The Coming War on General Purpose Computation  - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html?utm_source=assburner <comment><AUTHOR> _I certainly appreciate Mr. Doctrow's willingness to help get the word out but in my opinion a presentation at the Chaos Computer Congress is preaching to the choir._

True. OTOH these sorts of events create video by-products that can be distributed to other people (though Boing-boing is likely another choir).

Still, I found it interesting because of how he outlines the possible reasoning for such maneuvers (e.g. screwing with DNS is portrayed in the same light as dropping phone service for the head shop down the block), which can help folks like use when we try to explain to non-geeks why things like SOPA or walled-garden electronics are so bad.

<comment><USER2> I'm the choir you're talking about, on all of his major points, and I'd never heard the term "cognitive liberty" before this video. I'd like to think I'm well-informed on these topics, too.

These things are beneficial, if only for the same-page-ification that the choir requires from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This isn't coming. A decade ago Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) ran a bill that outlawed general purpose computers and made it a federal crime to posses a compiler without a license.

It's long since been here and will continue. Government officials desire the power to act with discretion to outlaw the computers they don't like and tolerate those they do. The especially want the power to decide after the fact and hold you retroactively responsible for anything they choose. The computer industry with its empowerment of the masses and startup culture is especially vulnerable to the usual bureaucratic power games so we will have to fight in order to lose our freedoms more slowly.

The legislators and bureaucrats aren't stupid and they aren't ignorant of the principle of Turing Equivalence. They love the idea that every computer can be demonized and outlawed at once. They especially love the idea that every programmer must hope for the forbearance of his superior in the bureaucracy, forever focused on pleasing the big man in Washington on whose pleasure his freedom depends.

It's like 1984 where Winston thinks that O'Brien will be his ally in reform because O'Brien understands the corruption, abuse, and evil of the system. Winston was wrong. The incumbents will not improve by being better informed. The horror totalitarian future you want to avoid is exactly the dream they cherish.

<comment><USER4> I see this viewpoint as containing the following characteristics.

* the idea that society-wide events happen because they are planned by an entity that is fully conscious of what it is doing

* the believe that entities actually exist that could actually reliably orchestrate society-scale things

* the idea that society-scale things can be planned at all, which entails that society-scale things can be predicted reliably

* the attribution of human characteristics to a vague group

* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular consciousness

* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular motivation exactly like that of a single human being, such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy

This type of thinking has been attractive to humanity for the last hundred thousand years or so. It's like Hellenistic polytheism in which the natural world could be understood as being comprised of human-like entities each of which can be understood the way you would psychologize a single person. You can understand the natural world as you would understand the complex interplay of visceral motivations of different human-like minds. You might find it similar to the world The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, any given soap opera, any Shakespeare play; the game of the viewer is you have to keep track of these different shifting alliances, relationships, and the visceral motives (lust, price, envy etc) of all these different characters plotting and scheming against each other; it's like porn for a certain part of the mind, it's just part of being a social ape. It's doubtless that it's a vital part of being a member of any small troop of chimpanzees, keeping track of complicated relationships, who owes who what, who's allied with who, who's sleeping with who, etc.

<comment><USER5> """* the idea that society-wide events happen because they are planned by an entity that is fully conscious of what it is doing"""

"fully conscious" is a weasel-word to disqualify the fact the fact that A LOT of society-wide events DO happen because they are planned by an entity.

Not only an aggregate entity, like a government, but even a single man sometimes. A dictator, for example, can (and historically has) pass a totally arbitrary law or course of action of his own choosing. (Napoleon: "we shall invade Russia").

"""* the believe that entities actually exist that could actually reliably orchestrate society-scale things"""

"Reliably" is another weasel-word here. Maybe a plan cannot ever go 100% as planned, but entities DO exist that can determine a course of action society- scale and make it happen. For example, NRA and it's lobbyists can pen, lobby and have the congress vote for a specific law.

"""* the idea that society-scale things can be planned at all, which entails that society-scale things can be predicted reliably"""

See adobe.

"""* the attribution of human characteristics to a vague group"""

Human characteristics (like "ambition", "ambivalence", "will", "shameless" etc) are totally applicable to groups, even vague groups. Actually, those characteristics as as easily applicable to single human s as to groups of humans -- there's nothing that makes them inherently applicable to single humans only.

"""* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular consciousness"""

Singular is another weasel-word here. They might not have a "singular consciousness", but they DO have an aggregate consciousness. I.e it's statistics, not an exact measurement.

"""* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular motivation exactly like that of a single human being, such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy"""

Same as above.

In fact your arguments can even be applied to single human beings. Who said that the idea that a single human being "can be understood as having a singular motivation such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy" is not silly?

We choose to generalize, we choose to make broad statements on data aggregates etc, both on terms of single human beings and groups because IT WORKS, and because it helps us understand and judge reality better.

It's like when we study chemistry: yeah, underneath it it's all physics, but it's a nice level of abstraction to have and it helps us understand processes and act better for a lot of cases.

<comment><USER4> >> * the idea that society-wide events happen because they are planned by an entity that is fully conscious of what it is doing

> "fully conscious" is a weasel-word to disqualify the fact the fact that A > LOT of society-wide events DO happen because they are planned by an entity.

> Not only an aggregate entity, like a government, but even a single man > sometimes. A dictator, for example, can (and historically has) pass a > totally arbitrary law or course of action of his own choosing. (Napoleon: > "we shall invade Russia").

Perhaps there is a difference between the claims that "events however they turn out will generally be seen as having been intended" and "there are no events that were intended as such", the latter of which your response would be more applicable to.

Do you think that there's a difference between claiming "Napolean" wants X and whatever the referent of "bureaucrats" is as wanting X that could be worth discussing? That difference being a major thrust of my point.

Clearly the vague-group issue wouldn't apply very well to an absolute dictatorship. Even with that dictatorship your example could be seen a strong counter-example: Napolean's plan was to invade Russia but his plan completely blew up in his face and ended up with a result that was absolutely not part of his plan.

You say that "not only" vague entities can have plans and then discuss dictators, so perhaps it's harder to think of examples of that.

>>"""* the believe that entities actually exist that could actually reliably orchestrate society-scale things"""

> "Reliably" is another weasel-word here. Maybe a plan cannot ever go 100% as > planned, but entities DO exist that can determine a course of action > society-scale and make it happen. For example, NRA and it's lobbyists can > pen, lobby and have the congress vote for a specific law.

Ok. Maybe sometimes something very specific and very short-term can be achieved reliably by a specific organization with the intention to do so. It is not true that there are no events that happen that were intended.

Perhaps if the poster had in fact given a very specific group with a very specific plan then we could have talked about the likelihood of that happening. I bet that would be a more useful discussion.

>> * the attribution of human characteristics to a vague group

> Human characteristics (like "ambition", "ambivalence", "will", "shameless" > etc) are totally applicable to groups, even vague groups. Actually, those > characteristics as as easily applicable to single human s as to groups of > humans -- there's nothing that makes them inherently applicable to single > humans only.

The poster made claims of EXTREMELY SPECIFIC human characteristics to vague groups. They know about "Turing Equivalence", "love the idea that every computer can be demonized", "love the idea that every programmer must hope for the forbearance of his superior in the bureaucracy, forever focused on pleasing the big man in Washington", "cherish" the "dream" of totalitarianism.

Even if some of the set of characteristics we could apply to humans could also be applied to groups, the burden of proof on something as specific as above would seem to be very large.

>>* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular consciousness

> Singular is another weasel-word here. They might not have a "singular > consciousness", but they DO have an aggregate consciousness. I.e it's > statistics, not an exact measurement.

I don't know what an "aggregate consciousness" is.

