Drop dead - <AUTHOR> http://tilde.club/~mathowie/files/e0c99a3e95d5d907ab156fca2ba889bf-36.html <comment><USER2> I think you guys are missing the point a little on this one. It's not that there is a picture of this dudes bare ass somewhere online and he's upset about it, it's that no matter what he did or tried he could be guaranteed in absolutely no way that the data was removed or under his control. Once it's in the pipes, it may or may not be there, there's no way to know. Anything you put online, in all sorts of incidental ways be it from giving your TV voice commands, sending your location to google maps, or your net connected security devices, becomes someones property other than just yours. Not that it's legal, or that people are spying on everything you do, but that you have no way of knowing about or controlling the data once it's there.

This isn't supposed to be scary, just a reminder that you can lose control easily.

This is a complex issue and if you think it goes away by saying things like "well then don't stand in front of the camera naked." then you are missing the point.

<comment><USER3> This dude is Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter.

He wrote another piece about accidentally spying on his house-sitter that I think is more interesting.

[https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is- sacred-e0bd...](https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is- sacred-e0bd2ec66ce8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The 'oh' moment of data dissemination.

Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam/Google's data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house.

I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn't be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data 'off site' in the sense that your house burning down wouldn't cause it to go away.

<comment><USER5> I want someone at HN to build a small network device which I can plug a NAS or USB drive into. Buy a pair, install one at your buddies/mothers house. They find each other over magically over the internet and any data you put on the local drive gets encrypted and put on the other remote drive.

Other drive burns down / is stolen, no problem. Your house burns down, go and pick up your photos, enter your passphrase.

I'll pay 200€ or so. The hard part is convincing another million people they want one, I guess.

<comment><USER4> Seriously? That's a pretty straight forward project. Buy a USB drive, buy a Rasberry Pi, rent a VPS from Amazon or whomever. Export the USB drive as an NFS volume to the local lan, Run a cron job on the Pi that connects to the VPS over SSH and does an rsync. Done. If you want it locally encrypted you'll need an encrypted file system.

Error recovery is tricky of course. You can leave a copy of your files in the 'cloud' (depending on your situation could be good or could be bad). And it depends on whether you want it active/active (you can add files on either side) or active/passive (where the passive side is pulling the active side pushing).

Should cost about $100 or 80€ in parts per unit (so double that for two units). A bit more for the internet access and a monthly fee for the VPS. If its a lot of data there may be some bandwidth charges as well.

<comment><USER5> Yes, seriously.

I understand your suggestion, but that seems to cost the same amount plus some hours of my time. And, the data is on a VPS, which is not under my roof (or a trusted persons roof). And I get another monthly bill.

I'm a user, this is what I want :)

Edit: Also, it should be easy to load the remote drive first locally with your dataset, before you drive to the summer cottage, so you don't have to wait days/weeks for the backup to be up to date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the one hand, "If you don't want naked pictures of yourself in the cloud, don't take naked pictures of yourself and put them in the cloud."

But this is like saying "If you don't want to get scammed, then don't respond to scammy emails." That is, it's perfectly good advice, which is fine for people who visit Hacker News, but maybe not sufficient for the vast majority of people who aren't aware of the ins and outs of our rapidly advancing technology.

There are whole communities of people devoted to the practice of finding women who accidentally configured their phones to upload all pictures to a publicly accessible cloud storage server. The women whose nudes are distributed this way may not realize their pics are being mirrored- or they may assume it's to a private site (because why the hell isn't that the default?!?)- or they may have shared these pics with a dude who made the same mistakes.

But regardless, the point remains- any _individual_ is easily capable of being immune to this problem. But there's a _whole population_ of vulnerable victims who don't even know they're being victimized. And that _is_ a real problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny. We're all so (justifiably) afraid of NSA and Google violating our privacy that we don't even consider the ways we do it to ourselves.

<comment><USER8> You can't "violate your own privacy" though. It's like wondering why someone who likes to eat a lot of strawberries might frown on being forced to eat even a single strawberry, or why someone who is perfectly fine with some permutations of the letters of the alphabet would protest others. "But I did the same thing that other guy just did, I just arranged some letters! Oh, the irony." Well no, details and context matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm missing something here.

If you don't want naked pictures of yourself taken, then you don't undress in front of a running video camera, right? Seems kinda obvious.

This fellow put together a setup that automatically takes pix of whatever happens and uploads them to a company's server and ... he's shocked when it does what it's supposed to?

I don't get it.

\</comment><comment>--

EDIT. Been pondering this. Perhaps he began with a misconception akin to that of a politician who wants a backdoor for the good guys to use, but who doesn't understand that if the good guys can use it, then so can the bad guys. Then the e-mail and his resulting thoughts showed him that he wasn't thinking about the world properly; thus his feeling of shock.

<comment><USER10> You make a good point, but perhaps you're being slightly unfair to the author. My take on his piece wasn't that he was "shocked" when the camera did what it's supposed to do. Rather, he realized -- upon seeing a very jarring stimulus -- that he has no idea who else can see what he sees, or what they do with that information.

A general consumer assumption with devices like these is that only the end user sees the footage. That's a naive assumption. But psychologically, it's understandable. We believe that the walls of our homes are "privacy shields" \-- Faraday cages, of a sort, that somehow prevent anyone outside from seeing in, or anything inside from leaking out. At the same time, we bring connected devices (including cameras) into those homes. Few of us consciously put two and two together.

Seeing himself naked was sort of a wake-up call for the author. He'd always known the camera was connected to the cloud. But then he became cognizant of who's on the other end of that cloud. I think it's fair to recoil upon coming to that realization, regardless of who the company might be (Google or otherwise). Consumers are embracing the "cloud," but they really have no idea what the "cloud" is, or what it can mean. Again: naive, certainly. But still an interesting thing to consider.

<comment><USER11> This happened to me, and "wake-up call" is exactly right. I set up the camera to check my cats when I was away, and found myself realizing I walk around naked a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The principle of the matter and all, I know, but you've got to love his response here: "now there's a web-accessible picture of me naked! Here, it's this picture: <insert web-accessible image>"

<comment><USER13> He stuck a black bar on that one (and references that in the post). Although that might seem a trivial difference, that there is an edit implies the author's knowledge of and control over the image. That makes all the difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a Dropcam in my garage for miscellaneous reasons. I, too, have wondered the implications of providing the Google/NSA complex video evidence of my comings and goings...

It'd be nice if Dropcams were more hacker friendly, and allowed recording to personally-owned devices, instead of forcing you to use their (fairly expensive) cloud recording service.

(Not to mention the ~100ish GB/mo bandwidth savings to stream this video, which is a fairly nontrivial requirement.)

<comment><USER15> It could easily be done, but that's how they make money, so it won't.

<comment><USER16> And that's a great sum up of the state of technology in 2014.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually have my laptop set up to take a snapshot every 20 minutes (unless I'm connected to work wifi - never know when it might be pointed at confidential data on a whiteboard, and it felt unfair to opt all my coworkers into it.)

It has definitely made me more mindful of situations like this.

(It actually sporadically refuses to take a photo on the new laptop right now, so [http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg](http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg) doesn't always get updated.)

<comment><USER18> Why do you do this to yourself?

<comment><USER19> I'd probably do that. Give the link to a few friends. It's pretty harmless, sort of an automatic snapchat. It'd definitely make me more conscious of when I'm being watched by my webcam, and I'd definitely want to have an opt-out when it was about to snap a picture.

That aside, he seems to do this because it is _pure nightmare fuel_. This is the pic from right now: [https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg)

<comment><USER17> There have been creepier once :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a device similar to a Dropcam but by D-Link, and have it configured to transmit data to my NAS, rather than the cloud. I can then SSH in to view the images on it.

If you want a camera monitoring your home, but don't want it stored on someone elses' system, it's pretty easy to roll your own with a variety of configurations.

</comment><comment><USER21> > It's at this point you ask yourself if having a net-connected camera for > monitoring your house was a good idea after all.

It's a good idea but you probably shouldn't buy the fancy "cloud" version. Just set up your own FTP server ...

</comment><comment><USER22> I may have to spend the weekend messing with my raspberry pi to make a local dropcam. Just found a link to a guide:

[http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287](http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287)

</comment><comment><USER23> What would bother me about this is that picture is far too small and blurry to identify a criminal. Is that the best this product can do? If so, are there any competing products that do better?

</comment><comment><USER24> Assuming you _do_ want off-site backups of your security footage, but only accessible to you (i.e. strongly encrypted), what are your options?

What if you want a remote live stream?

Linux or OS X, please.

<comment><USER25> Well, in principle you could toss your public key on that camera. In practice, I don't know if anyone does this as anything remotely approaching off-the- shelf.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like a good project for a raspberry pi.

