My hell as a 911 operator - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/my_hell_as_operator_HYlg05QYm291rqIakgY24J <comment><USER2> Ok, I have something to add here for the following reasons:

* I build big call centers for a living

* I'm a really big Telecom Nerd

You might be wondering why something as important as 911 is not automated or accessible via any other mechanism; why is it that the most critical service in the country runs on a system that hasn't materially changed since 1984?

For one, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is extremely reliable, authentic because it's logically addressed, and ubiquitous. The only real flaw is the addressing, which, because of Caller ID, can be faked, but that's another story (See Wikipedia on Swatting).

So, there's a huge movement to reshape 911 service to take advantage of modern things like the internet, SMS, GPS and all different kinds of connectivity. The way 911 works right now is sort of a hodgepodge all over the place depending on which vendor the municipality has selected for the Public Service Access Point. There is not one standardized 911 system across the country, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your perspective.

So everyone can agree fixing 911 is a great idea, BUT why hasn't it happened already? I can point to a couple potential reasons:

1) It's a really big contract; supposing PSAPs get standardized across the board, we're talking about many millions, potentially billions of dollars. That means lobbying and negotiation and time (oh by the way Sprint is currently leading the charge but I find it unlikely that the US will let a foreign-owned conglomerate manage their backbone emergency services).

2) The current vendors see nothing wrong with the existing solution, and have projects like what has happened in New York to stand against the tide of change. Their service contracts provide a big incentive to keep those boxes in those cities.

So I think there's a lot of reasons why 911 is as bad as it is, most of it isn't technical, but political, as with most old ridiculous infrastructures.

It's amazing how __not __planning for obsolescence almost automatically results in political conflict down the road.

<comment><USER3> The supposed advantage of a hodgepodge is that somewhere the right approach has been tried and is working well, and pressure will mount on cities with inferior systems to either match or adopt the better systems. Where, if anywhere, is 911 being done well, and how slowly or quickly will the successful approaches spread? Do you think this dynamic will lead to places like New York having faster and more reliable 911 systems, or should they concentrate on their own efforts?

<comment><USER2> 911 isn't being done well anywhere IMHO.

If you look at the way 911 works, there's no location information unless you use the cellular radio (and this assumes your carrier is using the cell tower to anchor your location). If you use IP to call, let's say via an application like RingCentral, how does the 911 service know whether you're in San Francisco or New York? It doesn't.

This isn't pie in the sky fantasy, this is actually how all over the top VoIP connections work. You pick a location and that's where your 911 calls originate. It doesn't matter whether you're using your SIP client in New York, your 911 call will still go to a San Francisco 911 center because your office address is in SF. That's not good.

So IMHO the right approach is a top-down rewrite and rolling that sucker out nationwide. Normally, we'd see one vendor start to dominate over other vendors, and while there has definitely been some consolidation in the 911 market, the fact that these services are federally mandated (Read: Allocated budget automatically) there's not a huge incentive for municipalities to shop around. These systems are essentially free as far as they're concerned.

Part of the reason we're not on IP is because the federal dollars can't be legally spent on IP in many places (gotta love lobbying). In short, the correct approach, IMHO, is IP-enabled PSAPs with GPS information for location combined with reform efforts in congress. The logically addressed world of the phone network is a fantasy and our emergency services should model reality instead of our dreams.

<comment><USER4> "So IMHO the right approach is a top-down rewrite..."

This is almost always an extremely bad idea:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html)

I have no inside knowledge, but wouldn't be surprised at all if many of the problems of the new NYC 911 system is due to a decision to rewrite the code from scratch, losing much of the knowledge and bug fixes embedded in the old system's source code.

<comment><USER2> I know but you have to understand, Joel makes excellent points, but if most of the systems are written in COBOL it makes them hard to extend over time.

We're talking about software from 1984 in some cases although it's all littered with security holes, bad interfaces and slow response times.

In the case of NY, I could agree with you, but I would say that the problem was significantly overcomplicated. There are better systems that could be used to deliver something like this. I think that, yes, sometimes you do need to do a top-down rewrite, especially when everything is wrong.

I do agree with your point that the NY incident is likely attributable to poor software design, but I disagree with the conclusion that any rewrite would suffer from the same malady.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am tired of HN (and the rest of the country) taking shots at government employees. They're talented. They work hard. They take pride in their work. They do a damn good job. If you look at any good technology product that's come out of government, it's almost always been a creation of federal employees: CFPB. Data.gov. Healthcare.gov. Some neat things coming out of the OPM. Accumulo.

There are Github repositories:

      https://github.com/GSA

      https://github.com/GSA-OCSIT

      https://github.com/cfpb

      https://github.com/opengovplatform

To quote Deputy CIO of CFPB Matthew Burton:

        Got two out-of-the-blue emails today asking
        "who is behind http://CFPB.gov's great graphic design."
        I'm proud to say: civil servants" [1]

On the other hand, feel free to tear apart the contracting system all you want. The system of "who can check all the boxes for the lowest price" is an unmitigated train wreck. It basically mandates a waterfall-designed usability disaster. The sooner we can tear apart that system, the better (and I say that as someone who has spent a majority of my career as a government contractor).

[1]: [https://twitter.com/matthewburton/status/359747466339418113](https://twitter.com/matthewburton/status/359747466339418113)

<comment><USER6> How is this a shot at government employees? If anything, this is a tale of how government employees are bearing up under pressure that would have caused any of us to quit in under a week. The government employees didn't design the craptacular computer system that's causing these problems. That was designed by Intergraph, a private company.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't replying to the article. I saw a handful of posts in the discussion blaming lazy, incompetent, or malicious government employees, and didn't want to post the same thing multiple times within the thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having been involved in long, arduous government procurement processes, I can assure you that it will leave you shaking your head and wondering how ANYTHING in government gets done.

The trip from RFP to signed contract is maddening and has probably driven more than one government worker to an alcoholic stupor, wishing for the sweet embrace of death.

On a side note, I'm no longer a government employee. My name is Greg and I'm an alcoholic....

<comment><USER8> When I was freelancing, I did some government work. I was flabbergasted by the slow pace at which things moved, and that I had to create accounts in 3 separate systems to submit and get paid for even very basic invoices.

Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which essentially maintain a strict control over all IT contracts that come out of the public sector. Massive corporate entities with an entrenched web of influencers at every level of government, ensuring that only a select few even have an opportunity to realistically compete for the jobs. The amount of overspending that could be eliminated with the disruption of those entities probably represents a significant portion of local, state, and national budgets, not to mention the likely better solutions that could be presented by folks more accustomed to working efficiently.

I'm not necessarily saying the 20 somethings who were going to make "Snapchat for dogs" could do a better job as government contractors. But certainly someone who designed infrastructure for Twitter might have some interesting perspective on how to manage 911 traffic.

<comment><USER9> Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services.

Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs.

The best thing for young professionals is to fight the system intelligently for those that have the resources to do so, or avoid it entirely.

Edit: As is with NYC's 911 boondoggle, a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price. But that wouldn't be the government thing to do. It has nothing to do with building a quality product.

<comment><USER10> Responding to your edit about "a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price"\-- I hear that kind of attitude a lot, I'm not so sure it holds to scrutiny.

Tackling the problem of a system that must be 100% reliable, synchronous, with complete uptime from day 1 is very very difficult, and not many startup environments will prepare you for it. A lot of systems that are scaling decently now (twitter was used as an example early on) had extreme early growing pains.

In fact, I think it is impossible to build such a system without significant upfront cost, because a lot of the cost should go into the testing phase. It's almost as though you'd want to create a testing call center that receives realistic calls and needs to route them correctly, and have it running for months while the software is iterated on. A lot of effort should go into making the testing center as realistic as possible, and a lot of time should go into teasing out the inevitable bugs.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like it doesn't need to be 100% reliable, though -- they have a painful backup system in place.

Also, replaying traffic from the old system into the new seems like a viable way to test out this sort of system. Or, they could have run both systems in parallel, and just sent a percentage of the traffic to the new system and slowly ramped up. I wonder why they chose to just cut over rather than doing a full and seemingly irreversible cutover.

Not that many startups would have done things that way, since the nature of startups tends towards the green field. But plenty of more-established tech companies would have, I imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pre-9-11, I spent some time doing some high-level analysis, talking to users and administrators, of a nation-wide EMS system for an entire country (Sorry, can't say which) It was a U.S. firm interested in figuring out exactly how much it would cost to create a national system so they could bid on it.

This does not have to be a very complicated system at all. It's basically a real-time workflow system. Information comes in, is assigned a type and other data, and depending on the values is routed to various other people, which also tag and update it. In a way, it's almost like a bug-tracking system. Tickets get made. Tickets get worked on. Tickets get resolved.

Now combine that 10K problem with a large rollout, lots of administrative BS, and $2 Billion? It's wonder the damn thing works at all. A group of hackers could cobble together something over a week with better uptime and more reliability than I'm inferring from this article.

The technical complexity of the problem has nothing at all to do with the political and legal maneuvering required to get and execute a large government contract.

