convert whatever into js)

<comment><USER14> Javascript has the benefit of being able to easily run natively on the web. Lua is more complex to get running in a browser, as other languages are as well.

Javascript has the disadvantage in that some people know and love and feel more comfortable in other languages. If you can convert from a language you love to a language that makes it easy to get into a browser... that's the dream.

<comment><USER13> Yup, that's my case, i miss the easy workflow of other languages with "more feature". I miss native namespace and packaging, class, a code completion that works... etc</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where can I find Viaweb interface screenshots? - <AUTHOR> After reading most of Paul Graham's essay, I'm really curious on how ViaWeb looked. what was the interface like? It seems super-advanced for the pre-2000 internet. And I'm dead curious to see the UX/UI. <comment><USER2> Some of the old screens, but not fully functional: [http://old.ycombinator.com/viaweb/](http://old.ycombinator.com/viaweb/)

You can always go to the Wayback Machine: [https://web.archive.org/web/19961120231442/http://www.viaweb...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961120231442/http://www.viaweb.com:80/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been to the wayback machine. But I couldn't have a look at the interface in itself. only the homepage. thanks for the other link</comment></comment>


Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-want-to-live/?single=1

<comment><USER2> This one is better: [https://pdf.yt/d/-jQQX6XY9dU0LN4G](https://pdf.yt/d/-jQQX6XY9dU0LN4G) Apparently, LW readers will in fact take over civilisation.</comment>


SoundCloud needs more money, or it may sell at a fire-sale price - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2017/3/10/14887806/soundcloud-sale-investment <comment><USER2> SoundCloud still has a niche in my opinion. Nowhere close to what it was theorized to grow into, at least in my perspective. Getting deals with RIAA instead of fiercely cultivating & breaking Indie artists & curators was the wrong pivot from my perspective. Now it's just bloated. Partially responsible? YouTube being easier to find stuff. Them's the breaks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A Question to Fred Wilson from Union Square and AVC.com:

Since Fred is one of the early investors + somebody who frequently promoted Soundclound on his blog and on HN (despite all the industry warnings that he shouldn't deal with the music industry's oligopol), we are wondering...

 _How does it feel when one of your flagship investment is in such a situation?_

(Serious question, and what are you telling your LPs now?)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been rabidly downloading and archiving my favorite podcasts that post on soundcloud. I have two fears. The first is that they may become lost forever due to lack of interest/awareness of the creators. The second is that the creators take this opportunity to lock old episodes behind a paywall.

I would love to see the Internet Archive put some muscle behind saving all the wonderful content on soundcloud.</comment>


Dear Starbucks, here's a wacky idea - <AUTHOR> http://krmmalik.posterous.com/dear-starbucks-heres-a-wacky-idea

<comment><USER2> The problem with this suggestion is that the floor that Starbucks occupies costs a _fortune_. The author says it himself: he'd be willing to pay "a small" fee to hang out in a Starbucks for _3 to 5 hours_. If you were to actually look what this space costs Starbucks to rent, I'm sure it would amaze you.

Starbucks isn't your office. Hanging around and having a chat is one thing, but staying for upwards of 5 hours is just excessive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well i'd say it averages around 3 hours. There was one session that went up to nearly 5. It never actually went past 5.

If there were multiple parties that were attending, and regularly at that, surely their menu spend would make-up for it?

Without my regular coaching sessions, i would visit starbucks, at best once every 5 or 6 weeks. This way, they see me every week, and i spend with them every week too. As a group of us, its guaranteed spend each week.

Arent subscriptions the new black?</comment></comment>


Knives of frozen feces don't make the cut, disproving well-known legend (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/knives-made-of-frozen-feces-dont-make-the-cut-disproving-well-known-legend/ <comment><USER2> Just based on the historical accounts mentioned, it seems more likely that the tools described/used were actually feces knife that have a layer of ice on the outside- which could arguably cut without having the melted skid marks problem described by the anthropologist. If this were mythbusters, I'd call this experiment inconclusive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Right. But he didn't have the fish and baby seal diet for 2 weeks before pooping, and he didn't freeze it at -50˙C you get above the Arctic Circle. (Common freezers only go at -30˙C). So that refutation is inconclusive, and the experiment needs replication with the right parameters, I would say...

<comment><USER4> More importantly, I'd say:

> _The authors noted, however, that the cutting had been done in a room with a > temperature of about 10°C (50°F), and therefore, "future experiments might > examine colder contexts."_</comment></comment>


Teachers wearing body cameras to film unruly pupils - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teachers-wearing-body-cameras-to-film-unruly-pupils-d3r7cdm60 <comment><USER2> Gosh you mean kids will have to be responsible for their actions? Like the adults doing criminal and embarrassing things on the police cams in the US. There is hope for society yet.</comment>


AMA about Lemmy, an open source, Federated alternative to Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/guklhr/we_are_the_devs_behind_lemmy_an_open_source/ <comment> blaser-waffle What steps are they gonna take to keep it from being Voat?

Happy there is another alternative, but it'll take more than FOSS optimism to make it a viable replacement.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, what happened there? I was excited when it first came out but I've never seen any good content. Just political vitriol.

<comment><USER3> Reddit is bad too. Apparently it isn't, but if you read it closely, you'll see it's all circlejerking and demonisation of the other side.

I think it is just impossible to have a massive internet forum to discuss politics without it turning into rubbish.</comment></comment></comment>


Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/business/dealbook/warren-buffett-and-dan-gilbert-unite-in-bid-to-acquire-yahoo.html <comment><USER2> Buffett is no fool. Berkshire is providing the financing to Dan Gilbert's group and will receive guaranteed interest as well as an option to convert to equity. I'm sure that financing is jammed packed with warrants and covenants.

Buffett has basically parlayed the prestige of his name into sweetheart deals with provisions that no other company could get (eg. his investment in Goldman Sachs).

<comment><USER3> But who cares about yahoo? (Serious question) yahoo should just die. Please tell me why it shouldn't

<comment><USER4> As a consumer, it might make sense to say this.

From a business perspective (he says having no business experience or expertise), Yahoo is a collection of assets: Code, people, branding, community. They aren't in first place, and they aren't profitable at the moment, but I think the case that they have zero or negative value is a bit simplistic.

Put it another way: Would you rather throw a pile of money at trying to build a collection of code, talent, business contracts, and users from scratch, or would you rather buy an EXISTING collection, on the cheap, and work instead to flip it into a profitable business? Both are risky ventures, but everything I've seen says it's harder to build from scratch than it is to keep existing users.

Perhaps your answer is that you'd prefer to build it from scratch, but do you see why - if the answer takes some thought to determine - that someone else might come to a different conclusion?

Heck, even if you want to completely toss the business model - even if you want to toss everything they've done and what they are trying to do - I'd imagine the servers, in-house expertise, and collected code and utilities, not to mention any purchased or licensed software, would make Yahoo worth considering as an acquisition.