<comment><USER25> It does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What do you mean by "web accessible"? Did Google decide to publicly publish all dropcam's customer pictures?

<comment> matt-attack I'm sure they're accessible via a customer account. That's sort of the point of this system - you can be on vacation and peek into your home. Web accessible doesn't mean not password-protected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This certainly gives me pause about buying a Dropcam, even if the only place its going to observe is near my front door.

</comment><comment><USER29> Of all ipcams in the world why the hell did he buy the one in 0.1% of them that uploads shit to the "cloud"?

<comment><USER30> I've heard stories of break ins where the crooks destroyed all the local hard drives. Cloud is the only way to avoid that, but a solution is to encrypt before uploading.

<comment> matt-attack Wouldn't the crooks now just snip that cable that's draped across your backyard to your roof?

<comment><USER30> Ideally the camera would cover that as well. Or you could use cell towers.

In the story I read (I think on reddit but I can't find it now) they destroyed all his hard drives but he had one camera that uploaded to the cloud so he still got some footage from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 1\. Visit google.com

2\. Search for [erase dropcam video]

3\. Click first result

<comment><USER32> it might say "erase dropcam video" but it really means "erase indexing of dropcam video"

<comment><USER31> Are you claiming that, when Dropcam says it erased your video, it's lying? That they're secretly keeping a copy around?

If so, come out and make that accusation explicitly. It would be quite a story, especially if you had a reference to cite.

<comment><USER33> Erasing data is rather difficult.

If you're being a responsible provider, you will be doing backups, in case your primary data dies. But backups are not all that useful if they can just be wiped out by an online process. There's a potential secret copy lying around.

Another possibility is that they run a caching system, that store cache on faster but still persistent storage (or even in memory on systems that don't reboot often). Does their caching setup ensure that it tells all involved caches to delete their copies of the data?

Many systems do some kind of transcoding, generating thumbnails or more highly compressed versions of uploaded video. Does requesting that a file be deleted immediately delete every file it was based on or derived from it?

Furthermore, when you delete data from most filesystems, it doesn't actually get overwritten, just the reference to it is removed. So even if you do delete all the copies that you know about, there's a good chance that the data is still on the disk, ready to be accessed by an off-the-shelf data recovery/forensics tool.

If you're a provider that runs a large amount of storage, you likely run through hard drives at a fairly regular rate, once they start throwing enough SMART errors. Do all providers properly securely erase failing hard drives before sending them off to recycling? Swapping out a failing drive and sending it off to recycling without securely erasing it first likely leads to other copies floating around in the wild that the provider no longer even has access to erase.

I would be more surprised to find providers that actually did securely overwrite every copy they had of a given piece of data when you asked for it to be deleted, than I would by a revelation that providers that "secretly kept a copy around".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> To paraphrase: "The device functioned as intended so now I hate It".

The developers of this product don't deserve this blog post, especial when the feature in question is a paid extra that requires setup.

<comment><USER35> The blog post illustrates that applications of technology can have unforeseen, unintended consequences (even though it may appear obvious in hindsight). Regardless of whether the device works as intended, the non-technical but human question of whether it should function that way in the first place is a valid question to pose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The blog's subtitle is "doing it wrong". Naked in front of a camera and pondering implications of Internet of Things backed by private corporations?

Yes, you are doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER37> Ultimately though, what are the negative consequences of some random stranger, or even the general public, seeing your naked ass? Pretty much nothing.

<comment><USER2> You've taken this too literally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Much as I care about privacy and the exploitation of people's data for commercial gain, I find this a bit histrionic. If you put the automated camera inside your house and you are the sort of person who sometimes wanders around naked, then the two are eventually bound to collide (which is why I don't have automated cameras inside the house).

On the plus side, everybody has an ass and this one is so far into the background of the picture that the only conclusions I can reach about the subject are 'Mathowie is quite pale' and 'he has an ass like every other member of the human race.' In other words, this isn't really awkward enough to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone else. Now if he had been dressed up as a lobster that would be quite a different kettle of fish.

</comment><comment><USER39> Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA.

But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass.

In the unlikely case that they do need to investigate the ass for national security reasons, they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data.

Which means the ONLY way the public will see the ass-picture is if: a) The ass is of interest to national security AND b) The ass is of such concern to national security it is stored in the NSA's internal ass-database AND c) There exists some kind of ass-Snowden that leaks all the asses in the NSA arsenal.

...why does anyone care about this?

<comment><USER40> _> Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner_

Good point, it's true that cloud servers containing personal information are never hacked, this is probably because most companies take security very seriously.

 _> But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass._

Exactly! It's not as if NSA employees have ever been known to abuse their power for personal or purely entertainment purposes!

 _> they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data._

Agreed, rest assured that your private photos and correspondences are safe in the hands of professionals who would never be interested in leaking personal or embarrassing data about innocent law abiding citizens.

<comment><USER41> > who would never be interested

Rephrasing Hanlon's razor, there's no need for malice where a simple fuck-up would suffice ;)

They don't need to be interested in leaking personal data, they just have to make a mistake that would allow such leak. And introducing bugs isn't not something unheard of, even for pros.</comment></comment></comment>


Improving Twitter search with real-time human computation - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2013/01/improving-twitter-search-with-real-time.html

<comment><USER2> Potential business purpose: Teaching the machine to quickly recognize an event-driven pattern of searches and selling (or adjusting CPC) on the search keywords that spike suddenly.</comment>


Android Standardization Is Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/03/30/google.pushing.to.standardize.android.3.arm/

<comment><USER2> I wish Google would make a statement about this. I feel like I'm getting less than no actual info once it's been through a chain of journalists, each with zero technical understanding, all trying to understand it through an Apple- based frame ("Fragmentation!!!!!111").

I like fragmentation. For all the talk, it doesn't seem to have held Android phones back at all. And I get cheered up every time I see some random device with two screens or a stylus or that transforms into a laptop or whatever. And Android is moving ever wider. The guy they hired from Palm was excited to talk at the launch of Honeycomb about how they were making Android more and more modular (e.g. hardware keys no longer a requirement) to fit more and more niches like car computers. He didn't say but he was certainly talking as if they saw Android as the next Linux or Windows, not just a phone or tablet OS.

I'd be very disappointed if this move was designed to appease the tech media that seem to think running Android 2.1 is a horrible fate far worse than death and that the world only needs one phone and one tablet.

At the moment though, until I get some more info, I think it's just a bunch of companies who suddenly all realised that Android sold an absolutely ridiculous number of phones in the last 6 months and are trying to strategically position themselves to get the maximum benefit for themselves from an Android dominated future.</comment>


Ask HN: Which US city would you start a startup in? - <AUTHOR> My cofounder and I have been living in the Bay Area for a few years now. We've been debating moving to another city. Which US city would you start a startup in and why? (Bay Area included) <comment><USER2> If you are already in the Bay Area, I would recommend that you probably just stay there unless you don't plan on raising VC. It's certainly not the only place you can start a company, but it is still one of the best places to do it.

In general, the early parts of any startup can be achieved pretty much anywhere. Building product, early customer discovery, marketing, etc. are not really dependent on geography for a large number of tech-focused startups.

Location becomes an issue when:

* you have some physical presence as part of your product (e.g. meal delivery, bike shares)

* you need to hire (unless you a comfortable with remote work)

* you need to build partnerships

* you need to visit clients (this can be solved by being near a major airport)

* you need to raise capital (the terms and availability are typically just a lot better in the bay area and a few other big VC markets)

So yea, if you are in the Bay Area already and you are wanting to build a true, hyper-growth startup, I would suggest that you just stay put since it will be advantageous further down the line.</comment>


A World in a Box: Harvard digitizes two centuries of colonial history - <AUTHOR> https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/1401 <comment><USER2> As a digitization professional, here's the part I'm most interested in hearing more about:

> The complete collection is set to be released this month via a new website.

They're currently running Omeka for this collection, which I'm a fan of.

<comment><USER3> I would love to learn more about best practices and tools for digitization, specifically focused on archiving sentimental items.

Tips and tools for (relatively) inexpensive, private (not advertising/tracking-funded) and secure sharing of digital achives with extended family members would also be most appreciated! Thanks for the pointer to [https://omeka.org/](https://omeka.org/).

Personally I have settled for private YouTube videos with email list access control as "better than hard drive failure" but I'm not totally happy with the choice. I would have preferred Google Photos but there is no free bulk upload option (import via Google Drive keeps original quality).</comment></comment>


New to Git? - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/120-new-to-git

<comment><USER2> How does Git compare to the other DVCSs? Aside from a few articles that compare it to one or two others, generally Mercurial, I haven't seen many informed comparisons that aren't a few years old. Git seems to get a lot of buzz because it's involved with Linus and (perhaps as a result) seems to be the hip thing in the Ruby community, but most of the buzz just says, "wow, git is better than Subversion!" for values of better that likely apply to every distributed VC system (e.g., "it lets me commit offline!"). Are there recent, informed, detailed comparisons?