<comment><USER13> _The technical complexity of the problem has nothing at all to do with the political and legal maneuvering required to get and execute a large government contract._

Or a large contract with any organization, as far as I can tell. In universities, the whole education-ware thing is a mess, with huge piles of contractor dollars going to junk like Blackboard, who manage to sell things to high-level administrators. By far the best education-ware software I've used is stuff that was developed for almost nothing by comparison: 1) a course- specific tool a student made as a senior project; and 2) a wiki. In industry, I have some third-hand knowledge of a large procurement project at a petrochemical company that spent somewhere in the 9 or 10 figures on document digitization and didn't deliver any document digitization.

<comment><USER14> If petrochemical company project was mostly a document imaging project, when did that happen?

I ask because I started playing that game when it was cutting edge, and finished about the time it was "very easy" (early to mid-90s).

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure when it started, but I was hearing about it from around 1990 I think, and the project got axed around '95\. I assume eventually they did get something done, either with a new contractor or in-house.

I actually had a part-time job scanning large technical diagrams through a sheet-fed scanner in the late '90s, for a different company (a NASA contractor). It was technically not what I was hired for; the main reason they needed to bring in someone part-time is that they needed additional staff to help "debug" a space toilet. So my main job was using it, and recording some basic data (pH, etc.) in a logbook whenever I did. Since I was sitting around for a few hours a day in between toilet debugging, scanning technical diagrams seemed to be the main other thing that needed doing. Seemed like a pretty ad- hoc process, but I don't know what that one was like on the backend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying?

Sounds like a perfect storm.

I'd love to see an itemization for $88 Million and how many vacation homes were bought.

<comment><USER16> > _Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying?_

Government is not as bad as you think. It's worse.

Lowest bidder really causes a lot of problems. My company recently bid for a contract for an EU agency.

We were not chosen, because the winning bid offered senior staff at a rate of 0.1 euro per hour.

The bloody idiots at Government procurement calculated the average as (senior+junior)/2 and awarded the contract to these crooks with the flawed bid as their average was the lowest.

It's not unreasonable to assume they will debit enough extra junior hours to offset the senior time.

I am not even allowed to tell media about this, by contract. I don't think it's a rare event.

Just my €0.02.

<comment><USER17> Please find a way to wikileak it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Large organizations have a tendency to demand custom solutions, and then they want to throw the switch all at once. That is pretty much opposite the bottom up, self-organization, of HN themes.

If you could "bubble up" a "good enough" 911 system, it probably would be reliable and probably would scale. But the contract will be given to the company which will say they can provide a big custom solution on a deadline. It's almost worse if they believe it themselves. A dishonest vendor would at least understand the scale of the problem(s).

</comment><comment><USER19> A lot of posts here talk about open source projects or the relative simplicity of implementing something like this at it's core: I agree with the idea though I understand that emergency systems require a high level of reliability similar to mil-spec hardware I imagine. If there was any justification for that price of 88+ mil, that would be it. Looks like that went right out the damn window. All systems have bugs, I think we can all agree on that, but I'd like to know that they followed the most sensical procedure to rolling this out. Did they test it prior to release? How did they test it. Did they bother with unit tests at the lowest level? Did they perform thorough integration tests? Did they consider rolling out incrementally (if possible) the new system so that they wouldn't be completely left out in the rain when it failed? What contingency plans if any did they build into the system upon failure? What was wrong with the old system, and what did the new system promise to deliver?

It's a lot of questions I wish more journalism would answer. On another note. It's interesting to think about open source. As some have mentioned, it's difficult to imagine the feasibility of actually doing an open source version and getting it adopted (though that may be because I don't know how EMS stuff is structured). Though I think all would benefit from a source code release of this system so we could actually crowdsource a better friggin' version because this one clearly isn't doing its job...since May.

<comment><USER20> I work in the call center branch of a fairly large corporation. Obviously we're not saving lives and dispatching fire trucks, but for some reason it seems like we're dead set against doing incremental rollouts and user testing in any meaningful way.

Don't get me wrong, I see things get to user testing phases and we have reasonable ways of logging bugs and problems, but almost every project I've seen had kept on trucking to meet an arbitrary deadline regardless of how poorly any of the testing goes, then the system hits the floor, chaos ensues and everyone runs around in a panic until someone managers to staple together a solution.

Kind of depressing that it looks to be the same in the government with calls that are a little more important than ecommerce sales.

I want to say that the guy that is in charge of the 911 phone network spoke a few times at a call center conference I recently went to.

<comment><USER7> "but almost every project I've seen had kept on trucking to meet an arbitrary deadline regardless of how poorly any of the testing goes, then the system hits the floor"

And the reason for this is simple..the one person who can pull the plug on a project of this magnitude, won't. Simply because s/he doesn't want to have to answer to having already dropped 88 million with _nothing_ to show for it. There becomes a single person to blame at this point, whereas a failed system that gets implemented, suddenly allows for MANY people to be thrown under the bus.

<comment><USER20> Totally agree. Even in projects at work, the worst possible thing people think they could do is admit that something they're working on doesn't work the right the first time.

I will say, though, that in the case of most projects I've worked on that are failing at some point, we _do_ have something to show for it. We just have things that need to be fixed. Even a totally failed try is something you know doesn't work.

It seems like people equate admitting any failure as admitting total failure.

It's one of the only reasons I like my job. My boss is comfortable saying "this didn't work, that's fine, let's figure out why it didn't work and make something that does."

I recently had a project to reduce a certain call-type to our call centers. We implemented a new system in one part of the company after doing some research into the call drivers, and did a follow up a few months later. My followup showed nothing had changed. I don't have any problem saying that. It just means we need to look into which part of the plan failed, why, and how we can fix it. Either way we'll have a better understanding of the problem. I'd rather do that than fudge the followup, keep the problem, and pretend everything was fixed.

<comment><USER7> "My boss is comfortable saying "this didn't work, that's fine, let's figure out why it didn't work and make something that does.""

The taxpayer is much less forgiving about "failures" and tend to trot out pitchforks and torches at the drop of a hat. They're much more guided by perception than actual facts. So for them, there's very little room for a distinction to be made between utter failure, failure, almost failure, not quite a failure, maybe a failure, no failure...

<comment><USER20> I don't actually know the answer to this question, as I'm not an overtly politically savvy person, but, are they really that much less forgiving?

Maybe I shouldn't say my boss is 'comfortable' with failure. He's just got the fortitude to deal with the realities of most situations and the track record to back it up.

Most of the managers and bosses I know of deal with projects in exactly the same way as this 911 project looks like it was handled. They push push push and don't accept any hint of failure because they think the perception others have of them would be unfavorable if they admitted some failure and tried to fix it. Of course, in this case it's the perception of the management and upper management members, and not a voting public. I have to say, though, their opinions don't seem much less fickle at times than the voting public.

In an anecdotal way, it doesn't seem like public works/government projects are immune to delays and push-backs. Seems like it might depend on the type of project as to whether there was public backlash?

I'm really just spitballing about something I'm not well-informed of at this point.

The main idea being that there's not a whole lot of forgiveness in the corporate environment I work in, but I stick with the boss I have because he's got the reputation and fortitude to own problems, when necessary, instead of trying to underbus everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Holy hyperbole. Definitely seems like this worker is frustrated beyond sense or has an agenda with saying things like:

 _They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw 'em in. They're not ready._

Two months training is not enough training? This is implausible. At its core, they're answering the phone, determining the reason for a call and typing information from the call into a computer. They're not driving out to a site and performing cardiac bypass on people having a heart attack.

The whole thing seemed targeted toward eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one.

<comment><USER22>
      >Two months training is not enough training?

You've never answered the phone, have you?

I've worked in customer service and (while that's not exactly any way on par with what these operators go through) there's an entire volume of stuff to keep in mind before going in. Being an operator involves engaging in a fundamentally unnatural mindset that's often completely antithetical to what your normal responses would be. No matter who's screaming, shooting, dying, it's still your job to remain calm, clear and transfer as much information as possible to emergency workers.

Try listening to a few 911 calls. There are tons on the interwebs (LiveLeak has a whole lot). Be prepared to lose sleep for a day or two.

<comment><USER23> I can't agree w/ this assessment more.

I did some contract work on network gear in a rural Ohio county's 911 center a couple of years ago and spent a few days around the dispatch center. I have a ton of respect for the work that the dispatchers do. I listened to them stay calm, cool, and collected while taking calls from people who were completely freaked-out (angry, injured, scared, etc).

The job is certainly a lot more than just answering the phone.

<comment><USER22> Obviously there's a whole heap of details, systems and other areas to be thoroughly familiar with. My criticism was of OP suggesting that somehow 2 months not being good enough was a stretch and the story was hyperbole. Although I haven't dealt with 1/100th of the stress a 911 operator has to go through, I can say that sentiment is quite silly.

<comment><USER24> EvanAnderson is agreeing with you. Perhaps you misread his comment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What if we made 911 into a voucher program.

When signing up for a phone, you must pick a 911 provider. The cost is fixed, so you're not choosing based on saving money, but based on quality of service. Each provider would be audited and would publish response times, etc.