It sounds like "consciousness" in that term may have a somewhat different sense than what we would normally mean by the word.

> In fact your arguments can even be applied to single human beings. Who said > that the idea that a single human being "can be understood as having a > singular motivation such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy" is not > silly?

That's an interesting idea but actually I don't think people actually think that way by default. I think people do in fact very often think of each other as being motivated by greed, envy, lust, etc.

Even so, should ill-defined groups really be thought of as having motivations "exactly like" that of individual people?

In fact I think we have a tendency to attribute group motivations as being even more simple than that of a single person. A person could be greedy but could also be wracked by guilt; a person could want Y today but change his mind and want X tomorrow. It's difficult to think of a vague group attribution that anyone would actually make that includes complex or conflicting motivations or changes of heart, etc.

> We choose to generalize, we choose to make broad statements on data > aggregates etc, both on terms of single human beings and groups because IT > WORKS, and because it helps us understand and judge reality better.

I strongly disagree and don't understand why you could think that. "statements on data aggregates" seems like a poetic way of referring to what is just some sort of personal feeling or impression. I'm curious to know why you think "it works" perhaps in comparison to other ways of thinking you've tried. I think we think as we do largely because we are predisposed to do so based on processes adapted from those of our pre-human ancestors, not because we tried out several different ways and concluded this was the best among them. Even so, perhaps any different way of thinking could have different merits and flaws that we could discuss.

> It's like when we study chemistry: yeah, underneath it it's all physics, but > it's a nice level of abstraction to have and it helps us understand > processes and act better for a lot of cases.

I think this is an exceptionally poor analogy. Chemistry is extremely specific and precise and well-defined and makes clearly falsifiable claims even if we erased all knowledge of physics. If we could discuss such matters as precisely as in a chemistry paper we could tell immediately how we could try to figure out which claims could be true decisively. If someone wrote a chemistry paper with as much vagueness as the poster I was replying they would be laughed out of the auditorium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Somewhat ironically, the way mobile computing is obsessed with simple 'apps' reminds me somewhat of the 'Unix philosophy' - lots of tools that do one thing, which you can chain/pipe together into workflows to great effect. I can see this taking off more if vendors and developers work more on simple 'piping' APIs. And other things like RDFs, Service-Oriented Architecture in general.

And it could be so much more richer than the usual piping of text that happens in Unix. Imagine, you take a picture with your camera phone; you pipe the image to some sort of visual pattern matching program which isolates the faces in the picture; which are then uploaded to an online facial recognition service and the identities sent back to you; which are piped to a social networking app to find which people list polka as an interest; and then finally to your email/messaging program of choice so you can invite them to your monthly polka event. THEN you can save this workflow and have it execute from just a single camera shot... or have the camera input come from a surveillance camera via bluetooth.

<comment><AUTHOR> _lots of tools that do one thing, which you can chain/pipe together into workflows to great effect._

Sounds like Android's intents.

<comment><USER7> I think if Apple has their way (uncertain) then everything will become a backplane for Siri.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its not just we vs them, as he mentions the possibility to print biological structures is kind of creepy, so some control is necessary. You wouldnt want kids printing out viruses and such far fetched scenarios.

We hackers have a responsibility to not only fight against stupid laws, but to put in place sane ones, which respect freedom and privacy and also maintain public safety.

<comment><USER9> I think he mentioned that as printing out biological structures that would eat Monsanto's products. You can take this to mean it is creepy, but I think he meant it was a threat to Monsanto and when Monsanto realizes this, they are going to attempt to get legislation passed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this war not already here? Perhaps it is not counted as a war since so few are defending general purpose computation.

I certainly appreciate Mr. Doctrow's willingness to help get the word out but in my opinion a presentation at the Chaos Computer Congress is preaching to the choir. [Edit:] BoingBoing is a little closer to mainstream, but there's a way to go.

<comment><USER11> If you watch the talk, you will see that it was written for the choir. He discusses the challenges and responsibilities that we as hackers will face in future, and how they will go way beyond the current copyright wars. It was something of a call to arms basically.

I was in the audience last night, and it was an excellent presentation. All of the talks I have seen so far have been excellent, and I encourage you to check out the 28c3 youtube channel, where prerelease versions of all the talks are being posted (with extremely low delays I might add.)

<http://youtube.com/28c3>

Also, you can watch live streams here:

<http://28c3.fem-net.de/>

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the recommendation. I did watch the first half hour's worth, up to the Q/A session. I didn't really hear any 'next action' though... was there any recommendation on what I should be doing about this now?

<comment><USER11> Not as such, it was more of a general thing about what might (probably will) happen in the future, designed to provoke thought in the community. As he was dealing in hypotheticals, however likely they may be, there was not much talk of specific actions, as far as I remember anyway.

The Q&A was also very interesting, and it included more concrete discussion of possible ways forward I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We should send the video to our representatives and other SOPA/PIPA supporters. Maybe some of them will get it.

<comment><USER13> They will "get it" only if the video is accompanied by campaign contributions.</comment></comment>


Free Graphic Go Algorithms 5 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BFXNTFF <comment><AUTHOR> Graphically learn data structures and algorithms better than before</comment>


The Secret Thinkpad Powerbutton Code To Bring Dead Laptops Back To Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.masnick.com/2007/09/07/the-secret-thinkpad-powerbutton-code-to-bring-dead-laptops-back-to-life/

<comment><AUTHOR> Betsy, my trusty 6-year-old T41 died on me today. She wasn't much of a looker, but she was built like a tank and always did what she was told. Betsy gave me a good scare on a couple of other occasions, but it always turned out that she was just looking for some good ol' love and attention. But this time was different. No sign of life. Completely unresponsive to my various attempts to woo her back. After attempting fuel her with life-force through every orifice, I finally gave up. She was dead. Dead like a brick. Having completely given up hope, I proceeded to salvage pieces of my heart and the many memories we had made together. Curious as to why she may have chosen to leave this world behind, and me along with it, I turned to my old flame, Bertha. Bertha is old, loud, lazy, and most of the time she just sits there. She was good at Googling, though, which is why I liked using her. Especially angry Googling, as in this particular case. As usually, she gave me satisfaction. She blogged all over me. But this was a particularly satisfying blog, since it made me think of Betsy. I have attached a link to it above. Excited to try it myself, I ran back to Betsy. And would you believe it, it worked! Betsy is back to life and purring like a kitten.</comment>


Will GOTCHAs Replace CAPTCHAs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520306/will-gotchas-replace-captchas/ <comment><USER2> The paper: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.1137v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.1137v1.pdf)

Its thesis: "We introduce GOTCHAs (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a way of preventing automated offline dictionary attacks against user selected passwords."

It cites [http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/276.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/276.pdf) which it is an improvement upon.

As far as I can tell from reading the papers, though it does not state this, the purpose is to make offline dictionary attacks harder by helping the users create/remember a higher amount of entropy than they do with a password.[1] Given ten images to be matched up with phrases, there are 10! matchings, providing at most log2(10!) = 21.8 bits of entropy (fewer bits if computers can make even a really bad guess at which phrases go with which pictures). That is about as much entropy as in four randomly-generated lowercase-letter- or-digit characters (log2(36^4) = 20.7): a great improvement for bad passwords, but modest for good passwords. The authors are hoping that its easiness-to-remember per bit of entropy is significantly greater than that of passwords (randomly generated and human chosen passwords).

[1] Once the attacker has gained all server data, there's no stopping brute- forcing. Even with SRP ( [http://srp.stanford.edu/](http://srp.stanford.edu/) ) in which the server _never_ sees the plaintext password, if the attacker gains a password's verifier that's stored on the server then they can offline- brute-force it. In this case, a brute-forcer would brute-force {password + which picture goes with which phrase}.