<comment><USER5> Yes, of course it has some teardown value. Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else.

But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on.

There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as their default homepage ten years ago.

You can hear the fail in their words. They're talking about retaining users, not offering value. They still want to be a portal (ie the base of every action you take), something users didn't want when it was new.

That's the business legacy you'd have to reverse before you stop producing negative-value, let alone actually produce something that may actually be valuable.

<comment><USER6> A fair number of people use Yahoo mail and Yahoo search. It's not a majority of the market by any means, but it's still tens to hundreds of millions of users all told.

<comment><USER7> They also own tumblr iirc.

I don't know if tumblr is profitable, but it has many users.

edit: whoops this was already mentioned a number of times in other comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find these things amusing "according to people who aren't authorized to speak publicly" except that they are talking to a reporter so that's kinda public. But really what they want to do is let potential other players know that "oh yeah, its real, we're bringing it and we're gone sell this thing, if you want a piece of this you better wake up and call us or your going to lose out." kind of vibe which attempts to incent other buyers to please make a bid and bring the price up. According to the Credite Suisse banker who helped with a transaction I participated in the ideal number of buyers is 3, and it helps if at least two of them both know each other and are competitive (think Benioff and Ellison for example).

I can see Microsoft's goal, add it the Bing group and give Bing the portal as well as it already has all the search traffic. Not so clearly on Berkshire though, breaking it up works if you can get it at the right price. I could also see IAC wanting to play, they could use a portal property to link all their front ends together.

<comment><USER9> > "according to people who aren't authorized to speak publicly" except that > they are talking to a reporter so that's kinda public.

They are speaking publicly, but they "aren't authorised" to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looking forward to a redesign of Yahoo! to match Berkshire Hathaway's website: [http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/)

<comment><USER11> I can't believe that is the website for the company which made Buffet the second richest man on the planet.

<comment><USER12> It works. It's not overdesigned. Compare [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) , or think back to how amazon or ebay's pages looked for the longest time. More pages should look like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not obvious what the acquiring group mentioned in this article would do with Yahoo after they've bought it, to make it worth the price. They'd have the 5th most visited domain name on the Internet, but as Yahoo has demonstrated, visits don't automatically turn into money. (Twitter has a similar problem, and sits at #8, but they have a social aspect that Yahoo doesn't.)

Unless Alibaba comes with the purchase at a discount, or someone wants to acqui-hire whatever talent hasn't already fled, an acquisition doesn't seem even remotely sensible.

A few quick checks suggest that Yahoo's searches-per-day traffic is still decent, at 12.4% of the market (2.2 billion searches/month); perhaps redirecting that to some competing search engine might be worth it for a cheap enough price.

<comment><USER14> It's funny you mention Alibaba. I did a little digging, and it turns out that Softbank (who owns ~35% of Alibaba to Yahoo's ~24%) has a 35% stake in Yahoo Japan. Very interesting stuff.

<comment><USER15> Yahoo! Japan is a separate company from Yahoo, Inc. It was formed as a joint venture between Yahoo, Inc. and SoftBank, thus both of them holding a stake.

<comment><USER16> and what reason it had to jump on alibaba?

<comment><USER15> Yahoo had a smart CEO who realised Alibaba's potential, that's all.

<comment><USER16> was asking about softbank

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't Buffet famously stay away from Tech? What changed? He is buying Yahoo and has invested in Apple.

<comment><USER18> Probably valuations dropped low enough that yahoo can be valued as a classic media company instead of a tech company.

What generally scares Buffet from tech is that the price of tech stocks is greatly inflated to reflect expectations of future growth. Buffet is very skeptical of inflated expectations of future growth.

But I do not think there is any great expectations of future growth in yahoo. In fact many analysts say that if you strip out the valuable asian assets, the value implied by the market for Yahoo's US business is about zero or even negative.

So the answer is that Yahoo is not really a tech stock anymore, but the traditional definition of that term. At least it is not priced like a tech stock.

<comment><USER19> > In fact many analysts say that if you strip out the valuable asian assets, > the value implied by the market for Yahoo's US business is about zero or > even negative.

If the value implied by the stock price is zero or negative, then even buying the company and selling off the office furniture nets you a tidy profit.

More realistically, it's very likely that if a company has negative value -- ie, that someone would pay you to take it off their hands -- then it is severely undervalued.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's true. Even badly performing companies like Yahoo! aren't only priced as a sum of their physical assets, but also intangible ones, e.g. the skills of their employees, their market position etc.

<comment><USER21> Someone actually did a calculation of this just recently, like about a month ago max. Adding up the Alibaba stake, the Yahoo Japan stake, the office and associated infrastructure, that summing those up totalled far less than the current share price. Somewhere around -8 billion IIRC.

<comment><USER22> It was a Bloomberg article[1] of rather disappointing quality. The authors apparently just took the market values of BABA and Yahoo! Japan, multiplied by Yahoo!'s percentage stake, added some unsourced number for cash and assets, and arrived at -$8 billion. They even included the statement, "The implication: Everything you think of as Yahoo—apps, websites, employees, computers, buildings—has a negative value."

It's terribly sloppy logic that led to this, as a pass through Yahoo!'s balance sheet[2] demonstrates. "Long-term Investments", which I presume includes their stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan, is listed as $34B (not the $38B in the article). Adding all other assets gets to a grand total of $44.1B. However, that is _gross asset value_ , not _book value_. Now you have to take off the liabilities. Yahoo! apparently has $13 _billion_ in deferred income tax on the books. It has about $13B in other liabilities, cutting its book value to about $28.4B and giving Yahoo! a price/book ratio of 1.21, not 0.81 as that analysis erroneously concluded.

You can't just compare gross assets to stock price and expect anything meaningful, and you sure as hell can't compare the values of a couple cherry- picked assets that sum up greater than the net equity and claim the entire rest of the business is worth a negative amount. I find it pretty shameful that Bloomberg actually published that clickbaity bullshit.

Yahoo!'s problem right now is not that their traditional businesses are unprofitable. Their problem is the massive liabilities they have on their books.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-yahoo/](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-yahoo/)

[2] [https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AYHOO&fstype=ii&ei=...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AYHOO&fstype=ii&ei=UWQ6V5nID4eqjAHe67mwAg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is the emotional Dan Gilbert who enjoys Comic Sans

[http://deadspin.com/the-cavaliers-finally-took-down-dan- gilb...](http://deadspin.com/the-cavaliers-finally-took-down-dan-gilberts- insane-com-1601145301)

<comment><USER24> I'm an ex-Quicken Loans employee, and my best guess is that Dan enjoys Comic Sans so much because of the reaction it gets. The billionaire equivalent of trolling.

To that end, while working on the web team we added a Konami code to the QL website that would change the entire site to Comic Sans. I just checked and sadly that Easter Egg got lost in a redesign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Buffett is a fan of the "cigar butts with one last puff left" [1]. It seems like he's applying a similar philosophy here.