You could choose the government program described in this article, or go with someone more technologically advanced.

<comment><USER26> Because the beneficiary of the 911 provider isn't likely to be you, it's the person who needs the emergency who probably can't come to the phone.

If someone needs to call 911 for me, I want to know it's regulated and up to quality - not based on whether the person who happened to pick their provider actually bothered to research a good one, etc

<comment><USER25> Did the system described in the article sound like a good one to you?

Mandated monopolies have a way of discouraging innovation and depressing quality.

<comment><USER27> Monopolies? 911 dispatch centers should really not be a battleground for competing commercial entities. They're a public service. You may disagree with the general idea of a public service, but it's really one of the very few areas where government can do (and frequently does) things for the good of everyone.

Call centers might be bad sometimes regionally, but that doesn't mean they can't work in principle. For example, in my home country (Germany), there is a public dispatch system for all emergency services and after having had to use it repeatedly for a range of things from routine to disaster response, I have to say it works really well. And I wouldn't say Germany is exactly the paragon of efficiency when it comes to public services either. So with a little bit of political will, it's achievable - as it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems to be that previous massive failures by companies such as Intergraph are quickly forgotten about. In Victoria, Australia, there ended up being a Royal Commission - and Intergraph didn't seek an extension to their contract as a result due to the massive fallout <[http://www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s181316.htm>](http://www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s181316.htm>), and <[http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/stories/s427907.htm>](http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/stories/s427907.htm>)

<comment><USER29> Yep, I expected to hear that Intergraph were responsible. 12 plus years after disasters in NZ and Australia, (the latter resulting in a Royal Commission) they are still at it.

Some links: (Australian) Victorian Police Corruption [http://www.smuggled.com/Inte1.htm](http://www.smuggled.com/Inte1.htm)

NZ Parliamentary Record: [http://www.vdig.net/hansard/content.jsp?id=76345](http://www.vdig.net/hansard/content.jsp?id=76345)

"This year [2000] we see the very two people who were involved in the police force who were making all the recommendations about Intergraph, go to work for Intergraph."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now imagine for a moment 911 line was a private company. People subscribe to it, pay a monthly fee, call it, wait to get through and don't receive help in time. What do you think people would do then? Stop paying and likely file a lawsuit. Good luck doing this with a government.

<comment><USER31> This would of course tie in with the private police force and private fire service, right? And when the customers stop paying and sue the company into oblivion, who handles the calls? Do you prevent monopolies from forming so no one company becomes responsible for all 911 call traffic? That doesn't sound very libertarian to me.

Let's presume we're interfacing with public services here, just for shits and giggles. What happens when grandma Jean forgets to pay the bill one month? Does she lose access to those public services when she needs them most because her 911 is redirecting to a busy tone?

<comment><USER30> 1\. When people say "but what about monopolies?" they seem to forget that we do currently have a giant monopoly, which is government, that prohibits others from entering the market by force, not just by market instruments such as predatory pricing (although that's the case too, since it is claimed the price of government services is zero). Even if you disagree with me that monopolies historically never remained monopolies for long without government support, wouldn't you at least agree that a private monopoly is still better than government, because I can still stop paying immediately and not expect men in suits from IRS on my doorstep?

2\. Proponents of government services always bring up cases where grandmas or disabled or poor people somehow suffer because they don't have enough money/physical abilities/brains to handle things. I agree those cases exists, but it very often is presented as if half of the society is in someway dysfunctional and requires government help (even if that's indeed the case, we should rightly see this situation as abnormal and fix it, not feed it). But the truth is, in a society there's indeed always a % of people who are dysfunctional. My guess is, it should be no more than 5-10%. Those people can be helped by voluntary donations and charities. Beyond that, we got people who made their choices in life (not buying insurance, eating unhealthy, drunk driving etc.). While I'm not necessarily claiming those people should not be helped when they need it, but the decision to help or not should lie with the body that actually does the job: that is, if a drunk uninsured driver is brought to a hospital, it is up to the charity that sponsors it and the hospital managers or doctors to decide whether to help him or not. By leaving this decision up to the government we simply incentivize all sorts of bad behaviors at the expense of people who have no intention of supporting it.

<comment><USER31> 1\. The government monopoly, as broken as it is, should not discriminate in matters of health and safety, whereas a corporate system that you're proposing would. I am Canadian and am not interested in defending the American system. We have free healthcare (so long as you're a resident paying taxes, and others of course are billed after receiving care).

2\. So, in your world, the guy who seemed to have alcohol on his breath can be left to die at a hospital. Sure. I think that's poor example, you'd be hard pressed to find doctors who would refuse to save a life in such a case. The reason I trot out grandma is because it is the poorest and weakest in our society that need protection the most, and your system would leave all that in the hands of some charity... hand-waving away all the issues that creates.

<comment><USER30> 1\. I respect the fact you don't want to discriminate when it comes to matters of health and safety. I, on the other hand, would like to discriminate. If a person who led unhealthy lifestyle knowingly requires medical attention, I want to have a default option of not paying for this out of my own pocket, because I don't know that person at all. Now, say I'm a Canadian citizen too: would you give me the same amount of respect and not require me to pay tax money for the things I have no intention of supporting and allow me to only pay to my insurance company?

2\. In my world what's most likely to happen is that this guy would be helped immediately, but the hospital stuff later will report the incident, the guy will lose his driving licence forever, will be unable to buy alcohol and will be required to pay to the hospital over time. I'm not gonna go into detail of how it is achieved without a government, but it's quite very possible and would even be enforced more effectively.

So, yes, my main point is: _forced_ universal anything is bad and immoral. Everyone should know exactly how and where their money go and be free to decide what to do with their money. If I dislike how my charity works and if I dislike that it doesn't help drunk drivers, I switch to a different one which does. If everyone in a society agrees to pay for universal healthcare voluntarily without a threat of IRS or similar agency showing up if they don't pay, then I have no problem with it.

<comment><USER32> > _" If a person who led unhealthy lifestyle knowingly requires medical > attention"_

It's interesting how, when this particular viewpoint comes up, the hypothetical individual is _always_ deeply irresponsible, borderline malicious. But the person making the argument never is.

> _" Now, say I'm a Canadian citizen too: would you give me the same amount of > respect and not require me to pay tax money for the things I have no > intention of supporting and allow me to only pay to my insurance company?"_

No, because this is a fundamental philosophical difference that runs to the core of who we are. I value the collective, and am willing to make sacrifices to my individual in order to advance the whole.

As a Canadian citizen myself, stay on your side of the border, please.

<comment><USER30> _> It's interesting how, when this particular viewpoint comes up, the hypothetical individual is always deeply irresponsible, borderline malicious. But the person making the argument never is._

No, I may be the most irresponsible person in the world. The difference is, I'm not asking you or anyone else to pay for it.

 _> No, because this is a fundamental philosophical difference that runs to the core of who we are. I value the collective, and am willing to make sacrifices to my individual in order to advance the whole._

So would you then personally come to my house with a gun and demand money and escort me to jail if I politely refuse to pay, explaining my reasons? Will you do this, knowing my family is going to suffer? Will you look my kids in the eyes and say "Your daddy is a criminal because he refuses to pay for what I think is right".

 _> As a Canadian citizen myself, stay on your side of the border, please._

Please do not assume everyone here is from the US. I'm not talking about a specific country, I'm talking about a principle. US is socialist in many ways too.

<comment><USER31> You're going to have a very hard time owning anything in Canada that isn't subject to seizure without paying taxes. So this hypothetical property you'd be trying to protect would cease to be yours.

We don't throw people in jail or point guns at them, and frankly even if you weren't paying income tax you would be paying tons of sales tax that you can't avoid. Worst case scenario you'd be forced into bankruptcy, tax debt is dischargeable up here, unlike in the US.

<comment><USER30> So the question remains: would you personally come to my house to cease it and explain to my kids that they are now homeless because their daddy simply disagrees with what you think is right and refuses to pay to people you believe are good?

<comment><USER33> >because their daddy simply disagrees with what you think is right and refuses to pay to people you believe are good?

I'd leave out this part.

edit: or to be clear, I'd be as likely to say that as I would be to say to the children of a burglar, "I'm arresting your father because he wanted you to have nice things."

<comment><USER30> That's an interesting twist. You're basically calling me a burglar, even though it is you who intends to take my money away from me.

<comment><USER33> I'm not calling you a burglar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> looks like someone needs 911.io -- replacement emergency 911 system using mongodb, node.js, and twitter bootstrap.

ultra reliable, super scalable

<comment><USER35> Fad technologies do not a reliable, scalable system make.

<comment><USER36> You may want to adjust your sarcasm detector.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This seems like a great opportunity for someone to develop an open source high-availability, fault-tolerant 911 dispatch system. Being able to get first responders where they're needed as fast as possible would provide a tremendous public good.

<comment><USER38> That's not how things work... You can't just create some system and see governments flock to you. There are years of consulting and specification requirements.

Linux is open source... Office Libre... Go convince a public office to switch to Ubuntu..

