Astrology For Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/12/astrology-for-businesses/ <comment><USER3> The value of Myers-Briggs has nothing to do with its accuracy: Good tests start by telling you that humans are too complex for a 4 axes characterization.

The value of MB _is_ teaching interaction. Many people, esp those in tech fields, have a high degree of "I'm like me, therefore everybody is like me." Thinking about how "the other half" lives and works causes a new language to develop between different folks which can be very powerful.

Here's an example: Development people are quite different than straight operations people. In MB-land, you might say the devs tend more towards N and ops tends towards S. I can't tell you how many hardware products I've seen die because of the failure to bridge that gap, with each side driving the other up a wall.

</comment><comment><USER4> A more interesting question for me is - Are there distinct personality types at all? My anecdote: I lived in a very white, very blue collar suburb of Vancouver for the first 20 years of my life and did not know anyone who wasn't in the same boat as me. Then I started working in an area that was dominated by Indian immigrants. I was surprised to find out that people where the same they just had different faces and names.

By that I mean that Raj was very similar to Steve, they laughed at the same sort of humor, they acted similar, they could have traded bodies (ala "Freaky Friday") and nobody would have noticed. At 26 I moved to Tucson AZ and the whole cycle repeated. Now I was living in an area that was 50% Hispanic. The same cycle repeated itself, where I met people that seemed to me to be personality clones of others I had known before. Now it was Juan who was just like Raj or Steve from my past. It felt like to me there was 12-16 basic personalities out there and I thought I could understand where the seed of Astrology or Meyers-Briggs sprouted from.

Now I am an employer of about 10 people in a manufacturing company. I have seen many people come and go, and after a while you see patterns. Of course humans are known to find patterns where none exist, so maybe I am just fooling myself. This foolishness keeps popping up though, whenever I meet someone new and I think "He is just like Steve, or Raj or Juan" and possibly this helps or hurts our relationships on some hidden level.

edit: I am Scorpio but have never taken the Meyers-Briggs test. I do apparently have nine of my planets in the house of money for any investors out there that are basing their portfolios on astrological principles :)

<comment><USER5> I dunno. I try to consciously avoiding reframing people in the context of a certain personality template or whatever. I prefer taking people at face value and gradually forming an opinion as to who they are while consciously dissociating the superficial characteristics. This is not an easy task and something I work very hard to do (and often fail).

( This is mainly because I was born and have lived in quite a few countries which were very different from the region that my race originates from: I have found that people take a shortcut to judging others which always annoys me. Some do it based on race, e.g. You are Ashkenazi jewish, you must be so smart. Others based on superficial personality traits observed in biased environments: You look so vibrant and love to talk, you clearly are an extrovert. )

I suspect the evolutionary advantage of having these short cuts is that it helps you size up a situation really quickly. However, in this rapidly changing world of ours, I find this to be a hindrance. People rarely are unidimensional and have significant personality shifts depending on who they interact with or who they talk to. E.g. I was working with a potential advisor back in School who is known to be a paranoid insecure tyrant who is incredibly sarcastic and mean to his grad. students. On the other hand, this person has been in a committed, long term relationship with his significant other, brought up kids in what could be described as the most gentle patient person.

( I realize that we are both trading anecdotes here but I tried looking for hard science to back this up a few years back and all I found were speculations.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't get me wrong I don't buy in to any of this, but while people, like say the last POTUS, say publicly that they believe in god, talk to god and are guided on policy by god, and that's seen as a plus point to a lot of voters, then I fail to see why astrology gets put down as some thing less credible. If anything, astrology is a bit less dangerous, since its little more than empty cold reading, etc.

In the end, a lot of decisions end up being take on the flip of a coin. Its this just an over complicated coin toss?

<comment><USER7> Rationality in the world is not going to happen all at once: chipping away at the irrational beliefs of people, and educating them in rational thinking is most likely the best way to get there.

<comment><USER8> Well said. Furthermore, let's try to root out these beliefs early. It's easy for great power structures to form around them if left unchecked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently applied for a job and they sent me this test and another personality test. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but is there any way to politely decline wasting 30 minutes of my life to taking a test that I refuse to take on the ethical grounds that this is pure bunk? I guess it is a great way to filter out people I wouldn't want to work for, but I wonder if refusing to take the test is somehow a litmus.

When legitimate _knowledge_ exams are found "discriminatory" by judges across America, shouldn't it be time to look at these so-called, non-scientific tests and ask if they aren't discriminatory against what, exactly? Wouldn't it be egregious if it were more likely that women or Latinos often fall into one of the "no hire, no promote" letters? That last is stupid hypothetical, but something has to get the madness to stop.

<comment><USER10> Working for someone else often involves jumping through arbitrary stupid pointless hoops.

Refusing to take the test, even if you have excellent reasons to do so, is probably a reason to not employ you. That early part of recruitment has little t do with getting the best person. It's mostly about trimming away hundreds of people applying for 2 positions.

You need your own assessment about where the benefits of cash, job security, job fun, etc outweigh the disbenefits of PHBs with idiot job demands.

> but something has to get the madness to stop.

Recruiting is hard job and is not a solved problem. I suggest a consulting company that i) works carefully to avoid discrimination and ii) just randomly places people with suitable experience and qualifications into a company. Market it as using advanced algorithms to place workers and it might take off.

<comment><USER11> There are a hundred different ways to look at this

1) you could look at it as a nuisance that isn't worth wasting any career capital fighting (that's a perfectly valid way to look at it, you can only fight stupidity on so many fronts, this probably isn't worth the effort) (seems relevent <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448755>)

2) you could say you don't want to take the test and see how much they care. You should have some wariness of how seriously a place takes their arbitrary hoops. If an organization can't deal with a nail sticking up over an arbitrary personality test, how are they going to deal with a nail sticking up over something that really matters?

<comment><USER9> Thanks for that link. Pretty interesting.

Point 2) I tend to be the nail sticking up, but that is more a function of my job descriptions in the past where it was my responsibility to say "no" or question things. It takes a a certain amount of deftness to pull it off consistently combined with a fearlessness of not getting your head chopped off.

The results of the test I recently took said something on the order that I am a very blunt person that appreciates honesty. While this is true in many cases, the test dismissed the idea that I have situational awareness. There is a time for letting someone know that they could have done better and there is a time for congratulating people for doing their best, even if my expectations were disappointed. Empathy didn't seem to be an important measurement for this particular version of the test. People are complex and slippery, with their own motives, and sometimes you can't expect people to be what they aren't.

To say the least, it was upsetting to read a small part of my personality painted with such a thin brush. Ultimately, if I was a hiring manager and read such a description, I would probably think twice about speaking to this person again. This seems to suggest that whoever created the test, or whoever wrote the descriptions, had axes to grind vs certain personality "traits."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Myers-Briggs is the corporate equivalent of those "Is He Right For You? - <USER2> Our 10 Question Soulmate Quiz" things that have done a brisk trade in magazines since time immemorial.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love personality tests, I find them addictive, I've taken the Myers-Briggs test at least half a dozen times at various times in my life, with results from INTJ to ENFP and everything in between.