</comment><comment><USER3> My bank made me choose three icons out of a list of 50 that I have to re-pick every time I log on to internet banking. I have no fucking idea which icons I picked, or why, or what significance the bank imagines that an icon of a frog could possibly have for me. All I know is that I don't use that bank much any more.</comment>


If it quacks like a RDBMS… - <AUTHOR> http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2010/08/19/if-it-quacks-like-a-rdbms/#comment-70010056

<comment><USER2> The actual 900% argument is buried in the comments of a frustrated user who said almost nothing about technical parameters of his experiment.

Please don't submit a title like that next time.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies if I wasn't clear enough.

The comment (which is what I linked directly to) came from the writer of the actual blog, who is one of the main developers for the Mongo DB PHP driver. <http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/about/>

So I would take it with far more than a pinch of salt.

<comment><USER2> Yeah well somehow the link doesn't redirect to the actual comment so we see just a blog entry; and now the 900% comment got rotated out from the entry page.

Thank you, you seem to have corrected the title of your submission.

Still I'm not sure such thing is worth posting to HN at all. Little technical value, just spreading the information that somebody is not satisfied with something. This is what I call "emotion flush". Do we really care?

Please note I'm not attempting to bash specifically you but rather thinking of improving general quality of HN links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you have the right job for the tool... these tradeoffs should make a lot sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right ... but the rise of NoSql is predicated on the 'fact' that RDBMS's can't perform near as well as NoSQL stores.

But it seems like the claim made on [http://www.mikealrogers.com/2010/07/mongodb-performance- dura...](http://www.mikealrogers.com/2010/07/mongodb-performance-durability/) that with an in-memory version of Postgres "once you turn off the log and all the durability it's neck and neck with MongoDB write performance" ... might not be so far off the mark.

<comment><USER4> With equivalent OS interaction, and no JOINs/seeks, the RDBMS could actually be faster, as there is no overhead of storing the name of every col in every record.

I still like MongoDB though. During dev it's nice to not have to worry so much about schema, run ALTER, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> touche</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Digital Watches are a Pretty Neat Idea (A Modest Proposal for Our Time) - <AUTHOR> http://underground.infovark.com/2009/01/08/digital-watches-are-a-pretty-neat-idea/

<comment><USER2> The meat:

 _In the interests of making one tiny, tiny optimization in this all-too- complicated matter of time (And we haven't even factored in general or special relativity yet!), I propose that we all adopt UTC immediately. Forget about daylight savings, forget about time zones_</comment>


4chan may have remotely wiped a Clinton official's iPhone and iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/13/13274178/4chan-podesta-ipad-iphone-icloud-hack-wikileaks <comment><USER2> As if the other hacking wasn't criminal this certainly is. 4chan hackers (if it is them) are really brain dead about sabotaging the Clinton campaign. Do they think it will be any better under Trump?

<comment><USER3> Do people think it will be better under Clinton?

Her IT guy running to reddit to ask tips retroactively change email sender information in outlook archives days before they had to give them to the Feds. And I am sure he didn't do that on his own but was tasked to do that from inside the clinton campaign.

It really baffels me that the FBI said they found evidence of intentionally wrongfully handling confidential information but that they would not continue to investigate. And Clinton actually admitting to it basically just saying "oops, my fault. wasnt a big deal, right?" And that this was the end of it. I am more than sure that anybody else in that exact situation would already be in jail or at the very least standing trial for this. There is no way someone else would have been let off the way they let Clinton off.</comment></comment>


Passwords are dead - <AUTHOR> http://pcidss.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/passwords-are-dead-a-collaborative-research-effort-being-presented-at-rsa-2013-p1/

<comment><USER2> I stopped reading when the author revealed his cluelessness about the appropriate countermeasure for rainbow tables:

> There exists databases FULL of every single password hash (for each type of > encryption / hash approach) that can be compared against recovered passwords > – think 2 excel tables .. search for hash in column A and find real world > password in column B.

This is a good description of the attack vector, and the fact that this attack vector exists is why any modern application should hash each user's password with a different salt when storing it in the database.</comment>


Sexual partner selection is shaped by your opposite-sex parent in childhood - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/invisible-illness/your-sexual-partner-selection-is-shaped-by-your-opposite-sex-parent-in-childhood-ad92419be706 <comment><USER2> This is an interpretation of a paper by Bereczkei et al. published in 2004. The paper, if I read it correctly, was based on photographs from "26 Caucasian families".

PubMed shows several more recent papers which cite the paper. One is [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3444291/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3444291/) from 2012, which uses "22,861 individuals from 6,105 independent families". That paper says:

> A strong previous demonstration of sexual imprinting was subsequently found > to contain serious errors (Bereczkei, Hegedus, and Hajnal 2009). The > distinct lack of an effect in the current large sample using appropriate > genetic controls indicates that sexual imprinting does not play a role in > human mate choice, at least in terms of the range of physical and > psychological traits investigated here.

Thus, I consider it very likely the conclusions of the first publication should not be regarded as conclusive.

If I had a Medium account, I would post a comment. Perhaps someone here would do that?

</comment><comment><USER3> Biggest "duh" ever. Daddy issues and mommy issues are nuanced but create similar patterns of damaged/altered behaviors in later life. Anyone who's done dating seriously becomes effectively an investigative psychologist to screen- out unhealthy candidates that would end up creating drama through their recurrent maladaptive/negative-attention-seeking relationship patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about girls without fathers and boys without mothers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Study seems to only examine individuals who are attracted to the opposite sex.</comment>


Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon-e5-v4-review <comment><USER2> I made a table of certain metrics of the various models.

This is useful for me when comparing ranges of cores, power, price, and maybe it will be for you too.

I'll filter to my range of options, then make decisions on $/W, $/Ghz, etc..

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PcjgdtSV-2JLJXDpktjg...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PcjgdtSV-2JLJXDpktjg_A8IR9r9tAJMAf8JeNdwmyE/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER3> Here's a fork with an added column that considers total system cost, which shifts the sweet spot up from 8 to 14-16 cores: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LOLcD0gbSlukcWAFtLYu...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LOLcD0gbSlukcWAFtLYuVxeHOWR5d0dyYNQ2u3vfzHM/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER2> I like it!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's very interesting is that in most cases with either modern PCIe- connection based SSDs or multiple SSD drives, database performance has become CPU limited once again in operations that require multiple transactions. These chips surely help with the higher processor counts.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't SSDs - and even better system-bus-connected storage contraptions - also drive the use of different algorithms? I can see how merely cutting the disk latencies by two (or more) orders of magnitude leaves you starved for computational resources, but you don't have to do many things at that point. Data packing is different (could be even CPU matched now?), access patterns can be more random, etc.

<comment><USER6> That's an interesting question, but I expect many of the algorithms will stay the same. Think of a computer as having a multi-level cache: network -> disk -> ram -> L2 cache -> L1 cache -> register, each one smaller than the last. We're seeing a big change in disk latency, but that's only one part of the chain. For example, we're still going to be optimizing data structures to fit in L1 cache lines.

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, that may be the new ordering if the disks are SSDs, but the typical seek latency on a spinning disk (~5 ms) is definitely higher than the latency to read data from another machine's memory across ethernet (a few hundred us), and even the bandwidths are comparable (~150 MB/s).