Saving money is often at the bottom of their focus.. and then you have competing interests releasing figures that show it is more costly to switch to free alternatives.

Public spending is a corrupt cycle.

<comment><USER39> >There are years of ...

Yes, First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Sorry, I know it's trite, but there's some truth there. Being ignored for years is not necessarily a reason not to do something. In some cases it's the very best reason _to do_ it.

[EDIT] - would those people down-voting please explain why?

<comment><USER40> I don't see how you could develop such a system without partnership from some government. How would you test it?

<comment><USER39> Maybe you could partner with just one small government to start. Of all the municipalities in the world, you'd think at-least one would be open to the idea, even if in tandem.

Maybe it could be started by a person who works (or worked) at the dispatch center, and is also a programmer (there must be at-least one of those in the world too).

The point is that NYC laughing/ignoring/fighting you is not a good enough reason not to start. (and who's to say that NYC would do any of those things, given the current state of affairs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The London Ambulance Service had similar problems when switching to a different system back in 1992.

It's actually an incredibly well studied case of an IT project failure. It's studied as a textbook case in just about every IT project management course in the UK.

Interesting that NYC is repeating what sounds like exactly the same mistakes.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ambulance_Service#System...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ambulance_Service#System_failures)

(or just Google for "london ambulance service case study")

</comment><comment><USER42> Where can we start the discussion to start building a better version of this?

</comment><comment><USER43> This sort of thing doesn't surprise me. Anecdotally, I've heard more than a few people bemoan a new POS system. Because I write software for a living, I usually prod them for details.

Even though their old system was some DOS based thing from 1991, it worked. It was fast and simple. Now they have some new, enterprisey, WPF + EF behemoth that is buggy and slow.

Sure, new software will almost always have more bugs than the system it is replacing; the old system, whatever its flaws (perceived or actual), was battle-hardened. It was probably written in a time when speed was more important than the technology stack it used.

These people don't care so much about a nicer looking interface. They need something that works and stays out of their way so that they can do their job.

</comment><comment> chestnut-tree Are there any examples of complex, large-scale government IT projects that have succeeded, come in on cost and time and worked better than what they replaced?

I can only think of one example: the UK's Government Digital Service (who built www.gov.uk). Admittedly not a mission-critical project that saves lives, but they actually managed to bring the hundreds of different government websites under one site, re-wrote and re-rorganised the content so it was easier to find and read, and actually improved considerably on what was in place before.

It's an exception rather than the rule though to most government or local council projects in the UK. Any other examples of success? (There must be some)

</comment><comment><USER44> "...and Intergraph [the Alabama company that designed the new system]."

[http://www.intergraph.com/](http://www.intergraph.com/) \- Flash header on company's homepage hangs on Chrome. Not a good start.

<comment><USER14> They used to be a really hot hardware and I think software (e.g. CAD) company, even did a lot of Chipper RISC chip work ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture) ; not to be confused with the Clinton administration cryptographic debacle). Then they exited the hardware business in 2000 and among other things became a patent troll: [https://www.google.com/search?q=intergraph+lawsuit](https://www.google.com/search?q=intergraph+lawsuit)

Which of course is an even worse sign.

<comment><USER44> At least they have been keeping their website's copyright up to date:

" © Copyright <SCRIPT> <!-- var year=new Date(); year=year.getYear(); if (year<1900) year+=1900; document.write(year); //\--> </SCRIPT> "

<comment><USER17> Why does website quality always seem to correlate so strongly with the company it's representing?

<comment><USER45> Funny how that works! A company that can't even get a website right probably has a few things wrong. First it's likely they take their customers for granted and don't care. However, it's likely the guys at the top actually think they have a good website. Companies like that make every decision by committee and as long as the boxes are checked, the 'product' works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It would be fun to have hackathon to design a better 911 system - I'd bet 24 hours worth of work would produce some amazing stuff (probably not super-ultra reliable production ready, but some cool stuff that could save lives)

</comment><comment><USER47> Wow. It's a new case study on how process risk equals 1970's-style failures: Big Design Upfront and failure to manage risk. Gambling with people's lives instead of ironing the bugs out in a mock environment, going live on a limited basis (smaller center/group first) and not letting the consultants drive the product.

The operators should've had final say on production worthiness. The arrogance of top-down "solutions" that don't work.

Other observation: results are often inversely proportional to budget, up to a point. Spending instead of thinking is not a solution.

</comment><comment><USER48> People always say being an ATC is the most stressful job that you can have. But this sounds worse, even if the system worked properly.

Does anyone know starting salaries for air traffic controllers?

<comment><USER49> $9/hr during training (seriously!), $33K at your first assignment.

Pay follows a "public school teacher" trajectory, or at least like the trejectory in my district. Such that you'll start your career eating ramen and living in your car, but by retirement you'll be hauling in $100K or so.

The FAA workforce is gray. No other way to say it. So you tend to see ridiculous averages like your local TRACON might pay on average $80K. However as a noob you'd only get $30K or so... you need 30 years in to get rich.

Most pilots get to know ATC people for obvious professional reasons. You can probably get interesting anecdotes from a private pilot.

Also more than a few ATC personnel ARE private pilots. Helps to understand the other side of the radio, so to speak.

I am told there is a narrow window where you're "too old" to be an ATC and get mandatory retirement, yet still young enough to be a CFI, and this is where gray haired flight instructors come from. I do not know if this is true or not. In other words mandatory retirement age for CFI > ATC but not by much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> There is a similar movie. The Call. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1911644/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1911644/)

</comment><comment><USER51> _Our call volume is too high for this system._

 _Starting pay for a 911 operator is about $26,000_

Yea, obviously not as high a priority as stock exchange market where milliseconds matter!

</comment><comment> Kilo-byte _Intergraph keeps telling us, "Shut your computer down and reboot. It'll just take a minute._

Glad I don't trust my life on such a broken system.

</comment><comment><USER52> Want to make a difference? Check out [http://codeforamerica.org/](http://codeforamerica.org/)

</comment><comment><USER53> I see Windows blue taskbar on the photo. HOW ITS POSSIBLE TO RUN SUCH IMPORTANT SYSTEM ON THE F __ __G WINDOWS???????

Answer me please!

<comment><USER54> I hate to break this to you, but airplane systems, medical systems, banking systems, fuel pump systems and a lot of other systems all run on Windows.

<comment><USER55> Windows should NEVER be used in anything mission critical.

Windows programmers and their 'Just reboot the machine' mindset should NEVER be allowed anywhere near a mission critical application.

Why? Here is your answer, straight from the original article:

</comment></comment></comment><comment>=

... Intergraph keeps telling us, "Shut your computer down and reboot. It'll just take a minute."

How many lives can you lose in a minute? ...

</comment><comment>=

<comment><USER35> Nonsense. This has nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with poorly-implemented software running on it.

I have seen Java-based systems running on Linux that stall/hang and run agonizingly slowly under what should not be demanding levels of use. Bloated, heavyweight software stacks exist on all platforms, and they are favorites in government contractor architectures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Seems like the US military would be a good candidate for taking care of 911 dispatch.

</comment><comment><USER57> Twitter can handle north of 4k tweets per second on virtually entirely open source software and these morons can't record phone calls. If this is not a glaring example of government mismanagement and waste I don't know what is. Where are the criminal indictments?

<comment><USER58> Comparing twitter to a 911 call center is like comparing a monochrome display to a 4k display

911 call centers have to interface with many different computer systems (for example the National Criminal Information center, department of motor vehicles, FBI CJIS, in house databases, court records systems, mapping, computer aided dispatch, weather information, etc.

Many of these systems (the NCIC, and CJIS have very strict requirements on what can and can not connect to their systems, and on top of that who can use a terminal that connects to their systems).

Its not an easy task. However comparing it to twitter is just ... wow

<comment><USER35> While not entirely disagreeing, I would ask whether there's room to question any of those requirements. WHY does the 911 call center need to interface to all those systems. WHY do I need an interface to the FBI or court records in order to respond to a call from a woman whose husband is having a heart attack in the living room?

Tight coupling of many separate systems is a classic anti-pattern in software.

<comment><USER58> because in most areas of the united states your the same person that is taking a call from a woman whos husband just beat her

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Any idea on which technology the current system is built upon?

<comment><USER35> I will go out on a wild limb and say Windows servers and either SQL Server or Oracle database.

<comment><USER60> Hate to break it to you, but that sounds more than adequate. I would choose differently if given the choice, but it's not a valid excuse for pausing 3 minutes to generate a job number by quite a long shot.

<comment><USER35> I actually agree, I wasn't making a good/bad comment, just speculating. Very few government contractors would bid a linux or open-source-software-based system.

I do agree, a well designed and implemented system running on Oracle and Windows can certainly handle something like 911 dispatch and do it well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The miracle of over-centralization at work.

</comment><comment><USER62> Guess they're running Windows.

</comment><comment><USER63> The NY Post? Really??

</comment><comment><USER64> wtf emergency system costs one billion dollars???