[1]: [http://basehitinvesting.com/warren-buffett-letter-on- walter-...](http://basehitinvesting.com/warren-buffett-letter-on-walter- schloss/)

</comment><comment><USER26> As a shareholder, I welcome the competition. :)

Also interestingly: Bain Capital is in the running. In the past, Yahoo has used Bain Capital as consultants to reorg, restructure, etc. It would almost seem like a conflict of interest, since they are acutely familiar with the innards of Yahoo.

Edit: as /u/mcmoose75 mentions below, "Bain Capital" and "Bain Consulting" (the one I was thinking of) are two separate entities.

<comment><USER27> You may be confusing Bain & Company (the consulting firm, a competitor to McKinsey) and Bain Capital. Bain Capital was started by some former Bain consultants, and is obviously similarly named, but is a totally independent organization.

<comment><USER26> You are probably right. Sorry for the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Read this first as "Warren Buffet and Dilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo". I think I prefer that headline.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sue Decker, ex-Yahoo CFO & President sits on the Board of Directors for Birkshire Hathaway. I'm sure she has plenty of insight to the value of the company, and the complexities of its business.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been following Buffett since the 1990s and his reputation for shunning tech seems to be based on his wise choice not to play in tech in the late 1990s. This seems to be based on relatively simple valuation techniques as well as asking the important question "Do I understand the business?". Of course he missed some winners as a result of this but overall it helped his results. His two tech moves so far, IBM and Apple, don't violate that approach at all so it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER31> When I consider Yahoo's value, I think of email, fantasy football, news, and tumblr. All four seem to be struggling when compared to their alternatives, but each of the products appear to have great potential value. It's hard to determine the quality of Mayer's work as CEO; some decisions were good, some look bad. I'm not confident she is a product person, and this is based on her management of Tumblr and the lack of development in email functionality and UI.

I could be wrong. I do go to Yahoo news everyday and it's not a bad service. It's fun to think about what the world would be today if Yahoo acquired Facebook LOL.

<comment><USER32> Were I to take on Yahoo, I'd turn it into a content powerhouse, with supporting tools. Yahoo! Finance should have the best articles -- very technical yet explanatory -- all supported by their stock tools. A billion ways to monetize that.

I would use Yahoo! Sports to _seriously_ go after ESPN, which is turning into a turdpile of garbage that's worse than TMZ. I'd literally troll them and get some extremely technical content as well as the fun stuff. Monetize with fantasy, tickets, live stream, schwag, etc.

Rinse and repeat with other news sectors. I'd find about a dozen niches and build out some aggregators with trending stuff - basically DrudgeReport style aggregators for each niche - awesome headlines and all.

Eventually, steer some content towards consumer facing products, and build out a shopping engine for the ones that are consumer-related.

Would this be the next Facebook or Google? No. But it'd be profitable as hell and with the right no-holds-barred content team in each niche, it'd once again become intertwined with American culture. It would "never" die, and it'd be a true fighter for the first amendment.

I don't deal with apps so I'd hire one of you guys to be my #2 for that side of the game.

Buffett and Gilbert you know who to call when you want this company to become relevant again.

<comment><USER33> It would cost billions of dollars to even attempt to go after ESPN. The primary value ESPN offers today is ownership of broadcast rights. Yahoo can't afford to outbid Disney on those rights and shareholders would never support risking that much capital on such.

What you're describing would never make money. Aggregator sites are among the worst things you could ever attempt if your goal is to make money, which is why so many of them fail and or produce mediocre business outcomes.

Drudge is a unique outcome that is nearly impossible to repeat - which is why nobody has been able to replicate it after all of these years. Its popularity occurred solely due to the Clinton impeachment scandal and two decades of brand / trust building when it comes to editing.

Having a juggernaut of articles and content in business / finance is worth _very_ little. You could combine TheStreet.com, Marketwatch.com, Quartz, Seeking Alpha, Fool.com and Business Insider all under one umbrella and it would be worth less than a billion dollars and barely make any money. It would be a complete waste of time and wouldn't move the needle on Yahoo's business.

<comment><USER32> > It would cost billions of dollars to even attempt to go after ESPN. The > primary value ESPN offers today is ownership of broadcast rights. Yahoo > can't afford to outbid Disney on those rights and shareholders would never > support risking that much capital on such.

I'm talking about web-based content first. Anyone who follows sports knows that there is a _wide_ open gap ready for someone to take a swing on actual sports coverage. ESPN has turned into a steaming pile of trash. You want more articles on Johnny Manziel, have at it ESPN. We're gonna cover _real_ sports on my Yahoo.

The better broadcasting play is to get into streaming / broadcasting for new sports. Be it eSports, rugby, lacrosse, and any scrap of basketball you can get your hands on -- NFL is going to collapse in the next generation or so (ask any Gen-X parents if their kids are allowed to play football and you'll understand why) -- so just give up on getting rights to the current powerhouse sports for the time being.

> What you're describing would never make money.

Killer content _always_ makes money when you know your demographic and don't sell your soul too much. I wouldn't emphasize the aggregators, those would be portals. The trick is that much of it would be re-written on the actual Yahoo site by _real_ journalists once something gets hot. Then you no longer give the traffic away.

> It would be a complete waste of time and wouldn't move the needle on Yahoo's > business.

This is because you don't know how to monetize. Content isn't the end game, it's the easy advertising. Yahoo! Finance is an under-utilized tool. The content on a powerful domain like that would be used to inexpensively gather new users into the profitable toolset - the end game could be to build out a trading platform, for instance.

LOL at Yahoo's needle, BTW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wonder if he'll bring a chunk of Yahoo to Detroit?

<comment><USER35> I can't imagine he has any other plan. I'm a Detroiter. Too bad Yahoo isn't really a tech company: [http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html)

<comment><USER36> What's the Detroit connection with Warren and Yahoo? I must have missed that in all the articles.

<comment><USER37> Gilbert.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Gilbert_%28businessman%29#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Gilbert_%28businessman%29#Detroit_initiatives)

<comment><USER36> Ahhh - interesting. If he can convince the top U of M grads to stay in Detroit rather than heading for the costs, he may be able to pull something off.

Are there many success stories of Silicon Valley companies leaving the Valley?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm weary of this. As a Detroiter I'm not a fan of Gilbert.

Though the prospect of bringing a large tech co to Detroit is nice, Gilbert and his people are very unpleasant to work with. They pay lip service to the importance of technology but generally don't respect tech people, or know how a real tech company operates. Not to mention their questionable morals (politically manipulating the State of Ohio so they could have a casino monopoly, instant mortgages, reverse mortgages, etc.).

Firstly, the Bizdom incubator was a mess. Very poorly run. Not a single successful business came out of it. No actual founders taught students. Just ex-QL people or trusted friends; the only thing in common was that none of them had ever started or ran a startup. Most of the startups that gained any traction did so by selling to Gilbert's other companies rather than proving that they have a real market - lots of incest going on.