So, now it has jumped from (disk -> network -> memory -> ...) to (network -> disk -> memory -> ...), which is a big change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Enty level is really nice considering the price per core:

Intel Xeon E5-2630 v4 10/20 2.2 GHz 25 MB 85W $667 US

Intel Xeon E5-2630L v4 10/20 1.8 GHz 25 MB 55W $612 US

Intel Xeon E5-2623 V4 4/8 2.6 GHz 5 MB 85W $444 US

Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 8/16 2.1 GHz 20 MB 85W $417 US

Intel Xeon E5-2609 V4 8/8 1.7 GHz 20 MB 85W $306 US

Intel Xeon E5-2603 v4 6/6 1.7 GHz 10 MB 85W $213 US

<comment><USER9> Compared to the 5820K i7, these don't seem much better... Is there something I'm missing?

[http://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel- Core-i7-5820K-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel- Core-i7-5820K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz)

<comment><USER10> ECC ram and multi-processor support. But yeah I see what you're saying and I agree.

<comment><USER11> ECC isn't just a gimmick nowadays?

<comment><USER12> Huh? ECC is necessary for anything but toy applications.

<comment><USER13> Is it? Or is that the old wives tale? Many very non-toy applications started on consumer hardware (including Google, and they turned out alright).

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to- ecc/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/)

<comment><USER12> You'll note that Google grew ECC as soon as they started billing people for real money. This is no coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool, might finally see an update to Apple's Mac Pro - it's been waiting on the E5 for quite a while considering the current Mac Pro ships with Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture!

</comment><comment><USER15> One of those announcements that makes me stop everything and reminisce... This is simply incredible! I could actually run 100 production Windows servers on this with my Data-center license... the ROI is insane... thank you Intel!

<comment><USER16> Be aware that Microsoft is moving to a core-based licensing model for Windows Server 2016. Microsoft would like a piece of this "ROI", too.

<comment><USER15> Ah I see - good point, and it makes sense. I actually prefer they keep pushing up pricing on the Server and SQL solutions so that people like me will finally start seriously considering opensource solutions.

<comment><USER17> I work for a Microsoft partner and I am involved with their sales processes. The discussion is never around competing with open source. It's not on their radar. The majority of the discussion is about replacing Oracle, which is still dramatically more expensive than SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

<comment><USER18> It's just funny to see MS charging by power of the processor. That's something they said they would not do, and used to mock Oracle for.

<comment><USER19> Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We used the E5-2620 series since v1 and now it gets two additional cores for the same price.

However when it comes to CPU's the price was really good for a while now, hopefully the prices for SAS drives will soon be as good as CPU's aswell. I mean computing power is propably cheaper than storage at the moment.

<comment><USER21> 2620's are the ultimate CPU per $ for pretty much all workloads except DB (where I like 2690's :)

<comment><USER20> It depends on your DB workload ;) Actually we sell the 2620 for shared nothing architectures to all kinds of small to midsize customers.

If you don't need to run fast queries against your analytics or keep logs for something like 20 years you really won't get too much data. Especially when the only thing you index are the content of business documents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think I still like the Xeon-D better. See this [http://www.cpu- world.com/Compare/253/Intel_Xeon_D_D-1537_vs_...](http://www.cpu- world.com/Compare/253/Intel_Xeon_D_D-1537_vs_Intel_Xeon_E5-2620_v4.html)

<comment><USER2> Throw that kit in a SuperMicro MicroBlade Chassis with Dual Node Blades, kerplow. 56 nodes with 64G RAM, 4TB SSD, and 8 cores per node for ~140W/node. Banging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The powerful marketing is the multi core vs clock speed.

Sort of like: buy one get one free (of slower clock speed).

I am impressed. (by the effective marketing deflecting the importance of clock speed).

<comment><USER24> I'm sorry, but pure single core performance ended circa 2007. This is the end of the road.

It is shameful that in 2016 we still don't have, say, parallel rendering in browsers. All hope is for Servo.

<comment><USER9> That is definitely false - single core performance still matters a lot in many ML applications, where utilizing many (>8) cores is still difficult.

<comment><USER5> If by ML, you mean machine learning (and not, e.g., Ocaml et al.), I thought those people were actually into GPUs.

<comment><USER9> GPUs are useful for deep learning and a few other easily parallelizable algos, but the majority of open source ML software is still stuck in the CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence Fantastic news that they have been released. Means I can get official quotes for them now!

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a Skylake E3 Xeon. Why didn't they use the Skylake cores for these E5 CPUs?

<comment><USER3> Because it takes ~2 years to wrap the EP uncore around a new core and validate the whole thing. Expect Skylake-EP around a year from now.

<comment><USER25> Are the cores not the same as the Skylake Xeon cores that was released back in Fall?

(are E3 cores different from E5 cores?)

<comment><USER3> It's more or less the same core (modulo AVX512), but E5 has a much more complex uncore than E3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> AnandTech's version is probably better for the HN audience: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel- xeon-e5-v4-rev...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel- xeon-e5-v4-review)

<comment><USER26> I left ars when Jon Stokes did. Learned more about CPUs from his articles than I did in most of college courses combined.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: State of the art of machine translation? - <AUTHOR>

What are the best things currently out there? <comment><USER2> Google Translate for certain language pairs. It's still struggling in others. Even in the pairs it's passable at, regional language variations are a long way off, as are most original expressions, idioms and any form of localization.

It started in the 1950s, and in the last 30 years it has certainly come of age, but it seems like it needs a new level of semantic and contextual linking from this point on, where the multitude of options for each phrase or word can be statistically compared in the context of the whole piece and it's own contextual relationships.

This could take another 30 years, or a breakthrough could bring that forward to 5-10 years. Predicting the future is of course a fool's game, but given the ever increasing mass of data being exposed to companies such as Google, it's not wholly unforeseeable.

It will be interesting to see if Machine Copywriting or Machine Design start to develop in the coming years, and to consider how inhuman and inconsiderate of the reader/viewer those might be.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Translate. No other general MT comes close (there are specialized MT systems that can surpass it). It's a result of Google's possession of so many terabytes of bilingual corpora (and a very clever hybrid system).

<comment><USER4> And yet, it leaves so much to be desired.</comment></comment>


Biomarkers and Long-term Labour Market  Outcomes: The Case of Creatine [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ftp.iza.org/dp8029.pdf <comment><USER2> Plausible (creatine is good for athletics, of course, but there's also a scattershot of small psychological studies suggesting cognitive benefits to supplementation [http://gwern.net/Creatine](http://gwern.net/Creatine) which would imply that one's normal levels of creatine might make a difference), but I'm really surprised that the correlation does not seem to be mediated by educational attainment, since that's where I would immediately expect to see some effect to get the increased wages.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is a biomarker for meat, eggs, and fish in the diet. So, in addition to the effects of creatine in a young persons body, it may be a biomarker for wealth, assuming vegetarians are a small enough minority.

<comment><USER4> The papers asserts they controlled for that (in the Conclusion):

        Nor does it appear to be proxying the effects of other biomarkers, nor parental background.

Also, since it wasn't due to education:

        The effect of creatine on labour market outcomes does not arise through the acquisition of formal education as measured by having at least some university education.

I think that also insinuates it wasn't just a proxy for wealth, as the wealthy kids would, I assume, have had better education.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the education<=>wealth assumption plays out as well in Finland as in the US. There is much greater access to high quality education in Finland, and it's cheaper, too.

<comment><USER3> That's a very good point. With free tuition for Finnish citizens, and very likley no "legacy" admission policies, education is not a proxy for wealthy parents in Finland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This kind of paper probably gets lots of money from EU and government sources. It has couple of people from different EU countries and it has people from different fields co-operating.

This is probably something that people think lets do this and see what happens at least we get maximum government funding for being interdisciplinary and co- operating between institutions. Results are probably not bullshit at all, but idea to study this is probably because its easier to get funding is for interdisciplinary co-operation.