I have been using Monotone for several months, including keeping my home directory under VC and synchronized between my desktop, server, and laptop, and have been quite pleased with it. I like its systems of using hashes as version IDs, and having one SQLite file for the entire database seems like a good idea.

Monotone got a little slow after I added several thousand files, but then I noticed there is a flag to first check against cached inodes (<http://monotone.ca/docs/Inodeprints.html#Inodeprints>) instead of recalculating the hashes for everything every time. It's apparently disabled to have a default stance of _extreme caution_ , but doesn't seem to pose anymore risk than, say, using a journaling filesystem, and speeds things up dramatically. The few evaluations I've seen of mtn wrote it off as slow, without trying this.

The "algebra of patches" system in Darcs looks interesting, as well. As I understand it: every change has its inverse calculated, so you can apply / undo any combination of patches in the entire history. I haven't used it for more than a few quick experiments, though.

<comment><USER3> Some of the major features that hooked me on Git (as compared to Hg, Bzr, and SVN):

\- primary local branching is done in the same repository without needing to create multiple parallel directories.

\- local branches need not correlate to public branches on a remote system.

\- keeping local branches current with trunk/master is dead easy when using rebase.

\- using interactive rebase is incredibly powerful for splitting, combining, rebuilding or reorganizing a set of commits on a local branch.

\- commit amending is dead simple, for those times when you miss adding a file (or part of a file) and catch it the moment _after_ you've hit the enter key.

\- much better two-way integration with SVN. I work on projects hosted using SVN using Git, and I gain all the benefits of local branching, etc, and I can still push all my changes perfectly easily to the server whenever I want.

Basically, Git is powerful, flexible, and designed to fit a more natural style of development (IMO), and really puts the developer in control at all times. After the initial shell shock of finding that "standard" source control commands work a bit different in Git (as compared to SVN, Hg, etc), and you learn the what/why/how of the staging area (the index), I've found Git to be the most development-friendly source control tools around, and for the first time in the history of using source control, I have never once cursed the tool for doing/not doing something wrong/stupid. That alone has made me a lifelong convert.

<comment><USER2> Ok, thanks. (I'm guessing that the two-way integration with SVN is a big deal for a lot of people, too.)</comment></comment></comment>


Australia - Welcome to the Orwell continent - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1399635276 <comment><USER3> I remember an article where a guy got a hold of the Finnish police's list of child pornography sites that were blocked at the ISP level by law. The guy decided to go through all the sites to see whether they were indeed child pornography, and he found that 95% of them were just normal porn sites operating legally. It turned out that the list bore resemblance to the US terror watch list insofar that it was primarily false positives, it seriously hurt legal companies, you got no notification of the fact that you were placed on it, and that it was almost impossible to get off it.

This begs the question: Who will guard the guards?

<comment><USER4> > Who will guard the guards?

The Free Marke.. Hahahahaha, jk. The People, like always. Unfortunately The People are typically dosing while on guard duty.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately even the most zealous of the "free market solves everything" advocates don't think that the free market can solve the problem of government regulation.

Which is why free market types spend most of their time complaining about government regulation, the one problem the free market can't solve on its own.

<comment><USER6> Oh, the free market can solve that too, you just don't want to be around when it happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just don't understand the thinking of anyone who thinks this is a good idea - if, of course, they are thinking at all.

Take all of the bad stuff throughout history that was caused by the balance of power resting in the hands of individuals and compare that the damage caused throughout history by the balance of power being held by the government, and the latter is so much more damaging the two don't even come close.

This filter restricts freedom and moves the balance of power towards the government just that tiny bit more. Of course it's for a good reason - <USER2> wants primary school kids looking at porn? Who could be against blocking terrorist training manuals from being accessible (remembering that some people are naive enough to think that such a thing is possible).

But when has any government ever taken away freedoms WITHOUT a good reason? It just doesn't happen. And the prospect of giving government just that little bit more control is frightening.

Even if we completely trust Mr Rudd and the current Australian Government, this is just another governmental power that's open to future governments who may or may not be corrupt to take advantage of.

Of course, I'm sure everyone on here understands this issue at least as well as I do, so I'll shut up now and just say that $5 was taken out of my pocket to fund this, and I am furious.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you will find such people online. Certainly not the sort of people who could touch type, let alone participate in an online community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now you know the big push to "internationalize" the internet -- every nation out there is going to have its own list of approved and non-approved (illegal) sites.

I wonder how long it will take for us to start seeing stories about some of the completely benign sites that the Australian government doesn't want folks to see? Or companies get squashed because they fall on the wrong side of the filter police?

Better still, is it possible for start-ups to purposely bypass the filters? Perhaps this is good news, eh? New line of business opening up -- accessing "bad" sites that aren't really bad. (And I don't mean simple proxy services, more like finding popular commercial sites on the other side of the firewall and being the man-in-the-middle between the two parties. Heck-- you could charge on either, or both, sides of that arrangement)

</comment><comment><USER10> Crikey. Maybe the new PM speaks Mandarin a little bit too well!

<comment><USER11> and I bet we have the same Cisco routers that China has, and so it would be trivial to switch on, in terms of technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was dodgy enough when it was opt-out rather than opt-in... Now there might not even be any real opt-out? Fuck off.

Senator Conroy's contact details are here:

<http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/contact>

I would recommend sending snail mail or email to Conroy's office and/or you local member.

</comment><comment><USER13> Inability to distinguish between 'this is wrong' & 'this should be illegal.'

And now we have a censored internet.

</comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't feel like progress. Feels dirty. Feels like the dirty thin edge of a dirty wedge.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please don't editorialize in titles. That's mentioned in the site guidelines.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, thanks for pointing that out.

<comment><USER16> _"... Australia - Welcome to the Orwell continent ..."_

Shouldn't that be _Welcome to the "Orwellian" continent_? ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope this pushes more innovation in large scale mesh networks.

</comment><comment><USER18> If they were going to beat this through the legislative process, it would have happened already. It's only a matter of time until the other "free" nations implement the same filtering, using whichever bogeyman is conveniently in vogue.

We need new protocols, designed such that politically unpopular traffic is indistinguishable from "normal use". We need an overlay network that allows entry into the cloud at a myriad of points, defeating network analysis and routing black holes. We need a secure naming system that prevents addresses from being arbitrarily removed by a third party. And we need to make these capabilities seamlessly available to common users who may not even be seeking them out - so that the idea that they're looking at "censored information" doesn't even cross their minds.

Hackers write code that creates internet reality. Get to it!

<comment><USER19> You have to create something of utility that would need something like this in the first place. Until it has enough utility, it work get popularized and it wont catch on. Look at the bit-torrent crypto arms-race between government and clients. Actually, something like an extended bit torrent would be the thing that would catch on.

<comment><USER18> Oh, completely. There's already designs and implementations of such things, but unless they're coupled with a useful service, they're not going to see adoption.

The internet has been relatively unencumbered so far. Now that the governments are taking notice and looking to censor it, the demand for useful services based on privacy is only going to grow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _"... The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy ..."_

In September on _"Software Freedom Day"_ which I attended, I happened to catch the tail-end of a talk by Colin Jacobs ~ <http://www.efa.org.au/about/board/colin-jacobs/> and Dale Clapperton of _"Electronic Frontier Australia"_ discussing the _"Clean feed"_ testing mentioned in the article ~ [http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2871574175/in/set-72157607...](http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2871574175/in/set-72157607387630079/) The description of the filtering tests was along the lines of - "500 odd test sites, on an internal network (effectively at Ethernet speed)" didn't inspire confidence in the testing of the proposed approach. Access speed will be a real issue. I'm not sure this implementation will be workable.

You can read a description of the blocking in the report, _"Mandatory ISP Internet Blocking Plan"_ here ~ <http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory- isp-blocking/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmm. My globe has "Oceania" printed just to the right of Australia. Perhaps it was a misprint and meant to go _on_ Australia. (Hint: Oceania was the country in "Nineteen Eighty-Four".)

<comment><USER21> Technically, the continent of Australia was part of the super-nation Oceania in 1984.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I should point out that after some searching I haven't been able to find any other sources for this.

Terrible news if it is true though. Many people who voted for Rudd would switch sides if this was true.

<comment><USER23> > Many people who voted for Rudd would switch sides if this was true.

No "many" wouldn't. They'd argue that it isn't happening, that it isn't that bad, and then they'd ignore it. Most will skip steps 1 and 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> well there goes the neighborhood. Anyone wanna house swap with me?

</comment><comment><USER24> I would support this... If it also came with the proviso that any politician implicated in sleaze was banned from politics for life.