On top of that, some entrepreneurs got straight-up screwed. At a minimum, by highly abusive investment terms (such as Bizdom owning 67% of the company and having the ability to modify operating agreements at will) - and to top it off, multiple founders in their system have had their ideas ripped off by Gilbert's people.

That's on top of their ridiculous real estate ventures. Such as offering startups hip, beautiful office space in Downtown Detroit - in exchange for a percentage of their company (I hear it's over 10%, with very few people biting). The startups that went through their investment funnels were "heavily encouraged" to get space there.

My guess is that if he gets Yahoo, he'll open up an office in Detroit, try to QL-ify it (i.e. make it a sales company that is a fairly close parody of Glengarry Glen Ross), it will flounder for a few years, and either get sold again or just die.

I really wish Detroit had a better advocate.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't know what is going on here but my bet is it has more to do with rich people doing tricky stuff with money than a vote of confidence in Yahoo, its products or potential to make money

If I was saddled with a dinosaur like Yahoo I would split it up and try and get some cash then rename what was left and I still think you would just be delaying the inevitable. The Yahoo name has about as much value as Netscape or Novell. It pretty much says outdated, failed technology company that has been overtaken by the competition.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is Buffett, so he must be thinking about this in terms of business, not tech.

Maybe they have calculated they could break Yahoo up and sell the pieces for more than they bought as a whole?

Otherwise I'm out of ideas.

<comment><USER41> closet indexing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Idea which I find interesting, but is probably not on target, is BH leveraging their investments in Yahoo and Apple to have Apple take over Yahoo. The sense of style which Apple cultivates applied to digital content curation, combined with a personal digital assistant tweaked for librarian reference desk responses (Viv-ianne the Librarian).

</comment><comment><USER43> Is the death of Yahoo due to poor leadership or did it just die a natural death like myspace or AOL

<comment><USER44> There was nothing natural about the death of either of those. Both were accelerated by an indifference to their platform.

Facebook could have gone the same way but they've largely stayed vigilant about being relevant to people.

<comment><USER45> I kind of want you to give me some examples of both of your points, please.

<comment><USER44> MySpace completely failed to stay with the times post-acquisition, they kept focusing on catering to big-name bands rather than the huge base of individuals. Over time people grew tired of MySpace being indifferent to them and moved on. Today the same type of crowd has made Snapchat a huge success.

AOL remained fixated on catering to their existing customer base and trying to grow high-margin dial-up revenues. They squandered their capital even harder than Yahoo did, as there's not a single AOL branded anything that's a best-of- breed. Everything about the company is second rate. Consider this: They bought the internet's darling company, Netscape, and could not make a nickel off of it or even keep the brand alive in any useful sense despite investing heavily in a series of increasingly bizarre reboots.

Facebook, by comparison, will not hesitate to incorporate features from other competing products if they think they're going to drive the platform forward and has made a number of strategic purchases like Instagram and Oculus to help cement their relevance.

I'm not even a fan of Facebook, but I admire their tenacity and their incredible ability to survive in an industry littered with the wreckage of previously huge social empires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I remember to read a lot of times that Warren does not invest in technology, because it's too risk and he only invest in what he understands. So, now it seems he learned.

</comment><comment><USER16> every time I missclick a New York Times link in my no-JavaScript mobile browser the site manages to redirect me back to the referrer url I was at. it's really uncanny. I click a link on HN, and after a page load, I'm back at hacker news.

except this one link. what should I think of that? why that single link is different than ever other nytime.com links?

</comment><comment><USER47> What I was interested in Yahoo was the YQL.

After it closed the chatroom services I almost quit using yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER48> yahoo -> $0. good luck Buffet

</comment><comment><USER49> So if it happens, does Dan Gilbert slowly move Yahoo workforce to Detroit to save money?</comment>


Show HN: Phoenicia – Open source game teaches children to read without a teacher - <AUTHOR> http://www.raisingphoenicia.com/get-phoenicia-beta-2-now/ <comment><USER2> If it teaches children how to read, then I think it should have a simpler name</comment>


The Rise and Fall of the Full Stack Developer - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-full-stack-developer/ <comment><USER2> I don't think Full Stack should mean "every technology out there". Rather, I think of it as meaning "having touched every layer", however you want to define layer (database, business logic, UI, network, etc).

Of course nobody has done every language and framework. But plenty of people could do any language or framework.

I think there's a certain stage you get to as a dev where you can more or less pick up anything. This goes especially for things like OO languages. The reason it works is that you're rarely in the far reaches of your new language/framework. There are certain things that are common in OO, and if you swap languages, the learning curve isn't that steep, and you'll mostly be doing things that have an analogy in what you already know.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is built on a misconception held by many people.

That is - treating mobile apps as something simple. They are not. Mobile apps of Android and iOS are full stack native client apps.

Building mobile apps is far closer to building your classic Windows desktop applications than an UI for a Web Application and it shows on the astronomic costs of the mobile apps - compared to Web Apps.

I guess that is because user interfaces tend to seem simple and the devices which run these applications are small and seem simple.

TL;DR: Mobile Developers are Full Stack Developers in their own right and the person writing the article should know better.

</comment><comment><USER4> The impression I get is that this is a bit of projection on the part of the author. Since they can't keep up with web, server, and mobile fronts, probably no one else can either.

Having highly specialized engineers for each technology in a project might be nice save two things: 1. small companies and startups may not being able to afford the minimum upfront resources needed to do this and 2. overlap of expertise in a team is essential to a cohesive effort and a solid product (I have worked in places where people all specialized and did not stray from their neat little box; the results were never pretty).

I also have a tough time taking the author seriously on this subject when their GitHub account is 5+ years old with no activity [1] — no repos, no commits, not even a starred project.

[1] [https://github.com/pyared?tab=activity](https://github.com/pyared?tab=activity)

<comment><USER5> Just FYI, that only shows his public activity. My own Github activity chart looks sparse even though I push to it hundreds of times a week. Almost all of those commits, except for the odd bugfix to an open source project, are to private projects. When I see my own chart, it's dense but when I view it as an anon it's barely checkered.

<comment><USER6> There really should be a way to selectively expose anonymized activity data. Is there really a business case for guarding data about your devs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author's definition of "full stack" is rather strange, as others have noted. But as the client side of web applications becomes more complex, it's true that it's harder for the same programmer to develop both the client side code (which may involve developing a sophisticated client side architecture in Backbone or Angular) in addition to the server side code and API layer. I see more programmers now who call themselves "front end developers" and aren't just UX designers with HTML/CSS knowledge, but can program a complex client side MVC application, working with a separate backend developer who focuses on the API.

I think this trend will accelerate as web applications are increasingly broken into loosely coupled services, with a rich client tying them together in the browser.