</comment><comment><USER7> TLDR; "Those with higher levels of creatine in 1980 spend more time in the labour market in the subsequent two decades and earn more. Creatine is not associated with educational attainment."

"The associations between creatine and labour market outcomes are robust to controlling for other biomarkers, educational attainment and parental background. Creatine is a naturally occurring nitrogenous organic acid which supplies energy to body cells, including muscles and brain. Our findings are consistent with high energy levels, induced by creatine, leading to productivity-enhancing traits - such as a high propensity for effort, perseverance, or high-commitment - which results in positive labour market outcomes."

</comment><comment><USER8> This study from a nephrology journal shows that urine creatinine levels are associated with lean body mass, degree of vigorous exercise, and meat in the diet: [http://cjasn.asnjournals.org/content/3/2/348.full](http://cjasn.asnjournals.org/content/3/2/348.full) Did these authors control for any of these factors?

</comment><comment><USER9> My bullshit meter reads over 9000.

<comment><USER10> Mine went off the scale on reading the title. But what about similar findings regarding testosterone and traders (and other activities involving risk taking) that have been found? What if they'd found a similar correlation between caffeine and labour output?

Made me realize my bullshit meter definitely includes a heuristic along the lines of "any mental association with the bodybuilder supplement industry adds a large multiplier to the bullshit level".

My bullshit meter is clearly flawed.

<comment><USER11> Creatine supp. isn't just for bodybuilders; it's actually beneficial for the brain.

<comment><USER10> Yup, it's actually among the couple supplements I do take. I was going for a point about bullshit meters since creatine is strongly associated with the scammy world of workout supplements in most people's minds.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Failure looms for "world's biggest agile project", UK welfare payment system - <AUTHOR> http://cartesianproduct.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/universal-credit-government-closer-to-recognising-failure/

<comment><USER2> The essay and its followup [1] are sadly lacking in specifics. "Agile" is an umbrella term that encompasses everything from small, flexible teams using rigorous engineering practices and collaborating closely with product management; to large, monolithic organizations slapping the word "agile" on the door, ditching documentation and testing, but not actually changing any of their dysfunctional habits. [2] The former tend to succeed; the latter tend to fail.

[1] "A bit more on Universal Credit and "Agile"" [http://cartesianproduct.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/a-bit- more-...](http://cartesianproduct.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/a-bit-more-on- universal-credit-and-agile/)

[2] "The Decline and Fall of Agile" [http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The- Decline-and-Fall-of-Agile...](http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Decline-and- Fall-of-Agile.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating stuff, but I have no idea what the author is talking about in this section:

 _"Some steps have been taken to try to rescue the project. The back end – the benefits calculation – has reportedly been shifted to a "waterfall" development process – which offers some assurances that the government at least takes its fiduciary duties seriously as it should mean no code will be deployed that has not been finished."_

It was so out of step with the rest of the post(s) that I thought it sarcasm at first.</comment>


The man who swims to work - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170724-the-man-who-swims-to-work <comment><USER2> nice</comment>


The Wetware Crisis: TEPES (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://brucefwebster.com/2008/01/10/the-wetware-crisis-tepes/ <comment><USER2> While it is true that it's hard to find very talented people, it seems to me that we only require very talented (as opposed to say "above average") people because of defects in pedagogy and engineering.

Another way of saying this

1: the number of software problems that I believe inherently require someone in the top 1% raw brain power is much lower than we think.

2: One major reason why #1 is true is that we are bad a teaching people to program

3: Another reason why #1 is true is that we are bad at managing the complexity of our systems.

So while the short term solution to #1 may be to only hire the best of the best, I think the long term solution is to address #2 and #3. I will further assert that there is probably a lot of low-hanging fruit for #2 and #3 though #3 has definitely improved a lot over my career.

I am not at all an expert on pedagogy, but I have definitely noticed learning programmers being completely baffled by things that I can teach them in an hour or two (it's obvious that having experienced software engineers tutor learning programmers is not a reasonable solution, and it's a completely non- interesting result that 1-on-1 tutoring is more effective than classroom learning) so I have some reason to think there may be improvements made there; even my 1-on-1 tutoring has greatly improved with help from my sister who is a very skilled instructor in a non-programming related field.

<comment><USER3> > it's obvious that having experienced software engineers tutor learning > programmers is not a reasonable solution, and it's a completely non- > interesting result that 1-on-1 tutoring is more effective than classroom > learning

For the record, it's not obvious. Many people have suggested an apprenticeship system for software engineers would be an improvement.

I'm not sure it's the system I'd choose, but it isn't obviously bad to me.

<comment><USER4> I believe programming is one of those things where 1) a lot of knowledge/ability can be transferred in a tutoring setting, and 2) the worth of this is high (considering the cost/benefit of good programmers).

While I find it hard to properly explain this, my experience is that this is not as 'obvious' for many kinds of jobs. Off the cuff I'd say it has something to do with the relatively insular/individualistic nature of programming (although I'd say this applies even to larger entities like a company), as well as the general 'craftsman' feeling I get from how my job actually feels.

Perhaps tooling also plays a big role. I'd say a sizeable chunk of my improvement when it comes to doing my job fast and well consists of using the right tools. When I sit down with other programmers, I'm often amazed by how much time they waste (and I used to waste) using suboptimal 'tooling'. These are things that are often difficult to learn from tutorials or classes.

Regardless, if I were to have junior programmers under my wing, I'd probably try to make sure there's some degree of tutoring going on, not just for the benefit of the juniors, but because I think it can really make a huge difference in their value to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

–Jeff Hammerbacher</comment>


Talkbin by Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.talkbin.com/

<comment><USER2> This is an important service for businesses like Groupon.</comment>


How to Bootstrap Your SaaS Company to $1M ARR Before Raising Venture Capital - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-to-bootstrap-your-saas-company-to-1m-arr-before-raising-venture-capital-d3be086effa0 <comment><USER2> Here, I'll save you the read. The keys to success are:

\- "Make sure you build something people will pay you for"

\- "Make the Value of Your Product Really Obvious"

\- Hire good people but not too early

\- "Be Relentless in Your Focus"

And in case you are interested (like I am) in hearing how entrepreneurs honestly evaluate mistakes so that we all may learn from them, this company only made two mistakes worth noting in their history:

\- Not enough PR made it hard to hire early on (but they wouldn't do anything differently)

\- Leaving out almond butter is how you get raccoons

This is the kind of "we're amazing at all the generic things and the only mistakes we made are humblebrags that aren't mistakes and irrelevant anecdotes" puff tech journalism that gives this industry such a bad name.

<comment><AUTHOR> There were a few other nuggets:

\+ Get Leads Without Spending Money: The most interesting learning for me was the idea to focus on getting "free" leads. Basically, the founders of this company figured out how to showcase one of Shopify's advanced APIs to such a degree that Shopify promoted the startups product. It's a "puff" observation on one level, but this old school "biz dev" approach to marketing a nice counterpoint to all the growth hack BS about fine-tuning Adwords spend.

\+ Don't make your first hire until you're at $1M ARR: Another simple observation, but scale is important. If these two guys can run a business for two years and get to $1M, why do most funded startups need 5-10 people prior to product market fit?

It may not be your taste, but these are lessons that are rarely taught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "You should expect the same passion and drive in your employees that you have yourself as a founder."

Nope. Especially not in a bootstrapped company where founders probably retain most equity.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, maybe not. But you can still find pretty kick ass employees by somewhat spreading the wealth around. Make sure they have a great office and they're well taken care of. Perhaps have a bonus pool. Offer flexibility. Etc.

It might not matter much in the valley, where every startup does it, but it will if you're building a business in say, Europe.