<comment><USER64> For those who don't understand my amazement: they build aircraft carriers for this amount of money! Don't tell me it's the same amount of engineering, knowledge and effort in building an emergency response system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> So let me get this straight:

You (and I) truly believe that the telcos have proof positive location on our landlines and cells, and this data is collected whole hog by the govt, but BUT somehow they cant locate a caller having a heart attack on long island.

You know, the govt has the systems it deserves, and I really dont care to hear whining about pencil and paper.

It takes no longer to write down on pencil and paper a 911 call and theres a mandatory handoff anyway.

This has nothing to do with the folks working the phones not being up to par. They are. It has everything to do with big telcos and govt contractors holding taxpayers hostage.

We dont need them. Use the pencil and paper, make a phone call to the next dept. That takes the same amount of time as data entry.

Grow up, be a human being and stop pretending that life and death situations are some variant of farmville.

</comment><comment><USER66> The sensationalism is high in this article.

 _Operators had to record 911 calls with pen and paper_

I know I work all day on a computer but I wouldn't consider using pen and paper a hindrance.

<comment><USER7> Have you ever been in a 911 call center? Many, many, many things are computer driven, not the least of which is interfacing with the various agencies one may have to deal with on a per call basis. Then there's "whose jurisdiction is this"? Kind of hard to determine with pen and paper. Who's dispatched to what? Who's covering which stations now? How many calls are in the queue? The list goes on and on.

Having to record things on pen and paper is hardly sensationalism. It's more or less a worse case scenario in the 911 dispatching arena...

<comment><USER66> I'm just saying that 20 years ago handwriting was the only option, and police still managed to get the job done.

<comment><USER7> Oh boy. In 1993 handwriting wasn't the only option. And we're talking about 911 dispatching, not just police. Fire, medics, police, dog catchers, tow trucks etc., are all involved now.

<comment><USER67> Successful management of any endeavor requires prioritization. If dog catchers and tow trucks are in the same bullet list as ambulances, they're doing something wrong.

<comment><USER68> If a car crash needs an ambulance it also needs a tow truck.

<comment><USER67> In most cases an ambulance is required much more urgently than a tow truck. The cops can call the towing company they prefer, once they're at the scene. There's no need to complicate the 911 system with towing, unless it's important that kickbacks from towing companies be paid at a high level rather than directly to individual cops.

<comment><USER68> Cops at the scene should not be looking up phone numbers for this week's roster of towing companies. That is handled by the central police dispatcher. Who also dispatches SWAT, bomb disposal, fire, hazmat, linemen for downed electric wires, animal control for welfare checks of sick people who have pets, etc. 911 is just one part of an integrated emergency response system.

<comment><USER67> Even out here in the rural hinterlands, 911 operators and police dispatchers are different groups. The cops can call the tow truck however the hell they want. The 911 operators still shouldn't care about the dogcatcher.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amorphic Encryption - <AUTHOR> As a symmetric as an asymmetric scheme requires a key (session or private) to be hidden. In this case, an attacker gets a chance and time for finding and decrypting it. As long as a secret has static attributes (length, type of characters, etc.) it will always be vulnerable for an attack. We propose a new concept of keyless encryption, "Amorphic scheme", which is semantically secured and has "Perfect Secrecy" level. It allows a secret to be transmitted over any public channel with no public or private key to be generated and stored.
AE is primarily focused on practical realization.
https://medium.com/@EggerMielberg/amorphic-encryption-6dd46bad2da <comment><USER2> Keyless encryption? Seriously?

With the painful jargon of your article, the "F-module" needs something more than a timestamp to use as a key. \- If it's its "system image" or something that depends on it, those bits are only known to one party and need to be sent to the other party through a secure channel. \- If it comes from the "assembler", there must be secure channels between the assembler and each endpoint.

Are you suggesting some scheme of centralized key exchange, or some technique to camouflage cryptographic messages in extraneous traffic? What happens in the realistic threat model in which the enemy can read, but not delete or alter, all network packets exchanged in the whole protocol?

</comment><comment><USER3> > _As long as a secret has static attributes (length, type of characters, > etc.) it will always be vulnerable for an attack._

You always know the type of characters, it's "bytes", "char" or however you want to call a number between 0 and 255. I don't understand how you fix this.

Some (most?) schemes have a fixed session length to make the implementation simpler. At least they have some bounds. If the protocol can be break knowing the length, it's a very bad protocol.

How does the users authenticate with the central server "assembler"?

The part about quantum computers doesn't make any sense.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why didn't you submit directly the link to Medium? With this introduction this looks like a Show HN.</comment>


Microsoft: How we'll take on VMware - <AUTHOR> http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-240370.html

<comment><USER2> What?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, its more about being a big bully than strategy! giving it out for free which VMWare cannot afford to do with its only bread and butter product.

However seems like someone at MS is pretty head strong on this issue - _"Choice is always good for customers, [so] instead of playing 'my hypervisor versus VMware', we decided we're going to leapfrog VMware, and the way we are going to leapfrog them is through our management solutions."_</comment></comment>


The Kitchen Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2011/07/06/kitchen-computer/

<comment><USER2> The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California has one of the Kitchen Computers.</comment>


A New, Deep-Learning Take on Image Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/spp-102914.aspx <comment><USER2> The fact that RCNN does a wasteful and naive feature re-computation for every object-like region in the image is well-known in the community, and there are several papers addressing the shortcoming in very similar ways (i.e. precomputing pool-5 features for the entire image once, instead of recomputing from scratch for each individual box). The Overfeat detecion paper [0] was among the first ones, for example, and it achieved similar speedups as discussed in the article, but the accuracy is not as great for various other reasons.

This article makes it sound like Spatial Pyramid Pooling is something new and amazing, but in fact this idea has been around in Computer Vision for a very long time (starting with this 2006 paper [1], which has now been cited almost 4000 times) and it has been successfully applied to pool descriptors over the image into fixed-size representations, ready to go into an SVM.

But this was the first time the basic concept was used as a layer in a ConvNet (by having variable-sized pooling bins) and it's nice to see the numbers.

[0] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6229](http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6229)

[1] [http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~slazebni/publications/cvpr06b....](http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~slazebni/publications/cvpr06b.pdf)

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly - not to mention the fact that [1] was based on the earlier Spatial Pyramid work of Grauman & Darrell.

The language in the article is a bit zealous - Microsoft did well, but didn't "win" any challenge in Imagenet. VGG and Google seem to be the ones people are really watching / emulating.

<comment><USER4> While Google's this year's submission was good, it didn't seem to contain any particularly inspiring ideas, as it was mostly just a collection of small improvements on previous ideas. Personally, SPP-nets seem to be the most interesting idea to come out of this year's competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious: what kind of computational challenge are we talking about? Does image recognition take 1 second on a smartphone, or 2 hours on a supercomputer?

<comment><USER6> Yann LeCun gave a webinar for NVidia a few weeks ago[1] which used a fairly high-powered laptop to do real time recognition of objects from a video feed. Overfeat[2] has also had this for a while.

There are some projects which can run pretrained deep nets in a few seconds on a smartphone, but they are definitely not "real-time" to my knowledge, though NVidia's upcoming unification of Tegra with their desktop line (and CUDA support!) may change this in a hurry.

sklearn-theano[3] doesn't support the "video stream" classification that Overfeat does, but we are planning to add it in the near future cause it is awesome :)

[1] [http://on-demand-gtc.gputechconf.com/gtcnew/on-demand- gtc.ph...](http://on-demand-gtc.gputechconf.com/gtcnew/on-demand- gtc.php?searchByKeyword=LeCun&searchItems=&sessionTopic=&sessionEvent=&sessionYear=&sessionFormat=&submit=&select=+)

[2] [http://cilvr.nyu.edu/doku.php?id=code:start](http://cilvr.nyu.edu/doku.php?id=code:start)

[3] [http://sklearn-theano.github.io/](http://sklearn-theano.github.io/)</comment></comment>


State of Software Engineers 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://hired.com/page/state-of-software-engineers/key-takeaways/ <comment><USER3> What a silly report. Looking at the top two key takeaways:

>Global demand for blockchain engineers is up 517%

Was, you meant to say. It's dropping steeply. Also, 517% compared too what? Previously, barely anyone hiring, and now 5 in 10,000 positions mentioning blockchain?

>Search engineers in San Francisco are paid the most, earning $157K on average

WHAT? Search engineers? What is "search engineers"? And $157K in SF being the most? This is false. You probably meant to say "senior engineers in San Francisco are earning the most". I only know engineers in San Francisco earning (in base, not counting stock or bonus) above $157K. My sample size is small, but 20/20.

Compare this with the Levels.FYI report: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019[1]. You see how the top tech companies are paying over $200K for entry level engineers in SF, well above $400K for senior levels.

Who writes this report? Or does this reflect how e.g. some of the top roles - FAANG and other tech companies - steer clear from places like Hired.com?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21804509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21804509)

<comment><USER4> The sillyness continues:

Headline: "1/2 of programmers prefer to work at a company that does pair programming"

Actual Question: "If pair programming was a common practice at a company, would it affect your interest in working there?"