One flaw in the test is that it doesn't distinguish between how you instinctively act and what you value most. Naturally I am a _total_ introvert, but at times in my life I have made an unusual effort to have an active social life and make a lot of friends. And I scored an E on the introvert/extrovert dimension. For whatever reason I was proud of this.

It would be trivially easy to game this test, but even if you take it honestly, the test is telling you something ambiguous: a mixture of who you are now and what you aspire to.

<comment><AUTHOR> In other words, feel good nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a long history of the use of pseudoscience by companies to pick job candidates. In the 1980s there was a craze for handwriting analysis, where a person's handwriting style was supposed to reveal various aspects of their personality.

If a company wants you to complete personality tests it's a sign that the management is easily influenced by the claims of fashionable "gurus" and isn't very rational.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is very widespread across all industries, especially at higher levels of management. Pharmaceutical companies are extremely prone to 'managing by nonsense' and pour immense amounts of money into these tests (especially the red/blue/yellow/green energy ones that are currently popular). Novartis is one of the worse in this area. They generally try to have a management team that is 'balanced across the color energies' and that.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what companies actually use these for. I've worked for a couple of companies that gave them to all the employees and then completely ignored the results. Probably just a ritual thing, I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's a large part of it - just a cargo cult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree these practice gives the feeling to do something without the burden of actually doing something. A more optimistic view would be, it creates some dynamic to introduce the idea of doing something. In any cases, the hard work remains to be done.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's a good overview of the non-science behind NLP: [http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/neurolinguistic...](http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/neurolinguistic- programming-and-other-nonsense/)

<comment><USER19> I just learned today that the first few google hits for NLP are about Neuro- Linguistic Programming and not Natural Language Processing. Imagine my disappointment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> if you try these things online you'll soon see it's pretty easy to play them. if you're given one in an interview, answer the "obvious" ones obviously and then with the ones that seem ambiguous or pointless, simply answer according to what you think appropriate for the job. for example, if they are looking for leadership, answer positive to whatever implies you enjoy telling others what to do (it's really that trivial).

given that, i assume they select for people smart enough to play them. which might have some value, i guess.

</comment><comment><USER21> What a great post! I've been a different Myers-Briggs type in the few times that I've taken them, and outside of its usage in business, I've heard things like if you and your partner only differ by one type, that could mean that you will have relationship problems. In addition, if both of you are (some astrological type) then depending on the type you may also have problems. This is such B.S. and there is no scientific study that proves it.

But, lets examine this a bit further. These tests do ask questions that identify behavioral traits, and it is true that some behaviors could more likely be less compatible, and that there are studies to support this. So, to some extent these tests are onto something.

And what about psychological tests? If each test was perfect, you would not need to take several tests that each vary a lot in the results. Both a family member and I have taken a number of psychological tests, over time and result were really inconsistent.

It isn't just in business that they use these types of tests, whether they are Myers-Briggs or widely accepted and used psych tests. These tests are used for college students in dorms to assess whether they are compatible. They are used to access psychological problems. This is very important stuff, and it is guesswork! The human mind and accessment of our behavior is beyond our current ability to measure and diagnose properly.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought Myers-Briggs was obsoleted by the Big Five, anyway.

<comment><USER23> Hardly, they occupy different spaces. Big 5 is the current faith in academia, while MB is the current cult within business.

In any case, the Big 5 has little more of a scientific basis than the MBTI, but as most psychologists don't understand the importance of statistics (and what factor analysis can and can't tell you) it still survives, zombie like. I hate the big 5, but I hate myers briggs more.

<comment><USER24> Big 5 isn't particularly good, and hopefully no-one says it is (except when they follow up with a "compared to MB"). And unlike MB, it doesn't _claim_ to be anything deep or fundamental. It is just a lens which might be useful, and that's what it says on the tin.

The most important part of Big5 (IMO) is that it gets away from archetypes. Changing "introvert / extrovert" to "level of introversion / extroversion" is very important.

<comment><USER23> Well the constant refusal of Costa and McCrae to accept the results of confirmatory factor analyses is what gets me. To argue that personality must necessarily have a different method because the current method does not agree with your (essentially qualitative) conclusions is not science in my view.

Certainly in my areas (social especially) there's a lot of flag waving for the Big 5 which really upsets me. Then, when I told my lecturers during the course of my PhD that all psychologists should have to learn a little matrix algebra i was essentially laughed at. Unfortuntately, until they do, stupid over interpretations of flawed statistical models are likely to remain commonplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I do Agile coaching. That is, I help teams work in a productive and fun way. Basically it's best practices of iterative and incremental development.

Because Agile is a best practices thing and not a standard, we're always interested in how some teams do better than others. A professional colleague has put together an online test where you can measure your personality and then find the perfect team-mates. It's a very similar concept to what the article is talking about.

I'm not a believer in personality tests at all, but I wonder if in the aggregate they might be marginally useful for team formation. I've heard some rumors that sports psychologists have been using systems like this for years. So, while personality test X might suck for detailing anything about me as a person, if all 100 people at my company take it, would it help optimize team formation? Even if helps out only 10% or so, it could be worth the investment.

Beats me. It's an interesting question. I'm all in favor of calling out the over-sold quackery for what it is, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There still might be something useful in there, even if it only works by accident.

<comment><USER26> It's vary hard to get good data from team sports, so they often end up using 'plausible' quackery. Sadly, the same is often true in bushiness which is why training fad's are so common. That and milking training budgets is profitable.

PS: Might be something there is only worth something if you can develop a test and compare results. If you can't then it's best to ignore 'gut' feelings on such things as you have no idea if your wasting time and money or even making things worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another anecdote: investor decided not to invest in a startup because his astrologist advised against it. The date company founded was not a "good" day. Yes, investor actually called founders to ask for this piece of info, as far as i remember the story. :-)

<comment><USER28> Look up Nancy Reagan's astrologer some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My current employers have invested in the Birkman method[0][1], which many people at the company see as quite helpful. I remain skeptical, but then again I found the Enneagram[2] to be helpful in giving me some guidance during a particularly trying time in my life.

[0] <http://www.birkman.com> [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Birkman> [2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality>

</comment><comment><USER30> I've taken Myers Briggs a number of times, and seen it given by three different employers. I've never seen it used for anything more than giving people a little more insight into themselves and others. In particular, I've never seen it used to make decisions about hiring, promotion, or anything that affects people's jobs, pay, or the business.

So while I agree that M-B can be overinterpreted, I am skeptical of the claim that businesses are actually trying to use it to decide who to hire, fire, promote, etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> As the famous saying goes: All models are wrong, but some are useful.

I agree that MBTI is largely unscientific, but I would point out that a model doesn't necessarily have to be scientific to be useful. To me, the value of a model is in the conceptual framework it provides you to work with, and the common language it gives you for discussing ideas with others.