</comment><comment><USER25> For the 30 seconds that it will take to break this. This measure is not so much orwellian as it is idiotic and a waste of time. Its sole purpose is to put up a PR stunt and that politicians can get away with using $128 million of taxpayer cash for this is unacceptable.

<comment><USER8> yeah but with the potential to be a pain in the ass and increasing latency..</comment></comment>


The healthy future of the web industry maybe short-lived - <AUTHOR> http://www.gavinelliott.co.uk/2011/07/the-healthy-future-of-the-web-industry-maybe-short-lived/

<comment><USER2> It's important to separate out the long-term trend from the business cycle. This business-cycle surge (which some call "the bubble") will crash, and then we'll see a rather different series of articles moaning that the web industry was overhyped and there's all these folks around who only know how to build Facebook Poking apps but can't find work, in the future we'll only need 17 Facebook programmers and they'll all live in some faraway country where the rent is cheap, blah blah blah, I have lived through this movie before.

Behind all this _sturm und drang_ is a very real growth in the need for web talent, and I agree with the article that the training system for talented people is broken-to-nonexistent. But the industry is healthy and will probably remain so for the foreseeable decades. (Though, as usual, the industry will evolve and all the tools, skillsets, and job descriptions will look different in ten years.) It's just that superimposed on the healthy industry is a cycle of unhealthy-looking talent shortages alternating with unhealthy-looking talent gluts. You can always make the picture look more risky, frenetic, and unsustainable than it is if you focus on the movements of the fashionable froth that forms on the top of the industry ocean. Fashion is that way by _design_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Right now I think we're in a "permanent bubble" economy.

The underlying problem is that the financial sector (and financial assets) have grown more than the rest of the economy, and there is too much capital in existence to be productively invested. When an area becomes fashionable, so much "hot money" shows up so quickly that bubbles get blown. The economy becomes the sum total of the active bubbles.

If you could just buy shares in a boring mutual fund or hedge fund and believe that they're going to go up 13% a year, fewer people would be interested in being angel investors or buying silver or whatever.

One characteristic of postmodern bubbles, compared to the old ones, is that the question "is this a bubble?" gets asked on day 1.

As far as long term prospects, many people involved in the .com age didn't experience the .com bust as a career destroying trauma -- it was actually a blip in the long term growth of the web industry.

The web industry still has another factor of 2 or 3 left in growth, maybe a little more -- but the thing that's different now is that the web industry is finally large enough to steal the lunch of legacy competitors. Retail, newspapers, television and many other industries are feeling the impact.

<comment><USER4> >"If you could just buy shares in a boring mutual fund or hedge fund and believe that they're going to go up 13% a year, fewer people would be interested in being angel investors or buying silver or whatever."

But the mutual fund still has to stick that money somewhere, and they go along with the bubble just like everyone else.

>"One characteristic of postmodern bubbles, compared to the old ones, is that the question "is this a bubble?" gets asked on day 1."

I like this. And, if people are constantly worried about bubbles, irrational exuberance can be avoided...or at least balanced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dont know. I see a lot of people trying to hire exactly the same people, a lack of willingness to invest in cross training or any training at all, as people just want so called rockstars. And a large number of people not building sustainable businesses that could support training and learning because they are just chasing a bubble.

The recruitment industry is also in the way of better solutions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seek and source talent globally. Look outside your own borders. Just because the USA or UK is short of web skills, it doesn't mean the sky is falling down for the whole industry. China, India, Russia, E. Europe, SE Asia are some places to start looking. (it is getting harder in those places too but MUCH MUCH easier than the "western" countries.)

<comment><USER7> The problem with looking outside the US, in East and South Asia particularly, is numbers. Yes, there are many more talented developers over there. However, there are _even more_ untalented developers. You'll have to put a lot more work into filtering and developing an absolutely solid recruiting process.

Then, there's the fact that cultural and language barriers still exist, despite American English being the _lingua franca_ of the web. Even something like timezones can be a hardship when the person you're working with is offset by eleven or twelve hours.

That's not to say that outsourcing is a bad solution. It's just not the low- cost, high-skill panacea like everyone makes it out to be. Like any other form of recruiting, you have to really work at it if you're going to be successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is no "bubble" when it comes to the talent shortage. We are short on talent because developers are needed EVERYWHERE.

Consumers are using technology on a scale never seen before. Our lives went from ONLINE to ONLINE ALL THE TIME. Every company in every industry has to hire web people, every agency needs a go-to web guy and the web industry itself is growing into every aspect of our lives: Entertainment (Netflix, Zynga), Mobile, Communication, Transportation, etc.

The amount of projects developers and designers have to maintain and build from scratch is incredible. Back in the day we had computers on the web. Now we TV's, phones, tablets, cars and even a Samsung fridge connected to the web. Building all this stuff takes talent... lots of it. And the best part about it, consumers want this.

<comment><USER4> >"Consumers are using technology on a scale never seen before. Our lives went from ONLINE to ONLINE ALL THE TIME. "

I see your point, but this is a hair too close to the "this time it's different" argument. The fact is, we're ALWAYS using technology at an increasing rate. The name and industries change, but the game doesn't.

The web as we know it will come and go. The jobs will shift from skilled to low skilled, and the industry will become far more capital intensive. Remember, at one point in time, the ability to use a computer was a highly sought after skill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find myself agreeing with his sentiment.

When the cost of doing business grows intolerably large, in this case the acquisition of talent, growth slows and reverses. This is one of the classical reasons for boom bust cycles.

<comment><USER4> And I tend to agree with this.

Being involved in "the biz", I look around sometimes and can't comprehend how something like this could ever slow down, let alone decline. Then the rational, economics side of me expresses a reminder that while the name of the industry may be different, we've seen stories like this many times in recent history. This cycle will ebb too. Just have to milk it.</comment></comment>


Industry Insights from Angelsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.angelsoft.net/industry/index.seam <comment><AUTHOR> Two interesting things:

1\. How valuation varies more than the amount asked for.

2\. How small 1.32% is.</comment>


Show HN: Browse and hire talent impacted by recent layoffs - <AUTHOR> https://layoffs.angel.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I work on the talent side of AngelList. Over the past few months, we've witnessed the tough decisions many startups are facing with layoffs. As a result, thousands of highly motivated and talented individuals have suddenly found themselves in unfortunate situations.

My team launched this product today to hopefully make things easier. If you know anyone that may have been impacted by the layoffs or companies that are still hiring and looking for fantastic talent, please share this with them!</comment>


Facebook selling digital gifts at a $35m run rate - <AUTHOR> http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/facebook-selling-digital-gifts-at-a-35m-run-rate/ <comment><USER2> Bodes well for facebook apps with digital goods business models

<comment><USER3> I see where you're coming from, but I'll play devil's advocate and say that your line of thinking is flawed.

The advantage of gifts is that they're Facebook-sponsored. Everybody has them. They get displayed in a special manner that other apps can't take, because Facebook still controls the user's Home page completely.

So while it's POSSIBLE that other apps gain SOME sales, if it's not native it'll take a hit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whatever they're paying Susan Kare, it's not enough...</comment>


How to Hack Into a Boeing 787 - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331088,00.html <comment><USER3> _Gunter, the Boeing spokeswoman, mentioned that maintenance technicians with laptops will be able to wirelessly access and download information from the 787's administrative network while the plane is on the ground.

Likewise, gate personnel in the terminal can upload flight plans and passenger information via Wi-Fi to the cabin crew's onboard intranet._

Using WiFi to upload flight plans seems like a particularly bad idea...

<comment><USER4> Flight Plans in the context of the cabin crew probably means basics like destination, duration, gate and baggage claim info, connecting flights for passengers, etc.

Flight plans going to the _flight crew_ are an entirely different matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The airplane has 3 networks (navigation, entertainment and flight) - <USER2> reason they are connected (unknown)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Boeing denies that a computer-security problem exists, and says further that if it does, it's already been corrected."

That sentence does not sound very reassuring...

</comment><comment><USER6> New Hardware Found: Airbus A310 <http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/03/01/gross.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER7> _The best firewall is 6 inches of air_

...unless the system is wireless. I claim that the best firewall is the "off" button.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, let's see...expert cited: Seattle Times tech reporter. Yep, definitely a computer security guru. Smells like FUD/anti-PR.</comment>


Ask HN: What can motivate senior developers go work in startup with low salary? - <AUTHOR> Let's imagine an early-stage startup with MVP or cool product idea. The startup founders don't have "success records" of sold companies, fancy office or perks.
It's a typical bootstrap company with inspired founders team and cool idea. And what is important: this is a startup outside of SF.
So... what could motivate you as a senior developer to join such company?
* shares?
* challenging tasks?
* "dream team"?
This might sound like a silly question, but getting tech people is the hardest part for every early-stage startup. So I'm curious to know your thoughts.
Thank,
Lisa <comment><USER2> All 3 but I think most important is feeling sure that the business leaders understand Engineering trade offs and who to sell the product. You can't do everything. Everything comes with an opportunity cost.