The headline suggests 1/2 people are explicitly choosing paired workplaces over solo; the question just says "is this something on your radar?" and is way more passive.

<comment><USER5> that doesn't even seen to ask what effect the practice would have. would i be more interested in working some place where pairing was common? many people might not - they'd still put 'yes' on that question, as it would 'affect their interest'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Half of engineers prefer to work at a company that does pair programming

Well, I'm glad that it's only half. Isn't that neat?

I wish this meme of "company that does pair programming" would die a slow and agonizing death. Not everyone's brain is wired for pair programming. I do plenty of presenting at work, where I share my screen and write code, Twitch- style, for an audience of coworkers. I do this in order to convey material to a captive audience, not as a baseline method of doing work. "Teaching" and "programming" are two non-overlapping activities for me, as the communications aspect tends to overtake most of my mental capacity, leaving only a precious few cycles for problem solving and creativity.

Any company that considers itself special enough to change how people work is not only delusional, but will also burn through good people who are neurologically different from the type that enjoys pair programming.

In short, flexibility is the name of the game.

<comment><USER7> I loathe pair programming. Do people play pair chess?

<comment><USER6> There's "pair tennis" (I know nothing about tennis, so apologies if that's not what it's called) which seems to flow alright, but tennis is a much more tightly constrained activity than programming. There are only a few actions each player appears to perform, with all other actions explicitly falling out of bounds set by rules of the game.

Chess is a much wider problem domain. I can't imagine anyone playing pair chess.

<comment><USER8> Really? You've never seen two people on a team playing chess (discussing the best move, etc)?

<comment><USER9> Each player has his own board side so you wouldn't notice.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess)

I assume that's what he meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This report is bogus, there is no way in hell Search Engineers are only making 157K in San Fran.

<comment><USER11> Wtf is a search engineer?

<comment><USER12> A google engineer in search PA?

Actually $157k salary sounds plausible, it's in the range of base salary for L4 band which is the most common level at google AFAIK. Of course, there should be like an extra $100k in stocks and bonuses on top of it, and noone from FAANG cares about base salary figure alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All I can say is I really, really despise Python and also I don't think this is a good report.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Half of engineers prefer to work at a company that does pair programming.

Oh please god, no. Don't make it a trend.

<comment><USER15> For really junior people and interns it's nice. It's probably not so great for everyone else.

<comment><USER16> I've found pair programming to be very effective for mixing two non- overlapping senior-level skillsets. For example, one person with deep domain knowledge but little experience in a particular language can pair with a language expert with little knowledge of the specific domain, to quickly produce a high quality solution in a fraction of the time as either could manage alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very interesting report! I was a bit shocked by these answers:

"What's your 10-year goal? \- 36% just want to continue building cool things \- 23% want to become a technology leader (SVP, CTO) \- 19% want to start their own company \- 15% want to be a product leader \- 8% want to be able to retire"

Only 19% want to start their own company in 10 years??

A few years ago when I was working in a big bank, I had the impression that about 70% of my co-workers wanted to create their own company and 30% wanted to become managers.

<comment><USER18> Wasn't my impression at a smaller company I worked. I asked around about start up ideas people had and no one had any. They liked their jobs and work. Some said they are saving for retirement.

People who wanted to start their own company has been a minority. Sounds cool to have your own company, but I think people realize it is really grueling work and encompasses more than engineering. 10 years seems like a long stretch for me tbh, I can't think past 1-2 years for my own. 2 years down the road, sure I would like to has released a product that a team can be built around.

It is also conflated by age/economics. Is it more younger than older or older than younger who want to start companies? Is it that people who have a safety net feel more comfortable starting a company vs people who don't have a safety net?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reading the info in this I had the thought that I'd love to get a report like this when considering a company or a specific team within a company. A subset of the questions would really help me assess fit quite quickly.

Has anyone talked about this or even tried to have this become a thing?

The alternative is having to tease this out during the 'question time' of interviews, or in rare circumstances having prior knowledge of the people you'll be working with.

</comment><comment><USER20> If only the term "engineer" was a protected term (as it is in Germany) then we'd understand programming isn't engineering and this report would be titled "State of Programming" \- and still be a click-bait report (I'm guilty as charged!)

</comment><comment><USER21> Why are there so many interviews per Scala developer? I love Scala but I have a hard time finding very many companies who actually use it (I'm in Austin, TX). It seems like its usage is dwarfed by folks using Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python, C#, Java etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> What's up with hired.com? When I was looking for a new job last year they posted a lot of jobs I'm very qualified for near me on sites like ziprecruiter yet when I actually made an account they said no they had no jobs for me.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this is a report specially prepared for recruiters, not a real statistical significant one

</comment><comment> 867-5309 PHP most hated?? what's wrong with PHP? it's a great introductory language

<comment><USER4> People also "Hate" Basic, but it was the gateway drug for almost everyone who discovered computers in the 80's

It seems really weird to Hate something you can easily make irrelevant to your life - maybe people mean they hate maintenance programming on old, cruddy code, of which there would be a lot of PHP - that's not really on the language though...

<comment><USER24> Like a lot of things in our industry, I believe hate for programming languages is just another fashion. Few people have some actual reasons or experiences, everyone else is just mimicking.

In case of BASIC, I think the source of the hate is mostly Dijkstra saying things like:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

or: "teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery."

Dijkstra is one of the ancient saints of computing, so people read this as gospel.

PHP is a more complex case. The language had (last I checked, which was years ago) legitimate issues. But on top of that, because of the LAMP stack, it enabled easy web development, which opened the floodgates for novices. Suddenly, you had an influx of people with no experience and little understanding, all writing production code and - more importantly - <USER2> for each other_. This was self-reinforcing, so there was a period in which your average PHP code base was a steaming pile of garbage, and educational resources Google led you to weren't any better. That time is, in my experience, the source of PHP hate.

Why no hate for Ruby or Python or other stacks? I think because they've managed to rein in their respective communities better (they actually _had_ communities, not mobs), and perhaps also because PHP was where most mistakes of backend development were made - so newer stacks had the benefit of hindsight.

You can see the same pattern repeating now with hate of JavaScript. One of the big reasons is, again, the flood of inexperienced novices producing garbage code and tutorials for each other, creating noise that drowns out both good libraries and good educational material. All the mistakes of frontend development are being made as we speak.

(The other big source of hate is the fear of the mob expanding to encompass other areas than web development. In the LAMP stack days, no one really tried to code PHP for microcontrollers. But attempts at running JavaScript or even Node itself on microcontrollers abound. Or, see how Electron is sucking out not just your computing resources, but also the proverbial oxygen from the native app development room.)

<comment><USER16> > or: "teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates > the mind beyond recovery."

> Dijkstra is one of the ancient saints of computing, so people read this as > gospel.

Can confirm. Learned BASIC (a very limited subset) at age 7. GOTO was the second concept I learned after PRINT. Have not stopped using either and kinda wish Python had a goto (except that I've worked through what that would actually entail; not worth it). Strict adherence to Dijkstra's hobgoblins is considered harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are so many things wrong with this report, I'm flagging the post.</comment>


Survey: How do people consume news online in 2014? - <AUTHOR> https://mdskhan.typeform.com/to/ZjZA5J

<comment><AUTHOR> Would really love to hear personal experiences & challenges faced by online readers today in their daily news consumption habits or in general the qualities of online news compared to other mediums</comment>


Amazon opposes plan to end Saturday U.S. mail delivery - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/06/amazon_opposes_plan_end_to_saturday_us_mail_delivery.html

<comment><USER2> I'm sure they're equally opposed to any plan to raise delivery prices, but right now universal coverage costs quite a bit more than it generates. I'm not sure there's a lot of fat for the USPS to cut, and to the extent that its budget shortfall is covered by the treasury it's an indirect taxpayer subsidy to Amazon.</comment>


One Solution to the Shutdown? Give More Power to the States - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/17/government-shutdown-federalism-states-224018 <comment><AUTHOR> I think there is a bit of wisdom here. There are substantial cultural differences across states. Thus the policies that they want vastly differ. State law will attune itself to the wishes of its citizens. However, the more emphasis on Federal law and programs receives in governance, the greater the mismatch between what people want and want they get in that governance. The stakes become that much greater and feeds political polarization, extreme views, and a whole lot of anger. De-emphasizing (again) the power of the Federal government could very well heal divisions, and increase the effectiveness of government.

There are objections (e.g. 60's Civil Right Movement was helped by a Federal Constitutional intervention), but I do not think those objections invalidate the observation above and in the article. My bigger concern is that State budgets are, unlike Federal budgets, much like our personal budgets: You can borrow, but you can't print your own money; states are forbidden by the Constitution from printing their own currencies. That flexibility in Federal budgets using Treasury bonds gives the Federal government substantial more flexibility to institute well-funded policies. The Federal government can give States money, but it rarely comes without strings attached, hindering autonomy of State governments. I feel that a solution would be to fund States directly without restrictions on the use of those dollars.