One doesn't have to believe that anyone is absolutely an "introvert" or an "extrovert" for the idea of an introvert or an extrovert to be useful, for instance.

<comment><USER32> These are all nice words, but when MBTI is tested it fails (citation from the article). So this model is wrong AND it's not useful.

<comment><USER31> "Tested" is vague. Tested for what? That a model fails to be predictive for certain tasks only really demonstrates that it's a bad model for that task, not that it's categorically useless.

<comment><USER32> Read the article and the citation inside if you want to know what it was tested for

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am no expert on this topic, so can only speak from my own experience having taken MB twice, 7 years apart, scoring INTP on both occasions. Each time following the test I read a few pages in the book about INTP as well as a few pages on each of the archetypes on which I was judged not to be. Generally I regard personality tests with enormous skepticism but in the case of MB I must confess I was impressed with how accurate the INTP profile described my world view. More importantly, I found no such positive correlation between how my mind works and the other profile descriptions.

If the test is worthless, as the author of this article suggests, how would he explain people like me who upon reading the profile for their archetype in the book attest "yes that is a shockingly accurate description of me" and upon reading others' profiles react "no absolutely nothing about that resonates with me"? My own view is that MB, while hardly perfect, is surprisingly revealing for many individuals and can help one understand and be more tolerant of people whose profiles are in sharp contrast to one's own.

That said, I have taken other personality tests which highly intelligent people have recommended to me and found absolutely no value in those results. But I would not make the claim that those other tests are therefore universally useless, because after all I am but one data point.

<comment><USER34> I also found the results of this test surprisingly accurate, but I think it is likely that you and I are the victims of coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This reminds me of the day one of my work 'colleagues' asked me what my star sign was and various other similar questions, indicating he was evaluating me as a potential mate.

Disregarding the sheer immaturity of the approach and inappropriateness in a work-related context, I had a good amount of laughs over it with one of the company's bosses.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can hear the screaming sound of Patrick Moore rotating in his coffin as i type this response.

<comment><USER36> Oh dear someone doesn't have a sense of humor do they

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have some other links about the test mentioned in the interesting submitted blog post here.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on- leadership/myers-b...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on- leadership/myers-briggs-does-it-pay-to-know-your- type/2012/12/14/eaed51ae-3fcc-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html)

"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers- Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don't want it. And it's not clear whether organizations should, either.

. . . .

"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."

<http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html>

[http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality- tests/person...](http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality- tests/personality-tests-popular-tests.htm)

"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."

[http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...](http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/mbti.pdf)

The book-length treatment of the subject, by Annie Murphy Paul, in _The Cult of Personality Testing,_ is quite interesting.

[http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie- Murphy/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie- Murphy/dp/0743280725)

There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

The long version of my company hiring procedures FAQ was last posted at

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803>

18 days ago, with uncharacteristic snark in response to a snarky blog post title.

<comment><USER38> My understanding of Myers-Briggs is that it is only useful when undertaken voluntarily, and the subject accepts and recognizes the validity of the outcome. Jung was a therapist, so his main purpose was to help people seeking to attain mental health. The idea of the test is for individuals to understand themselves, not for other people to understand them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Excellent write-up btw; thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The problem with these personality tests is their belief in an atomic, immutable "personality" or identity. It doesn't exist. People change radically. The person I was at 5 is gone. He's effectively gone, forever. That's not a bad thing. It's to be celebrated.

One thing I like about Buddhism is that it dovetails well with my skeptical, nonreligious inclination. You're expected to find things out for yourself, not take your beliefs from on high. If you don't believe in reincarnation (I do, but it's not required) you can still meditate. You're still invited to participate. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or an afterlife.

One teaching of Buddhism, that I find to be very useful, is that most of what we call "me" is an illusion. It's inherently empty. To the extent that it exists, it's dependent on so many other conditions and relationships. People get into traps. "I'm just not a happy person." "I'm a neurotic mess." "I'm a programmer, so I could never be a good writer." Bullshit. People also inflict it on each other (crab mentality) by focusing on reputation and "track record"-- this illusion that observable state reflects inherent traits rather than an interaction between a person and external conditions-- rather than real capability.

People get deeply invested in, and limited by, these identities they build for themselves and each other that actually make no sense.

Ok, rant over.

<comment><USER40> If one were to read on this subject just as an outsider peeking in, what book would you advise?

<comment><USER39> A very good start is the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but there are a lot of great books out there on these topics.

<comment><USER41> I know it's a completely different arena, but how do you feel about Hesse's Siddhartha?

<comment><USER39> I haven't read it, but it seems cool.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python is 60 times slower than Java - <AUTHOR> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=mandelbrot

<comment><USER2> The table is more interesting than the graph. Note that fortran takes only 0.6 times as long as the fastest C time.

<comment><USER3> Yes,

\- and the source code for each of those programs is more interesting than just the measurements

\- and understanding that some of those programs are written for multi-core and some are not is more interesting...

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php?test=mandelbrot)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This bechmark uses the Mandelbrot calculation, that is finished in 30 seconds (Java) and about 30 minutes (Python version).</comment>


Del.icio.us export disabled and support email down - <AUTHOR> https://del.icio.us/export (the social bookmarking site) currently says (if you are logged in), "We're sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible."<p>I tried to email support to ask about this; the Help page (https://del.icio.us/help) says to email support at del.icio.us, but that doesn't seem to work right now. <comment><USER2> Is that really the same del.icio.us that I had an account at once? Wow. Looks terrible. Like the web equivalent of an abandoned mall.

<comment><USER3> Fittingly they have a terrible store too: [https://shop.icio.us/](https://shop.icio.us/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paging @idlewords, I'm sure he has a lot to say about this :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ha! Tried to export my bookmarks from them a couple of weeks back and got the exact same message. Apparently I am not the only one which is making me think is it deliberate?

My bookmarks are not precious but I would like them back del.icio.us! Shameful!

</comment><comment><USER6> If anyone figures out a way to export bookmarks I'd greatly appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I saw their logo recently in Font Awesome and was surprised they included it. I thought Yahoo shut it down years ago. I guess I just jumped ship and never looked back; that name is forever tainted for me.

</comment><comment><USER8> This does happen quite often, but does anyone still use del.icio.us?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm so happy that I switched to Diigo some time ago!

<comment><USER10> I got fed up with delicious and moved to pinboard.in several months ago. I am very pleased with the service $11/year and will continue to support the developer.</comment></comment>


Hacking – Why do we blame the victim? - <AUTHOR> https://joelx.com/hacking-too-much-victim-blaming/12785/ <comment><USER2> Cause in some cases (not all Mind you) it's simple lack security that has allowed the hackers in. It's the same reason we would blame someone who left their valuebles visible in an unlocked car.</comment>


Judge rules Seattle homeless man's truck is a home - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/judge-rules-seattle-homeless-mans-truck-is-a-home/ <comment><USER2> Imagine the situation. The only property that you have is a truck. You get out of money and cannot afford gas anymore, so for 72h straight your truck stay parked in some street. The city notices this and impound your vehicle. Now you have to:

1\. Pay for the time your vehicle is in city deposit and the fine

2\. Do nothing and wait for your vehicle got auctioned.