Have the business leaders thought that through? Can they talk about it credibly? Can they explain how they imagine the company will succeed?

There are certain characteristics around focus, willingness to make hard decisions etc that are more important to me than a "record of success". Past success doesn't indicate future success. After all, there's a ton of luck involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow! To summarize your ideas: the founders should prove that they are real leaders who know how to succeed in both tech and business part.

Follow-up question: how do you define if founders can do that? Is it how they talk (credibility is something hard to image without context)? Maybe they need talk about numbers & future plans?

I'm curious to understand, what is important to show in the job description and tell during the interview with the engineers.

Some side note: in our founding team we have both business and engineering expertise. We talk about this from the perspective "what we can teach you" but not from "look, we can deliver result".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> * Better use someone on a short fixed term job who will write a specification and a test suite (and penalities). Then subcontrat the development to some remote company and use the test suite to verify the compliancy of the deliverable with respect to the specification. You can as well use short fixed term jobs for the testing team.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about it as well. However, at some point in the very close future, we will need an in-house team. So maybe having motivated development team right now is better than searching & managing someone of a short-term base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I value the option to work remotely. It means I know I'll be working in an environment I'm already comfortable with as opposed to an environment that an employer thinks/hopes will make me comfortable. Also much less time, money and energy wasted on commuting to work and back.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1.5 year ago we had experience with the remote team. Being totally honest: it didn't work out. Maybe because we had lack of process, maybe we were bad at managing people. Still physically working with a team and having that personal touch makes me feel comfortable and sure that everyone on the same page.

Maybe you could explain what means "comfortable environment" for you? Just curious to know.

> Also much less time, money and energy wasted on commuting to work and back. > As I'm from Kyiv and I'm leaving in the city center, that is something > unexpected for me. An interesting point to consider...

<comment><USER4> Remote work can be difficult on both sides when starting out - difficult for managers who are more used to face-to-face management, and difficult for devs too who have to develop good self-discipline in a relatively unstructured unsupervised environment. I think it's a matter of experimenting and practising (which unfortunately a typical small startup can't afford to do).

Comfortable environment for me is many things. It includes the physical things: \- a favorite working chair.

\- a preferred working location - in my case, from home some days, and from a co-working space on others

\- preferred food

\- a preferred ambient lighting level

\- a preferred AC level

In case you're puzzled about the last two: very bright cubicle lighting gave me eye fatigue in multiple workplaces, and very cold AC levels caused discomfort, probably due to dehydration. It reduced my productivity in those workplaces, and because the only relief was to come home and sleep, it caused me to not be able to enjoy my hobbies after work. That affected my motivation and sense of well-being.

Environment is also the computers and tools I prefer. I use multiple computers for my work, each of which has been setup for specific kind of work. In some companies, they provided company laptops, but sometimes they were underpowered, and other times I had to use a particular OS/editor/other tools. In one place, every little installation required permission and authentication by a system administrator.

These may look like minor things to employers, or may even look fussy, but they did affect my productivity and sense of well-being a lot.

From my point of view, all these were unnecessary problems and complications, and often lead to second and higher order problems. If those workplaces had provided a remote option, they wouldn't have these problems, I would have been more productive, and I might even have continued to work in those places.

When I was very inexperienced, I didn't mind these problems at all, didn't have the leverage or financial security to be able to negotiate or refuse them, and had even convinced myself that they're part of life.

But it need not be that way. Once I turned towards consulting and remote work with a backup plan for my financial security, I realized how much better life can be. Now, I can afford to be choosy about whom I work with and where I work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Early stage startups always entail challenging tasks and shares. You're trying to persuade senior developers to gamble on a couple of founders with no track record and an idea. You had better have a truly incredible idea! Care to share what that might be? Right here and now is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your superior management skills by utilizing HN to pitch to the best developers in the world. It's a free spin of the wheel, so why not try to hit the jackpot?

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a retired guy that still have a child with an uncertain future (disability, etc...), then offer shares for the child, not for the guy.

The guy might not be interested for himself (after all the life expectancy is not huge when you have retired), but the possibility to clear the skies for the child is immensely attracting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends on the specific developer and a bunch of other factors.

Having been through the startup song and dance more than once, I can give you a single data point: what motivates me.

1) I prefer to work with small rather than large companies because of the opportunity for autonomy and to understand and be involved in the business as a whole rather than just one tiny corner. But upon interviewing I have to be convinced I'll get those things.

2) How low is the salary? I don't expect Google salaries from a tiny startup, but I won't take less than what I see as market rate for small companies, either. The opportunity cost is too high, and I've got enough experience to know that the expected value of all those stock options is exactly $0.

3) I pick jobs in part based on what I want to learn next. Sometimes those are technologies (a language or framework); sometimes they're developer skills (get better at code review or devops); sometimes they're soft skills. You need to be willing to hire people who don't already have experience in all the things you expect them to do. And you need to either be able to give them mentorship or the space to fail until they learn those things.

4) What's the commute like? A five minute difference in commute won't be the deciding factor when choosing between jobs, but I'll never take a job that requires more than an hour each way; and a 10-minute walk to work is incredibly appealing. Even better, allow me to work remote at least 3 days a week, with zero commute and more control over my environment (see next point). And if you're open to fully remote work, you can find excellent senior developers in Nebraska, Argentina, or Poland, whose expectations around work culture are similar but whose idea of an excellent salary is half that of the Bay Area/NYC/Seattle/etc.

5) What's the office like? I've resigned myself to the fact that almost no small companies have anything other than an open office these days. Poke around HN's archives a bit to find out what the majority of engineers think of open offices and why. If you can offer private offices, small team offices, or even cubicles, highlight that in your posting to get developers beating a path to your door.

6) What are the hours like, and are they flexible? After doing this for 15 years I can say with confidence that while I can do a couple weeks in a row of more than 40 hours during crunch time, it'll take either a week off or 6 weeks of working 40-hour weeks at 50% productivity before I'm back up to full productivity. Too many startups try to push their developers at a 60-plus hour/week pace and quickly burn them out. I won't even consider that job any more. I value my health (mental and physical) much more than any job.

There are probably a few other things but they're not coming up off the top of my head. You'll notice that none of the above points are especially "sexy" \- they're mostly about offering day to day quality of life that's better than I can expect elsewhere. Junior developers who are new to the industry may be dazzled by the idea of a dream team and exciting new problems and omg equity! But most of us who have been around the block a few times just want a sane working environment and reasonable compensation at a place where we won't completely stagnate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comprehensive comment! Very thoughtful and it gave me many new ideas to showcase our "strong sides" (what we can actually offer).

Some notes:

1) > But upon interviewing I have to be convinced I'll get those things. I'm feeling more and more that we as a startup have to convince the engineer that we are worth joining us.

2) > How low is the salary? I won't take less than what I see as market rate for small companies Totally understandable. Do you think it's possible to propose reduced rate for some period of time (until investments come to the bank account)?

3) > I pick jobs in part based on what I want to learn next. Mentorship is what we heavily do for our current small team. This comment helped me to understand what I need to highlight in my job offer :) As we have a tool inside iOS simulator, there are many new things we can propose to learn. Can be a good point for candidates.

4) > What's the commute like? Together with the comment from @lovelearning, you made me think about the commute... Seriously, I have no idea that it can be an issue. We have a room in the friends' office near the subway station. It's like 5 min walk from the subway and it's near the city center. We're from Kyiv and public transport is pretty good here, so it can be one more good point to mention.

> Even better, allow me to work remote at least 3 days a week, with zero > commute and more control over my environment Generally, we would prefer > someone in the office but that's something discussable. If a person can > deliver and we build remote process, then fine. Good point to mention too.

5) > What's the office like? small room with 6 tables, nice flowers, my paintings on the wall and mutual kitchen. As we rent that room from friends, they are working in that space as well. Our room is always closed by the door, so it's quite there.

6) > What are the hours like, and are they flexible? Flexible hours and we try to care about mental health. By this, I mean we don't push the team with extra work hours or workload, unless it's critically needed. As founders, it's our job to work 24/7 and fix all the fires, as well as do all shitty tasks.

7). > But most of us who have been around the block a few times just want a sane working environment and reasonable compensation at a place where we won't completely stagnate. as anyone else :)

Thank you again!

<comment><USER6> You're welcome. I wish more startup founders would _ask_ what developers actually want instead of making (often idiotic) assumptions. To answer your followup questions:

> 1) I'm feeling more and more that we as a startup have to convince the > engineer that we are worth joining us.