</comment><comment><USER2> Muster the courage to veto.</comment>


Ask HN: How to reach initial users for a shopping related app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> How about 1. Google AdWords/AdMob 2. Fb Ads 3. SEO (obviously, 1. and 2. provide instant gratification while 3. would be a slow starter).</comment>


Hacker news unofficial desktop app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bjarneo/HNU <comment><USER2> Note: This "desktop app" is a web app built on Electron, which is a JS library that runs chrome for you. So this app will clock in at roughly 200+ mb ram, in addition to what your system is already running.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's not a desktop app but web app running in a separate browser that has no chrome. HN integration in Emacs is a desktop app because it actually provides a different way to interact with HN and this is the same web page, just rendered in a silo'd window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since this is an Electron-based app, I figure this is as good a place as any to ask something that I don't understand about Electron...

How well can an Electron-based app fit in with the underlying operating system?

If running on a Mac, can an Electron-based app expose itself via AppleScript so that other applications can interact with them? If running on Windows, can it expose itself via COM? On Linux can it register itself with DBus (I'm not sure if this even makes sense - what's the Linux equivalent of COM/AppleScript)?

On the Mac, does the stuff in the Services menu work? Do text fields get automatic spell-check? Can I double-tap 'fn' to start dictation? Can it expose itself to the Accessibility stuff in a meaningful manner?

These things don't make sense for all applications. I can't think of why I'd want to interact with an HN application via AppleScript (or COM), for example, but there are other types of applications where being able to do this would be great (Excel and Word base their entire macro facility on COM, for example).

I can see wanting to use Dictation in an HN app as it might make commenting easier for some people. Same goes for the text field spell-checking.

I guess the big question is, where can an Electron app fit in the spectrum between 'web site rendered in a dedicated application' and 'full-blown Windows/Mac/Linux desktop application'?

<comment><USER2> Not an electron, or node developer, but based on my experience: As long as there's a library to do this available for node, it can do all those things, since the node part of the software can talk to the browser part, and the browser part can talk back. So for anything you'd need to have the browser talk to the OS to, if node can do the talking, then the web page running in electron can do it too, via node.

<comment><USER4> So then the question becomes, how many developers take the extra effort to make their Electron application a first-class citizen on each platform?

My guess is that almost none of them bother. I looked at the documentation for Atom, which seems to be the flagship Electron application, and there's no mention of its API being exposed to the system (AppleScript on MacOS and COM on Windows), even though it does have a very rich API.

A quick search seems to confirm that there is no useful AppleScript support:

[https://discuss.atom.io/t/applescript- support/1439](https://discuss.atom.io/t/applescript-support/1439)

[https://discuss.atom.io/t/accessing-the-contents-of-a- window...](https://discuss.atom.io/t/accessing-the-contents-of-a-window-via- applescript/22048)

The second discussion mentions that there is a dictionary, my guess would be that it comes from the underlying Chrome browser. Interestingly enough, looking at the dictionary for Google Chrome, it appears that they have made an effort to expose things that make sense for a browser to expose to AppleScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you select "Add to desktop..." under "More tools" in Chrome and check the "Open as window" option it will look the same as this :)

<comment><USER6> I didn't know this, absolutely great. Now I have some of my "always open tabs" as separate windows without the bookmarks and omnibox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the benefit of this over using a browser?

<comment><USER8> None, given that it essentially runs in a browser anyway (Electron). I suppose it's very useful if you have ~200MB of RAM and ~80MB disk space that you really want to get rid of.

I hate Electron. :-|

<comment><USER9> Qt/GTK/WinForms or GTFO!

<comment><USER10> WPF/UWP instead of WinForms and I agree. I don't even get why so many people like writing web apps, I feel a hell of a lot more comfortable working with a proper widget toolkit (my preference being GTK or WPF) without the constraints enforced on me by a browser and JavaScript.

<comment><USER9> It's because there are a lot of people here obsessed with reaching the largest possible audience they possibly can. And since every brother and their mother are on mobile, or, at least, a web browser...

The way I see it, mainstream masses are finally (FINALLY!) leaving the world of desktop computing behind, so now it can return to the nerds and people who just wanna do shit

<comment><USER11> How about new ideas like WebAssembly?

<comment><USER10> WebAssembly just makes a better target for transpilers, it doesn't really do anything to make developing "desktop" apps inside browsers easier.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"you should follow me on twitter here" is annoying - <AUTHOR> First of all, I apologize for using HN as a venting outlet, but I suspect that other people may be feeling somewhat like me on this topic.
Ever since Dustin Curtis produced his article (http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html) I've noticed that many people have been taking up his results and using his call to action verbatim. His article is an excellent piece on user behavior research, and his results quite interesting, but it really bugs me that lots of articles now close with the words "you should follow me on twitter here."
You may ask why I get upset over this. The reason is that it sheds some light on the intentions of the writers. Seeing the call to action tells me "this person will do anything to get followers." I may be naive, but I would like people to follow me due to my interesting insights, and not because of some cognitive hack.
Articles that are otherwise inspiring then come crumbling to pieces once I get to the bottom of the page and see this blatant attempt at getting followers. In fact, it produces the opposite reaction in me, I quickly close the tab and forget the contents of the article or why I thought it was insightful in the first place.
I'd much rather see people trying other approaches, or even better, not try to persuade me with anything else than the content they produced. If what they're saying is insightful, I'll crave for more and will bookmark them, follow them, and tell my friends about it.
Dustin did a great job at finding this hack, and I expect to see "follow me on twitter here" at the end of his articles. He earned it. Everyone else, please find your own hacks. <comment><USER2> I disagree. I think hacker news serves as a great platform for the community to benefit from what other members have found works. There are countless postings, whether they relate to CSS, analytics tactics, or tips like Dustin's "follow me on twitter here" that we all benefit from. I recently shared tips from my personal experience running a small e-commerce, and I hope some members get actual value and implement some of my findings. I thank and applaud Dustin for a great article and proudly utilize his findings. Keep sharing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stop taking this so seriously! Its a damn twitter account. Who cares what people close articles with. The more people that follow them the happier they are. To each their own.

<comment><USER4> IMHO it cheapens the whole article and makes it plainly obvious that the main intent writing the article wasn't to be interesting, but to gain followers on twitter.

When someone ends an article with "You should follow me on twitter", they're being arrogant obnoxious and rude. If their only aim is to get weak minded sheep to follow them, then fair enough. But put the "You should follow me on twitter" link at the top so other people can just ignore the article.

<comment><USER5> Does having the Digg voting widget or other similar social bookmarking tools cheapen the article?

<comment><USER4> Sure, just like any website that starts by asking you to invite your friends.

All of these devices are just ways to try and get people to spam for you. Ooops spam is so 1.0. I mean "go viral".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In writing, two forces oppose each other: the desire to be authentic, and the desire to gain readership so that authenticity can be valued.

It's really hard to achieve both goals. One can be really authentic, writing what you care about without regard to your readership, but your work may go unappreciated. Good writing alone doesn't gain followers, unfortunately.

So people try to walk the line (or just cross it) of what tactics can be considered appropriate. Those who don't employ tactics to gain followers and readers often go unnoticed. It's unfortunate, and at times frustrating.

HN at least offers an outlet for tech-related posts where it's acceptable to post your own writing. It lets authors express viewpoints, ideas, and feedback in a neutral, yet effective way. You don't have to spam posts to every social news site to get your writing noticed here. The small target audience makes all the difference.

I don't know what exists for other writing niches. Reddit and Digg don't really cater to good writing as well as HN does.

But I digress, this was about twitter. It's nice to have followers, but when all is said and done, twitter messages are short-lived. They will fade into obscurity soon after they're posted. Blog posts and decent essays, when written well, can often last for many years without losing their value. So I'd suggest to authors: Push twitter less, and focus more on your content. If you're going to advocate anything, advocate that people follow your RSS feed.

</comment><comment><USER7> "I expect to see "follow me on twitter here" at the end of his articles. He earned it."

That's a bit over the top. Lot's of people have used that phrase before that article. What's next, a land grab for variations of "follow me on Twitter" phrases? Trademarks for article endings?

I like people to read my blog to follow me on Twitter, not because I care for a high follower count, but because I care for relevant relationships on Twitter. Someone who reads my blog is much more likely to be relevant than someone who just searched my Twitter stream for random phrases.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, seeing "follow me on twitter here" has started to get annoying.

Still, I'm pretty dubious of the notion of "finding your own hacks". I mean just look at written english in most articles, they aren't comprised of just a list of sanitized opinions and facts. They're full of prestigious jargon, funny quips to pull the audience to pull the audience to the readers side or at least entertain (the same goal?), etc, etc; as far as I'm concerned, just more "cognitive hacks".

Shrugs

<comment><USER9> More after the break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Restated: copy-based hacks have a limited window of effectiveness.

Fortunately for us all.

<comment><USER2> "The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal."

Picasso/Banksy

<comment><USER11> "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -T.S. Eliot [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Philip_Massing...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Philip_Massinger)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is no real principle you are basing this on. It is your own assumption that "this person will do anything to get followers." All web content that is popular in some part by UX practices that were invented by someone else.

There is no coercion, and many of the most successful websites do this kind of testing constantly.