You end up with the second option because you don't have any money (or the car wouldn't be impounded in first place). So you now have: a fine to pay and no car.

And no place to live.

<comment><USER3> Just another one of those fun ways that being poor in America is ludicrously expensive.

<comment><USER4> So how does this play out in Europe? Say, a poor immigrant can't afford housing in London so he sleeps in an illegally parked car.

<comment><USER5> The car gets towed.

But asylumseekers and refugees get some money from the state they are doing the legal asylum/refugee process.

Oh, and you can push a car by human strength. Preferably at night, to somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm watching closely for the implications of this ruling. There are already Seattle neighborhoods who have folks living in their RVs, cooking meth, with no trash service, no working sewer system, selling drugs out of their RV, spewing needles around the ground, and the police already refused to do anything about it.

Sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, but there needs to be enforcement of laws and respect to the neighborhood that you are living in, whether or not you are homeless.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/meeting-draws- hund...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/meeting-draws-hundreds- frustrated-by-rvs-property-theft-in-seattle/)

<comment><USER7> This ruling is completely different from your example. Making and selling drugs and even littering is still 100% illegal, regardless of if you do it in your home or car. Very different from selling your car/home to pay parking tickets and fines.

<comment><USER6> Seattle police have already been told to stand down enforcing homeless folks living in vehicles, including when residents report drug selling, and health violations. This ruling will just add to the pressure for police to look the other way.

It's not fair to the residents of the neighborhood, or people living in vehicles that are respecting the law and minding their own business.

[http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-business-owner- frust...](http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-business-owner-frustrated- by-crime-violent-incident-near-unauthorized-rvs/681752879)

<comment><USER8> Are the people living in vehicles not minding their own business? How do you know the people living in homes are respecting the law?

Do you see that you're putting a value judgement on ownership of a home and attributing them with some ownership of the "neighborhood" while denying that broader sense of ownership to people choosing to reside in that neighborhood in their vehicles?

<comment><USER9> The people who own property contribute to the upkeep of the neighborhood in the form of property taxes. People living in cars do not. That is the fundamental difference.

<comment><USER10> > The people who own property contribute to the upkeep of the neighborhood in > the form of property taxes. People living in cars do not.

That's, if true, entirely the fault of how your state allocates revenue from vehicle license fees, not the people living in (currently licensed) cars.

<comment><USER11> If you were to jack up vehicle license fees, you would further punish low- income people who are barely getting by and need to drive for work.

<comment><USER12> You're willfully ignoring the obvious classifiable difference between a vehicle used as a dwelling vs. a vehicle used for commuting. There could simply be a registration category for vehicle dwellings with increased fees to offset the difference. This could even translate into states providing facilities for pump outs and showers for those registered for vehicle dwellings to improve the sanitation of what's going to be happening regardless.

The reality is the law, as always, is lagging behind reality. Things have changed substantially in the last few decades in terms of how realistic it is to live a fairly normal and connected life from a vehicle. There is essentially no practical need for a mailing address or land line anymore for example, smart phones, internet, efficient solar panels...

Drug addicts/cooks living in squalor who happen to be in vehicles will be committing myriad obvious and easily policed crimes. Why those police are not doing their job is entirely orthogonal to if a vehicle should be considered a potential legal residence.

<comment><USER11> _> There could simply be a registration category for vehicle dwellings with increased fees to offset the difference._

What incentive do people have to not lie about that? When someone loses their home, are they obligated to go to the DMV and update their registration and throw in a bunch of extra money? How do you police this? Do you have the police capacity to handle this?

How do you enforce violations? If someone is living in their car but didn't pay the registration, do you tow their car? Doesn't that get right back to the original problem?

 _> This could even translate into states providing facilities for pump outs and showers for those registered for vehicle dwellings to improve the sanitation of what's going to be happening regardless._

In the Seattle area, at least, there are free RV hookups for people to dump their waste. Many people just don't use them. Their vehicle may not actually be that driveable, or maybe they can't afford the gas, or maybe they simply don't care.

 _> There is essentially no practical need for a mailing address or land line anymore for example, smart phones, internet, efficient solar panels..._

Yes, a well-adjusted, committed person _can_ leave reasonably from a vehicle. But what about the people who live in vehicles in part because they aren't doing the work required to keep the social contract and be a participating member of society?

 _> Drug addicts/cooks living in squalor who happen to be in vehicles will be committing myriad obvious and easily policed crimes._

Many of these crimes aren't easily policed, actually. Drug possession requires a warrant to search a vehicle. Finding discarded paraphernalia isn't enough, nor is a witnessing drug use. Littering and waste dumping are almost impossible to police — you have to be caught in the act by a police officer.

Ignoring that, the reality is that Seattle _isn 't_ policing these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Moreover, the courts "have consistently held that there is no constitutional > right to housing."

I'm still puzzled at how our society affirms our Right to Life, while simultaneously affirming food, water, and shelter as Essential to Life, yet will never make the logical conclusion that food/water/shelter are necessarily included in our right to life.

1\. All men are entitled to life.

2\. Food, water, and shelter are essential to life.

3\. Fuck you, get a job or freeze to death.

<comment><USER14> Rights are mainly seen in the US as negative rights. The Bill of Rights Constitutional amendments are all proscriptions on government behavior. A right to life means that I must not kill you. If however, you are choking to death, there is no obligation for me to help you.

I think negative rights are the way to go. Once you start having positive rights, then you place obligations on others which ultimately require force or the threat of force to make people do something. In addition, positive rights has a tendency to keep on growing - for example a right to Internet access. The downside of that is that rights then do not become something that is stable across time and space but just a synonym for something someone arbitrarily decided to call a right.

<comment><USER15> > The Bill of Rights Constitutional amendments are all proscriptions on > government behavior.

Which the government conveniently forgets.

<comment><USER16> One of the many pitfalls you run into when the institution enforcing your rights and the institution being enforced against happen to be one and the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't imagine the legal ramifications of this. How would a court or government agency deliver legal notices to such people, for example?

<comment><USER18> How do they deliver them to tents under the bridge? We need to stop pretending the homeless don't exist.

<comment><USER19> You're absolutely right! The homeless have always been with us, and it's high time government policy caught up with that. Yet, might there be a kernel of subtlety here?

In some places, the homeless quite commonly register intersections or similar locations as their stationary home location. Then things like notices are delivered to them there. This, as grandparent implies, is not so straightforward with a mobile vehicle.

What does that leave? A requirement to constantly update your location of record with local government? Overbearing surveillance to track the homeless so government can reach them? All-electronic systems relying on devices and services the homeless almost certainly can't afford? None of these are great solutions. All are clearly problematic, in the damning social justice sense.