Yes. This. Even mediocre software developers have tons of opportunities open to them these days. You need to convince them why they should work for you instead of the other guys. Frankly, that should be the case with any employee, but it's even more so in a market where talent is scarce and opportunities abound.

> 2) Do you think it's possible to propose reduced rate for some period of > time (until investments come to the bank account)?

That depends. A) Is that investment deal already closed and signed, and just waiting for the funds to land? B) Why should I believe you'll ever have that money? C) Will I be getting back pay to my full rate once the money does land? D) What's the incentive to me to take that risk at all, when I could just get a job with a company that will pay me in full now? Am I going to be paid interest on what's essentially money I'm lending to the company during that period? [In short, the answer is "probably not", but maybe if you can find someone unusually trusting or desperate, in which case you may want to ask yourselves why they're so desperate.]

Good luck!</comment></comment></comment>


Why Microservices Fail - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/why-microservices-fail-6cdc006f9540 <comment><USER2> I believe the author is describing the chain-of-responsibility ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain-of- responsibility_patter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain-of- responsibility_pattern)) pattern. If so then yes, it's a good pattern for service abstraction.</comment>


Back To My Roots - <AUTHOR> https://al3x.net/2014/02/11/back-to-my-roots.html <comment><USER2> Whenever I read things like this, my immediate reaction is "How do these people have so much money to travel around the world doing nothing-in- particular for two years?"

Are there just a lot of really rich people out there? Or am I over-cautious and they're operating without a safety net?

<comment><USER3> From the article:

 _To make things a little more surreal: a few weeks after I turned 30 this past October, Twitter went public, confirming that I never need to work again. (I'm still getting my head around that.)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks great.

You know what's really wacky about government inefficiency?

It's damn near impossible to help, much less fix from the inside.

I've long been convinced that the best/only way to help right along the lines of what these guys are doing - build boxed solutions from the outside.

This is effectively an air-drop of tools which sails in over top of all the petty backbiting, ass covering and general self-serving bullshit that stifles in-house projects.

</comment><comment><USER5> Kudos to him, I would have gone back to school and lived the life of the spoiled rich brat I always wished for.

<comment><USER6> I just connected the dots and realised that I went to high school with al3x in the DC area. I never realised the programmer I knew in high school went on to work with twitter, et all. What a brilliant surprise!

Anyway, really glad to see he's doing so well, especially after reading his blog entry a few months ago about his personal troubles. It's refreshing to see a fellow human being making great use of their time and fortune to the betterment of others. Good luck in the new role, al3x.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really interesting — I think the question of "How can I help make government better?" is not asked enough. My guess is that there is a large number of very smart people who would love to write code to improve the government; I know that when I'm looking for a new gig I'll be reaching out.

<comment><USER8> Minority set-asides wouldn't be my answer. It seems the government needs the best contractors it can get.

You'll notice that private companies never do that stuff because they suffer if they don't get results.

<comment><USER9> Minority set-asides aren't our exclusive purpose. We want to reform the procurement process to make it more competitive and honest. Part of that is making it so that a woman doesn't have to write an essay explaining that she's a woman before she gets granted woman owned business status by the SBA.

But another part of it is advocating for the RFP-IT Act, which would make it a lot easier for small businesses to sell to the federal government: [http://blog.dobt.co/2014/01/27/Reform-Federal-Procurement- fo...](http://blog.dobt.co/2014/01/27/Reform-Federal-Procurement-for- Information-Technology-Act/)

And another is piloting our software, Screendoor.io, which is based on the project we ran successfully in the White House, RFP-EZ: [http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers- sa...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-savings- taxpayers-new-opportunities-small-business)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been hacking around with DOBT's formbuilder.js, and they seem like a great team. Hope the new position suits you well!

</comment><comment><USER11> For those who, like me, were clueless, DOBT = "Department of Better Technology"[1].

Not, oddly enough, "Depth-Oriented Brief Therapy" which is the only Wikipedia hit[2].

[1] [http://www.dobt.co/](http://www.dobt.co/) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_therapy#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_therapy#History)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is similar to what I would do in the same situation. If I didn't need the income of my day job, I'd spend the time on public service or charity of some sort. I can't see myself spending money like a trust fund dilettante nor funding yet another startup.

</comment><comment> raving-richard I don't believe in the government. Unfortunately it believes in me. Well done on being almost as free as a person can be in this unfree society. But please don't help the biggest source of unfreedom there is. Instead, use your time to help make others free if you want a suggestion as to what to do.

Easy to use crypto for one.

</comment><comment><USER13> For all their hand-wringing over the healthcare.gov debacle you'd think at least one of these DoBT guys would have gone in to help fix it. That probably would have gotten in the way of fund-raising, though.

<comment><USER9> We did the best we could, and tried to help on it as much as the law would allow. And still do. But one cannot simply volunteer to help the government do things, as the federal advisory committee act prohibits government from accepting free advice or work (you can infer why).

Not sure what you mean about fundraising though, as we don't raise money (we have received a grant for our operations from the Knight Foundation, but aren't looking to raise any VC money).

<comment><USER13> You must not have tried very hard. [http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/oracle- red-hat-and-google-e...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/oracle-red-hat-and- google-employees-pitch-in-to-fix-beleaguered-healthcare-gov-reports-indicate/) People are still flying out there to help with healthcare.gov, all the time.

<comment><USER14> Those big companies used their government contacts to land some big government contracts. The government reached out to industry as a PR move, throwing money at whoever promised they could fix the problem as soon as possible. There's no altruism here.

<comment><USER13> sorry, no, you're all wrong. those employees are all taking unpaid leave to come work on healthcare.gov.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EliasDB – A graph-based database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/krotik/eliasdb <comment><USER2> Issue #1 has a pretty solid write up by the author for why not dgraph or cayley[0]. In this post the author also mentions it's a rewrite from Java (which is quite obvious if you look at the code). I hope the project becomes more idiomatic Go as the author learns the language. In scenarios like this where a project for the author's learning and not necessarily production use, I wish GitHub had a better way to distinguish this from stable software looking for adoption.

[0]: [https://github.com/krotik/eliasdb/issues/1#issuecomment-2494...](https://github.com/krotik/eliasdb/issues/1#issuecomment-249425914)

<comment><USER3> Then again, Linux started with a newsgroup post that read:

 _" I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."_

If there was a "student ghetto" for open source, it might even be more harmful in net: overly humble creators would feel their good projects belong there, while the self-promotional extroverts would focus on getting their crap among the "real projects" just for personal fame.

<comment><USER4> I think the distinction isn't so much between "student/hobby projects" and everything else, so much as it is between "projects that go through the motions overly-formally to learn the motions, rather than to achieve the goal" (i.e. the result of doing a code kata) and projects that are created with intent to put them into—at least hobbyist—production. Even quickly dashed off scripts are useful to others; while perfected, deliberate homework assignments usually aren't.

Partitioning the search results of sites like GitHub based on such a factor _might_ be useful.

You're right, though, that people wouldn't know well-enough at the time to self-report this "is practically-applicable rather than an academic exercise" property. It'd be more useful as a fact derived from social- bookmarking/tagging of repos, I think.

GitHub already has a pretty good signal for practicality in its "stars"; people don't star things that aren't useful to _them_ in some sense. You could maybe add some other explicit signal (maybe a "hide" button in the search results) to serve as a negative signal.

Better yet, though, you could build some sort of "BlackBoard for CS" education-workflow site on top of GitHub, and use _its_ positive signals (this _is_ academic) as the negative signal for GitHub itself.

(As an aside: I've always wondered why more sites don't use this approach. It's way easier to incentivize people to tag something they _want_ vs. something they _don 't_. Build a second frontend for your site that serves the user-base you _don 't_ want on your main site, and serves them _better_ —and then have that frontend add the ghetto-tag to everything it passes to the backend.)</comment></comment></comment>


Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/us/law-lets-irs-seize-accounts-on-suspicion-no-crime-required.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509500)</comment>


Detox: It's All a Con - <AUTHOR> http://www.statsguy.co.uk/detox-its-all-a-con/ <comment><USER2> It's all about biota; if the author has decided that fasting or restricted diets (of whatever kind), etc, can't possibly alter one's gut bugs; then it would be nice of them to maybe drop some bibliography showing that, since there's a lot of evidence on the other side. Sure there's a lot of nonsense spouted, too: but Low-FODMAP diets, just for one, do in fact have solid clinic evidence behind them. The author doesn't buy the SIBO explanation for that for a minute? Great, but even if SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth) is bunkem, and the scientists who proposed it wrong, that doesn't alter the mostly positive outcomes. Of course, the article is air and jazz hands, it doesn't discuss any of this much less list counter-studies, but this is what's relevant; science agrees that toxins ARE produced in the gut when our biota goes wrong.