<comment> atom-morgan > I see more programmers now who call themselves "front end developers" and > aren't just UX designers with HTML/CSS knowledge, but can program a complex > client side MVC application

It's almost misleading these days for a designer with HTML and CSS knowledge to say they can do front-end development. If you can't navigate your way around a client side MVC framework, I don't think there's much you can contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author has confused the audience with his own definition of full stack. Full stack in traditional sense only meant server and client side development. Mobile, Cloud, Machine Learning are other independent horizontal offshoots.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like his expanded full stack is due strictly to an expansion of platforms that it's become standard to deploy on (i.e. you don't just release a website, but also have a native ios and android app)--excepting machine learning, which I can't see a reasonable argument for including as integral to a canonical web development stack. He suggests we will resolve this through a change in methodology--but this problem isn't new and it seems to me that we're as likely to sort it out with technology instead.

<comment><USER10> That and buzzword compliance. Why are MongoDB, Scala, and machine-learning on the list? What customer-visible advantage do they give your startup that your existing Rails/Django app on MySQL/Postgres doesn't have?

If you want to use machine-learning effectively anyway, you need to have a bunch of other technologies, like crawling & unstructured data extraction, or custom log processing & millions of users, or some other way to get the raw data that your machine-learning algorithms can process. Without data, machine- learning is useless. But that's a problem for an established company, not a startup, and established companies have long wanted specialists anyway.

<comment><USER11> If I were to shoot for the most charitable reading of the article, I would abstract a way from particular brands and replace Amazon with "cloud hosting(AWS, azure, GC, ...), mongo with "scale out database", scala with "modern language", and machine learning with "data science".

With such replacements the article looks fairly reasonable - larger scale demands newer technologies, proliferation of client platforms demands more suppor for them, and growth in computing power and science makes users expect some smarts they did not demand a decade ago.

<comment><USER10> Except that within the context of startups, it's still not reasonable. You don't need to scale when you're first founding your startup: your biggest challenge is building a product that _one_ person finds useful, let alone one million. You can run such a service off your favorite shared webhost, or a single EC2 micro instance for like $10/month, or just use the free Heroku plan.

If and when your service catches on, _then_ all the article's points become valid. But then you'll have resources available to hire specialists - and the full stack developers you hired in the early phase become full-stack integrators managing teams of specialists, assuming they have the ability & inclination to grow with the company. You're going to have to rewrite your code and throw out your early technology choices anyway: you might as well take advantage of the full stack developers you can find to get to the point where you can afford the specialists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nobody would call for a 'full-stack' automobile worker who can assemble engine, chassis, interior and paint the whole thing (o.k. paint is done by machines nowadays). 'Full-stack' is a sign of an immature industry that hasn't figured out division of labor yet.

<comment><USER13> Using this automobile production analogy, I would say that a full-stack tech engineer is analogous to an autoengineer who understands all levels of the production, with some direct experience in the types of relevant manufacture processes of all components of the automobile, as opposed to only understanding based on the blackboard theoretical description of auto production. They know the design principles of engines and of electric systems, and materials science, and the relevant history of the industry leading up to the state of the art. They could join the division-of-labor sub- team for any arbitrary process of production, because they understand any arbitrary process at the blackboard level and have some general experience in the types of any arbitrary manufacture process -- though they are never actually permanently required to stick to just one sub-unit of operation. And thank $deity someone does understand the whole picture, otherwise no one would, and you're just waiting for some new problem to bring down the whole cargo cult operation.

This is in contrast to someone doing one aspect of the division of labor, who knows his division, but doesn't understand the full stack of automobile development. _" I just make sheet metal into body parts. Engines and electrical systems are magic to me."_

Not all code production houses need full-stack expertise, because they actually can operate in their niche without it thanks to our system of finance and contracts. Most don't, in fact. But big operations ( _a la_ a major automobile company) had just better be sure they have engineers who understand automobile production from design to showroom (reverting to the analogy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is laughably stupid.

I stopped reading when they substituted a relational database for MongoDB. Nevermind that they both solve completely different problems.

This post must have been written by an incompetent business analyst who feels all warm and fuzzy when he parrots the most popular buzzwords of the month. This kind of shit makes our jobs harder because managers see this stuff and decide that "our next project will be built on MongoDB and Amazon Cloud... it's bad ass rock star tech!"

</comment><comment><USER15> MongoDB is worth a place with "HTML/CSS"? Give me a break

<comment><USER16> Indeed. And somehow, I'm able to build full web applications from database to CSS, by myself, without once using "Machine Learning"...

This whole article is ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The issue is that even though most of us have the spare time to hop on a plane and go mine some rare Earth metals ourselves, while tweaking an ARM chip specification, in fact when it comes time to building a foundry for it we are too gunshy to lay down $1B-$2B. As Wikipedia states, "Prices for most common pieces of equipment for the processing of 300 mm wafers range from $700,000 to upwards of $4,000,000 each with a few pieces of equipment reaching as high as $50,000,000 each (e.g. steppers). A typical fab will have several hundred equipment items."

Well, either that, or full-stack doesn't mean what the author thinks it does :)

What does mobile app dev have to do with a full web stack for example :)

<comment><USER18> > _What does mobile app dev have to do with a full web stack for example_

While the author's definition might be too expansive, I can answer that one: Design your APIs to support mobile clients that sync, for which you'll need an experienced mobile architect, or your mobile clients will be stuck not taking advantage of local storage for better performance and resiliency in situations with unreliable connectivity.

If you treat mobile as an add-on, it will bite you in the ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Full stack: Someone who can build one (1) stack which fulfills the business requirements. Database to backend to frontend(s). If you're using rails and Django at the same time, and your full stack engineers have to take on an unnecessary cognitive load, that's your problem.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think as a joke there should be a 3/4 stack developer trend as the new hotness -- it should signal "I am competent in one area as opposed to a jack of all trades, master of none"

If I was looking for positions I put that on my resume.

<comment><USER4> Have something similar on my resume: Jack of all trades, master of SOME

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> C#/F# .NET:

\- ASP.NET WebAPI : web server

\- Xamarin : iOS, Android

\- Azure : cloud

\- Akka.NET : actor model

\- XAML/WPF : enterprise LOB, Windows Phone

</comment><comment><USER22> Most programmers never do or use machine learning, and in fact most people who call themselves "data scientists" don't know the first thing about it. Knowing a package with some canned algorithms in it is not one tenth of the battle. If you can write a logistic regression or SVM from scratch (not that it has to be as good as the existing product; in practice, you'd probably to use an existing QP solver, for example) we'll talk.

I also don't think Scala is part of "the full stack". Worth knowing? Sure. Powerful? Yeah, it's quite a large step up from Java. You'll want to know it to use Spark, and it's a great "gateway drug" for Haskell. But I don't think it's on the list of things that a person needs to know to call himself a "full stack web developer".