Again, you're completely correct. We need to admit, accept, acknowledge, and embrace our unhoused friends and neighbors. It's just possible that a truck and a tent under a bridge might pose slightly different levels of difficulty for addressing-type needs.

<comment><USER20> There are also folks who choose to live in vans or RVs as a lifestyle. There are also folks who go backpacking overseas for months or years at a time, or who work nomadic jobs (like travel nursing) which move them every few months.

You don't have to be homeless to lack a permanent address.

<comment><USER19> You're right! All of these things are true, real, and valid scenarios that can lead to this situation.

Those who have relative means will often maintain a mailbox of some sort. There are services that accept mail and scan it for you and other ways. Few of which are available to the homeless, due generally to a lack of financial means.

Lacking a real permanent address doesn't inherently make you uncontactable by governments. It's the combination of lacking a permanent address and lacking the means to work around it that creates a perfect storm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > He had been living in his 2000 GMC pickup, parked on a side street, but the > city of Seattle towed it because Long had violated a city rule that requires > vehicles be moved every 72 hours.

Judging by the amount of leaves, gunk, and other crap that accumulates underneath the parked cars on my street (Which were also in the same place day, after day, after day), this is another one of those rules which is enforced incredibly selectively. If it weren't, half the cars on Capitol hill would be in impound.

<comment><USER22> I live on Capitol Hill and regularly see parking enforcement checking cars, but if there are cars that you think are hanging around too long near you, you can report them at [https://www.seattle.gov/police/need-help/abandoned- vehicles](https://www.seattle.gov/police/need-help/abandoned-vehicles)

<comment><USER21> What are the owners of those cars supposed to do? Repark them, when there is no parking available? The residential buildings there don't have enough parking spots[1].

This isn't Soviet Russia, it's not like I'll get an extra ration and a pat on the back for turning my neighbour in.

[1] This has gotten better since they've added a parking permit requirement.

<comment><USER22> What? They are supposed to find longterm parking if they want to leave their car sitting useless for days at a time, not use public space for it. And if they are regularly not needing their car for days at a time and they're unwilling to pay for storage, maybe they should get rid of it and find another way to take their weekly ski trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >Shaffer also ruled the fees the city required Long, 58, to pay to retrieve the truck were too high, violating constitutional protections against excessive fines.

This is really good for anyone who owns a towing and impound company in Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER24> "could have great implications for homelessness"

Thinking like a politician, one of the implications might be- since we can count a car as a home, all the people living out of their cars aren't homeless anymore. With this huge reduction in homeless people we can cut the budget to the shelters because they are serving fewer people. They'll definitely win re- election because they simultaneously reduced homelessness and cut spending, and they didn't even have to put forth any effort. Total win for the politicians.

</comment><comment><USER25> this is my own private domicile and I will not be harassed

</comment><comment><USER26> This makes sense and it's good for the courts to step in on this. The point of the law is clearly that there's a limit to how much the government can take from a person which is fair and just. There needs to be a rational-thinking person in the room who knows it's wrong to take away a person's car when they're currently living out of it because of economic troubles. It's always good when common sense and decency wins out in a court of law.

<comment><USER27> It's even mentioned in the old testament:

"If your neighbor is poor and gives you his cloak as security for a loan, do not keep the cloak overnight. Return the cloak to its owner by sunset so he can stay warm through the night"

Deuteronomy 24:12

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> According to the much better article at [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/judge-rul...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/judge-rules-seattle-homeless-mans-truck-is-a-home/), it was a WA state judge who ruled based on WA's "Homestead Act".

<comment><USER29> That's in the article linked.

<comment><USER30> The linked article is on a different domain...?

EDIT: I misunderstood the point, sorry

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure I understand your question.

The submission links to an article at fox13memphis.com. The user I'm replying to suggests a "much better" article at seattletimes.com because it includes content which I'm pointing out is already contained at the submission link.

<comment><USER30> Ah, okay, sorry. I understood it literally, like "this is the same link".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There is a significant segment of American society that believes that if you are poor you must have done something to deserve it, like not work hard enough. Because of this, to help poor people is to subsidize (and hence encourage) laziness, and that is unacceptable. On the other hand, we can't just shoot all the poor people (though we can shoot some of them, as long as they're black and threatening) and we can't just have them loitering in the streets because that's bad for business. So the best we can do it run them out of town on a rail. Out of sight, not our problem any more, that's good enough. We don't need a long-term solution, we just need to stave off disaster long enough for Jesus to return, and that will be Real Soon Now.

Sadly, this is not an exaggeration. Tens of millions of Americans really do believe all of the above.

<comment><USER32> I think you ruined your point at the end there by implying this attitude is unique to those that are religious. It definitely isn't and the "fuck poor" sentiment runs deep throughout every part of western culture.

<comment><USER33> The sentiment is hardly unique to western culture either. Off the top of my head the Hindu Caste System seems like a pretty good example of a system that excuses the mistreatment of the poor.

<comment><USER22> I think the difference is that the caste system relies on the poor being there, it doesn't imagine that they should all disappear.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why you're stuck with an open office plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.interviewqs.com/blog/closed_open_office <comment><USER2> In some places I've worked in, the space saved by open offices was used for couches, ping pong tables and other perks. The companies didn't end up saving space, or not at the rate that they could have. Whether that's a net win for productivity is unclear.

However, when you're dealing with a behemoth that views 2-ply toilet paper and store brand coffee as luxuries the employees should be thankful for, it's easy to see how these savings would motivate the move to open offices.</comment>


CTO Lunches - <AUTHOR> https://ctolunches.com/ <comment><USER3> We had/have a group like this in my city. It's kept to a minimum of interactions as it usually descends into war-story exchange quickly. It's a great way to open up some backchannels that might come in handy, but I didn't get anything more valuable out of it that reading some in-depth blog articles wouldn't have given me.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like it was a social group were people enjoyed having some peers chatting with. Not a research group on cutting edge technology issues. Contentwise the real world can rarely compete with the internet...

<comment><USER3> Oh indeed it was, it's just that at this point I can take any group of friendly devs to chat and don't need much CTO glitz around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stopped reading at "Group sponsorship by developer focused companies", this sounds so bad when just before they said "no recruiters, no sales people, no gimmicks." => pick one of these two, can't have both at the same time!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been a member of the Boulder group for over a year and the sponsorship is relatively new. Before then there was no website, just an email list, and lunch was just pay as you go (which, with 15 people, was a bit of a pain when we got the check).

As far as I can tell, the influence of the sponsor is limited to a thank you at lunch and a shout out on the website. But I understand your concern about the tension. This is something that every volunteer organization or meetup group struggles with:

1\. It usually costs money to put on an event worth going to. Not a ton, but food, beverages and space aren't free.

2\. People prefer free (and tech people tend to expect free).

I know another meetup that struggled for years trying to solve this problem, and never found a satisfactory answer.