The cleansing movement started before we knew nearly as much about our biota as we do now, so understandably much of the folk-terminology and initial high- level concepts look rather dated by now; but that's exactly what the history and philosophy of science tells us to expect from any successful theory, namely that it's higher-level concepts usually don't turn out to be entirely accurate (or even very accurate), even in the case of highly useful theories. The history and philosophy of science tells us that no theory ever has all its P's and Q's lined up, particularly at the top of the theory, and the terminology it initially chooses is almost never ideal - so to leap from finding given terminology and the broadest expression of concepts (and your very idiosyncratic almost pun-like interpretation of them) disagreeable to assuming that you don't have to look into the considerable existing evidence we now have that is consistent with them, is extremely bad (but common, and classist) logic. The guys with the biggest budgets and best University connections usually lose the medical knowledge and innovation wars, for the simple reason that they're the incumbents - it's the innovator's dilemma all over again.

Low-FODMAP diets came out of Monash University in recent years. This isn't the best citation, I admit, but it is what's handy right now: [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/when-gluten- sensiti...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/when-gluten-sensitivity- isnt-celiac-disease/)

<comment><USER3> I developed some SIBO-ish problems in the year following a shock to my metabolism. In recent years I have been making a bit of an effort to avoid certain fiber.

I think your post is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Jackfruit – Add an always-on video hangout to your Slack channel - <AUTHOR> https://jackfruit.live/ <comment><USER4> Our company is fully remote. We have an always-on Google Hangout that everyone is on all day.

The key for this to work is that everyone has their mic + camera turned off except when we have a scheduled meeting (ie. standups, team meetings).

Throughout the day, people often pop in the hangout by unmuting themselves to ask the team a quick question, which also works great. In practice, this doesn't cause very many interruptions because people know to ping someone 1-1 if they have a question meant for a specific person rather than the whole team.

Even on days when everyone's mic + camera is muted all day except for standup, it's still effective at creating the feeling that you aren't sitting there working alone (I guess it acts as a reminder that you really do have teammates working alongside you, albeit virtually).

<comment><USER5> I enjoy remote work because I want to feel alone – I can't help but think preferences like this alienate some of your employees. Like me, if I worked with you.

<comment><USER6> What level of human communication would be non-alienating for you?

<comment><USER7> Slack with access to video calls at need.

I've worked remotely for over 8 years at 3 different companies. Two have had some variation of this (Hipchat/Slack + Google Hangout / GoToMeeting or Slack calls) and it works great. We have a daily standup meeting on video and then we can jump on a video call through out the day if we find a need for it.

Otherwise, I have clear focus through out the day - I can choose whether to respond to slack notifications or turn them off and work through them later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This feels like a nightmare to me. If I am thinking and in concentration - <USER2> external stimulation needs to be shut off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here - yes I can appreciate that. I'm a fan of deep work. I've found that most teams jump in-and-out of rooms during the day and the original idea of hanging out together while you work hasn't really materialised.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. The original inspiration for this came from working remotely for 7 years and feeling occasionally lonely and isolated. I wanted to create a frictionless, always-on video room for your team to hang out in while you work. But I've found that so far most teams use it for stand-ups.

Feedback is much appreciated!

<comment><USER8> We used an always-on-video solution (the now dead Sqwiggle) in a past startup. It all went relatively well until one day, the wife of one of your coworkers, walked naked in the background. His webcam/laptop froze at that moment and a picture of his naked wife stayed up for about 5 mins.

That was the last time we used that app. Just something to take into account.

<comment><USER9> Always-on video staring at people's faces is weird in the best circumstances. It's a bizarre view to have passively, rather than during active conversation.

<comment><USER10> I think it's creepy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great job on building something but man I'd hate it if employers actually demanded always on video, even for calls. Slack is pretty intrusive as is.

<comment><USER5> Slack is extremely intrusive, doesn't obey DnD and forces favicon updates.

<comment><USER12> I've been using [https://muzzleapp.com/](https://muzzleapp.com/) on Mac.

Not affiliated, just a happy user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like this idea. Discord has it for audio. Our fully-remote company pretty much uses zoom in a somewhat similar way. "Always-on" doesn't have to mean everyone is always in the room, it's simply an analogue of a physical meeting room or even an IRC channel directory. You can see who is currently in it and what the topic is (if there is one), and choose to hop in. That said, I would probably disable audio and video if I'm idling in a room I'm interested in until someone joins and starts talking.

It's a video meeting channel directory. I think a lot of comments are focused exclusively on the "always-on" wording, which I feel misses the point.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty cool, but terrifying. I would be in constant stress and probably resign the day after if I was required to join an alway-on call.

I work remotely.

</comment><comment><USER15> @drpancake -- aren't you nervous about Slack doing something just like this? They seem to own all the technology required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not too much. Slack has built-in video calling features already and what I'm doing is outside of their core focus. But it's a possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We tried various iterations of this when I was a PM a Blue Jeans (enterprise video conferencing company). We always called it the virtual water cooler - <USER3> place where people on distributed teams could just pop in and ask questions/chat as people in the office do at the water cooler.

Lots of customers showed interest, but nobody ended up actually using it. Video conferences always ended up being scheduled ahead of time (i.e. meetings) or escalated (more like this use case - starting a Slack chat and turning into a call because that was easier for the topic at hand), and this occupied a sort of weird middle ground between the two.

I still love the idea, and I hope you can make it work, but I suspect that it's really only ever going to be practical for a small subset of distributed teams that have just the right culture for it (and I don't know exactly what that culture is).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting, thanks. I'm seeing the same behaviour here - very few teams use it to hang out while they work, they're typically using to jump on ad-hoc video/audio calls or screen share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pretty slick implementation. Was also wary about the always on video rooms but it seems they're opt in for the most part.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have zero desire to shove my face into other people's existence remotely. If I want to see people or be seen I work at the office. I turn off video in our conferencing software and I absolutely despise people who blast their face into a 27in display sized window, and then decide to eat snacks the whole time.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not to take away from the efforts of the developer but this basically turns Slack into Discord. Which I think would be interesting. I think always open audio channels are useful because anybody can just join and you can code and talk whilst doing so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Discord was certainly an inspiration here, as well as the now-defunct Sqwiggle. I'm seeing some teams using it like that, but most of them like to jump in-and-out of the room during the day as needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Congrats on launch, but I would never use this or force the engineers on my team to use this.

</comment><comment><USER21> On chrome os screen sharing button is disabled even though it's still chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Could you let me know the OS and browser versions you're on?</comment></comment>


Decompiling Clojure Part III, Graph All the Things - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guillermowinkler.com/blog/2014/04/27/decompiling-clojure-iii/

<comment><USER2> This series is fantastic and I can't wait for a better Clojure debugger!</comment>


Gradberry Spamming GitHub Users - <AUTHOR> Gradberry appears to be mass-spamming contributors to various github repositories.  See http://pastebin.com/mmjkUY0w for one example, and https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/585287293860093952 for another. <comment><USER2> Omniref also spammed me via either npm or github, telling me my project was on their site and that I should "claim" ownership for the documentation for it. Omniref is also a YC startup.

I found it pretty annoying because they're essentially telling me to claim 'ownership' of it and splintering where people should be getting help from. At least my library isn't that popular anyways otherwise I'd be much more angry (and more annoyed)

So I guess essentially YC is advising their companies to start spamming developers?

<comment><USER3> Sounds like "growth hacking" to me. Basically a fancy word for "spam from a startup".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi guys, founders here, we genuinely apologize to the community for for doing this. As a lesson to other founders and startups, here is exactly how it happened:

\- Through github, we selected a total of 200 devs (13-14 from each repo that correlated with an open position)- based on their commits, prior experience, etc- If they seemed like the right fit for the position, we sent them an email.

It was a dumb decision, period. And we promise to never do this sort of thing again. Recruiter spam (or any other sort of spam) sucks, and we should have known better. Lesson learnt.

<comment><USER5> Your honesty is admirable. But this delves into a much deeper question. What exactly makes you different from every other recruitment house? Companies come looking for talent and pay a fee or a percentage for the people they find. You have a database of talent which is curated based on some way of looking at github commit history. I guess I can see how that can be quite useful when trying to hire someone.

But then from this situation it looks like you aren't getting the type of talent you need to fill the positions you have. So you did what most recruitment firms do. You sent out a form letter trying to get the best talent you could find (like the Director of Security for Heroku) to sign up for your service to keep the companies that are looking for happy.

I am not trying to make you look bad or whatnot. You've already apologized. But I (and I would imagine quite a few others here on HN) use a lot of recruitment services either to be hired or to hire others. Can you talk a bit as to how you plan to be different and find or place that talent better in the future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Spammy startups are becoming more common these days, both US based and Europe based.