Furthermore, the author published the blog to share the technique making it even less justified to "find your own hacks."

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know. I found Dustin's original article pretty much to be a hack for trying to get twitter followers. He just dressed it up in UI-optimization garb.It was nicely done, no doubt. But the purpose was twitter followers, which I'm sure he got.

As for the point you make "I may be naive, but I would like people to follow me due to my interesting insights, and not because of some cognitive hack."

This is exactly what I commented on at the time of Dustin's article -- show the reader what's in it for them. Why should they become a follower? Concentrate on the value proposition instead of the gimmick.

My comment didn't receive that many upvotes as I remember. Sad fact is, a lot of people would rather focus on techniques than value. After all, you can simply copy a technique. Adding value -- saying something interesting and worthwhile to the reader -- is a lot more work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, this is starting to get old, but thats just a sign that he succeeded at doing something interesting enough that it is now a standard.

Btw; you can follow me on...nvm.

</comment><comment><USER15> The only thing I really dislike about it is having more "here" hyperlinks. Even if conversion rates are slightly better, where would the web be if the majority of anchor texts were "click here"?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I agree the web would not be a better place. There's just something to be said for having that clear call to action. It's hard to resist.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I know. I would much prefer the call to action be more clear in the link:

        You should follow me on Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the author of the original article was trying to gauge the effectiveness of a call to action over an assumption to action.

No, we don't want to put the "click here" links at the end of everything, but that MAY just be what people need when it comes to Twitter.

"Click here" is familiar, it means there's more to see and do, and something isn't just going to start happening magically.

Saying "follow my twitter" to a general audience sounds absolutely creepy. What the hell does that even mean? I had a lady once ask what "following my twitter" meant, because she wasn't sure what my "twitter" was. Seriously, 10 years ago, had you asked a random woman to follow your Twitter around, you'd get slapped first, and there would be no asking questions later.

NOTE: I ALWAYS say "follow me on twitter" or "follow me on twitter.com" now - geezers like it when you add .com because it reminds them of the only 3 years of their life they actually made money in the stock market.

Long story short, don't get bent over backwards because you think this person is a follower-whore. This is Hacker News, and the author of the original post was hacking his twitter tag-line to see what pulled in the most subscribers through that single medium.

It's all for science my friend.

</comment><comment><USER18> No reason to get your panties in a twist, it was 'linked-in', then 'xing', now it's twitter. Given the balloon like nature of these fads I give it another year or so and it will be gone again, or at least greatly reduced.

Every product - twitter too - has a lifecycle, there are 'boom' periods and there is an inevitable bust. See the hula-hoop, click-clack, tamagochi and a whole bunch of other items for real world analogies.

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel much the same way. I don't use that awful program at all and I'm just waiting for the fad to pass. I would feel the same way if the author plugged some supermarket chain at the end of their article, or there was some "This article brought to you by such-and-such company". I am sick to DEATH of advertising and twitter is basically advertising your mundane life.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hadn't seen the original article, and maybe I just block out all the 'follow me on twitter here' links, because that is barely recognizable to me as being everywhere.

At the same time it is an interesting practice in call to actions. Though i really wish we could see a comparison of a button vs. text. Are people more likely to recognize a button as clickable vs. just text? and how would that compare? Does text on the button have similar effects? etc.etc.

</comment><comment><USER21> "In fact [...], I quickly close the tab and forget the contents of the article or why I thought it was insightful in the first place"

Do you think the problem is "follow me" or "on twitter"? If the second, in my opinion you have a deeper problem than just hating a certain kind of messaging service. If the problem is "follow me", then why even mention twitter?

</comment><comment><USER22> You might be surprised to know that most everything we do is caused by some cognitive hack or another. It's better to just accept it. Or you could try overcomingbias and lesswrong.

</comment><comment><USER23> -Fact. It's just polemics. It needed to be said.

</comment><comment><USER24> you should follow me on Plurk then (is that better?) hehehe (hey it's a new cognitive hack!)</comment>


Building my own 64GB memory card with a $6 eMMC chip (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://ripitapart.com/2016/10/28/emmc-adventures-episode-1-building-my-own-64gb-memory-card-with-a-6-emmc-chip/ <comment><USER2> Given the compatibility between SD/MMC, one thing I'd like to see on the market, but haven't, is an Android phone which has no "internal storage" to speak of, but instead replaces the soldered-in eMMC with a microSD socket. That would make expanding, brick-recovery, as well as backing up and controlling access to the data very easy; like taking the hard drive out of a computer before giving it to someone else.

It's not difficult at all to do from the hardware perspective, but no one seems to have produced such a thing on the mass market.

<comment><USER3> You dont need a hw mod, all you need is an Android phone with a sdcard slot and the option to do raw read/write to the embedded flash from the bootloader as you WILL fuck up many times during experimentation. Havent tried with qualcomm stuff, but successfully converted my Mediatek-based CAT B15Q to sdcard-only.

All you need to modify is /etc/fstab, /init.rc (or, in some cases, /init.XYZ.rc), split the sdcard into three partitions (OS, /data, /sdcard), copy the existing partitions from flash to the sdcard et voila.

<comment><USER4> I would love to read more about your experiments! any chance for a blog post?

<comment><USER5> If you have root, just replace init with something like that:

        #!/bin/sh
        mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /root
        exec chroot /root /bin/init

<comment><USER6> although you probably want `|| sh`

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is so gloriously horrible. Please note that if you want to get the maximum speed out of an eMMC device, you need proper PCB layout: ground and power planes, decoupling caps right under the appropriate BGA balls, traces length matched and impedance controlled, etc.

<comment><USER8> A single chip will forgive a lot of mess. A big array though will not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe a dumb question: If 64GB chips are $6, why aren't we seeing terabyte- sized tablets and netbooks for $100 more than the baseline version? I would imagine the idle power draw is negligible and the extra size and weight well worth it.

Producers take the exact opposite approach, and use storage size as a price discriminator: a 64GB version might cost $300, while the 128GB is "only" $499, pure profit margin an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the actual storage.

<comment><USER10> so you could technically upgrade an ipad?

<comment><USER11> You can technically replace any chip on any device with a better, pin- and voltage- compatible chip. But you need soldering equipment easily tens of thousands of dollars.

For example, a Dell desktop I had a while back was the lowest-end SKU, and therefore they left the AGP connector off of the board, even though the BIOS knew about AGP and there were the AGP solder points/vias on the motherboard. Had I had the ability to solder the dozens of points at the same time, I could have added my own AGP slot.

<comment><USER10> I was thinking you could have a laptop company that uses the same board for a few years (for it's whole range) everything would be soldered on but could be sent back for generously priced upgrades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are ready-made boards for this being sold for less than $2. Just search "eMMC Adapter 153 without flash" on ebay.

153 is number of balls on the eMMC chip OP is using. You might need a different adapter for different eMMC chip.

</comment><comment><USER13> Are there cost effective ways for hobbyists to solder BGAs? I remember back in the day, it wasn't that expensive to get an etching kit and create some single layer prototype boards but they all used through hole components. Now-a-days it doesn't seem like that kind of stuff is possible anymore.

<comment><USER14> You can get perfectly acceptable results on everything except large BGA layouts with only a toaster oven, or for smaller jobs even a hot air gun is enough.

A lot of people will insist you absolutely need a massive multi-thousand dollar peice of kit, but its nonsense, and gear of that grade is only of much use if you are doing large batch jobs and you want to minimize your failure rate, for one off projects a few percentage points either way in terms of failure rates is completely irrelivant, especially considering you can just rework it anyways.

if you want to go the full 9 yards though, you could spring for something like this and get real professional level results, for around $300ish USD + a little DIY.

[http://www.whizoo.com/](http://www.whizoo.com/)

And in regaurds to the boards themselves, its true you cant very easily make 4 layer PCBs with Vias and other sensitive alignment constraints at home, however the good news is that they can be ordered even cheaper than it would typically cost a home maker in materials for even single sided boards!.

[https://dirtypcbs.com/store/pcbs](https://dirtypcbs.com/store/pcbs)

[https://pcbshopper.com/](https://pcbshopper.com/)

<comment><USER15> The very popular 858D temperature controlled hot air stations only run about 50usd. Performance is much better than a hardware store heat gun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love seeing that kind of crazy soldering. I would have had to make an SD- shaped PCB and heat gun the part on.

Also (2016)

<comment><USER17> Thanks, we've updated the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We used eMMC in a design recently: I learned that the unused balls are essential for breakout on low layer count boards.

</comment><comment><USER19> This actually might be worthwhile for ODROID or Pine owners because both of those companies demand premiums for their eMMC boards.

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot of the bandwidth of a 'proper' SSD device comes from running a bunch of operations in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love how these (assuming they are not fake) have at least half a billion addressable bits.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg: Elon Musk's doomsday AI predictions are 'pretty irresponsible' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musks-doomsday-ai-predictions-are-irresponsible.html <comment><USER2> On a scale of 1 to 10 for people I would trust with our planet's future, Musk is a 9.5 and Zuckerberg is a 0.</comment>