The answers I have seen work for groups are:

1\. Find sponsors and thank them

2\. Charge a membership fee

3\. Only do free stuff (meet in the library, or a park)

4\. Have the meetup organizer pay out of pocket (a different kind of sponsorship)

5\. Be lucky enough to have already acquired some kind of income generation (typically an older established gepup like a fraternal order)

It's a tough problem.

<comment><USER6> These are all ostensibly people with high-upper-quintile incomes at minimum. Is it really out of line to just have everybody pay their own lunch check?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, that's fine, and how things operated for years. Not sure how free lunch really helps attract more folks. However, that doesn't help with other infrastructure like the website, unless you want to ask organizers to pay out of their pocket.

You'd have to ask Miles (who commented above) why he made the switch to sponsorship.

<comment><USER7> I replied directly above, but the other reason sponsorship is attractive is because it's hard to host a group of 20-30 people for lunch usually.

We've lucked out in Boulder & Denver where we can make a reservation for that big, but a lot of places I've talked to want event fees, so I'm still going to avoid that, but it'd be nice to have the option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a digital version, the Rands leadership slack is a nice virtual community.

<comment><USER7> I'm a member of Rands too, and I do think it adds some value, but I started this group as an email group because I generally don't think Slack works well for communities. It's one thing for Slack to be used at the workplace where people are usually "always on", but for a community, it's hard to have high value, long form discussions.

The email list discussions have blown me away. People will literally write 10 paragraph emails about their decades of experience, and because it's not in a chat format, all members can check their email whenever and see the thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this for real CTOs, or "CTO"s of companies of 1, just out of bootcamp?

<comment><USER7> It's for engineering leaders. We don't have anyone who is the "CTO of a company of 1, just out of a bootcamp", but here are some of the profiles of people we have:

1\. CTOs & VPs of Engineering of VC backed, bootstrapped, or publicly traded, companies with employee counts of 10-5,000. This makes up the bulk of the members (probably 90%).

2\. Engineers who have started their own companies as CEO. They're engineers, have been their entire life, and still do some coding because they love it, but now they happen to also be responsible for other stuff. (5%)

3\. CTOs of new startups, out of an accelerator (usually Techstars, Boomtown, or YC). They're teams > 3, so this type of CTO still does a fair bit of coding, but also manages a few resources (either FT, PT, or outsourced) to get engineering done. Their goal is to learn from all the experience in the group. (5%)

<comment><USER10> This is a better definition, the role of CTO changes dramatically as the company grows. Steve Kleiman (NetApp's CTO) used to joke that a CTO was just a VP of Engineering who failed at Managing people. And while it is funny its also got a hint of truth.

But when you look at Engineering leadership, when you're small (one engineering team) that means the CTO can talk to any engineer and understand and advise them on the technical goals of the product and the processes by which that product is being produced.

As you get larger the CTO needs to be able to explain to a customer's technical staff why their product is the way it is, and how that relates to what the customer wants to do with it. At this point you are probably mentoring more people than managing them, having hired managers for the day to day.

Larger still and the CTO is not only helping customer's see the value, they are watching the changes in the technology that are going to make the current products obsolete in 3 to 5 years. They spend a lot of time looking forward so that they can warn the engineering leadership when it is time to swerve.

Once you're an "Enterprise company" there are now lots of people who are the CTO of this, or the CTO of that. But the actual CTO is an integral part of the executive staff who is keeping the enterprise value up by, most likely, working with the M&A team to acquire companies that will shore up gaps in the strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Founder of CTO Lunches here. (Thanks @moreds for submitting)

Ask me any questions you have!

<comment><USER11> Not really a CTO when I only have 3 people in my team, should I try to join?

<comment><USER5> CTO is just a title. I'm not in these groups but I think (and hope) it's not about the title, but about the things you would talk about.

You could be CTO in a company of just 1 and having a lot of interesting things to bring to a discussion, and could be a CTO in a company of 10'000 and be dull and worthless in a discussion. You could even not be a "CTO" but a skilled dev with experience and a lot of interesting things to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would love to have a London group

<comment><USER13> Dude there is already a tonne of things like this. Just go on Meetup for London area (e.g. CTO craft London)

I'll be frank, most of the time these lunches / socials are a waste of time.

Why, well there are mostly two types of people that go to them:

* the wunderkids who are there to evangelize their amazing product that they built using Haskell and a C++ engine. They aren't really interested in anybody else (fair enough).

* the recruiters / poachers / ruby fanboys __, who are there to get you signed up.

 __sorry Ruby fanboys /fangirls; I had to pick on someone.

<comment><USER7> Preach!

This is exactly why I started this group though, to try to avoid this. I try to avoid this with a few tactics:

1\. Every social event for developers or nerds like me has been awkward as hell. No one wants to stand in the corner with a beer avoiding people, or shouting over loud ass music. The lunch format has helped avoid that. I've really found that breaking bread and sitting down with food in front of you makes a big difference in the social interactions and the people that feel comfortable coming. You end up making high value connections with the 1-2 people sitting next to you.

2\. Local captains are engineering leaders themselves, and they hand curate the group, and kick people out if they're being all sales-y. I curate the Boulder lunch, and it's all engineering leaders facing the same problems. No one except engineering leaders are allowed to come. The only exception to that is our first sponsor, name.com, who sends their 1 community outreach person to eat lunch, chit chat (not a pitch to the whole group), and picks up the tab at the Boulder lunch.

3\. The email list provides so much additional value to the group, and because it's email (as opposed to group chat), people love writing long responses and participating over time (sometimes hours, days, or weeks after the last email in the thread has been sent), not just participating in the fleeting moment of a group chat discussion.

<comment><USER14> Would love to join but the challenge being that I'm north of UK - would love to connect with CTOs outside of the UK to get a pulse of things around the world.

<comment><USER7> That's what the email list is for :)

Join the waitlist!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be great if this was open to people who want to make the leap to CTO. Sounds like a good opportunity to learn from others who are already there.

<comment><USER7> Apply with your background and we can take a look. That is one of the intentions though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hi all, Just posting to add depth to the dialogue:

I run a community called enrich (joinenrich.com), which connects CTOs/Engineering Leaders with their peers to form more real connections - <USER2> you can call folks on a whim.

Total focus is on developing more long-term, authentic relationships. No sponsorship. Ping me if interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like a great idea. How often do people typically connect (weekly, monthly, etc)? Who does the matching (you, random, the requestor)?

FYI, the hamburger menu on your mobile site is empty for Firefox and chrome.

<comment><USER16> pardon the delay here! We do the matching - based on historical data on what makes a match "work." Groups formally connect monthly, but folks meet in between meetings at their leisure.

And thank you on the hamburger comment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's be clear - CTO stands for Chief Technology Officer. If you break the title into sections you'll have a clear picture of what that means.

Chief -> Top, big cheese, main dude (or dudette)

Technology -> Like computers and stuff

Officer -> Simple definition: "Officers are responsible for the management and day-to-day operations of the corporation." You know, like making decisions and helping the company be successful.