What these spammy startups not know or simply ignore: spamming anyone in Europe without prior consent (e.g. opt-in for newsletter) is against the law and therefore illegal and ripe for legal action.

<comment><USER7> The recommended first step from the UK Information Commissioner's Office [1] is to ask the company to stop. The next step is the ICO asks them to stop.

The second step was very effective at ending the daily texts I was getting from a local pizza place.

[1] [https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/spam- emails/](https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/spam-emails/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really really gross spamming. Especially so because they are targeting potential customers/users that would be vehemently against this kind of spam in the first place. It's really extremely stupid and unethical.

Interesting to note that YC backed this company. I wonder if YC were aware of their user gathering methods (doubtful).

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate GitHub spam. One of them told me basically "we saw you had one commit in that repo a year ago so you're obviously a core developer with that project so this is not spam because it's super relevant for you".

Gradberry is apologising on twitter now with the same bs: [https://twitter.com/gradberry/with_replies](https://twitter.com/gradberry/with_replies) ("we sent one email since your profile matched out job requirements, sorry about that!", "sorry man :( We did genuinely like your repo commits though.")

I hope this blows up in their faces. Spam is spam.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's their YC page: [http://blog.ycombinator.com/gradberry-yc-w15-curates- technic...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/gradberry-yc-w15-curates-technical- talent)

The Techcrunch article: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/from-pakistan-to-y- combinat...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/from-pakistan-to-y-combinator- gradberry-vets-technical-talent/)

Post from one of th founders [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9143684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9143684)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't even put myself in a place, mentally, where receiving this message would make me want to do or feel something positive.

Who responds well to this? Seriously, who sees this and thinks, "sign me up?" Am I just out of touch here?

<comment><USER11> I wonder what a "super clean commit" looks like anyway?

<comment><USER12> White space only changes? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the record, the original title before someone edited it was "Gradberry (YC W15) Spamming GitHub Users"; the parenthetical was then edited out.

<comment><USER13> Was this prevented from hitting the front-page as well? It's top 5 in /ask, but did the people responsible for the title edit disallow it from being on the front-page such to prevent bad YC press?

If my theory is true, I will be extremely disappointed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hired is doing the same. I got almost 10 emails from Hired since they started spamming me.

My approach is just deleting the emails. I have some powerful Gmail filters that tag emails based on their content so every know and then I go to the tag I created for those emails and quickly review all of them (mostly based on title) and then delete all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there anyone out there who actually chases down spam sources and actively stops them at the source (via anti-spam laws, abuse@ addresses, ISP/datacenter reporting, domain registrar reporting, working with ISPs about customers running botnet nodes, fixing exploitable web forms, etc)? I would pay non- trivial amounts of money per month to a company to which I could bounce spam mails and receive satisfying notes later about spam providers they've zapped out of existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > If you are open to go where no coder where gone before, click here to > engage.

Wow, that's a rather _interesting_ call to action.

</comment><comment><USER16> this is happening more and more often. Use a fake/anonymous email address for GitHub:

[https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email- address-...](https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address- private/)

<comment><USER17> Don't worry, if they know your name and domain, they will try to figure out your email address ;-)

[https://github.com/Gradberry/Email- Permutator](https://github.com/Gradberry/Email-Permutator)

[http://gb-emailvalidator.azurewebsites.net/](http://gb- emailvalidator.azurewebsites.net/)

<comment><USER6> These tools are tools for spammers. Sorry - but come on guys. Read up on the laws!

<comment><USER18> Nono, they are leveraging the market opportunity to generate viral leads with growth hacking.

<comment><USER6> Buy ads, call people and ask politely if you can send them more information.

But don't spam.

<comment><USER19> GP was being sarcastic

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what would have been the right way to acquire developers in this case. What is more effective than being unethical and spamming people?

<comment><USER21> I have the same question. Without a doubt GitHub seems to be a perfect channel for that. I'm wondering where is the spam border? Let's say I'll _manually_ choose 100 developers who seem to be a good fit for early adopters and _manually_ mail them something like "Hi! I'm X from Y. Here at G we are doing Z for developers like you. I'd appreciate your feedback"

I'm afraid that some of these people would still consider this spam, even if the intentions are genuine.

<comment><USER22> > I'm afraid that some of these people would still consider this spam

Because it is. It's unsolicited mass emailing

A _genuine_ email would be "Hi, this is X from Y, we met at Z and you told me you were interested in A, I have a few startups doing work around A, B and C, would you be interested?"

Or something like that

<comment><USER20> Yes that would be a genuine email but wouldn't apply in this case. How can Gradberry send genuine emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, I for one didn't know anything about this Gradberry before reading this on the front page.

Mission accomplished, I guess?

<comment><USER24> The adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is no longer true, if it ever was.

Sure, I've now heard of Gradberry, but my association is "those spammers who scraped GitHub for email addresses". Any email I get from them will be immediately deleted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do you guys know why this isn't on the front page or Hckrnews anymore?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9337265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9337265)

</comment><comment><USER26> That's growth hacking for you ! disgusting and way too frequent.

</comment><comment><USER27> Before authoring commits that I plan to send to Github, I run:

        git config user.email $firstname.lastname@example.com

Frankly I'm surprised spammers aren't a bigger problem on Github, given that it's one of the few websites that makes it fairly easy to get a plaintext dump of large numbers of email addresses.

</comment><comment><USER28> I once got a spam message like this about a repository that i _starred_. I made no commits, opened no issues, just starred!

</comment><comment><USER29> Uh, front page. Wave goodbye to the money.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow, that's a rather interesting call to action.</comment>


Nextdoor CEO Takes Blame for Censorship of Black Lives Matter Posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/886147665/it-s-our-fault-nextdoor-ceo-takes-blame-for-censorship-of-black-lives-matter-pos <comment><USER2> >Friar said they were deleting posts about Black Lives Matter because they were following outdated rules stating that national conversations have no place in neighborhood forums.

Is this wrong though? If you're talking about a local protest/activity, absolutely; but does generic black-square-style posting have a place on a hyperlocal community forum like ND?

<comment><USER3> It's not wrong, but the mob has come for him and having any contrarian or critical opinion of this movement is career suicide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Those guidelines have now been revised to state that conversations about racial inequality and Black Lives Matter are allowed on Nextdoor_

I'm not a Nextdoor user but the way I read it it seems like discussions were limited to only local events and proposals. Say, a post about a BLM protest at the local mall was ok, and a post proposing a possible future BLM protest at the mall was ok, but not a post promoting or criticizing BLM in general. The new guidelines appear to now grant a specific exception to the core concept.

I don't envy their position. Doing this opens the floodgates to rule exceptions for every special interest group on the planet and not doing it puts them in the crosshairs of a massive and popular social movement.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, is there then an easy tool to report rogue community leads ? (mods) I don't think there is one specifically for that purpose.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hah. I quit Nextdoor over all that racist BLM nonsense. We already have a Twitter. Good to know I made the right decision.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nextdoor sounds like Stallman's worst nightmare and Stalin's dream startup idea. I wouldn't want to be the CEO of this company given the hole they have just dug themselves in.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is she also going to take the blame for the rest of the blatant racism that happens constantly on nextdoor?

<comment><USER9> The CEO is a woman.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. I fixed it. Lol at me getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious "black person walking in the neighborhood" racism that's rampant on nextdoor though.

<comment><USER10> Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The platform is filled with racist Karen's scared of a black person's shadow. Embarrassing they don't take more of stance against it.

<comment><USER11> Hey now. Don't be sexist and forget to mention the Ken's.

<comment><USER7> You also shouldn't be transphobic and assume their gender if some of 'them' are also transgender themselves for the sake of absolute 'inclusivity'. /s</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You submitted an application to Y Combinator. What next? - <AUTHOR> http://tech.exponential.io/startups/submitted-application-ycombinator-next/

<comment><USER2> I like this. I like the idea of planning for success - it is almost a mental model for seeing whether the action you are doing is "right" or not. The fact that it is yc is almost irrelevant. This idea could almost be extended to other elements so that it is not reliant on yc - eg. when you get 100 customers, what should they experience/see?</comment>


Tesla patents new chemistry for better, longer-lasting and cheaper batteries - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/12/26/tesla-patents-battery-chemistry-cheaper/ <comment><USER2> \- Nickel-manganese-cobalt cathode

\- Dioxazolones and nitrile sulfites as electrolyte additives

I never found chemistry that interesting in school, but now I'm much more curious. Would like to find a video that explains battery chemistry evolution.

<comment><AUTHOR> chemistry had a lot of memorizing. that's never interesting at school.

<comment><USER3> Any recommendations for getting a working knowledge? Up to chemistry like what's described in this patent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Youtube should be the best bet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>