Anyway, someone needs to write a terrible language that isn't _so_ bad that no one uses it. Take all the worst features of C++ and Java, bolt on some enterprise crap, make your shitty ORM a first-class citizen, and then sell the shit out of it. (It can't be unusable like Brainfuck, but it can be worse than Java and still sellable to the enterprise.) It'll be a nine-figure effort, but I'll spot the first $200. Here's the one rule: this shitty language has to be named _FullStack_. Then we can be done with this shitty buzzword because "Full Stack Developer" will mean something else. Bonus points if it's attached to a "hip" but broken database system called Big Data.

<comment><USER19> I like to put my culinary and sock-puppetry skills on my resume under the devops section.</comment></comment>


How the Apple Watch UI should have been - <AUTHOR> http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1951

<comment><USER2> These changes make great sense.

The watch should mirror iOS for UI / UX in as many ways as possible to make the learning curve as low as possible. Of the people I know that own an Apple Watch (after I purchased mine), all of them have asked me "how do I do x", from as simple as changing the color of the clock, to how to play music, to how to silence it.

If it followed iOS UI more closely, these problems / questions may not exist.</comment>


Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals - <AUTHOR> https://sciencebeta.com/spin-psychiatry-journals/ <comment><USER2> I think this is a natural outcome of the peer review process; you're not targeting research papers at statistical models, you're targeting them at human reviewers. This kind of behavior is equally prevalent in many fields, _including_ computer science.

I recently reviewed a paper from a research team in China, on a scalable and ubiquitous ad hoc sensing platform. The presented "spin" was that it could potentially be useful for monitoring power distribution networks, thereby reducing blackouts, which was certainly true. However, it could also have been used for an inescapable, totalitarian panopticon (this part was implicit and unstated).

As a reviewer with explicit instructions to evaluate the ethical implications of the work, is it my responsibility (A) to interpret the stated "spin", (B) extract and evaluate strictly the technical contributions of the work, or (C) all of the above, and the implicit "anti-spin" interpretation that was provided courtesy of my Western worldview?

And here's a twist - six months previously, a similar situation occurred _with my own work_ , in which a technology that I envisioned (spun) being used for disaster relief caught the eye of an alphabet agency for low-cost, secure data collection in third world theaters. This was deeply shocking to me at the time, because I hadn't considered this potential use case when I was developing the system. I had spun its impact so effectively in my own mind, _I didn 't even see the negative alternative_.

It's my observation that human brains will inject their own spin if it doesn't already exist, using the social and cultural norms to which that brain is accustomed. I don't hold a researcher's desire to sell their work as effectively as possible against them, especially if the person to whom they're selling most effectively is themselves.

<comment><USER3> I'm a novice in my IT career. If you're able and willing, would you mind explaining to me how software (spun as it may be) for disaster relief, could be used for data collection outside the scope of the objectives you had in the name of disaster relief? If this question misses the mark you're welcome to ignore it. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> It's probably image analysis from overflight, if I were to guess, or an ML- augmented database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article might be spin itself, given how it captures attention with the accusation but hides what was actually tested with the circumlocation "a previously published definition of spin". For all I know, they just counted every abstract that contained the word "may" and called it spin.

</comment><comment><USER6> The issue is probably two-pronged: 1\. There is pressure from the department (and funders, as the article mentions) to produce publications. The need to publish leads to researchers to spin null results as a way to "cash in" the time and effort put into a research project (I'm assuming good intentions here on the part of the researchers). 2\. Articles get published if the authors can argue that their work makes a new and unique contribution to the field. This argument usually rests less on the article's results and more on the discussion of these results. I am not surprised that authors spin the results in their discussion sections.

As a side note, most readers only read the introduction and discussion section of a paper. Those two sections usually have the most spin as they are written to "hook" readers in the paper (and to an extent, to be accessible to a non- technical person sometimes outside of the field). Lit review, methods, and results sections are usually more dry as they report on the technical aspects of a research project.

<comment> your-nanny huh? we read the methods and results first, then the spin (exception, the abstracts)

<comment><USER7> Several major journals, including nature, put the methods at the end.

<comment> your-nanny so? do you read scientific papers in order? I don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Abstracts are typically between 150 and 250 words, yet studies, especially clinical trials, are frequently complex affairs. Fitting nuance into an abstract is just often not possible, and frankly, the clearest most succinct language usually oversells the results.

</comment><comment> your-nanny Ah, but if they had not found spin we would never have heard of their study...

</comment><comment><USER9> Also: "Spin" found in over 50% of top quantum mechanics journal abstracts.

</comment><comment><USER10> They're called soft sciences for a reason, they're more about interpretation and opinion than hard irrefutable evidence. So this is not surprising, it's probably quite a bit higher than 50% too, and in all of the soft science fields where agendas or political motives may be present; sociology, psychology, political science, some archaeology, etc

<comment><USER11> If you can't follow the scientific method most of the time, should their work be considered science at all?

<comment><USER12> Are you actually arguing that randomized controlled trials aren't following the scientific method?

<comment><USER11> Clinical trials are not true repeatable, scientific experiments. They're really just controlled studies which are the best that can be done in the absence of the possibility of a controlled experiment. In psychology, this however is just the tip of an iceberg of problems with such research being unscientific.

<comment><USER12> I don't follow.

An experiment needs to be repeatable _in principle_. You don't actually have to re-run it with the exact same specimens or subjects; they can be sampled from some larger population that you're studying (e.g., patients with depression). Nevertheless, you can often do something like a cross-over design that lets you repeatedly test the same patients in different conditions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What are the underlying reasons for "The Patterson Cycle"? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-underlying-reasons-for-The-Patterson-Cycle-and-why-is-it-roughly-14-years-long

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or does the top-voted answer -- from Mr. Patterson himself -- not answer at all the question of why there is a 14-year cycle?</comment>


Undercover Facebook moderator was instructed not to remove hate speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582152/facebook-channel-4-undercover-investigation-content-moderation <comment><USER2> It's the same argument again and again but nobody that defends this really think this through.

For the ones that still want "fake news" completely banned, I have a question: who is going to decide what is true and what is not? A company? The government? Will we have "commissions of truth" deciding what can be published or not? Will the users "vote" on what can be published or not?

Please come with a proper solution and stop arguing for something you and nobody else want. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> The same two things always come to mind.

1.) Always assume it's the people you don't agree with that are going to decide what can and can't be said.

2.) Understand that definitions wander and interpretation is everything. If Orthodox Jew Been Shapiro needs a $600,000 security unit to allow him to speak at Berkeley because of "his white supremacist bullshit," note that the censorious don't seem particularly interested in the precise content of the speech.</comment></comment>


Wandering the web stacks, or, fighting intellectual atrophy on the internet - <AUTHOR> http://jsomers.net/blog/wandering-the-web-stacks

<comment><USER2> In some ways, the author is describing problems similar to those Julian Sanchez discussed in The Perils of Pop Philosophy (which I discuss in turn here: [http://jseliger.com/2009/06/01/highly-recommended-the- perils...](http://jseliger.com/2009/06/01/highly-recommended-the-perils-of- pop-philosophy) ). As Sanchez says:

"Those are real enough, but there's also the problem that the general glut of information and opinion makes it disconcertingly easy to kid yourself about how well you understand a particular topic."