If you fit into that description, even if you don't have that specific title, you are acting as a CTO. Lots of VPs of Engineering fit into that title. So do lots of CEOs of software companies.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hit me up if you're in Chicago.

<comment><USER7> Let's start a Chicago one :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> NYC group?

<comment><USER7> Shoot me an email!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tokyo Group?

<comment><USER7> Shoot me an email and we'll get it going!</comment></comment>


The New Gap Logo Might Be a Genius 'Crowd Sourcing' Stunt - <AUTHOR> http://codybrowntext.tumblr.com/post/1269577353/the-new-gap-logo-might-be-a-genius-crowd-sourcing

<comment><USER2> If that were the case, they probably would have just announced the change in a press release (and alerted the appropriate design blogs) and waited for the backlash. I don't think they would have gone ahead and deployed the change to gap.com.</comment>


Introducing the Europe Region, Now Available in Public Beta - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/4/24/europe-region <comment><USER2> From a legal standpoint: Does this now comply with the EU (German?) data privacy laws? I was told the other day, that using Heroku was a No-No, because you are storing your customer data with a non-EU-compliant company outside the EU. With this, the data resides in the EU. Does this (magically) make my troubles go away?

Remarks: I am totally not a lawyer

<comment><USER3> Well, IANAL, but they say they are based on Ireland (in Amazon's EC2 servers), so Irish law (which is a subset of EU law) applies to their servers there.

I'm not sure what they keep meaning by "not safe harbour compliant", since the law applies all the time to all people in Ireland....

<comment><USER4> > Irish law (which is a subset of EU law)

Shouldn't that be "superset"?

<comment><USER3> _ahem_ yes. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I may be more excited about Heroku Fork than I am about the EU region. I've copied apps many many times, it's one of those tasks that I always meant to write up into a script and never got around to. Thanks Heroku!

<comment><USER6> Love to get your feedback on fork - ping me at: rd at heroku as you start using the tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this based in the EU? Or a non EU European country? EU =/= Europe. The blog post keeps mentioning Europe, but a lot of aliases are EU. This is important to figure out what law is applicable. (The graphic implies it's hosted in Ireland)

<comment><USER7> This is based in the AWS EU datacenter in Ireland. However, as far as the law is concerned, we are not yet Safe Harbor compliant, but are actively working on it.

Sign up for updates to stay informed heroku.com/europe

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Going to sacrifice the Karma to say:

I didn't know Europe was out of alpha. They seem to be experiencing integration bugs.

I knew we should have unit-tested Greece.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just 4.5 years after EC2 was available in Ireland...: <http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/DevPay/1924>

</comment><comment><USER10> Would love the ability to have one instance in US, another in EU, and have heroku auto-route to the best one...

<comment><USER6> How would you handle db/data sync between the apps?

<comment><USER10> ..I would let you (heroku) do that for me, magically? ;)

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't that be nice!

I work on Heroku, on the databases, which are rather thorny in that department...

...it's going to take some evolution in how applications are written to make that work not uglifically (and it'll probably be ugly at first and for a while), but it's the dream, and I think it'll come to pass over time and with work from many people.

<comment><USER12> There are literally more Heroku folks in this thread than unaffiliated commenters :P well played.

Personally I'd just be happy with a master-master postgres db or sharding, for $money, where money is some amount enough to make that happen without me worrying about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now, could SFDC _please_ do the same - not having a datacenter in EU is so bad. Performance is measurably worse.

And Safe Harbor is nice, but having a DC in EU would make the discussions around it even easier.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, this is awesome for both DR reasons and performance reasons. Congratulations Heroku! (Hopefully a second US Region and an Asia Region will follow...)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hurrah! I'll be toying around with this first thing in the morning. Thanks for all the hard work, Heroku guys.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm hopeful that more regions are in the works. Might we see an Oceania region any time soon?

</comment><comment><USER17> Sorry, already running on EC2 by now...

</comment><comment><USER18> woot! here's to hoping we get support for regional redundancy in the US soon.

<comment><USER19> Agreed, Heroku is fantastic but I'm paranoid about keeping all my servers in one region.

#CTOproblems

<comment><USER20> if this is a big enough concern, it may be best to just drop down a level of abstraction and run directly on AWS.</comment></comment></comment>


Feynman sprinkler - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_sprinkler <comment><USER2> It's a classic source/sink problem in fluid mechanics. You can't suck out a candle.

Most everything in single phase, low Reynolds number flows is about the interplay of inertia and viscosity. Viscosity acts to run out all motion while inertia is essentially your kinetic energy. If you're going to suck flow back through a nozzle it's not going to have much directionality.

Maybe you could exploit the Coanda effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The question of how such a device would turn was the subject of an intense > and remarkably long-lived debate._

Long-lived debate about an experiment easily performed seems the opposite of the point of an observational science like physics.

<comment><USER4> I agree with pdpi's answer. But, also: given that when Feynman tried to do the experiment the apparatus exploded and flooded the lab, perhaps it's not quite so "easily performed" :-).

<comment><USER2> There's that old friction between physicists and engineers. Perhaps Feynman wasn't good at building experimental rigs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You must be reading [https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious- Cha...](https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious- Character/dp/0393316041)</comment>


Data analytics with Pandas and SQLite - <AUTHOR> https://plot.ly/ipython-notebooks/big-data-analytics-with-pandas-and-sqlite/ <comment><USER2> This is riddled with problems.

a) I routinely load 6GB of financial data into R in less than 45 seconds, and it's complex and hierarchical to boot. Admittedly that's in R's native file format but even a flat CSV takes less than 5 minutes.

b) Why SQL? Has this person considered Pytables or h5py? Here is an excellent file format created by guys who work with large data sets all day long, which is vastly superior to an on-disk relational database for data sets of this size (and much bigger). Moreover, they map directly to Numpy.

c) Why SQL (II)? Why is all the wrangling being done in slow SQL when Pandas has 100x faster in memory querying capability via groupby and query methods?

d) The visualization is terrible. "Other" dominates the dataset and dwarfs any of the more interesting categories and their relationship to time of day. This is a very clear case for when a chart grid would have been preferable, easily constructable in Pandas or of course GG Plot, and surely doable with Plot.ly. We would have been table to compare how different categories have different time-of-day profiles.

e) If we're going to push data visualization tutorials into the big wide world, why not introduce people to quantile plots, useful here to compare the distribution of complaints (literally one line in R), or more simply and very intuitively, we could have superimposed all the hour-by-hour complaint density plots on each other and see how they compare (again, literally a few lines in R as in plot(density(x)); par(new = TRUE); plot(density(y), add = TRUE, col = "xxx"). After having normalised the data of course. This has its analogues in Python. A second, bog-standard, _unstacked_ , bar chart could then have been used for aggregate complaint volume by hour, and dare I say it, even a pie chart would have been better here for comparing aggregate complaint category sizes.