I personally don't believe that just because you retain most equity as a founder in a "lifestyle business" you can't find equally and/or better employees. You just have to focus on different things. It's just a different game (organic, slower growth, longer term), and you probably don't want to be handing out equity to people if you run a profitable bootstrapped business.

<comment><USER5> I think the context matters. If the employee(s) in question have meaningful equity and authority in the business then it's a reasonable comment.

If they're just salaried employees, even with some token paper lottery ticket style equity options, it's absolutely ridiculous to expect them to have the same passion and commitment as the founders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The $1M ARR is about the point that I'm at today with my startup. It's three founders which own 90% equity, and 3 small investors which own the other 10% split between them. We managed to build it up with relatively small capital investment from the founders, but in our industry there is no getting away with not hiring any employees for a long time, as it's not simply SaaS, but SaaS + "services" (services meaning doing a portion of the work for our clients within our software rather than them hiring people to do it themselves).

Our software is B2B, and the sales cycle is frustratingly drawn out and expensive with demos, in person meetings, etc. That was something I hoped we could get away from when we started, but seeing the sales cycle first hand, I can't see a way to make it much cheaper while still growing. The people at these large companies which make the decisions really like in-person meetings, and if your competitors are willing to and you aren't...not a good way to try and save money. The up side to that, is each customer brings in a lot of revenue. We've noticed that a sale can take anywhere from 6 months to 1 year to go through.

I wouldn't change anything about the slow growth we went for rather than trying to ramp up and get as many clients as possible as quickly as possible. It let us focus on the product a lot more, and make it efficient for our users (and thus our internal employees providing the "service" portion of our product). We'll continue slowly adding clients as we build out our product more, we want to keep customer satisfaction high so we don't want to spread ourselves too thin.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this! I've got an idea for a financial data B2B business that I am going to go full-time on later this year.

The idea of a long drawn out sales cycle worries me as I'm only looking at an initial product with a $10k p.a. price point. With that I can't necessarily afford to have sales people out in the field so they would have to be in- house. I imagine clients would want demos etc. so mostly Webex

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's actually the same general space my business is in. We do Trade Promotion Management for manufacturers, which means managing their "contracts" and "claims (rebates)", and ensuring that they don't pay out more money than is actually owed.

Our price point is considerably higher than yours, and requires buy-in from every level at these companies for them to go for our product. We don't have a dedicated sales person at this point, but that is a good portion of what one of the three founders spends his time on.

We were initially trying to position our product at a much cheaper price point for just the software with us providing none of the "service" side of things, to market to smaller customers which are currently managing everything with Excel, but we found after talking to these companies that they are just as much of a pain to try and sell to as the bigger guys, and required just about as much effort, even if the revenue it would bring in was just a fraction of what a bigger client would bring in. That caused us to refocus on targeting the larger customers for now at least.

We use Webex heavily for demos and everything, but with a sales cycle stretching into a year, every single client we've got has taken us going out there for at least one in-person demo with the higher ups, and an in-person training for their users after the sale. It adds up, but for a very complicated software that they tightly integrate into their business, it's necessary for them to feel all warm and fuzzy, have a face to a name, and feel like they are not going to be left high and dry if they have any issues. The effort put in during, and after the sale is really necessary to ensure all those points are hit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you haven't noticed, there's been about 5-10 of these companies pop up lately and explode in popularity. ConvertKit went from 0 to 5k in MRR over 2 years, then from 5k to 200k over the next 2 years. A rising tide raises all boats. So I assume the article is about getting in early on a massively growing industry. As someone who has been fortunate in this very way, trust me when I say that you really can't overemphasize the importance of this. Unfortunately it may or may not require being able to predict the future, so your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER9> > If you haven't noticed, there's been about 5-10 of these companies pop up > lately and explode in popularity.

Forgive my ignorance but what you mean by "these types of companies". Is it simply SaaS companies for a niche product?

<comment><USER8> more intelligent email marketing flow/autoresponder providers/SAAS -- Drip, Klaviyo, ConvertKit, Customer.io etc have ALL grown hugely over the past few years. If you bootstrapped a half-decent business in this space you probably became successful.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, right now it is all about email marketing automation. Few years ago, the hot space was project management software and before that it was bug tracking software. Get your timing right and you are golden, start too early or too late and you will be in a tough space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I enjoy articles that talk about success and how people/companies got there but I have gotten tired of reading the gospel. Instead of prescribing to me how to be a success just share what you did.

</comment><comment><USER12> "...Make a Million Dollars Before You Hire Employee #1..."

?

<comment><USER13> Yeah I mean if you just define your first few employees as "founders" instead, you can have 100 founders and make a million and then hire employee #1 right?

<comment><USER12> This! Or sell the "startup experience": 1 "CEO" + 15 (free)interns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ed! So happy to read this article from the Beehive days!</comment>


Nikki and the Robots 0.3 is out - Haskell-based open source game - <AUTHOR> http://joyridelabs.de/blog/?p=732

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of zillion at the first glance ( a fantastic sega 8 bit classic).

Very cool that it's in Haskell! This is a great sort of project to work on in Haskell for me. I find games and websites give more rewarding immediate feedback than number crunching.</comment>


Web app for interviewing technical candidates in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paf31/initialround <comment><USER2> Great idea! I hope others will follow your example.

Btw, could you clarify exactly which type of licence you are using ([https://github.com/paf31/initialround/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/paf31/initialround/blob/master/LICENSE)). Is it something like BSD?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I finally decided to go with the BSD license, since I'd like to enable people to benefit from this, which might mean being able to add new tests without revealing the model answer :)

<comment><USER2> "Distributed under the terms of the BSD 3-clause License."

It was clarified in the README. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While building Texts.com, my CTO and I learned a ton by studying the path of GetchaBooks. They had shut down and decided to open source their code ([http://getchabooks.com/open-source.html](http://getchabooks.com/open- source.html)), which is a generous and noble thing to do.

I see it as good coding karma; and you never know the contacts you might make (I initially wanted to hire one of the creators; but I settled for buying him a few beers since he had just accepted another offer).

<comment><USER4> Hi Frank, I wrote most of the backend for GetchaBooks. Glad you got some value out of the source.

Even though I invested a fair amount of time in continuous refactoring while actively developing it, refactoring and documenting to a point where I wasn't embarrassed to make it public and could realistically say that someone else would be able to use (which ended up happening with tuftstext.com) and perhaps modify or extend it was a significant learning experience.

IIRC I spent a few weeks on that, but I think it was worth it. Instead of setting aside the project with a vague idea of the right way to do some things, I ended up actually having done them the right way, so now when I encounter a similar problem I know how to do it the right way the first time.

This is basically the same situation you would face if you were handing off code when leaving a company. This experience is one reason why I think it's important to develop and document your project to open source quality standards throughout the lifetime of the project.

And what better way to do that than to open source your code even for an active company? Usually you're probably not competing on tech, and I bet any community contribution you'd get is greater than the likelihood that someone will actually manage to maintain an instance of your code.

The books-by-course space is a perfect example of this. So many "startups" have duplicated so much work building these sites, when what you actually need to succeed is marketing. (The thing we took away from it, I think, is that you need per-school branded sites.) They should start sharing resources more.

What do you know, here's the college bookstore part of GetchaBooks extracted into an HTTP API, now with parallel scraping, that I just made public on Github: [https://github.com/mwhite/bookstore- api](https://github.com/mwhite/bookstore-api) Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to get working. But expect to get sued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is very cool to open source your software. That being said, I'd recommend you work with a native English speaker on your marketing if you plan to pursue another startup. The copy writing on the marketing site is bad enough that your code never mattered.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a native English speaker. I appreciate that the marketing site is lacking in a lot of ways, but I didn't see my English as part of that problem.