Skimming vacuous websites won't get us to knowledge, and at this point, reading books more often will. The trick is being able to find the pointers to the books you should read, which I think the web is very good at, and which I try to contribute to in my own small way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the great tips. I've been bored with the usual suspects in my bookmarks, and have returned to reading dead trees again. I'm loving it! But I suspect your advice here will help me rejuvenate my love affair with the internet.</comment>


Lawyer who argued for Internet sales taxes admits he doesn't pay them - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-attorney-who-convinced-the-supreme-court-to-allow-internet-sales-taxes-just-admitted-that-hes-a7ef9ce8ae35 <comment><USER2> I see this as a great argument for his side, actually. State governments need to be able to enforce taxation at the time of the transaction, because it's going to be impossible to collect otherwise. Without an effective collection and enforcement mechanism, of course individuals won't go out of their way to make extra payments! Even the tax lawyer arguing the case isn't going out of his way to pay!

The question of whether states should be able to charge this tax in the first place is another conversation. But if you accept that levying these taxes is the right choice for society, there needs to be a viable collection mechanism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah good point, though probably one could make this point by showing statistics about how much tax is due versus paid. I'm sure the numbers are stark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While the implementation of the tax may be poor (expecting everyone selling something on the internet to know the tax for 1000's of addresses) it certainly seems fair that the tax should be paid.

As a compromise, if the only the state tax was due, that would be something.

<comment><AUTHOR> That does seem like a much fairer compromise. In the law at issue, a business could be required to charge and remit taxes if they had just 200 transactions with residents in the state. If this means compliance with dozens or hundreds of county laws, that could be burdensome.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note: I'm the author. I used to be a tax lawyer, before getting into the startup life. Hopefully this piece appeals to non-lawyers and general-purpose readers. Would love to hear comments from fellow HNers!</comment>


West Virginia Engineer Proves to Be a David to VW's Goliath - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/23/us-usa-volkswagen-researchers-idUSKCN0RM2D720150923 <comment><USER2> >"When the news about Volkswagen broke last Friday, Carder heard from some of the heavy diesel engine manufacturers that were part of the consent decree.

>"They saw what had happened and called to say: 'Good job, you guys,'" Carder said. "Some folks said: 'How did they not learn from our mistakes 15 years ago?'"

Neither VW nor these companies made a "mistake", though they all use that term. This was deliberate deceit, fraud, trickery. If there was a mistake it was thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money. Each time they talk about their "mistake" they reveal how deeply attached they are to a culture of denying responsibility.

<comment><USER3> So, what deceits do software makers call "mistakes"?

<comment><USER4> Graphics drivers can detect when a speed test is being run, and degrade the output quality to get a higher frame rate.

I don't think anybody called that a mistake, it's just straight cheating.

If anything, they've probably seen that and thought it was a great idea!

[http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers- optimize-q...](http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize- quake-iii)

<comment><USER5> As someone who works in games industry - we have a line to AMD and NVIDIA open all the time. They change their drivers to work with our game just as much as we change our games to work with their drivers. Each driver has thousands of profiles for different games, and that has nothing to do with cheating - it's because no one writes perfect, 100% standard-compliant shaders or other gpu related code. The article you linked is ancient, but this still happens - drivers know that in your specific game there's a problem with the textures so they will automatically reduce the fidelity of texture shaders, or do some other changes. If you changed the name of our game internally, the drivers would no longer pick it up and you would lose 10-20 fps depending on the situation. That's not "cheating".

<comment><USER6> To me, the line between cheating and ensuring good compatibility is drawn when you deceptively "optimize" for particular benchmark measurements at the expense of other qualitative un-measured or difficult-to-measure qualities. This undermines the purpose of the benchmark.

There's a huge difference between "Game XYZ uses these inputs and shaders, let's make sure our driver works as well as possible when we see this pattern" and "When we detect the user is running Benchmark ABC, make everything look like shit so we come out with a high benchmark score that we can use in our marketing materials!"

I'll admit, however, the line gets fuzzy when the game itself is used as a benchmark.

<comment><USER4> Come to think of it, with computer proliferation this will permeate everything, and already has.

Trying to buy airline or cruise tickets? Some kind of shenanigans are bound to happen. The system is trying to infer if you might be willing to pay a lot.

Though, in the old times this haggling was done by real people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" Despite the discrepancies, a fix shouldn't involve major changes. "It could be something very small," said Carder, who's the interim director of West Virginia University's Center for Alternative Fuels....

"It can simply be a change in the fuel injection strategy. What might be realized is a penalty in fuel economy in order to get these systems more active, to lower the emissions levels."_

Fix is likely not that big of a deal... but what about the impact on the consumers who paid for a car with a certain performance level and are now left with a diminished product?

I have several colleagues who have VW TDIs that are distraught. Many of them are very well informed consumers who took pride in purchasing a more environmentally friendly car at a higher premium. The car might be able to meet those environmental standards but the price tag no longer seems justifiable.

<comment><USER8> Are diesel vehicles actually more environmentally friendly? It sure doesn't seem that way driving behind one.

<comment><USER9> Yes, they are among one of the four items identified in improving fuel economy: Aluminum frames (carbon fiber is better but cost prohibitive at this time), diesel, streamlining (read shrink), and the other that I am currently blanking on.

a. Diesel engines get 33% better fuel economy. [1] b. Have a lower total cost of ownership. [2] c. They are better than petrol gasoline on three out of five emission items, the one that is noticeable to the naked eye, particulates, is what causes concern. [3]The caveat is that petrol gas emits particulates at a smaller micron level, unnoticeable to the naked eye, and may actually be of greater concern to the general public.

1\. [http://www.carsdirect.com/car-buying/diesel-fuel-vs- unleaded...](http://www.carsdirect.com/car-buying/diesel-fuel-vs-unleaded- gasoline-understand-the-pros-and-cons) 2\. [http://www.dieselforum.org/files/dmfile/20130311_CD_UMTRITCO...](http://www.dieselforum.org/files/dmfile/20130311_CD_UMTRITCOFinalReport_dd2017.pdf) 3\. [https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=200609260829...](https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060926082929AA4DvqB)

<comment><USER10> There's one small issue with diesel engines. Diesel exhaust fumes cause cancer: [http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2012/06/14/diesel- fu...](http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2012/06/14/diesel-fumes- definitely-cause-cancer-should-we-be-worried/)

<comment><USER9> The article mentions that particulate is in a classification that is known to cause cancer, however, the article admits that "IARC isn't in the business of telling us how potent something is in causing cancer – only whether it does so or not."

The amount needs to be identified, because it could be similar to the radiation levels in bananas... There is some, but it may not be enough to be deadly.

<comment><USER10> I mentioned this mostly as a reply to:

 _[3]The caveat is that petrol gas emits particulates at a smaller micron level, unnoticeable to the naked eye, and may actually be of greater concern to the general public._

The diesel exhaust fumes are proven to be worse than the petrol engines in at least one respect - health.