This looks like a pitch for Plotly aimed at casual HTML developers, not serious data scientiests.

<comment><USER3> >The visualization is terrible.

That's a feature not a bug. Plotting libraries for Python have always been abysmal. Matplotlib is both ugly and hard to use.

<comment><USER2> Wow I have to agree with this (even though the post is using plotly). I don't know where the culture difference comes from between the R and Python ecosystems that makes the latter so much worse than the former when it comes to graphics. Python seems to be able to do so many things so well, but then at the final output stage it all falls apart and I find myself back in R. On that point, I even wonder if with all the Julia bruhaha, the actual _real_ competitor in data science might actually be Javascript! Much faster than Python, and a community that truly understands graphics quality (I'm looking primarily at D3 but things like Mathbox.js and even Hicharts are pretty decent). I'm thinking that SVG and increasingly Webgl will incentivize linear algebra skills in the Javascript ecosystem, and those same skills will suddenly be transferrable to data.

<comment><USER3> Besides D3, Google charts, which are also in JS, are also quite elegant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, this is surely useful for some use cases. But for reapeated analyses that 50 min loading time is a no go and there is certainly big room for improvements. For instance, using R with data.table to process ~4GB file would result in few minutes spent on loading and processing, while giving a very similar flexibility of REPL and scripting. There should a similar way to do it in python i guess...

<comment><USER5> The loading time is probably because of the way they are using the ORM:

[https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/8953](https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/8953)

I guess it also isn't a great approach to do row based filtering using a data frame.

<comment><USER6> All in all, excellent showcase of the product and the team behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you'd like to do this whole thing with open source tools take a look at [http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/](http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/) in place of plotly

<comment><USER8> But if you're setting up bokeh server for the first time...bring a friend and some coffee

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The take home message is that there is very large class (probably a majority) of data analysis problems for which SQL databases are very well suited. Though PostgreSQL would be a better choice.

And while we're at it, we may want to consider a) defining some indexes and b) buying a little more RAM

<comment><USER2> SQL is useful when you have a use case that will require randomly querying the dataset. This is a case of synchronous parsing in which any database (relational or not)'s random-access capabilities are not used at all, yet you're paying for it in _much_ lower sequential throughput and indexing overhead. HDF5 is a far superior here.

For a vast data set (> 100 gig) one may argue that a database will allow you to parse "on disk", but that is not the case here and if you're doing data science you will quickly realise that even 32 gig in your machine is a small amount of RAM. What you'll gain in on-disk ability with an indexed database, you'll quickly be frustrated with because your wrangling "discovery/cleaning" workflow will be frustratingly slow. The real answer is that 64 or 128 gig of RAM with HDF5 is almost indispensable for the working "medium data" scientist (most people), before we're having to talk about Spark, Hadoop, YARN etc for the ginormous, properly "big data" cases.

As you say, RAM is where it's at. The real takeout is that 128 gig of dimms is cheap compared with the time you'll waste trying to do medium data on disk with (no)SQL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a job for blaze, out of core pandas and numpy frontend to large datasets. [http://blaze.pydata.org/en/latest/](http://blaze.pydata.org/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hehe - this entire workflow can be done in Google Sheets (don't even need Excel) by querying the NY open-data API. No code necessary.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand: "This entire workflow can be done in Pandas and SQLite. No proprietary third-party software or services necessary." I vastly prefer that. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Best title change ever.

Can't we all just agree that "big data" requires at least 2 computers?

<comment><USER14> I'm going to say not necessarily. [https://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/uv_2000_20.html](https://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/uv_2000_20.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> plotly is awesome. A lot of companies spending $50k + a year on BI software can do better (and save a ton of money) by throwing plotly iframes on some simple static webpage and update them at any interval using cron jobs and python.

<comment><USER15> I work in the business intelligence space as a consultant.

The cost of any BI project is dominated by the time and effort put into ETL and data modelling. 80% of our effort goes toward this back end work. With this in mind, the presentation layer is essentially an afterthought. The lion's share of BI cost goes to expensive humans. If you can spend a few $100Ks for presentation tools that integrate seamlessly with the back-end analysis services and streamline report design/publication, then it's a no- brainer.

With technical employees/consultants at a premium, and in short supply (especially in the data modeling space), it is worth $100Ks annually to have a toolset that allows non- and minimally-technical employees to quickly and easily build new reports.

Take a look at Microsoft's PowerBI dashboards, or at the visualization capabilities in Tableau. The functionality there is what businesses want/need.

Those tools and Plotly equally require a solid data warehouse behind them to support any meaningful and timely analysis. The marginal cost of a highly- integrated and easy-for-non-technical-resources reporting layer is pretty low after that investment.

<comment><USER8> "a toolset that allows non- and minimally-technical employees to quickly and easily build new reports"

Been there, done that.

This is the mantra of the BI system marketing machine that I've never actually seen work in practice.

But I'm glad you've seen BI enterprise systems succeed where the end users are happy and feel their toolset is flexible enough for the new daily challenges they encounter (sincerely).

I love Tableau as an exploration tool and think the UX and visualization capabilities are awesome. Just not the solution end users wanted. I've also rolled out a massive cloud based enterprise BI system (data warehousing, ETL, etc.) at a separate company. That wasn't the solution, either. Plotly was. But, just my two cents.

<comment><USER15> Microsoft's PowerBI platform is growing on me for an end-user UI.

You're definitely right that none of the enterprise solutions are completely "there."

It still seems to me that "Export to Excel" is the strongest BI feature of any tool. Pivot tables are ubiquitous. Throw any OLAP cube up on a server and host a workbook on SharePoint and you're probably 60% of the way to a good BI ecosystem.

^^ This is in terms of data vis and presentation ^^ The backend work still dominates.

Fair disclosure: my company is a Microsoft Partner, so my primary exposure and all of my work is in that ecosystem. For geek-cred, I run Arch and OpenBSD for all my personal systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Big data analytics with Pandas and SQLite

> A Large Data Workflow with Pandas

> Data Analysis of 8.2 Million Rows with Python and SQLite

> This notebook explores a 3.9Gb CSV file

Big data?

<comment><USER17> Yeah like others point out this is small data. My rules are:

1) Does it fit in a desktop computer memory? If it does it is "small data".

2) Does it fit on a hard drive in a desktop? Then it is just "data". Or medium data.

3) If you need a cluster or some centralized network storage to fit and manage it, you might have big data.

4) Next level up is streaming data. Your data doesn't even sit anywhere because it is accumulated faster than you could ever processes it.

<comment> semi-extrinsic The best definition I've seen of Big Data is "the database indices don't fit in memory on the beefiest single server you have access to". (And this doesn't mean you can claim big data because you only have access to your 4 GB RAM laptop.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aaaah, big data. Lovely.

And this from people who are marketing a visualization product. SMH...

</comment><comment> Scott-S-McCoy No one is going to comment on the table concisely named "data" in all of these examples?</comment>