<comment><USER5> Even if you are a native speaker, some outside advice would help.

> "Recruit Top Developers with Feedback-Driven Interviews"

That doesn't make logical sense. Recruiting is about finding candidates. "with interviews" makes no sense in this context.

"Feedback Driven Interviews" means nothing to anyone. Google doesn't know what it means. It is not an industry term. It is bullshit bingo. That never works.

Why not start with "Improve your hiring process by ..."?

I am no copy writing pro, but you need to learn to invert. Become the customer and sell yourself. Write in the active voice.

<comment><USER6> Native english speaker here. I consider CV reviews, phone screens, in person interviews etc to be part of the 'recruiting' process which encompasses basically everything before the candidate signs a contract and becomes an employee.

So 'recruiting with interviews' makes sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel bad your startup failed, but I'm grateful you decided to open source the project. I wish more people did the same since there are plenty of lessons to be learned. Plenty of public bulletins and blog posts discuss -- sometimes at length -- over what part management difficulties and other obstacles have played, but very few actually release technical details. Even more rare to see the source released.

Hope you fare better in your next venture. If you haven't started, you should.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice one! And it's probably good for you also as it helps you draw a line under it by giving it away.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the idea. The plan is to move anyone who wants to keep data onto private Azure instances, and then to close up shop. Maybe if anyone is interested in developing a customized version of the code, then I'll work on that in the future.

<comment><USER9> Can you also share insights on how/why the startup failed? Also, do you plan to keep the site operational for the free customers or completely shut it down?

<comment><USER10> because developer.

I should be a target customer, since I periodically interview candidates for programming positions. However, landing page and screenshots failed to explain to me what the unique selling point was. How many people here know what "Feedback-Driven Interview" is?

Whole product seems to be about providing an online testing tool ala topcoder.com. But coding tasks are usually only a small part of the interview process (not that I agree with that, but that's what happens at 90% of companies I've applied for).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you've hit the nail on the head here. For one thing, I didn't put enough energy into any of the non-dev aspects of the project. Also, I started writing the code before I had really validated the product properly. I had some recruiters which were interested, but most eventually turned out to dislike the idea of scaring away their prospects with tests, and didn't see it adding enough value. It was even harder to market to individual companies looking to hire.

<comment><USER10> Yep, it's easy to spot those mistakes in others', when you look from a side. It's much harder for me to do boring work myself, instead of playing with new frontend libs and writing code. At least you'll be more self-aware next time, few people have this luxury.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought I was the only person who attempted at creating startups with asp.net/azure before I switched to RoR. It looks like I was not alone! Kudos to the OP for open sourcing it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would be awesome to get some screenshots of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some on the actual homepage here: [http://initialround.com/#Tour](http://initialround.com/#Tour)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for open sourcing this. It looks like a useful web application.

</comment><comment><USER14> SQL Azure? Bwahahaha..

</comment><comment><USER15> azure? lol

<comment><USER16> what's funny with azure?

<comment><USER17> Indeed, nothing is funny about azure. However, using ASP.net Web Forms is hilarious.

<comment><USER16> Yes I found this weird as well. I had a look at the code behind files and at least they all seem to be almost empty.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually used MVC on the second part of this project, which is not included here. To be honest, my requirements were so small (and ASP.NET MVC seemed quite heavyweight for my needs) that I just went with the first thing that worked, and webforms were just the path of least resistance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Websockets – History, concepts and open source solutions - <AUTHOR> https://go.ably.io/websockets <comment><USER2> This is an interesting read. Would have liked to see more details on how to build a websocket server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! That was a super fast read :D Coincidentally, the next article will talk about just that! Make sure to keep an eye for that link.

However, the thing to keep in mind is, your own websockets server would lack some serious attributes such as scalability, message ordering etc unless you have a dedicated distributed systems engineers' team working on it!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: OS / Hardware choice for a software startup in Africa - <AUTHOR>

I'm starting a software start up in Rwanda.  One question I'm struggling with is what hardware/OS platform to provide my employees with.  I have been on OSX for the past five years and love it, the perfect blend of polished apps and real unix underpinnings.  But Apple has almost no presence in Africa, so all hardware would have to be brought in.  Another choice is Ubuntu, but having run it at various times, I know that there is a good bit of frustration involved now and then due to hardware drivers, especially on laptops.  But it is probably the most transferable skill for the employees, which is part of the goal. Lastly, Win7 is a choice, but that makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.  I'll be training them on Python/Django/etc and it just doesn't feel right running those environment in Windows.<p>What would you pick and why? <comment><USER2> I shipped laptops to Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.) Forget starting an Apple shop, or a Linux shop. Most IT people there get trained in MS stack technologies, and most techies you will be able to hire will be familiar with them.

If the purpose of your startup is _profit_ and not some other altruistic or _fun_ reason, I suggest you don't try to introduce you them too many new things at the same time. You wont be able to service Apple hardware there, at least not cheaply.

You can source newish IBM Thinkpads for $350 a piece, if you're buying 10 units+ (feel free to contact me for that) same with HP and Toshiba ones.

They should be able to pickup Python and Django on their own, and fairly quickly. They're already competent in ASP.NET and other more complex technologies.

Nairobi has some decent IT scene as well.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> >I'll be training them on Python/Django/etc and it just doesn't ...

If you are going to provide the training the hardware does not matter. You can just extend the training to cover the OS. My preference - having worked in the Continent - would have been for Windows, since it can accelerate the training and introduce Ubuntu at a later stage. At the end of the day it depends on what the _software start up_ is involved with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the interesting thing is that there is really very little familiarity even with Windows. I mean, yes, they've used it, but hardly to such a great extent that it is a big advantage.

Really, I suppose it is almost more of a practical question of hardware.. My preference is clearly Mac's, but how do you manage a company with hardware that isn't even available on the continent, much less the country. Keep a spare I suppose?

There is a humanitarian angle to the startup, that is to train and enable the Rwandans in a way that is very difficult to get here. But is that a wasted effort if you train them on an OS/hardware that is completely unavailable to them outsider your company? Is the added pain of Ubuntu worth it because of that?

<comment><USER3> I am not surprised that there is going to be little familiarity with Computers and even Windows. I would definitely - not start with Ubuntu and forget about Mac's. Training will be the hard part. Focus on that and maintenability of equipment. Avoid laptops - they get stolen easily and battery packs fail fairly early.

Wishing you good luck!</comment></comment></comment>


Beating Back the Patent Trolls: Repealing a Major Tax on Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gilelbaz/beating-back-the-patent-trolls-9cd769028170#.9u9i1puue <comment><USER2> _settling with trolls just motivates them to keep coming, leading to a world where 88% of patent cases filed against tech companies are brought by patent trolls and 82% of patent troll victims are small and medium sized businesses._

What about a tax on Non Practicing Entities, based on the degree to which they are non practicing? (Ratio of patent-generated revenue vs. other revenue and practical investment.) Let's make it more expensive to use patents to block innovation than to foster it.</comment>


January 27, 1945.  - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwolfschanze.livejournal.com%2F1468706.html The troops of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. <comment><AUTHOR> It was done by granddads of these Ukrainian guys fighting each other today. History is not without the sense of irony.</comment>


The Target Isn't Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It's The Policymakers - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/the-target-isnt-hollywood-mpaa-riaa-or-mafiaa-its-the-policymakers-120205/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> Flagged for idiotic use of the term MAFIAA. Normally it is just childish, like M$ or crApple, but by using it along with MPAA and RIAA it also becomes redundant.