Maybe if every truck on the road and a lot of the cars ran on bananas and not on diesel, then I would be concerned about the radiation levels in bananas.

Moreover in the place where I live people are allowed to remove their car DPFs which makes things even worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This, plus:

-the case of the Kansas mathematician investigating election fraud

-the case of the banking expert pointing out that CalPERS and other large pension funds are being suckered by private equity

make me hopeful that we'll see a new trend of academics and specialists pointing out the fraud in the systems we take for granted.

[http://cjonline.com/news/2015-04-01/wichita-state- mathematic...](http://cjonline.com/news/2015-04-01/wichita-state- mathematician-sues-kris-kobach-sedgwick-county-elections-commisioner)

[http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/09/the-larger- implicatio...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/09/the-larger-implications- of-calpers-staff-and-board-incompetence-in-private-equity.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to know how they expected to get away with this? Something like this isn't a decision made by one or two people. The layers of engineering, and number of people that had to be involved in pulling this off had to be enormous. I'm amazed that a whistleblower didn't come forward sooner.

<comment><USER13> Actually one or two people could have gotten away with this. As a software developer on large automotive projects, I was often writing code to do things I didn't understand. My coding came from hand written specifications that often had sequence diagrams which is basic software flows. I.E. Do this when you see these conditions. I typically didn't understand the conditions.

Additionally, modern ECUs in vehicles are modifiable at run time through something called XCP/CCP programming. You can think of of this as calibrating the ECU. ECU = Electronic Control Unit.

The thing that really bothers me about all this is from the article

"Carder said he's surprised to see such a hullabaloo now, because his team's findings were made public nearly a year and a half ago."

It seems nothing was done until the media outlets got a hold of the story?

Why didn't this blow up happen a year and a half ago before all these additional vehicles were put on the road?

<comment><USER14> This didn't blow up a year and a half ago because VW had not yet confessed. The timeline as I know it is that these results were published a year and a half ago, which got the attention of the EPA. The EPA did their homework, and about a year ago, started pressing VW on this issue. VW denied for a year, and just recently finally admitted. It's an unfortunate timeline, but I think a reasonable one. Source, from molecule in this thread: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/adva...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/advanced-cars/how-professors-caught-vw-cheating)

And great insights on the software side of this.

<comment><USER15> EPA doing their homework is fine, but what exactly is reasonable in VW denying this for a year?

<comment><USER14> Nothing. I'm assuming that VW is in the wrong and _not_ reasonable. I interpreted the original question to mean, why did every one else (media, government, public) not pay attention to this until now? Given the timeline, it's reasonable that the media, government and public did pay attention when they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Carder may be surprised at the "hullabaloo" now because he released the results 18 months ago, but I have had a hell of a time finding any written documentation of their technique.

Was their research limited to observing the effects on cars as they were driven around (something they did), or were they able to dump and analyze the firmware as well? The EFF wrote a story talking about how the DMCA made it hard for researchers, but didn't actually mention the barriers (if any) in this case.

If anyone has links to the written research or an understanding of how hard it is to get at the firmware controlling these emissions, I'd love to read it.

<comment><USER14> This is the full paper: [http://www.theicct.org/use-emissions-testing-light- duty-dies...](http://www.theicct.org/use-emissions-testing-light-duty-diesel- vehicles-us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are any other manufacturers under suspicion? You'd think the incentives are similar for the large players, and they are certainly all able to do this kind of trick.

<comment><USER18> Personally, I won't be the least bit surprised when we find out all the major American and Asian manufacturers do/did this same stuff and worse.

Ultimately I can't place total blame on the manufacturers, consumers demand emissions standards from their legislatures and then turn around and nearly bankrupt themselves buying 5000lbs extended cab trucks that says 24MPG on the sticker but realistically won't get more than 12 in real world conditions.

If you demand magic and are willing to pay $30k to get it, don't act the least bit surprised when someone lies to you

<comment><USER19> Most manufacturers aren't all-in on diesel, which was VW's strategy. They fudged the tests to have low-consumption during road tests but still pass NOx lab testing (NOx being a side-effect of good combustion in a diesel engine, which you want for better fuel efficiency and to limit particulate matter)

<comment><USER18> The the underlying technique used to fudge the test was that the ECU firmware behaved differently during testing than it would in the real world.

I imagine the performance / efficiency curve can be similarly tweaked in a gasoline engine, allowing the OEMs to both pass the mandated emissions standards testing and still sell the kind of big boy truck consumers demand.

<comment><USER20> Yep, google Chrysler Lean Burn (which made sense back when they did it, allowed to avoid catalyst for a few more years) and more egregious GM Lean Cruise (which is now not permitted in US models).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The West Virginia report from may of 2014 . Car a and b, though not specified I think are the VWs car c is a BMW. Page 63 shows the difference between driving around and testing.

Report (pdf):

[http://www.theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/WVU_...](http://www.theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/WVU_LDDV_in- use_ICCT_Report_Final_may2014.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Funnily enough, if VW changes all cars to run permanently on the "clean" map it will actually increase the fuel consumption, reducing NOx emissions at the same time. So what is better? To burn more fuel but emit less NOx, or burn less fuel but emit more NOx?

</comment><comment><USER22> The researchers could have made a _lot_ of money ($15-30M) off this information by shorting Volkswagen prior to the release of their reports, and it would've been perfectly legal. I speculated a bit about this notion -- specifically for VW and more generally as a startup / arbitrage opportunity:

[http://www.travisdeyle.com/musings/volkswagen.html](http://www.travisdeyle.com/musings/volkswagen.html)

<comment><USER23> People already do things like that:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/in-praise-of- sh...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/in-praise-of-short- sellers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm wondering how they detect that they're in an emissions test quickly enough to not emit too much early in the test. Do the testers connect their equipment to the OBD-II port of the car? Or I guess you could tell from the fact that one set of wheels is spinning while the other wheels are stationary (because it's mounted on a dynamometer).

<comment><USER24> I found a bit of an answer. According to this EPA document, it detected a test by sensing the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, duration of engine operation and barometric pressure.

[http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/vw-nov- caa-09-18-15....](http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/vw-nov- caa-09-18-15.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to know what sanctions the individual VW engineers will face. I assume professional engineers in Europe have a similar code of ethics that engineers in the US and Canada have to uphold. "Just following orders" doesn't let you off the hook.

<comment><USER26> Well, in a _formal_ sense, most US engineers aren't licensed and have a specific code of ethics to uphold. (To be clear, that doesn't mean they don't or shouldn't follow their own code of ethics or that they haven't agreed to follow a code of conduct with their employer.) I'm not sure to what degree the situation is different in Germany. Of course, engineers who interact with regulatory bodies often are licensed--and, indeed, that's one main reasons for getting licensed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a ridiculous scandal. Greed knows no bounds eh.</comment>