<comment><USER3> It was intended as "whatever you call them" rhetoric.</comment></comment>


End of an era: Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/End-of-an-era-Bob-Muglia-is-leaving-Microsoft/1294683968 <comment><USER2> Wow....this seems like rather big news. Server and Tools Business has been a bright spot for Microsoft in the last few years.</comment>


Record of awesome wrongness - <AUTHOR> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/journal-economics/

<comment><USER2> It's a more general problem with economic pundits: there is no real accountability that their predictions be any better than coin tosses. Sometimes, you can just confidently make whatever prediction is most politically suitable for you. Other times, the best thing to do is to make bold predictions of any kind without much evidence, because occasionally you'll be right and look like a prophet.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the comments on this article referred to this long but very insightful article.

[http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop- operati...](http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative- who-left-cult/1314907779)</comment>


Cardd – Community driven business card collection [OPINIONS NEEDED] - <AUTHOR> http://enigmatic-lowlands-87051.herokuapp.com/ (DOMAIN IN PROGRESS)
Hello hacker news community! It feels so good to finally be making my first post.
A couple of weeks ago a friend a I started building a fun side project to practice our front and back end skills. We decided on building something fairly simple; a website where you could find a share business cards collected by people all around the world.
We sure did learn a lot from this experience and we would love to get some feedback from all of you :) <comment><USER2> ok but what is the mission and purpose of building this app, like what pain are you guys trying to resolve here. The app is neat and minimal. But i dont see the reason for its existence. Please explain that to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment, moshiasri!

We didn't really give much thought towards the mission / vision of the app. We got the idea while attending an entrepreneurship event and saw it as an opportunity to start working on new projects on a weekly basis so we could train ourselves to create prototypes a lot faster.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to move to the USA and find cofounders - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, I live in a city that is far from being the startup hub, what is even worse, is the fact that it is really far from being in USA as well. On the other hand, I live with startup ideas in my mind, (started one and failed, started the next one. ). So I definitely need to move closer to the place where the air is full of new ideas, ventures and what is more important, the place where I can find people that are eager to take a risk, are willing to innovate and work really hard. Have anyone succeeded to do that? I appreciate if you folks share your personal experience, success and failure stories. <comment><USER2> Look for similar conversations here in the past. It's quite difficult to just "move to the US", so you're probably better off either finding a better place where you are... You risk spending so much energy with the immigration bullshit that you will get distracted from working.

Of course you could come on a tourist visa, hang around a bit and just see what comes up, but being able to stay without a job is not easy, and if you get a job, you won't have much time for a startup.

<comment><USER3> A good summary of what to fix in the US immigration system.</comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg's Hearing at the Congress - <AUTHOR> https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/facebook-transparency-use-consumer-data/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why the House hearing is getting so much more publicity than the Senate hearing, which is today, actually. Maybe it's because Facebook has bought more members on the House committee and that's the one to take it easy on him, while everyone watches.

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-07/facebook-gave- mone...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-07/facebook-gave- money-85-house-committee-questioning-zuckerberg-next-week)

Watch the Senate one, too:

[https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17215936/watch-live- streamin...](https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17215936/watch-live-streaming- online-video-facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-hearing-april-10-11)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!</comment></comment>


Dropbox's Mailbox app hits the beta on Mac, available to all users - <AUTHOR> http://www.mailboxapp.com

<comment><USER2> I've been using the beta for a while now.

It's still (obviously) a beta, so you will get frustrated every so often if you're using it daily. I love mailbox and I'm still using the beta, but I usually yell at it (mentally or out loud) once a day, so just beware!

</comment><comment><USER3> I would love to use this, I really would. The UI is great.

But I can't get over the fact that all of my emails would go through a third- party service. It's just too much to ask these days.

</comment><comment><USER4> As privacy is a major issue with my livelihood and my business, I think I'll avoid anything with Dropbox. Especially when it's baked in.

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope that is a way to track all the changes the apps are going through. Would love to see its evolution, from beta to stable.</comment>


New TSA queue 30% faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/11/481694459/new-airport-security-lanes-in-atlanta-are-30-more-efficient-tsa-chief-says <comment> King-Aaron Considering the TSA was formed in 2001, I would have thought they wouldn't need to "bring TSA into the 21st century".</comment>


Oldest human engravings - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13962.html

<comment><USER2> Actually, these engravings were made by an Homo Erectus 500.000 years ago. The first humans (Homo Sapiens) evolved 100.000-200.000 years ago. They had many differences, for example hhey had only ~600 cm3 of brain volume vs the ~1200 cm3 of modern humans.

<comment><USER3> > Actually, these engravings were made by an Homo Erectus 500.000 years ago. > The first humans (Homo Sapiens) evolved 100.000-200.000 years ago.

Actually, "human" is a the common name for all members of genus _Homo_ , and, anyhow, classification into species or subspecies within that genus is somewhat unsettled. _H. sapiens sapiens_ \-- anatomically modern humans -- seem to date from about 200kya, but whether _H. sapiens_ does or not is a disputed matter of classification (with a variety of archaic human populations -- mainly _heidelbergiensis_ , _neanderthalensis_ , and _rhodesiensis_ \-- classified as either separate species within genus _Homo_ or separate subspecies within species _H. sapiens_ depending on the source.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they're on Java, how did they use the shell to produce a toolset? Runtime.getRuntime.exec()?</comment>


Handing Out Money To Advertise Website... - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/newsbeat/newsid_7869000/7869277.stm A guy in NYC is handing out money to everyone if they wait in line.  Seems like a decent way to advertise a website.  He must have a lot of extra money. <comment><USER2> All that money handed out and the BBC didn't even mention the site name.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Basically I just need to pay my bills and save money, and this money helps me do that. With my $50 I'm going to grab a McDonald's now."

I think someone is confused about saving money, and how to accomplish it, really.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> bailoutbooth.com is the website.

<comment><USER2> It was painful to look at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, very curious as to what the site is.</comment>


30 Resources to Find Data For Your Apps - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2009/10/01/30-resources-to-find-the-data-you-need/

<comment><USER2> Also check out the answers in this Quora question [http://www.quora.com/Data/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets- ope...](http://www.quora.com/Data/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets-open-to-the- public)</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite Place for Startup Jobs? - <AUTHOR>

Is news.ycombinator.com/jobs your go to place, or somewhere else? How often do you look at what is out there?<p>And in the same vein, what are you looking for in a startup position? Equity, cool problems, location, great team members? <comment><USER2> <http://www.startuply.com/> was pretty popular back when I was fresh out of college and looking for jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input! I took a look at the site, nothing interesting about it seems to jump out at me. I'm asking this question to see if there is a need for some kind of leaderboard for what people consider the most interesting companies to work at. A lot of the postings seem kind of haphazard and unfocused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Also <http://www.startupers.com/></comment>


What TDD Is and Is Not - <AUTHOR> http://www.daedtech.com/what-tdd-is-and-is-not

<comment><AUTHOR> Another benefit of TDD is that it avoids generalizing by reasoning. Instead, it does generalization by example. Its not top-down, nor is it bottom-up; its programming from known-to-unknown.</comment>


A Keras multithreaded DataFrame generator for millions of image files - <AUTHOR> https://techblog.appnexus.com/a-keras-multithreaded-dataframe-generator-for-millions-of-image-files-84d3027f6f43 <comment><AUTHOR> This is a tutorial-style post that offers an alternative approach to dealing with large sets of training data, without resorting to copying and moving files to hard-coded directories named `train`, `validation` and `test`. Instead, you keep the files where they "naturally" reside on your system and track their locations with a Pandas DataFrame, feeding their names to the Keras generator. It scales well when dealing with millions of image files and hundreds of gigabytes of data.</comment>